Despite it all, Dorian took a moment to gape. How is she still alive? She was like a weak flame sputtering in a wind; her qi struggled mightily against her wounds, trying to close the gaps, but there were too many of them. She clung on, if only barely.

Then came the thinking, the cost-benefit weighing. But there was no time to think. Why was it always like this? He dashed to her side and gave her wounds a cursory look. By an eyeball estimate she’d die for certain—but perhaps not if he intervened.

Then again, his entire escape plan was dependent on flight. He’d be weighed down by another body and he could hardly wrap his qi around them both; fast as he was, it might wipe out a chunk of his top speed…

He looked to the Flood Dragon. It was now nearly a mile off, coming across the point of the explosion. It was a matter of seconds before it figured out it’d been tricked.

He growled, sighed, and made a snap judgment. The Flood Dragon was far enough off that it’d only take a few hops for him to be clear of it. Perhaps it was greed, but he bent over and snatched up Kaya in a fireman’s carry. She didn’t make a sound as he hoisted her over his shoulders. He gritted his teeth. I didn’t invest all of that into you for you to be wasted here. Above, the Vordors screeched their shrill melodies, angling closer.

Behind, there was a deep, bellowing, furious roar. He didn’t need to turn around to know he’d been found out. Huffing, he took to the skies. In the same instant he felt that basilisk gaze bore into his back, cursed, and sped up his climb.

Kaya’s weight was less than he’d thought. She wore nothing but leathers—no metals; it was barely a burden to lift off two steps. And muscled as she was, she was no heavier than any adult warrior—with some boost from his qi it was no great task to lift her. By the third and fourth step, however, with the momentum wearing off her weight was turning substantial.

Then a strangled cry rang out from behind him like a peal of thunder. It almost masked the shriek of a massive body cantering across the sands, each step its own sandstorm. It was closing the distance at a terrifying rate; he could almost imagine the giant storm of claws and jagged teeth barreling his way.

Dorian gave up suppressing his shouts and loosed a roar of his own. In the same instant he pushed his qi to its limits, shoving all he could into one all-in-one leap. The Flood Dragon had come so close he felt a rush of wind on his back, raising all the hairs up his spine.

Either this took him out of the strike zone, or this was where the run ended. Straining ever muscle in his body, he leapt.

Even as he started the motion, blasted off the qi, he heard the sloshing of an acid discharge of insane proportions. The wind was at his back and it carried a sound like a giant’s stomach churning, ready to swallow him whole. He saw his shadow dwarfed by a wave which seemed to blot out half the landscape. It seemed the Flood Dragon was also throwing its last-ditch effort. He screamed a curse. His qi, burning at mach speed, dipped dangerously low—less than a quarter was left. At this rate he’d plummet out of the sky in mere minutes. There was nothing else to do. Any less and the wave would catch him. If so much as a splash of it caught him it was over.

Just as he breached the cloud layer, his ears popping, sweat cooling, he saw the tsunami of black roar up behind him. Then, groaning like a dying titan it passed beneath him, the oily onyx crest of the wave whipping by ten feet under his ankles. Now it fell fast; its path ravaged all; it came upon the Sinkhole and rammed into the crystal-clear waters, black encroaching upon light blue, wrestling with it, smothering it. The aftershocks flowed up and out, meeting each other in violent swells of ink, dissipating to nothing. And through it all was the ever-present hiss of things broken down, melted, as though the land itself sang a funeral hymn.

Dorian met eyes with the Flood Dragon one last time. It opened its mouth to screech. He didn’t stick around—instead he dashed high into the cloud layer, and was gone.

***

He touched down half an hour later, totally spent.

The Tribe had left without them. Dorian’s mouth felt very dry. They must’ve seen all the commotion, the chaos and the blood, and scrambled. Come to think of it—had he and Kaya superseded the limit the Chief had given? They must have. He couldn’t think of very much of anything at the moment.

Kaya. Right. She was minutes away from dead. Her life-force was now am ember struggling in the ashes. She was losing far too much blood, and he hadn’t had the time to so much as stop.

The first thing he did was to set her down on a bed of linens, then splash a copious amount of refined healing-elixir on her. Then he force-fed some down her throat—she was still delirious, not even semi-conscious—and set to work on her wounds.

It wouldn’t be pretty. He had no healing techniques; all he knew were basic mortal best practices, and all he had at his disposal were his elixirs. She wasn’t broken beyond repair, but she was broken in too many places to count—and that was just the bones, never mind the internal bleeding. If it hadn’t been for her bloodline he doubted she’d still be breathing now.

He scoped around. He’d dashed as fast as he could under the cover of the clouds. The Cloud-Treading Steps were a true godsend; in less than an hour he’d put enough distance between him and the chaos that he feared no retribution. This, he recalled, was one of the safer zones that Rust Tribe frequented: far enough away from a Sinkhole that it was light on powerful Beasts. Decently populated by Cacti and hilly enough that sandstorms were never a true issue. A place safe enough to take a breath.

The next few hours he devoted to stabilizing her and thinking.

He’d need to get back to the Tribe. That much was obvious. He’d go back offering the gifts they’d gotten; they were pragmatists, Rust especially. They’d welcome him back with open arms. Alone at his power level, he wasn’t sure at all of his chances.

The desert was vast, true, but the Tribe didn’t move nearly as fast as he did—and he knew the direction in which they moved. He knew where the the Festival was held and he could gauge distance and position by the stars. Finding them shouldn’t be much of an issue.

