The smarting pain in his wrist quickly subsided to a dull ache. He rubbed his wrist with his other hand, and there didn’t seem to be any blood or any other wound; it was just sore and tender.

There was a small stream of qi now constantly leaking from his right wrist while he performed his cultivation technique. He could manipulate the flow by clenching some of his wrist and finger muscles, as well as by simply increasing or decreasing the speed of his breathing. He picked up the damaged claw he’d fashioned into a makeshift knife, and proceeded to try and direct the qi leaking from his wrist into the channels he could perceive inside of the claw.

The bad news was that it didn’t work. The good news was that it almost worked, and he now had a much clearer perception of the pattern that the qi needed to flow in.

There was a circuit of qi inside of the claw, shaped roughly like an oval. A smaller channel wrapped around the larger oval in a tight weave, covering the entire circumference, before looping back into itself. As far as patterns went, it was very long and precise, but it was not too difficult to follow or understand.

When the qi rushed out of his wrist, some of it dissipated into the air, but if he positioned the claw exactly right, some of it would also enter into these channels. As the qi filled the channels in the claw, it began to resonate in his qi sense, as if each of the coils were resonating with each other.

It wasn’t working because there wasn’t enough qi, the flow was irregular, or there wasn’t enough pressure – one of these things was preventing the resonance from reaching a critical threshold. The root problem was too much of a gap between where the qi came out of his body, and where it needed to go inside of the silverine claw.

He had an idea. A terrible idea in a series of terrible ideas.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said, psyching himself up for what came next.

Hudson grabbed the bone saw and went for the second claw on the silverine, this time measuring carefully against his hand and wrist, before cutting the skinny arm off at a sharpened angle. Careful not to cut his tongue or cheek on the very sharp point of the chitin, he put the arm end into his mouth, sucked out the raw flesh, and spat it on the floor.

It tasted like lobster. He was incredibly, thoroughly disgusted at the thought of putting raw silverine guts in his mouth… but he also liked the taste of lobster. Could silverine be cooked and eaten? Confusing thoughts for another time.

He very carefully lined up the sharp point of the arm against the skin of his palm, such that the claw portion curved over his knuckles, and he was able to grip the round arm with his first two fingers. The sharp point of the hollow arm – almost like a large, chitinous needle – pricked the palm of his hand. Closing his eyes, and before he could think about it any further, he shoved it hard, cutting deep into the flesh of his palm.

Hudson ignored the pain and blood and focused intently on his breathing method and his qi sense, positioning the sharp point of the silverine arm inside of his palm to rest as close as possible to the point where qi was leaking out. He increased the tempo of his breathing technique, and opened his eyes.

His qi soared through the pattern in the silverine’s claw, circling and circling upon itself. The flow resonated, building up to a potential before crossing an unseen threshold. The resonance solidified into a barrier that his qi sense could not penetrate. The resonance wasn’t completely perfect, however, and little bits of energy escaped the closed pattern as a soft, silvery glow.

Success! He had activated the silverine’s claw ability with his own qi. His palm had a bloody hole in it, and his wrist still felt painful where qi was exiting his own internal flow, but he now had the same type of ability as the silverines to dig through rock.

The glow of pride at his success faded into a curse as he realized he wasn’t wearing his armor… and if he wanted to put it on, he’d need to take the claw out of his hand. And then put it back in again.

He fumbled with the vambraces and greaves and swore to himself that he would sleep in his armor for the rest of his life. He had been in multiple life and death situations with his protection just sitting in a bag. It was awkward in the tight space, but after contorting his body he was able to put all of his armor pieces on, including the gloves.

He cut a hole in the right hand glove and reinserted the silverine claw into the wound on his palm. He stuffed some bandages around his palm and inside the glove, and wrapped the remaining tourniquets and other strips of cloth ripped off of the rucksack around his hand.

When he closed his fist, the shaft of the claw angled up from his palm and out between his thumb and index finger. The chitin thickened considerably and curved down, sharp side facing out, before resting tightly against his knuckles.

He was finally ready to escape from his prison underneath the rubble – the key question was: which direction. He could try digging straight up, but that was probably the most dangerous in terms of collapsing the rubble around him. He could pick a random direction and dig out horizontally, trying to be careful with how he shifted the rocks and boulders as he dug.

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Or… He could dig down, following the hole that the silverine had dug to get to him. It might lead him back to the cave system where the S.E.C.T. cheater group had gone to mine for maseki. Or it might lead him directly into a large swarm of silverines.

Hudson decided to follow the silverine’s other path – the short passage it had cleared to grab his rucksack – to see if there were any other remains from the mining equipment they had brought into the rift. He had fought a silverine and injured himself to get this claw attached to his arm and glowing silver with a powerful qigong technique, but if he could use that to get his hands on one of those sledgehammers, it would be worth it.

