“Teya,” I repeated, watching as the river spirit’s Avatar rearranged itself ever so slightly, a resemblance of a smile. It looked like tears formed on her face made from a thousand minute waves folding into each other.

Stormy tapped the word ‘yes’.

I wondered why the river spirit was crying. Was she afraid of death or was she simply lamenting something that I could not comprehend?

“Nice to meet you, Teya,” I said.

Then, I waved a hand at the flesh-sphere of Bobliss. “Say, how long is it going to take you to grind down Bobby?”

Teya shrugged.

Stormy’s paw slid over to [maybe].

"Hey, uhh, I see that you’re using your rocks, but are you using dragonglass to grind down Bobliss?" I asked. "I want to make sure that dragonglass simply doesn't wash away downstream."

Teya nodded. The kitten pawed at the Codex, indicating ‘yes’.

“You can sense dragonglass in the water, yeah?” I asked.

Again, a nod.

I watched as the blood of the fallen Champion poured downstream, a crimson ribbon in the clear waters of Glinka. The sight was a tad unsettling.

"Will he reconstitute himself?" I asked.

Teya's watery form shrugged. Stormy pawed at the word [maybe].

I frowned, not satisfied with the ambiguous answer. But then, without even glancing at Teya, Stormy's paw slid over to [YES].

My frown deepened as I processed what looked like the Kitten’s personal future-prediction.

"So, he will reconstitute," I muttered, more to myself than to Teya or Stormy. "That's... problematic."

Teya looked at the kitten who mewled out my words and nodded.

“Hey, Teya, can you give me some of his blood?” I asked. “I’d like to see if I can figure out how it works, see if there is a better way to unmake our enemy.”

The river spirit nodded. Her Avatar extended a hand out to the river and a watery hand formed from the eddies and grabbed a bunch of blood spilling from Bobliss and held it in the air.

I ran up to it with a bucket from the cavern and quickly scooped the blood in from the liquid hand.

“Thanks!” I grinned.

“Mrary mrawr,” Stormy murmured.

“I’ll talk to you in a bit, Teya!” I said. “Keep on grinding him, for now, make sure he doesn’t put himself back together.”

The river spirit affirmed that she understood me with another nod.

The kitten leapt on my shoulder, curling herself around my neck. I returned to the cavern.

Setting the bucket down on a wooden table pilfered from the bar, I began to examine its contents. The blood was darker than normal, almost black, with an odd shimmering quality to it. As I watched, it seemed to move of its own accord, tiny ripples forming on its surface. Slowly, but surely, it came together into a single blood sphere as if guided by an invisible gravity well.

I quickly repaired the cracked Astralscope lenses by liquefying and solidifying them again.

Through the Astralscope, the blood glowed with intense, pulsating, red shimmers. Threads of folding darkness wove themselves through it, reminiscent of the tattoo I had seen on Bobliss's chest.

Was all Champion blood like this or just Bobliss?

I sheared the blood sphere using the Knell-blade, carefully extracting a small sample and placed it on a glass slide. Under closer inspection of my makeshift microscope, the blood seemed to be in a constant state of flux, behaving similar to the Jotuns, constantly expunging more organic matter out of itself as if unfolding new blood cells out of nowhere and then folding them somewhere else as they died.

"This could explain his healing factor," I pondered.

I added a drop of dragonglass-infused water to the slide. The blood of the Champion hissed and bubbled, gradually coming apart as it fought against the anti-life and magic-killing radiance.

I spent hours experimenting with the blood, testing its reactions to various stimuli. It resisted all attempts to alter its state or composition, always returning to its original form, trying to escape and come together into a single blood sphere unless broken apart by dragonglass-infused water.

It resisted cold and heat.

I put a smallest drop of it onto the knell-blade and watched as the blood of the champion danced and hissed atop it, spinning and refusing to burn away, constantly regenerating.

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Where was all this power coming from? I tapped my chin.

Carefully, I drew a small amount of my own blood and placed it on a separate slide. Compared to Bobliss's chaotic dance, my blood simply sat still.

I introduced a small amount of the Champion's blood to my own sample. The reaction was immediate and violent. My blood recoiled as if burned, some dissolving entirely. The Champion's blood, however, seemed to thrive, absorbing the remnants of my destroyed cells.

"It's parasitic," I murmured. "It feeds on witch-blood, converting it into more of itself."

I turned my attention to the remnants of the Star-Shards from Cali's sleigh and her broken lavalier. Both still radiated a faint blue-silver field, visible through my Astralscope. I recalled Cali mentioning that these shards were unusable to Star-Eaters due to their alignment with the Liesl family.

Curious about their properties, I decided to grind them into dust using the Knell-blade. As I carefully crushed the shards, I noted that they resisted the blade more than ordinary gems would. The process was slow and meticulous, but eventually, I had two small piles of glittering dust before me.

Through the Astralscope, I observed that the dust retained its blue-silver aura, though it seemed more diffuse now.

I carefully separated the lavalier-dust into several smaller portions. I mixed one portion with a sample of Bobliss's blood, another with some of my domain's earth, some mixed with my blood, and the forth with regular water. I left the 5th portion untouched as a control.

