A rule of thumb: creatures impenetrable from the outside often hid a soft interior.

The Javelin gored through a huge chunk of flesh and kept going, spearing through a bulbous bulge of throat, quickening as it went.

He saw the Torchdragon’s pupils flare out, dilating, a trembling corona of pale orange. The Beast’s jaws made to clamp down, and gagged—mere feet from crushing Dorian’s head to paste. Dorian’s heart skipped a beat.

Then they breached the surface. Dorian shot up first; the Torchdragon writhed in hot pursuit, burning up with fury, blinding sunlight slicking furiously off its scales; they hung there for an awful, interminable moment in the air, borne aloft by sheer momentum.

Dorian let out a heavy, shuddering gasp. Any instant those two jaws, those two hulls of endless, man-sized teeth, would snap shut. Any instant he’d wake up in the Unstuck Space, his run brought to a bloody and painful end—

But they never did.

They held still, wide open, like a gate jammed at its hinges. And all this time something wasn’t still.

The Javelin had not stopped moving. It had gone down, even as the Torchdragon had gone up, and it found only soft mushy flesh. Even the rougher sinews and muscles were ripped wide open as it speared down, seeking an end—

One heartbeat. Two.

And then gravity took hold of both he and the Torchdragon again. Down they went.

Shit! A quick [Cloud-Treading Step] vaulted him over to the side; away from the Beast’s still-gaping maw.

As he rocketed away, he observed the falling body—Hells that thing was massive!— and saw it’d gone slack all along its scaly breadth, utterly at the mercy of gravity. Its eyes gazed dully. Its jaw hung loose. Dorian’s breath caught. Could it be?

Two sounds came next.

The first, only Dorian heard. A clink! —a sound his Javelin made deep in his soul. At last it’d bore up against something hard, definitive. It stopped.

The second the entire Oasis must have heard.

The Torchdragon’s body—so huge its shadow stretched across the whole of the Sinkhole—a body which must’ve weighed as much as a fleet of steel battleships—struck the water, tail-first.

It was so violently loud it blew out Dorian’s ears. Just the vibrations rattled him down to his bones, sent his teeth chattering. The whole world shivered with it, as though stung by an electric shock.

Then came the water. Dorian saw it rise then rise higher, and higher, and higher still, until it smothered the light of the sun.

He didn’t even bother trying to escape this one. He was spent. He accepted his fate, let it crash down upon him, and then was lost, wrenched about in a melee of monstrous currents, dragged into a universe of irresistible chaos.

For a time he was spun, tossed, battered, drowned; then the waters recede and he washed ashore gasping, spluttering, alive.

Brushing the wet hairs from his eyes, he scrambled up.

The Torchdragon lay belly-up in those Sinkhole waters.

Dead.

Dorian’s whole body went limp. Dimly he felt himself fall to his knees. I’m ALIVE!

He began to laugh. Hysterically. Freely. HAHA! By some mad roll of the cosmic dice—godsdamned alive!

Then another thought struck him. His laughter choked off.

He scrambled up, tried standing, forgot he’d lost half a leg, swore, and then settled into a flamingo perch. Stable, he squinted at the Sinkhole. At the corpse.

The corpse full of fresh BLOOD!

Cackling, he kicked off.

Behind him he heard gears cranking. The gates were blowing open, guards streaming in as he flew through the air. Voices cried out—‘WAIT!’—

Then he swan-dived past those endless rows of teeth, past the torn-up strips of throat, deep into the blackness of the Torchdragon’s gaping maw.

There was one thing and one thing only that any Beast Hunter did upon first slaughter. Before the Blood could settle and get stale and dry into the corpse itself.

Beast Core!

***

The Beast Core was much like the Spirit Sea. It held all a Beast’s Blood Essence. Left alone, it’d leak out and infuse the body, making Bloodline Relics.

Sure, there was Bloodline to be had elsewhere. A good handful of this Torchdragon’s scales might qualify as Bloodline Relics. Its larger Fangs might too. But the real treasure lay deep within.

The real Blood Essence was stored in the Core. Most often its as nestled right under a Beast’s heart.

And it just so happened that Dorian’s Javelin— still stuck in the Torchdragon’s body—had carved him a tunnel straight through the thing. Greedily Dorian plunged in, ricocheting off squelching, fleshy, awfully warm walls of a sagging throat, diving farther down the fleshy, sticky tract. He landed in a splash of strange, sticky oil-black acid; it hissed but didn’t burn him, almost as if it knew not to. As though it knew he was kin. Then he slid down the world’s gunkiest waterslide in complete darkness, led only by a sharply growing sense of resonance and his own rising eagerness.

There!

