The next morning arrives with the monumental task of organizing, cleaning, and maintaining the house, all of which ends up taking the entire day to accomplish even with the both of them cutting around corners. And so the next, next, day arrives, the hall now spacious as it should be, all is cleaned and neatly put away in boxes, and everything has been checked thoroughly and any damage repaired. Of course, with a job well done Elio has the full intention of lazing around today, fatigued from helping to organize the hall and doing most of the cleaning as the man wouldn't allow him to help with the maintenance for fear of hurting himself, and so while spotting for damage with his sharp eyes he sweeped in the downtime. The man on the other hand had been climbing up and down, left to right, repairing everything Elio was able to spot, including things he didn't want the man to spot, (the underside of the turntable), but unlike Elio he doesn't seem tired in the slightest and is instead considering something very carefully near the stockpile. Moments later he walks up to Elio who is lying down on the comfortable middle bench having just had breakfast, “Alright then, I'd say it's about time we go collecting. Cmon, we need to start early to get as much as possible” he says, Elio looks up at him, scowling at the gall of the man who still wants to work after yesterday. He objects too having to go collecting, but his protest falls on def ears as the man asks,

  "You're tired from yesterday?” as if it is something unusual, “but the stockpile needs refilling and i need your help in doing so!” he points at the dip in the wall called the stockpile were it is as he says, barran, with more empty boxes then there are materials of use, he explains “all that maintenance drained what we had in materials, and it's safer to stock up now then suffer the consequences later”, and while he does make a point, Elio would rather suffer the consequences if it means getting some rest, and he firmly places his head back on the bench. Seeing as how Elio is not moving in the slightest, the man falls back on a tried and true trick, or more accurately reward,

  “Well, if you do change your mind, the ballista is waiting afterwards, who knows, I might give you an extra da-, Elio?” looking down Elio had disappeared and is now next to the door that leads outside, already wearing his thick blue jacket and currently tying some iron sole boots of his own, annoyed, but complying. The man says,“I think that's a new record” and readying to go out himself. Before they venture out, they take with them a basket, light to carry and size appropriate, with the man grabbing a slew of sinister tools, and Elio a small collapsed crossbow, wrapped in leather and with a glass bolt already loaded in, at his side.

  The late morning sun hangs past the horizon and cliffs but before noon, basking the sky in its usual red but not warming the land that it pases over. The black gravel of the pit is accompanied by an air not hot enough to warm the body and not cold enough to cool it either, instead staying in an uncomfortable middle. The mighty cliffs in the distance stand tall as always, with small waterfalls of sand streaming down its side, pushed into the pit by the occasional and ever welcome breeze, and somewhere along these desolate planes the man searches the land as Elio accompanies him, very much not ecstatic to be here.

What would be the occasional and indifferent walk is made worse by Elio's tiredness, now these gravelly planes seem endless and annoying, his boots that he usually doesn't mind seem heavy and uncomfortable, and his jacket feels constricting even though it is loose and light. But even so he will bare any small inconvenience, push aside his laziness, and even be bored, if it means getting to go on the ballista once again, While they are walking the man looks to his side to see Elio subconsciously acting out his thoughts, from damming the gravel in front of him, to looking longingly at there house behind him, and he says under his breath as the scene comes to an end, "I wonder if you'd be an actor in the future”, Elio turns to ask what the man said, and he replies, “We made it to our first corpse!”.

  Gradually approaching, they see the lifeless corpse of a wyvern ghoul shot down by Elio two day ago, given, it hard to discern whether they were dead or alive while they were still moving, but it is easy to figure out with this particular wyvern as it had suffered a very brutal death. The bolt shot landed directly into its neck, cutting off the head from its spine and causing it to glide down onto the bed of razors that is the black gravel, and cutting up what little flesh it had down to the bone. Though in a bat of misfortune it did not die on impact, and the upturned gravel shows the sign of a struggle after the fact, implying that the landing might have pushed the bolt enough to return some agency to its mangled body, and all the pain that comes with it.

  At the sight of such a horrible scene Elio is not bothered and the man is ready. They set their baskets down, pull out the needed tools, and begin to dissect the corpse promptly. Walking up its sheer size becomes apparent, at its widest it is as tall as the man, and several times longer from beak to tail, one could imagine that it would be a formidable opponent up close, thankfully a clean bolt through the neck can take it down from a distance. The second thing of notice is the lack of smell and rot, there is no sign of decay, or the stench that comes with it, not even as they flip it over to expose its gravel ridden ribcage. With the corpse now flipped Elio walks of to work on the wings while the man breaks the ribcage with a gardening hoe, and pulling on each rib until it snaps and breaks, an easy task as it had suffered a lot of damage from the fall

  Meanwhile Elio is hard at work cutting up the wings of the wyvern, with an oversized scissor he glides its blade in between the finger bones of the wings and along any cuts and tears to get the biggest piece of leather he can, think of a game of connect the dots, but i is with the dilapidated corps of a several meter long wyvern. After that he places the newly acquired leather into his bag and pulls out any long and spindly finger bones that aren't shattered from the impact as well as retrieving the bolt that was logged in its neck. On the man's side of things, he eventually opens up one side of the chest to reveal a black organ within, and once again no smell, and no blood either, infact, through the entire process not a single drop of blood was spilled or splattered, and in the ribcage, it is unusually dry. Either way he clears out the dry rib cage with a shovel sees-.