The results were intriguing. The portion mixed with Bobliss's blood seemed to create a sort of weak neutralizing effect, causing the blood to lose some of its constant regenerative properties. The earth from my domain, when mixed with the Star-Shard dust, felt like annoying prickles at the edges of my consciousness. The portion mixed with my blood also felt like an annoying tickle.

Sorceress-aligned Stardust simply wasn’t made to work with my domain. Could I somehow modify its alignment?

In about another hour, the spinning drop of the Jarl’s blood sitting atop the dragonglass blade finally perished. It left behind a microscopic, barely visible pile of reddish-white crystal dust.

I examined the champion-dust in the microscope, comparing its composition with the remnants of the lavalier. It looked very similar, except in the view of the Astralscope the lavalier-dust radiated silver-blue coronas while the dust extracted from the blood of the Jarl radiated red coronas.

I dissolved each sample in a water drop filled with micro-organisms and samples of plant cells.

The stardust aligned to Bobliss seemed to pull minute tendrils of energy out of the microorganisms, killing and absorbing them. Stardust from Cali’s lavalier had no visible effects on microorganisms.

I brought one of my spirit rocks next to the champion-stardust, watching as a small trail from the spirit began to be drawn into the hungry, red-white dust.

It seemed the Champion-aligned-stardust was capable of absorbing both living and spiritual energy.

In about twenty minutes of this, drops of shimmering dark red blood cells remanifested themselves around the champion-dust.

"Damn," I said. "It's like Bob is written into these crystals."

The Sorceress-aligned-stardust had no effect on the spirits of my domain.

I went to the life-water barrel and extracted a bit of blood from Cali’s cold, pale hand. It burned up very quickly in contact with the Knell-blade, leaving no crystals behind.

Right. Arcanicx didn’t have stardust in their blood, instead they wielded stardust outside of their bodies using their Auras.

I pulled out my Codex and began to write, my mind racing with the implications of what I had just observed:

Hypothesis: Gender-Aligned Stardust Properties

Female-Aligned Stardust (Cali's Lavalier):

* Radiates silver-blue coronas under Astralscope

* Neutral to nature spirits

* Doesn’t affect living cells

Male-Aligned Stardust (Bobliss's Blood):

* Radiates red coronas under the Astralscope

* Actively consumes energy from living cells and spiritual entities

* Exhibits parasitic behavior, converting male-witch blood into more of itself

* Likely the source of Champions' enhanced strength and regenerative abilities

I looked at the girl in the barrel. Her ocean-blue eyes were open, white hair floating through the water. Cali was definitely dead, she wasn’t projecting an Aura anymore, wasn't moving.

I looked at my own hand. I wasn’t projecting an Aura either.

Uhh.

Stormy had an Aura. Glinka, err, Teya had an aura. Bobliss had an Aura.

I looked at the nearest male horse. Abott had an Aura. Castella had an Aura.

Where was my Aura? Was my total lack of Aura why spirits couldn’t see me? Did Yaga Grandhilda have an Aura? She certainly did, I saw her freaky spider-leg green angel wings unfold out of it.

A creeping feeling of dread crawled itself into my thoughts settling itself there.

No, it couldn’t be.

Grabbing my own wrist, I felt for my pulse. To my relief, I felt the steady thrum beneath my skin. I relaxed, letting out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

Then a troubling thought occurred to me - I hadn't slept in weeks, and I'd barely eaten anything. Sleep and eating as a witch was a conscious activity, one that I had to force myself to do. My body didn't seem to produce waste either, didn't sweat. My skin didn't flake off when washed.

How was that possible? How was I accelerating my own heart in moments of stress? Could I slow it down too like a Buddhist monk?

Curious, I relaxed all of my motions, exhaled and didn’t inhale again, tried to halt my pulse, focusing on not using my heart, trying not to breathe at all.

To my shock, my pulse slowed and then stopped entirely.

I held my fingers to my wrist. My pulse was gone. I didn’t feel the urge to breathe in or out either. I waited, expecting to feel dizzy or short of breath, but nothing changed. I felt exactly the same as before, except my thoughts became somewhat slower.

"What the hell?" I whispered, staring at my seemingly lifeless wrist.

The implications were staggering.

I thought back to my earliest memories in this world, emerging from the icy waters of Glinka. Had I ever truly been alive since that moment? Or was I merely a vessel for the Understanding, animated by Teya into life and then animated further by my domain? Why did I feel like I was a dying vampire at the edge of my domain’s leash?

My mouth opened and closed. I pricked my own finger again and let the Knell-blade burn away a drop of my blood. It burned away slightly slower than Cali’s, resulting in a small sprinkle of violet-tinted crystals.

My blood was animated to behave like human blood by crystalline microstructures just like the blood of Jarl Bobliss.

I brought the resulting violet powder to the same test spirit. A magical wave danced between the spirit and the pile of dust, so thin that it was barely there.

The clock in my head struck midnight.

“Stormy,” I said. “Is Jarl Bobliss alive?”

The kitten looked up at me and then her left paw slid to [NO] and her right paw slid at [YES].

The fallen Champion was neither dead nor alive, that’s why it was so hard to put him down, why he kept coming back even though I shot him in the head twice. Crystals in his blood regenerated him into existence.

“Stormy… am I alive?” I asked, pushing the question out of my lips.

The kitten’s paws remained where they were on [YES] and [NO].

Hypothesis: Ioan Starfall died two months ago.