Balor retreated from the underground lair with a clear picture of what The Call was. It didn’t make complete sense to have happened, but he couldn’t deny what he saw.

  The next morning, as Erul, he was about to set off on a different journey, away from the village altogether. He wanted to see if the ghost serpent knew about this primal fear that was affecting their experiment.

  On his way through the village, he met the girl he shapeshifted into the night before. She was being carried by her father like a smaller child to the village healer, despite her repeated yells of protest. It seemed someone had indeed seen her at the sacred site or just wandering outside at night.

  Well, that’s unfortunate.

  He wondered if his small interference would go on the historical record or alter the world in a significant way. While fantastic and troublesome, it was exceedingly unlikely.

  “Where are you going?” Tarsel asked out of nowhere. Balor hadn’t noticed the man approaching him from behind.

  “Outside, I need to hunt something,” he said, looking at his brother. He had no intention of telling the man that he was probably not going to return.

  “With what?” Tarsel asked, frowning at him. “Can’t hunt things by throwing stones at them, brother mine.”

  Ah. Good point. I forgot I lost my bow and everything else.

  “I think I need some supplies,” he said, nodding.

  “Do tell me how you plan on getting them? You’re already dressed to leave, but not even a knife on you.”

  Balor hadn’t planned anything. It seemed foolish now, but he’d been too excited to figure out the Dark Lord situation that he forgot all about mortal concerns. Now he’d run into a dead end with Erul’s brother.

  From Erul’s memories, he knew this man was persistent and a better tracker than he was. There was no way to escape now without being an anomaly in some capacity.

  He could run faster than the wind, and he could use soul matter to make himself invisible. There were a thousand other things that he could do. None of them could categorically be explained by a first civilization resident without making a bigger fuss.

  For example, Tarsel could gather other men and soldiers to look for him. That affected multiple lives, and any number of major changes could spiral out of it. The village could be attacked while most of the men were away. More young ones could be taken. A Zartiga could eat everyone. It would be a blip in the grand scheme of things, but Balor didn’t want to nudge the experiment that badly.

  He had exhausted his use for Erul the hunter. He needed to change into another shape now, preferably someone even more low-profile than a solitary hunter. Shapeshifting again did feel rather cumbersome. He was just getting used to being Erul.

  “I’m going to make some rabbit traps. Can I get your knife?” Balor lied to Tarsel, extending his hand. This was the sort of sibling dynamic that they had between them.

  Tarsel groaned, digging into the flaps of his leather armor. He untied a sheathed knife and handed it to Erul. “There’s been a Zartiga sighting early morning. They’re drawing closer. Don’t go too far.”

  Erul knew the demons of the forest and how they normally behaved. They were too well fed on other prey in the forest to meddle with a village full of people. Considering these were Zartigas altered with magics by the Dark Lord, there had to be a reason for this to happen now.

  Is that because they’re looking for me because I killed one?

  He didn’t have enough information to conclude such a thing. Nodding at Tarsel, he turned and walked away.

  The rabbits could be found in the less dangerous wilderness down the valley, and trapping them required some elaborate setups with sticks.

  As he went, Balor thought about Magics in general. That was his next great question. That was going to be a key component of the failure of Veilthorn. He had to know how the ghost serpent implemented it.

  Unfortunately for Balor, he’d picked an inept target to shapeshift with Erul. This man wasn’t versed or practiced in magic. He had memories of failing the trial of magics at his role-giving ceremony. It had been the reason behind his ending up as a simple hunter.

  Erul’s brother was no different. He was even less attuned to magics than Erul was.

  It seems there is a genetic component involved.

  The ghost serpent had opted for dispersing their soul matter into the atmosphere and allowing lifeforms to interact with it. This meant they had some sort of physical part of themselves that could interface with the soul matter. Erul did not know the internal anatomy of his own species.

  The first civilization hasn’t advanced far enough to medically dissect cadavers. In this age, a serious affliction that could not be cured by ingesting a specific blend of edible plant or animal matter meant death. Bodies had to be respected in the state where they died, buried deep beneath the soil.

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  Balor needed to see this soul matter interface mechanism somehow. He could dissect his own body by rearranging his soul matter, but there was one issue. He didn’t have the context to compare what this primate's body was supposed to be without it. In fact, there was nothing to compare a primate's body with to find what was ‘different’ in this magics implemented world. All that knowledge was left behind with his stellar core.

  He headed into the woods to lay rabbit traps, but he wanted to dissect someone who had better attunement to magics.

  I did see some people falling trees when I came in. They were using some magics.

  He hoped to find someone else in the forest.

  Balor used Erul’s brother’s knife to create several traps for small animals. He worked faster than Erul would’ve, ending up with twenty-seven traps before he realized he was working too fast. He found good locations to place them as well and committed each spot to memory to come check later. Traps dealt with, he headed towards the tree cutters to find someone who could use magics.

