— Keira —

By the time Keir and Ismini had a rough but workable plan to put before the council, noon had come and gone. They also had managed to collaborate with the others via runners to decide to hold the meeting shortly after sundown.

With hours to kill and no immediate plan, her mind turned to the strange sensation of the ocean within her soul. After initially finding that sensation she could regain some awareness of it again with only a thought. Despite that she somehow felt that the middle of the street, or indeed in public at all, was not the best place to examine it closer.

After a few decades spent as a traveling adventurer, her first thought for finding a bit of privacy was to get a room at the local tavern.

She was about to head straight there when she realized that as she had still shown no sign of needing sleep the only reason to obtain a room, other than to get some privacy, was a place to leave her few belongings she traveled with.

The moment her mind touched on her pack she froze, her foot still in the air, the only thing that kept her from cursing was the fact she had no air in her lungs. As a result she mouthed instead of spoke the words as she set off towards a specific section of the shattered wall.

When she’d arrived in the village, she’d hidden her bag after removing what might be useful in the fight. Since then she had completely forgotten she had never returned to retrieve it. As annoyed with herself as she was she had to admit her oversight made some small amount of sense.

Keir had a lot on her mind since the moment the fight began. She’d gone immediately from combat to a council meeting to scouting. None of which were things that she would have normally taken her pack for if she had a decent place to leave it. For such a short scouting trip she normally would have at least grabbed her waterskin and a bit of food before she left but she had no need for either since her death.

She might have only expected to find snakes in the village but her training hadn’t let her just drop off her bag in plain sight. More by instinct than intent she had hidden her bag well. So she was not surprised to find it exactly where she left it.

While she retrieved it she was glad no one was nearby. The bag and its contents were obviously hers but somehow rooting through the rubble pile to retrieve it felt a lot more awkward than she expected. With most of the village living again it felt less like digging out through a pile of rocks and a heavy broken beam and more like walking into someone’s home and digging through their chests to find something you left there.

After the surprisingly stressful but fortunately uneventful retrieval was complete she made her way to the tavern. Much like when she was looking for Ismini several people wanted to stop her for a chat and plenty more greeted her as she walked past. A few minute walk was therefore turned into an almost twenty minute process. The entire time, her impatience to examine the strange sensation of waves in her soul and the knowledge that she had several hours to kill warred in her each time she was waylaid.

The street in front of the tavern buzzed with a surprising amount of activity. Well over two dozen undead were in the early stages of breaking down the massive corpse she’d left there. The packed dirt road was a quagmire of bloody mud and even the splintery rotten walkways were slick with blood, mud, and all manner of less easily identifiable liquids.

It was obvious almost immediately that the butchering was surprisingly well organized. One group was wielding knives and in some cases their claws, or other sharp appendages, to remove large swathes of skin. The skin was then passed to a smaller group that folded and stacked it up on the walkway.

Where the skin was already removed a third group was in the process of carving large blocks of meat from the carcass and passing it off to others who stacked the meat alongside the skin. From the deep wheel ruts in the mud it seemed like a final group was transporting the prepared materials elsewhere.

As she watched them work for a minute it was hard not to liken the scene to a group of ants dismantling a large insect.

Keir pushed away the somewhat insulting, if fairly apt, comparison as one of the particularly gore coated villagers approached her. The man who approached was likely an orc in life. It was hard to be certain with the thick coating of blood covering his entire lanky bony form.

When she looked more closely at his almost emaciated frame and the thick serrated claws Keir thought he might have returned as ghoul or something like one.

As the orc got close he spoke up his voice raspy and wet “Ya ta one tha killt this’n eh?” Orc mouths weren’t well adapted to speaking common trade languages clearly at the best of times. The fact that most of his teeth were now closer to those of a shark than a typical orc couldn’t be helping the situation.

Fortunately the Steel Coast were decently close allies to a large tribe of orcs that traveled the sea in a large fleet. As a result orcish was one of the several languages she was proficient in. In slightly rough Orcish Keir replied “This is certainly my kill.”

The man’s face split into a massive grin revealing the plethora of sharp serrated teeth filling his mount and responded in orcish. “And a damn impressive kill at that. Name’s Skariish.”

“That's a strong name. Mine is Keir”

They exchanged a salute, his telling her he was from one of the northern desert tribes though she couldn’t place which. Keir’s own said she was an ally of the Crimson Wake Tribe.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Likewise. By right of conquest this belongs to you then.” And retrieved a jagged chunk of pale green and dark red crystal large enough Keir couldn’t comfortably carry it in one hand.

It took Keir a moment to recognize what the crystal was. It was a Beast Core, almost certainly from the serpent before her. She was more than a bit surprised not only by the size of the crystal but also the fact it had one at all. The presence of the core meant the serpent had been right on the cusp of advancing to tier five.

After staring at the crystal for several more seconds she looked back up at Skariish and said “I appreciate you gathering this.”

He chuckled, sounding like a person laughing through a slit throat, and said “No problem. I’d be happy to talk more later, for now I suspect we both have things to be getting on with.”

