The Collector consumed everything. The bodies of the remaining five soldiers, their equipment, armor and swords and all, the map, and their steeds. This, it did to erase all traces of their movement, making it more difficult for future human investigations to piece together the Collector's existence.

All of the soldiers possessed as their leader did minute traces of the special property inherent to this anomalous world, but in such trace amounts that their biomass was no different from that of a normal human's.

>>>

*Biomass gained (+16)*

Biomass level: 30/100

*New genetic material gained*

Stored Genetic Material:

-Black Ant

-Black Hobgoblin

-Human

-Lesser Oni

-Frostborn Hobgoblin

-Blacktail Horse

>>>

The Collector clicked its mandibles.

The leader of these humans had provided two points of biomass, just as the rest of his underlings did now. The leader's dialogue had indicated a possibility that it was superior to the rest, but in the end, they were all the same: weak, groveling creatures to be devoured.

Would this be the standard of primitive spanning the vast majority of this anomalous world? Would there lie no challenges, no warriors worthy of true consumption?

The Collector knew that it should find relief at the prospect that this world was largely defenseless other than the question of these 'gods', but it could not help feel a twinge of…disappointment.

The admiration it had began to feel towards the 'champion' had long faded with these recent displays of pitiful weakness, the heat within its being simmered down without the prospect of battle to entice it.

The development of this native, unknown adaptation, too, seemed to be correlated with better regulation of this heat, though how and why, it did not understand yet.

The answers would come when it could question a 'sorcerer' more familiar with this topic. From contextual clues, it could parse that these 'sorcerers' possessed more knowledge of 'magic' but did not necessarily hold noteworthy combat capability.

In fact, if past evidence indicated anything, no 'sorcerer' was capable of effectively harming the Collector, though the goblin which styled itself as a 'thrall' did hold troublesome capabilities.

By now, the Collector could understand that not all familiar with 'magic' were equal, but this 'sorcerer' in the forest might possess equally difficult abilities to fight against. However, it was willing to undertake the risk to subdue this specimen.

The Collector started off towards its new goal, returning to its eight-legged form and skittering through the forest floor.

__

The Collector traveled two hours and twenty-five minutes. It could travel through the forest at a far faster rate than it could with its boar base as the jumping arakka was specialized for speed. And with its efficient processing systems, it could weave through the thick of the forest as if nothing stood in its way at all, and yet, an hour's worth of movement only allowed it to cover just shy of half this forest biome's length.

In conclusion: this forest biome was sizable, and there was much, much more of it the Collector had yet to explore farther to the north and, behind them as the soldier's map indicated, a mountain range and an entirely separate, colder biome.

Where the Collector stopped, it noted that the tree line ended, revealing a vast mud bank lined with craters. The rush of water flowing through a river echoed nearby – the source of moisture for this mud bank.

The river itself was wide enough that it determined that the humans of this world would require vessels to adequately travel across.

Judging from the strength and flow of the current, the Collector surmised that the ravine separating the lighter zone of the forest from the darker led to this larger river, and, remembering the map, it knew too that this river flowed down to the human settlement, likely providing it necessary water to subsist upon.

The map itself only largely laid out the expanse of this forest, Anendara as the humans called it, and this area along with the darkwoods was demarcated with a shade of darker coloring indicating a zone of danger.

The Collector could understand why as it felt the sensitive hairs lining the seams of its hyperalloy armor raise up.

Underneath the mud, giant scorpions lay dormant, ready to snatch up prey that neared them. These, the Collector did not invest much attention to, for they were beneath it as a threat.

No, it instead gazed up to the sky, its gleaming yellow eyes cutting through the dark of night to set upon the form of a pillar floating atop the wide river.

The Collector analyzed it.

Made by a tinkering civilization judging by intricate patterns of bones and skeletal systems marked upon dull rock. Cylindrical in construction. Dimensions of the structure sizable. Twenty-five meters high. Eight meters in diameter. Three segmentations in the rock indicating three floors.

Cloaked. An anomalous property refracted wavelengths of light visible to human ocular systems.

However, the Collector could see through it as its brethren had seen through countless different variations of cloaking devices from the spacefaring tinkerers. It understood that beneath this cloaking ability, the very top floor of the pillar glowed with light and heat.

Mechanisms of the cloaking capability: unknown.

Mechanisms by which it floated: unknown.

Both likely related to anomalous, special property tied to 'magic'.

High probability bordering on certainty of this being the 'sorcerer's territory.

Attempting to extrapolate this specimen and its construct's combat capabilities…

Unknown until direct contact made.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. The pillar floated at a height that it could reach.

Its beetle wings could not sustain long term flight, but it could, combined with the hydraulic pump of the arakka legs and its new coilbooster sub-adaptation that allowed for immense bursts of muscular power to perform a flying leap capable of reaching it.

For now, though, there were too many unknowns. It did not even know if the pillar was occupied in the moment, all it knew was that at this range, the pillar did not possess any anomalous capabilities able to sense the Collector.

So, the Collector waited and observed in the undergrowth, its form absolutely still as its eyes stared unmoving and unblinking at the pillar.

===

Ekur paced back and forth with his withered hands behind his back. His sunken eyes darted from side to side as he breathed heavy breaths through yellowed and broken teeth. The wrinkles of his face showed not just the wear of years, but also stress and, perhaps, a sprinkle of insanity here and there.

His sandaled footsteps echoed through the confines of his atelier, but for the first time in twenty years, another human other than himself would enter this sacred study space of his.

Where he had spent so much time defying the chains of the Sorcerer's Order in pursuit of a cure to Undeath, and finally, he would have it.

Yes, yes, all that time humiliated and running and hiding would finally come to an end with this. He would show those stuck-up fools of the council that he was right all along, that all he had done and sacrificed was for this greater good.

The footsteps belonged to a young man that ascended the spiral stone staircase leading into Ekur's chambers at the top-most floor of his floating atelier.

"Gods above, this place absolutely reeks," said the man as he put a black gloved hand to his hooded face. He stared at Ekur with hints of disgust, looking up and down at the sorcerer's stained, wrinkled brown robes. "When was the last time you bathed? A decade ago?"

"Fifteen years. The pursuit of the truth has long since caused me to transcend my physical needs."

"Evidently not," remarked the man as he pinched his nose. He scanned his surroundings.

Looked like a sorcerer's atelier. He could see the mana crystal suspended in the air above an upraised stone pillar at the center of the room. Judging from the color of the crystal, a pale, blue tinted white, it seemed to have pretty high purity.

Whiter the better, as he recalled back when he thought he would end up a scholar.

There was a small, stained mat in one end of the circular room with huge piles of dirty bowls standing at attention nearby. The sorcerer's living space. Small, comparatively speaking to the rest of the atelier.

The rest of the room's space was dominated with an alchemical laboratory, its tables full of colorful vials tubes bubbling with background noise. Surgical instruments lay scattered about the tables as did a few remnants of dried blood.

There was a smaller workstation for stone shaping. One table holding a pile of smoothed rocks and a sigilus, the favored tool for sorcerers to carve spells into stones via sigils.

The sigilus looked like a lengthy stylus of clay with a magnifying glass attached to the side, and judging by the dull blue aurichalcite bands circling the stylus, it was a pretty expensive model.

Good. Meant that this sorcerer probably had the coin to pay up.