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  Attached to the spine is a cancerous lump of flesh that pulses like a heart, even as the corpse around it is being cut open. He climbs into the ribcage and with a knife carefully cuts the lump open to remove a glowing red crystal, in that moment the entire body of the wyvern deflates slightly, all the muscles loosen, the skin wrinkle, and the eyes fill with a black pestilence. He wipes the fresh blood of the crystal, whereby he can see radiant red glow reflecting off the dry inside of the ribcage's white bone, an energy unknown. The man brings the crystal closer, and closer, into a padded pouch, and then hops out,

  “I'm back out from its insides, what's next-oh….huh, i see” he says in surprise as Elio had already done all the work taking apart the mostly undamaged left wing, and he stands next to his work with a sense of victory, hands crossed, chest puffed, and head aimed high. The mans responds, “Well now it looks like i didn't do much” and so as a compromise he would move all the materials to his basket before they both take off to the next corpse. As they are walking along Elio's eyes begin to wander about the sky and land, before landing on the monolithic triangle that they are walking away from, and with nothing else to do he decides to inquire to the man about it, by pulling his sleeve and pointing at the monolith, the man responds.

  “Oh the gate? It's so-and-so, i just finished all the edits and am preparing for another test” he says with voice of tempered expectation, Elio on the other hand becomes excited at the mention of the test, infectiously so, the man responds as to calm Elio down, “We can celebrate after-if the test goes well, but at the moment i just need to collect enough crystals to go through with it” as he is talking he pulls out the crystal from before and holds it up to the sky, looking at the reflection of light coming through it, Elio too looks up at the crystal and points at it as they walk, “Hm, sorry what is it?” the man asks and places the crystal back into its bag while Elio elaborates further by waving his hands around as to show distant, and imaginary, explosions, the man says with a hint of concern,

  “Elio, I told you this, no magic! and besides you can't use it with these crystals” to this Elio seems sad, his head begins to hang low and so the man reassures Elio, “I'll teach you magic when you get older, so don't worry your little head about it” and he ruffles Elio's hair as, like the flip of a dime, he becomes excited, looking forward to firing bolts, with his mind. The man on the other hand is just glad that Elio isn’t sad anymore, and before they know it, they are already at another corpse, the man places the bag down and takes out a slew of tools. “Alright, this one is a bit cleaner” he says, and in front of them is a wyvern that landed dead on the ground, its wings aren't any more tattered from being dragged along the gavel, and the ribcage is mostly intact, making it easier for Elio and harder for the man. After flipping it over the man climbs onto its chest, were takes out multiple meat cleaver like blades with thick backs and no handles, and digs each of them into its chest in a line, just off center, and on the ribs, an easy task as the outline of the ribs is rather prominent from the seemingly shared malnutrition of the wyvern ghouls.

  After setting all the cleavers up, he brings out a makeshift sledgehammer and begins to slam the cleavers deeper into the ribs to break it. Once broken at the top, the man jumps off and pulls each one down, breaking it at the base exposing its also dry insides. But as he clears out the organs he notices to his dismay that the bolt shot had pierced through the chest and into where the crystal lay. Removing the bolt and cutting open the crystal reveals that the bolt had indeed broken the crystal into shards, though he still pockets them while commenting.

  "Damnit! If only it didn't hit the middle, ahhh whatever, we've got more to go”. coming back out he begins to work on the other wing just as Elio is finished with his, and then move to the next corpse and so on, luckily for Elio they have now reached a point were the bodies are close by and so he doesn't have enough time to get bored, they keep collecting until there bags are full of items, and then to switch out those item with ones of better quality, and then round it out just for the crystals, they eventually return home at sunset, bags full of okay quality leather, bone, teeth, crystals, and some usable meat from the wyverns who had any. In the distance, the wyverns that they began collecting at, give out a haze of a sickly green that wasn't there before, as rot and decay take over quickly, now that the crystals are gone.

  On their return, Elio is very much tired and happy to be back, meanwhile the man is energetic as ever and spends no time preserving the meat and then sorting through the leather to remove any fat or tendons that remained (there isn't much). A good minute later and after feeling returns to Elio's legs he walks to the man to retrieve his prize, the man says as he sees Elio approach, “Yes?” he asks inquisitively while placing another leather in an ever increasing stack, Elio points up as to ask to go on the ballista, however the man replies confused, “Hmm?”, Elio then nods his head towards the tower door thinking he must have misunderstood, the man notices, leans to the side to see what's behind Elio, and then straightens back up, “What?” Elio is surprised as the man never had any trouble understanding him before and so he directly points at the tower door and acts out firing a ballista, the man answers, "Pardon?” at which Elio figures out he's just messing with him as inferred from the ever growing grin on his face, the man chuckles to himself a bit before answering, “Right, Rigghhhhhht, the tower, well this time you did pretty well and worked pretty hard, so how about hmmm…four days! Four full days on the ballista!!”. At hearing the result Elio is ecstatic and thrilled by the prospect, he runs to his room to change but turns back remembering that he's already wearing the jacket and gloves, he runs to the tower only to realize it is too late as the room is already darkened, the man notices this as well,

“It's already this late? Shame, well I'll start making dinner” the man stands up to cook, and while he does so Elio runs around the spacious hall, as energetic as ever.