Sitting in yet another dark cellar, I was looking at the body I had caught while sneaking about. After sleeping for most of the day, I had told Lia and our two four-legged friends about the discoveries I had made during the night. Lia was quite intrigued about the diversity of creatures I had discovered within the area I had dubbed Racoon City. Sure, they were all Withered, just like all those with burning eyes were Shattered, but there seemed to be a much greater connection between the different Withered compared to the Shattered. The Shattered had been mostly passive in their interactions, essentially ignoring each other's existence if their bodies were of different species, while the Withered actively worked together. Or maybe they were all working under the same banner, possibly some sort of psychic hivemind, which would explain the constant psychic chittering I had noticed.

My current theory was that I could hear said chittering thanks to my advancing skills in Mind Magic, that the chittering was a racial application of that skill, though I couldn’t be completely certain just yet. Not until I either managed to replicate and actively understand the method employed or I was told about it by something that was already able to employ it. Basically, unless Alex managed to learn English and told me about their psychic communication method, I would have to find my own answer.

It was an interesting idea, as it might allow me to fully communicate with Silva and Alex, not just the usual mix of twenty questions and pantomime, That alone gave it quite the potential and that was while ignoring the possibilities for silent and distant communication. Before the change, mobile phones used to be a thing but now? Now, the furthest somebody could communicate was shouting, at least until some of the older methods were put back into use.

Something like using reflective mirrors to send out Morse code signals, or maybe something like lighting a smoking fire to use the smoke or specific drum beats. All methods that used to be employed in the past, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. It was an interesting question, which would humans rediscover first, or would people simply come up with something entirely new, like some sort of employed travel within the Astral River? Maybe something similar to the way I had communicated with the Grandmother back on Mundus, essentially projecting my mind into a familiar and known space and using that space to talk. There were countless ways I could imagine people could go about communicating, all with their own methods. It was an incredibly diverse and interesting field, something that I could see myself investing quite a bit of time in. Not for any practical application, I doubted I would ever want to talk to enough people to make the time investment worthwhile, but simply because it was fascinating.

But before I could invest countless hours of magical tinkering and research into the myriad ways people could share information with, I had more important things to worry about. Namely, what were the Withered, where did they come from and, maybe the most important of all, how would I best go about killing them?

To answer those questions, I had started to take the Withered Skulker I had killed apart. Sadly, I lacked a comparative sample, something to see what a healthy, or maybe even a Shattered, racoon would look like internally, I could only guess from similar creatures. Back when I had taken the Centaur apart on Mundus, I had been focused on the human half of it, as my training with Mrs Wu had given me an adequate understanding of human anatomy. Far from what I’d need to be a doctor but more than enough to know where to poke to cause damage and why poking in various spots would do so.

To further that understanding, I had looked at a few of the anatomical plans of more common creatures, especially the ways they were similar. The differences between cats and dogs were relatively minor, they had the same organs and those organs had almost the same lay-out. Sure, the heart of a dog of Silva’s size was quite a bit larger than that of a common house-cat, but that was to be expected.

The only problem was, I had no idea how much of that would apply to a racoon. I assumed that most of the organs would be roughly in the same spot but other than that assumption, I was unsure.

Luckily, I didn’t overly care about the exact anatomy and I hoped that the differences that made a racoon into a Withered Stalker would be pronounced and, well, magical enough for me to pick them out even without a comparative sample.

Draining the blood, what was left of it, was the first step. Using Blood Magic should have made that trivial but the tar-like substance running through the creature's vein wasn’t as cooperative as I would have liked. It still worked, but it was almost as difficult as draining the sap from a tree, making me wonder just how alive the Withered actually were.

The blood itself didn’t smell like blood either, there was a scent of decay along the stench corruption, a cloying odour that made me sick. It was plain wrong, the substance I had drawn out of the corpse didn’t carry Vitality, as blood should, it was… It was something that should not be. Just like the Nethersprites I had witnessed on Mundus, these creatures just should not be, they should never have been allowed to enter our plane of existence. Nothing good would ever come from them, the only thing that should be done with them was annihilation.

Shaking my head to clear away the sheer disgust I was feeling, I made sure to store the disgusting internal tar in a prepared bottle, the stuff should not be, but was, so I wasn’t about to simply discard it. I could hate it as much as I wanted, but I needed to get over myself until the Withered were all gone.

Next, once the internal tar was dealt with, I started to carefully pick apart the organs. Again, it was mostly done with a combination of a sharp blade made from Ice, my fingers and a bit of Blood Magic to help me along. While the blood was almost entirely drained, the flesh held enough similarity to it to allow me minor mastery over it. It was that connection between flesh and blood that allowed me to heal wounds, only now, I didn’t try to heal, I tried to understand.

Interestingly, the organs were familiar enough in their position and shape to make me somewhat confident in my work. The internals of the racoon hadn’t changed upon becoming a Withered if one ignored two major exceptions.

The first exception was the heart. The racoon's heart was, for lack of a better word, withered, roughly half the size of what I had expected it to be and shrunken, reminding me of a raisin and not something that would beat in a creature’s chest. That assessment was doubly true when I noticed a weird crystal-like structure the same colour as the dark internal tar pressed into the side of the heart. It almost looked like the crystal was growing into the heart or maybe the heart was being pushed aside by the crystal, I wasn’t quite sure. Either way, it didn’t look like anything a living creature should have in their body, like a kidney stone only taken to a metaphorical eleven. And in their heart.

The second exception might be even more important. It was their brain, or what was left of it. The somewhat spongy mass within the creature's head was covered in weird, gooey strings. It wasn’t the same stuff that made up the internal tar, but it looked somewhat similar, like some sort of black, molten cheese that was partially solid. The strands stretched into the primary brain, crisscrossing the entire thing as if the brain was some sort of sea creature caught in a net.

While I wasn’t sure what those strands were, or what they did, I was somewhat confident that they had a connection to their psychic chittering. Which made me wonder, how was Alex able to hear the same psychic noise I could hear? Or was the ability part of something else and it was merely a coincidence that the weird goo was within the creature’s brain? Maybe some sort of control mechanism for the Withered, or something else, I couldn’t be sure. I needed more samples, especially samples of Withered Husks and Hunters, so I could compare what the different types of Withered had in common.

Something to look for in the coming days. For now, I felt that we should establish an actual, comfortable and hidden forward base from where we could head into Racoon City to hunt Withered, grind a few more levels and get the samples I wanted.