  Deep enough into the forest, he changed form from Erul to Balor, gathering all his dispersed matter as he turned invisible again. These hominids were severely disadvantaged in dark places with too many structures. He could deal with any situation by turning invisible.

  He traveled up the way he arrived from the coast and eventually crossed paths with the tree cutters. To his great surprise, he found their whole camp massacred.

  Zartiga attack, definitely. It seems they are indeed drawing closer to the village.

  He had also failed to notice how far this was. The villagers who were spooked by the morning’s sighting of Zartiga hadn’t set off to check on their forest-dwelling tree cutters yet. He was the first to get there.

  Back when he came this way, he’d counted six individuals. He saw remains of four. Two had either been eaten without a trace or successfully escaped somewhere.

  Regardless, this is a fine opportunity to see what they’re made of.

  He had four corpses in various states of damage to dissect. He decided to go with the most intact one first. It was a young man sprawled across a rock with one leg torn off at the hip.

  Balor remained invisible just in case a wandering villager happened upon him somehow. He drowned the corpse in blue light, scanning the dead hominid from head to toe. He got a good structural read of its skeletal structure and internal organs.

  He bombarded the body with small amounts of soul matter to probe the usual pathways, the circulation of blood, and other fluids. Eventually, he managed to isolate the correct pathways to simulate a functioning body by using his soul matter as the corpse’s lifeblood.

  Essentially, he managed to bring the dead back to life, albeit without any consciousness. His soul matter leaked from the grievous wound at the hip, mimicking regular blood.

  So far, nothing about the body looked like it had anything to do with magics. Every internal system that he explored played a crucial part in keeping things running.

  He managed to discard parts of the body by their isolated functions. The limbs had nothing to do with magics. Neither did most of the body below the neck.

  Magics must work with something else I haven’t explored up there.

  So far, his artificial lifeblood hadn’t done anything with the brain or the nervous system in general. They were complex systems that needed much more focused granularity to figure out.

  Patiently, he simulated through the dead structures of the brain to test out various artificial impulses and their responses. The brain and nervous system were orders of magnitude more complex than his other tests. He wasn’t going to iterate through all options in a reasonable amount of time.

  Based on a series of targeted impulses, he narrowed it all down to a specific part of the brain where it connected with the spinal cord. There was an unused structure there that he couldn’t trigger through any internal impulses. That part of the hominid was not an active participant in the regular function of its body.

  It’s an organ, then. It’s been added to their design at some point during their evolution.

  That didn’t make complete sense. A serpent or Dragon didn’t have the keys to the world seed itself. The ghost serpent couldn’t have added a whole separate organ to the target sapient lifeform. The sheer operational risk of even attempting to change something about the world seed was insane to consider.

  Any number of things could go wrong, and only seedmakers had the prerequisite talents to even comprehend such problems at scale.

  Veilthorn creates this organ specifically for magics? Is it forcing that outcome as well?

  That encroached upon the celestial task of a serpent or dragon. World seeds were supposed to be flexible and general in their targets. This seemed like the world seed itself imposing the methods of magics that it wanted to implement for Veilthorn.

  Of course, the mere evolution of a separate organ didn’t decree that the world maker was supposed to implement it that way, but the fact that this happened this way at all was quite unusual. It was even more unusual why the ghost serpent even adhered to it.

  This deeply invasive implementation of magics made sense. The hominids had a separate organ to interface with soul matter, and they could channel energy to perform various utility functions based on their narrow view of the cosmos.

  They used magics to create fires, blow winds, part the soil, flow water uphill, manipulate heavy objects, and reinforce weapons.

  If magics were implemented less invasively at a later stage of civilization, the hominids would have discovered more sophisticated use cases and systems around it.

  There must be a reason it was done this way.

  He wasn’t going to find those answers by dissecting this corpse any further.

  Magics once implemented had to follow the same rules. He was sure most other creatures that interacted with magics at some capacity would have a similar organ, be they fish or birds. There could be a sentience threshold for magics, maybe even more parameters. He didn’t have time to dissect all the lifeforms to figure that out.

  Based on what he saw in the underground lair and now this, Veilthorn didn’t seem like a typical world seed. It played by its own rules.

  He had a billion creative ideas to never play by those rules. Doing unique, new things was exceedingly easy. That was the first instinct of any serpent or Dragon when they got a world seed.

  It was curious—and foreboding then, why the ghost serpent chose to play by the rules imposed by Veilthorn.

  Did they also fail and restart multiple times?

  Balor had to find that out somehow. Right now, he had no idea how to get such information out of the ghost serpent. He basically had to walk up to them and ask that question—an extremely weird question that would instantly alert them to his identity.

  The resulting battle of serpents could end this cycle of Veilthorn. It was truly a question that could end the world.

  Maybe I’ll ask after I see what’s going to kill them. At the very end of this.