He chipped away at the rock surrounding the passage the silverine had dug, to make it large enough for his shoulders to fit through. It was maybe only four or five feet in length, and at an awkward position to hammer at. Hudson had to twist himself around and lie on his left side to get enough clearance to punch his claw into the stone.

Each impact was jarring and painful, grinding his palm into an even bloodier mess. He discovered, though, that the reinforced claw was so sharp, he could run it across the surface of the stone and shave the stone off, instead of hammering away at it. That reduced the number of jarring impacts, although it did not completely remove them.

After a short time, Hudson had managed to dig a wider channel about four feet in. He was now lying on his stomach and digging the space out in front of him. He hadn’t found any other sign of their mining equipment, and decided to take a quick break.

As he squirmed his way backwards, he accidentally knocked a fist-sized rock loose from the ceiling of his just-widened tunnel. A small stream of dust and pebbles poured into the passage, coating Hudson in chalky stone bits. The small stream grew larger, then suddenly stopped, and the entire passage collapsed with a crash.

Luckily Hudson had fully retreated into his original space before he was crushed by the rubble. This space was now smaller, however, as some of the ceiling had collapsed close to the passage he’d been widening. He was saved from the whole thing falling on him by the very large, very solid boulders that leaned against each other and formed the majority of the ceiling.

That had not gone well. He had proven, at least, that the rubble surrounding his little pocket of safety was not safe or stable enough to dig through. He gazed at the hole in the floor the silverine had come through, a head-sized tunnel disappearing down into the dark at an angle.

The other problem with digging through the rubble is that he didn’t know which direction would take him out of the pile of rubble, and he would have to dig in multiple directions before he dug a way out to the ravine and the surface.

Hudson shook his head and stopped trying to think of ways around it. His best course of action was following the silverine’s tunnel down into the cave system, then finding his way outside from there.

A few breathing cycles, and his glowing claw started chipping away at the tunnel leading down into the darkness.

Hudson worked for hours, widening the tunnel leading down for at least twenty feet before deciding to rest. The tunnel proceeded downward at a fairly steep angle, so he spent a little bit of time flattening out an area for him to rest in. He also maneuvered a flat piece of rubble down the tunnel to place over the hole, so that he wouldn’t be surprised in his sleep by a silverine crawling up the tunnel.

He fell into a deep, dreamless sleep as soon as he closed his eyes. When he woke, he drank a few sips of his water and ate half of his remaining preserved fruit. It wasn’t near enough to slake his hunger or his thirst, but it would have to do for now.

He shuddered as he gripped the sliverine claw again in his right hand, the sharp chitin digging into the mangled flesh of his palm. He tried not to think about scars and permanent damage to ligaments and tendons, or damage to the network of qi flowing through his body.

He was determined to do what he needed to do to survive. The anger and rage that he’d kept bottled up for years had escaped from the cage it had been in. It warmed his heart, dulled the pain in his hand and wrist, and kept him company in the dark.

Only a few more hours of chipping away and the silverine’s tunnel gradually widened into a natural crack in the stone. When it was wide enough for Hudson to push his rucksack in front of him and crawl through without cutting the stone, he still kept his breathing technique going to power the claw, so that he had a bit of light to see by.

Hudson crawled through the natural crevice, scraping his back and knees on sharp outcroppings. It continued flowing down at a gradual slope, until almost suddenly, the massive weight of rock above him suddenly disappeared.

He pulled himself up into a sitting position, reveling in the feeling of freedom. The claustrophobia of being stuck in a pile of rubble, then crawling through hard stone passages only barely big enough to fit him evaporated into the open air now surrounding him, leaving him slightly giddy.

He let his breathing technique slow to a halt, deciding to take a break and rest. As the dim light faded from his claw, and his eyes adjusted to the absolute darkness of the caves… he noticed that the darkness in the caves wasn’t quite absolute. There seemed to be a very dim glow coming from in front, or perhaps beneath him.

He lay down on his stomach and inched forward gradually. His fingers found the edge of a cliff in front of him, curling over the lip. He pulled himself forward and looked over the edge

Below him was an indistinct mass glowing with a soft light. The details were hard to make out, so it must be far away. The blob gradually shifted from a silver color on the edges to a greenish, teal color in the center. He squinted his eyes to make out more details, and he saw pairs of dots moving in and out from the edges.

With mounting horror, Hudson realized what he was looking at. He had discovered a silverine hive. Each of those tiny dots? An individual silverine’s claws shining dimly. All together there must be thousands of them, all crawling over a mound of maseki far below him.