Keir agreed and they went their separate ways, Keir into the tavern and Skariish back to the carcass.

The door of the tavern let out a muffled creak as Keir pushed it open and stepped through into the common room. Scraps of dried snake skin lay scattered along the paths carved into the thick layer of dust on the floor that led off to the back. Combined with the lack of corpses implied that someone, likely either Alasdair or Mesalin had cleared out several dead snakes.

Keir was about to call out when Mesalin stood from behind the bar holding most of a broken bottle. With a casual flick she tossed the bottle into a nearby bucket where it clacked off the other glass already in it and said “Hey, I didn't expect to see you before the meeting later.”

Keir shrugged and said “I was just coming to see if you have a free room I can use for a bit. I want to go over a few things in relative privacy.”

Mesalin frowned slightly and pulled out a ledger from under the bar and after flipping it open and scanning the page for a few seconds said “Yeah, most of them are full but there are a couple left.” She reached under the bar and retrieved a key that she threw to Keir and said “If you're not planning on keeping the room for the night or longer just drop off the key when you leave.”

Keir nodded and said “I should be out of your hair well before it’s time to head to the meeting.”

After a small bit of small talk Keir walked to her room, On the way she found quite a few boards, especially on the stairs, that creaked ominously but none of them seemed in too much danger of breaking underneath her so she did her best to ignore them. There were several rugs as well but time and lack of cleaning had done them no favors. Not only did each step kick up a plum of dust it was all but impossible to tell if they were actually faded or just that coated in dust.

When she reached the door to her temporary room, she was looking forward to finding a section of floor that didn’t creak and not moving from it while she examined the feeling she’d planned to study and now the core she had just received.

Both the lock and the door stuck a bit but soon gave way. Beyond the door Keir found a fairly standard tavern room underneath the thick layer of dust. It was sparsely furnished with only a bed, a small table, a chair, and a basic chest.

After checking that both were still relatively sturdy, Keir brushed the dust from the table and chair. She placed the crystal on the table and sat down. She considered starting with the strange feeling but the core was far too tempting not to take a closer look at.

Specializing her inspection skill for examining items could be a bit annoying at times like when she wished she could see her exact stats, but it was times like this that she was glad for that focus.

“Nascent Viper Beast Core: Affinity (Venom, Blood) Tier (5) Completion (97%)”

As soon as her skill activated she heard a notification in her mind and after reading the results of her inspection she opened it.

“Congratulations, by right of conquest you have acquired a Nascent Core. Claim Nascent Viper Beast Core (Yes/No)”

It was all Keir could do in that moment to simply conceal the notification rather than immediately select yes.

Because Cores only began forming in beings at the peak of tier four and only complete in those tier five or above she had not been taught everything about them. Even for a royal they were very rare. What she did know was that they were incredibly important to gaining higher tiers even with a Path and that claiming one was a lengthy and difficult process.

She didn’t know if it would all need to be done in a single sitting but from what her tutor who’d taught her about them had said she suspected it would take days or even weeks to completely claim the core.

As much as she was excited to begin she wanted to gather a bit more information and get things settled a bit before she started. Instead she placed it into her bag and settled back into her seat.

She wasn’t completely sure how to begin trying to identify the feeling in her soul. After debating the best way to start she decided to go with what helped her find it the first time. She closed her eyes and began meditating, turning her focus inward as she did. In the absence of breathing or a heartbeat, time fell away as she pushed away the sounds from the street below. As she followed up and the feeling of the chair beneath her fell away she found what she was looking for. As each sensation faded away the sound and then the scent of bloody waves crashing in her soul grew clearer and closer. Suddenly with a feeling of a membrane ripping around her, Keir was once again laying on soft fine obsidian sand staring up at a sky with too many stars.

As she sat up she was barely surprised to find she was once again on the strange triangular island. She was surprised, however, to see the island was not quite as featureless as the last time she was there. The soul and body coasts were entirely unchanged. Near the gateway on the beach where the Sanguine Sea washed against was something Keir couldn’t quite make out from where she stood.

Curious, she walked over to examine it more carefully. A few yards away from the high tide line was a relatively shallow pit of the same obsidian sandstone as the stairs, filled with the blood water of the Sanguine Sea. The pit was an uneven oblong about four feet across at the widest point. The stone was fairly smooth but was far from even, with bumps, ridges, and ledges throughout. Most of the, at least partially flat, areas had a layer of the fine sand the rest of the island was made from.

As Keir looked into the semi translucent red water she noticed a few tiny crustacean like creatures and something that might have been a starfish, an octopus, or some combination thereof moving around amongst tiny new coral and sea plants.

Even if she hadn’t lived for centuries in an island nation she would have immediately recognized the new feature as the tide pool her passive skill talked about. She was about to try to figure out how to return from her soulscape when she felt a pull towards the temple in the depth of the Sanguine Sea.

Far more confidently than the first time, though still with a bit of trepidation, Keir once more descended the strange staircase.

The second she stepped through the door into the room with the statue of Mortis, Keir immediately realized the origin of the pull. One of the previously sealed doors leading deeper into the temple was standing wide open the room beyond concealed by shadow.