The return to the scavenger camp was a grim affair. Fenn, leaning heavily on Loric, grit his teeth against the pain from his savaged leg. Borin was in a foul mood, the successful hunt soured by the injury.
Kaelen trailed behind them, a ghost in their midst. His face was a perfect mask of youthful exhaustion and shock, but his mind was a silent tempest. The two notifications from the Index burned behind his eyes: the prompt to begin his cultivation, and the warning of the 27-day clock. One was a promise of power, the other a death sentence if ignored. They were two sides of the same cursed coin.
At the camp, Elara, the matriarch, immediately set to work on Fenn's leg. She cleaned the wounds with boiled water and a pungent, dark-green paste. Kaelen watched her work, his Index quietly analyzing her. Threat Assessment: Negligible. Essence Yield: Cracked.
He dismissed her as a potential target. Inefficient.
Borin, surprisingly, tossed a roasted piece of Crawler meat to Kaelen. "You didn't scream. You didn't run," the big man grunted. It was the highest praise Kaelen had received. "Eat. You earned it."
Kaelen ate, the coarse meat tasting like ash in his mouth. His body no longer craved such mundane sustenance. It craved the hot, violent rush of an Essence Shard. As he chewed, he analyzed the others. Loric was wary. Borin was powerful but brutish. Fenn, however, was now injured. His mobility was compromised. His guard would be down.
Designation: Human. Name: Fenn. Threat Assessment: Negligible (Compromised).
The addendum was new. The Index adapted to circumstance. Fenn had just become the most logical target for the monthly cycle. Kaelen filed the information away. He had 27 days. There was no need for haste. First, power.
As night fell and a chill wind swept down from Redfang Peak, the camp huddled around the main fire. The scavengers told tales of past hunts and cursed the Bloom. Kaelen sat slightly apart, a forgotten orphan, letting the shadows swallow him. When the last scavenger had retired to their tent and the only sounds were the crackling fire and the wind, he moved.
He slipped out of the camp's perimeter, his steps making no sound on the glassy ground. He found a shallow alcove, a depression in the obsidian rock that shielded him from the wind and the sightline of any potential night watch. Here, he was alone. Here, he could begin.
He sat, closed his eyes, and focused on the prompt that had been hovering in his consciousness for hours.
Sufficient Essence detected. Commence Crucible Foundation?
[Y/N]
With a cold, decisive will, he selected [Y].
The response was instantaneous and brutal.
The two Impure shards he had stored within him detonated. It was not a gentle release of energy. It was a violent, chaotic flood. The raw, furious essence of the Cinder-backed Crawlers surged through his veins. It felt like being injected with magma. A searing, agonizing heat spread from his core to every extremity, a fire that threatened to consume him from within.
Echoes of the beasts' primal rage, their terror, their pain—all of it crashed against his mind. A lesser man would have screamed, his consciousness shattered by the psychic assault. Kaelen did not.
He met the onslaught with the cold, unyielding silence of the void. His psychopathy, the very emptiness that made him a monster, was his ultimate shield. The beasts' rage was just noise. The pain was just data. He observed it, analyzed it, and endured it.
He could feel his body changing on a fundamental level. The fire was not just burning him; it was forging him. The Impure energy was acting as fuel for a crucible, with his own body as the vessel. He felt his bones groaning under the strain, growing denser. His muscle fibers tore and were instantly re-woven, stronger and more efficient. His skin tingled as it toughened, becoming more resilient.
It was the first stage of the Crucible Foundation: a violent, painful tempering that prepared the mortal vessel to contain the power of the Aetherium. While others spent months gently absorbing ambient energy to achieve this, Kaelen was accomplishing it in minutes through sheer, brutal consumption.
After what felt like an eternity, the fiery torrent began to subside. The chaotic energy, having been burned as fuel, settled, integrating into his newly hardened form. The pain receded, leaving behind a feeling of profound, tangible power.
He opened his eyes. The world seemed sharper, the darkness less absolute. The whisper of the wind carried more detail. He clenched his fist, and the feeling was different. There was a density to his grip, a latent strength that had not been there before.
He called up the Index.
Harvester: Kaelen
Cultivation: 1st Realm - Crucible Foundation, Phase 1.
Void Corpus Status: Satiated.
Essence Shard Inventory: [Cracked] x1.
Harvested Abilities: None.
He was no longer Uncultivated (Mortal). He had stepped onto the first rung of the ladder. He was a cultivator.
A Grade 1, Phase 1 cultivator. The same level as the beasts he had just consumed.
A cold smirk, genuine and sharp, finally touched Kaelen's lips in the darkness. This was a good start.
Now, to climb higher. He would need more shards. Better shards. And in 27 days, he would need to collect his tithe. His eyes drifted in the direction of the camp, towards the tent where an injured hunter slept.