A glow—not of light but of Blood, of heat, something like a boulder nestled in these walls of flesh—his Javelin lay beside it. Gritting his teeth, Dorian sank his fingers into the walls of the creature’s intestines. He skidded to a bloody halt.

Right before it.

Then, trembling, he climbed for it, stabbing handholds into the creature’s insides until he was side-by-side with the thing. Up close it felt like he’d put his face against the surface of a star; he could feel a scalding heat tonguing his skin. It was almost unbearable.

My gods.

He was shaking as he held his hand out. His eyes were wide and he couldn’t keep a panting smile off his face. He was drooling. He almost couldn’t bear to do it—could bear to reach out and, with one finger, make contact.

The touch was physical. But the connection was spiritual. It went somewhere beyond, and he felt his Bloodline brush up against something massive.

The whole Bloodline of a Sky-Realm Beast—of his lineage! Freshly deceased! At his literal fingertips, dormant, waiting for someone with just the right timing, just the right fit, to suck it all up.

A weird thought popped into Dorian’s head. One of his earliest memories of his childhood—a truly mind-boggling amount of time ago—was seeing one of his family’s pet dragonfish eat another in his pond. Then, crying, running to his brother Houyi. Houyi had held him, of course, gone through the motions of comfort, but it was what he’d said after that stuck with Dorian now.

“Remarkable,” his brother’d said, eyeing the dragonfish flatly, clinically. “This fish weighed a stone. Its victim did too. In but a meal it has doubled its mass.” Then a corner of Houyi’s lips quirked. “Imagine if humans could do that.”

Absurd how it came to mind now, all these aeons later.

Dorian felt his lips quirking too.

Imagine if humans could do that, indeed?

***

It was his turn to open his mouth. A mouth of the Spirit. Then he sucked.

Bloodline rushed in. Fresh, hot Bloodline. It tasted like a nectar of the gods.

One sip had his head flushing. He felt like all the nerves in his skull had been set on fire. It rushed in, then down, seeking out his Spirit Sea—

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Density]

[21% -> 25%]

HELLS! That huge?!

[Core Saturation: 11% -> 15%]

A dizzying rush of Blood Essence was gushing into him. It felt like he was drinking molten magma—it hardly felt like his body could contain it all he was taking it in so fast!

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Density]

[25% -> 29%]

[Level-up!]

[Core Saturation: 15% -> 28%]

How much more was there? All Dorian could do was keep that Spiritual mouth wide open, and drink. The speedrunning part of this run had well and truly kicked into gear—

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Density]

[29% -> 33%]

[Level-up!]

[Core Saturation: 28% -> 46%]

Oh, my. My, oh my.

He was so happy he was nearly delirious. He would’ve laughed was he not so busy trying not to puke out a lump of swollen, boiling qi. He felt like he’d just eaten a sumptuous dinner. Like he’d been stuffed full to the point of bursting!

And yet the plates just kept coming, and coming, and coming, without any signs of slowing—

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Density]

[33% -> 36%]

[Level-up!]

[Core Saturation: 46: -> 66%]

In one stroke, one damned stroke, 3% to 66%—deep into the mid Earth Realm, like that!

His grin was threatening to stretch off his face. It was so ridiculous, so stupid fast, it was nearly worrying. And also dizzying. Like he was a mortal who'd been rocketed up so high into the atmosphere the air was hard, almost painful, to breathe. He was struck by an overpowering jolt of vertigo.

He couldn’t actually enter the Sky Realm proper. Not as he was now. The Sky Realm necessitated an Infused Core; it meant he needed to select a Law, and instill its insights into the Core, for it to advance.

Which meant that there was a rock-hard bottleneck he simply could not pass.

The Beast Core didn’t care a whit, of course! That flow of godly liquid was slowing—absurdly he was almost thankful for it, he was so bloated—but it still meant he was taking in more and more. Almost more than his body could hold! His skin was starting to smolder, leaking smoke-black light, as though about to burn off his flesh. His body was suddenly horribly heavy, like his bones had turned to lead, his muscles to cement.

But still—

[Level-up!]

[Bloodline Density 36% -> 39%]

[Level-up!]

[Core Saturation: 66% -> 78%]

Hells. Am I actually about to explode?! Dorian wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. What an issue to have—powering up too fast!

But he didn’t have time to think on it, for the next Level-Up in this fast-flowing stream arrived. It stole his attention utterly.

[Level-up!]

[Heilong Javelin: Second Forme]

[Toxic Spear: The Javelin is now tipped with the Bloodline acids of the Basilisk Torchdragon itself, which no metal known to man can withstand. Anywhere it goes it leaves a trail of this hyper-potent acid, derived from its new Bloodline density. As it moves, it terraforms the battlefield.]

Dorian was beside himself with joy, and also dying of bloat, all at once.

Fuck it—

If I die, I die. Keep that shit coming!