More pressing, though, was what they’d do to him if he ever revealed he had the mother of all Prime Bones. It still sat like a time bomb in his Interspatial ring. He hadn’t decided what to do with it.

Extract it with Hu’s distillery? Surely not; there was no way Rust would allow him to keep the thing. Ingest it now, raw? That’d be a damned shame—a ridiculous waste of resources. He’d refine half the blood essence in the Bone, at best.

And what would he do once he had the Bloodline? Keep it hidden? For how long? Would he simply not reveal his trump card until he was well into the [Vigor] Realm, or beyond? He frowned. That seemed ridiculous—and utterly impractical to not leverage a great asset in a speedrun. None of it made any sense, and all of it seemed bound to bring issues…

He stilled, blinking, as an idea popped to mind.

Surely he couldn’t be blamed for taking the Prime Bone if he were stranded with a wounded sister in the desert, right? He’d be prey to all sorts of beasts—Vordors would literally kill to find such easy pickings! No; he was forced to take it in order to better protect himself and Kaya. The corners of his lips were slowly rising to a grin.

That, and the rest of the loot he’d offer, should do at least a patchy job of smoothing over any unrest… right?

It was a shaky story, no doubt, but the Bone was burning a hole in his Ring. He was a patient man, but every second he let it sit meant an extra second of risk. Especially if he ran into any stronger Beasts, or worse—stronger cultivators. If he made it back to camp there would be no safe time to distill it, not with the attention even a flash of its aura would draw. It had to be now.

But he wouldn’t ingest it outright. That’d be a waste of essence he couldn’t stomach. He’d need to chuck together a makeshift solution in which to soak the Bone, draw out and fully imbue its essence with qi. It wasn’t an ideal solution. He’d only have access to the basic cauldron setup he had in his ring, meaning he was forgoing a better extraction with Hu’s more precise tools. As it stood he saw no better alternative.

So there were two tasks, then, to occupy the rest of the night. The first was to keep up Kaya’s treatment and stabilize her. The second, to prep a solution to squeeze out every last drop of essence in that Prime Bone.

Despite his awful circumstances he was positively giddy at the thought.

The next few hours passed fast. He drew out cauldron, a host of ingredients, and set a brew in motion. He fed himself a few elixirs to replenish his strength. Then he bandaged up Kaya’s wounds, set her limbs in the right places, and watched over her as she crawled back to stability. Even with his expertise and a dragon’s hoard of healing elixirs, he doubted she’d walk this week. On a steady diet of high-grade elixirs and pills it’d take at least a month for her to be in any semblance of fighting form. He’d wiped off most of the blood now and she didn’t look too awful; mostly human, which was a massive upgrade. The minor wounds had all been sealed up, but her nose had been viciously broken. After he’d set it back it’d always be slightly crooked. Two claw-mark scars cut her face in two. Those would never fully heal either. Somehow she still managed to look irritatingly pretty, a fact that would’ve irked the old Io to no end.

All the while, he had been careful never to remove the Bone from his Ring. Keep it in open space for a prolonged stretch and it’d definitely attract the wrong herd, and just a flash of it at an inopportune time might send some ghastly beasts his way. His hacked-together way to get the most out of it was to toss it in a solution and let it marinate, awakening all of its essences, before he’d swallow it—not totally dissimilar to preparing a raw steak.

At the six-hour-mark came the crucial time. The solution was done. All that was needed was to place the Bone in it. The first thing he did was to leap up almost a thousand feet, scanning the surroundings for any concerning Spirit Beast. None but a few Vordors in the distance. Good.

Then, dropping down, he pulled out the Bone.

Even in that brief flash the aura almost brought him to his knees. With a flick of his wrist he chucked it into the solution, then shoved both back into the Interspatial Ring. It was all done in a half-second but he still rose up into the air again, scanning the horizons for any disturbances, heart thumping. Only a few minutes did he drop back down. He licked his lips.

It was all coming together.

He stayed up the rest of the night, waiting and watching, fighting back impatience. Kaya groaned throughout the night, never waking fully. He fed her pills at regular intervals. He watched the stars. He hadn’t had much time or reason to breathe since he’d begun this run. It was the nature of the run, but now there was nothing to do but wait. Here, soaking in the night sky, the pastel lights of the falling moons, he felt at peace. He wondered at the strip of white running across the sky, a streak of suspended light. He’d seen such streaks before; usually they were scattered debris caught high in the atmosphere. Here, though, they seemed to come in larger chunks—discernible shapes, even, like a divine painter had thrown a brushstroke across the sky aeons ago, but its paint had since chipped in countless places. Irregular enough that he’d wager they weren’t natural formations…

Soon the sun was rising and his mind returned to ground level.

The Bone. He’d timed it by the trajectories of the moons. They were now impressions of light on the horizon, scarcely peeking over the top. It’d soaked to completion.

He gave Kaya a look. Still asleep. He did another quick scout of the perimeter. No great threats spotted.

In his time sitting here he’d given the matter some thought. The Bone looked to be a snake or serpent’s scale, possibly a dragon’s. The sheer weight of its aura spoke to its nature; its qi was heavy as water pressure at the ocean floor. The Flood Dragon had likely come from the depths of the Sinkhole—could this, too, come from there?

Yet another note curiosity to explore for later. Right now there was no sense in waiting any longer.

He dragged out the Elixir in one stroke, let the Bone’s crushing aura wash over him, and downed it clean—Bone and all—in three big gulps.