Blake jumped up to his feet. River’s effect had cleansed his exhaustion and cleared his channels, cleared away his pain and— Wait, it hadn’t just cleared away the pain. His injuries were beginning to knit back together faster. Strength flooded back into his body. She had healed him.

  If he could combine that with the healing that his enhanced body regularly afforded him…

  But he had to survive this, first. The spiker raised its arm, preparing to slam a hand down on Blake, but he jumped to the side, rolling, then skidding along the loose stones. River jumped the other direction, just barely avoiding the impact.

  “Over here, you big idiot!” Blake shouted. “You want me, not the little water deer!”

  “Brother!” Iver yelled. “I can’t get a clear shot!”

  “I know! I’m—”

  Blake cut himself off and squinted at the beast. It didn’t change its focus. For some reason, it was still chasing River. She’d done nothing wrong. She hadn’t even tried to fight it, she’d just tried to help Blake.

  He couldn’t adequately describe how it made him feel. The twinges of anger, the cold twitching in the back of his mind, locking on to something solid and sending a core of tingling down his spine. Pressure built around his body, and he could control it.

  He projected the pressure directly at the spiker. The beast stopped, turning to stare at Blake, completely frozen. Its eyes went wide, and a trickle of blood ran down its nose.

  What had Blake just done?

  That is killing intent, Ethbin replied.

  Blake would worry about exactly what it was later. He’d gotten the spiker’s attention. Now it was time to do something about it. He Augmented his legs and sprinted forward, then sprang off his staff, using it to give himself a slight bit of extra height. Then he swung his staff around, aiming for the spiker’s curled lips, poised to hook its mouth.

  But its head was too low. He pressed his hand to its snout, triggering another Black Palm and shocking it under the chin. Its head snapped up, and he hooked its cheek with his staff, dragging it down to the ground with his momentum.

  The beast’s head slammed into the stone, creating a massive plume of dust, and Blake shouted, “Iver, now!”

  The boy took a wide stance and triggered a smite technique, aiming for the top of the spiker’s head. A bar of flame surged off his hand, burning away his sleeve and crackling out toward the spiker. The compressed air ahead of the technique did the most damage, but the flame seared away its thick skin and cracked its bone.

  But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t dead yet.

  Blake whirled around, building speed in his staff, and struck the exact same spot Iver had hit. Black sparks snapped on the tip of his staff, and when the weapon collided with the spiker’s head, the bone shattered. A surge of black lightning snaked up from the ground, moving at a diagonal while forming tiny little snake heads and fangs.

  The rapid heating and cooling of the skull caused it to shatter entirely. Bone shards zipped out like bullets, and one flung Blake back—thankfully, it hit him in the sternum, and didn’t do any real damage to his enhanced skeleton. It also saved him from the explosion of gore that followed. He would’ve been covered in the putrid stink of the spiker’s blood if he hadn’t gotten himself knocked away.

  “Are you two alright?” he asked, sprinting over to Iver and Froskur.

  “Not injured any more than before the beast attacked us,” Froskur replied.

  “I am unhurt, Senior Brother,” Iver replied. “Th—thank you for saving us.”

  “You helped out too,” Blake responded. He deactivated all his techniques, then raced across the battlefield until he found River cowering at the edge of the clearing, hiding beneath a bush, out of the others’ sight. “It’s alright. The monster is dead.”

  Blake made sure that, whatever that killing intent had been, he sealed it away before looking at River. He’d heard vaguely of the concept, of it being able to kill people if it was strong enough, and he wasn’t taking any risks with River.

  “Now go,” Blake hissed. “I’m not sure if the others saw you, or if they were paying attention, but…go!”

  He was on the opposite side of the spiker, now. They wouldn’t see him talking to River.

  Looking up at him inquisitively, the little eiknir obeyed. She bounded off into the woods, disappearing behind the trees. Blake staggered back toward the spiker’s body and pressed a hand to its side. “Ethbin,” he whispered, still out of sight of the others, “is there anything here I can harvest? And use for muscle reforging?”

  Search for muscle parasites, the ring responded. Parasites like that usually have some sort of powerful venom in them if they’ve latched onto a spiker, and you can use that to reforge your own muscles. But do not force it if you don’t feel an alignment to your body and your own purpose.

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  “Got it,” Blake said. “What about Bone Reforging?”

  Perhaps its marrow could have a similar effect to the fiendsmoke, but I don’t see why you would want to reforge your skeleton again with a lesser ingredient. You would only make it worse.

  Blake took off the ring and stuffed it in his pocket, then snapped off one of the spiker’s talons. He held it like a sword and, Augmenting his body, used it to dig through the beast’s flesh until he found its ribs. He worked at it for a little while, bashing it with his staff and using the aftershocks, until finally, the rib snapped in half, leaking brownish-black marrow.

  He carried the rib back to Froskur and said, “We’re going to reforge your leg and finish your skeleton. You haven’t done that yet, right?”

  “I’ve only just finished the bones in my upper arms,” Froskur said. “It took weeks…”

  “Yeah, well, you’re going to finish your leg in a matter of minutes. And then the rest of your body. It’s going to hurt, but we’re not going to catch up with the others if you can’t walk. You’re going to advance and repair your skeleton.”

  “Just leave me—”

  “No. No one else is sacrificing themselves to save me.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Senior Brother,” Iver said.

  “We don’t have time for doubt. Whatever scared this spiker is still out there, and if it catches our scent, we’re done for,” Blake said. “Keep watch.”

  “Y—yes, Senior Brother.” Iver nodded, then turned away.

  Blake raised the spiker’s claw, then drove its thin tip down into Froskur’s upper thigh, piercing down to bone and etching a hole in the surface of the bone. The boy yelled, but Blake pulled the claw back then poured marrow into the wound as blood burbled out.

  “This marrow should start eating away at your bone,” Blake said. “Chase it through your Bone Meridian with mana and reforge it. It’ll be faster and stronger than anything else you’ve reforged.”

  With tears in his eyes, Froskur nodded.

  Blake wadded up an extra roll of bandages from his backpack and put it in Froskur’s mouth, both to quiet his pained shouts and to give him something to bite down on. Then Blake turned away and stepped up beside Iver. “It might take a while.”

  Since Blake hadn’t poured in as much marrow as he would’ve for his own body, the reforging wouldn’t be as strong. But they needed to go quickly, and by Blake’s estimates, this was still going to be stronger than the shoddy job most of the outer court sect disciples were doing.

  “We can only afford to wait out here for about a half hour, Senior Brother,” Iver said. “Then we will have to move.”

  Blake gave Iver instructions on how to help Froskur with the hands and feet once the legs were done—piercing each bone while still avoiding any tendons.

  “You say this like you have other plans, Senior Brother,” Iver said.

  “I need to keep harvesting the spiker,” Blake said. He ran back to the fallen beast, snapped off a different talon, then dug around in its muscles, looking for the parasites Ethbin had described.

  Finally, he sliced open the beast’s bicep, and hundreds of snake-sized creatures surged out from the muscle. They were more of a worm, but they had a hard, beige shell and a fanged maw that reminded him of a sinkhole. Each little fang dripped tarry, glistening liquid. Muscle dissolving venom that turned all flesh it came into contact with into steam.

  His first instinct was to jump back, but the parasites were slow. He stomped on one to catch it, then snapped it in half at its center. Putting on the Honour ring, he asked, “Ethbin, will this do the trick? They’re not fiends, though…”

  As parasitic monsters, they’re getting awfully close to becoming fiends. It will ‘do the trick,’ to use your language.

  “Understood,” Blake replied. He sifted through his backpack until he found the empty vials that had once held fiendsmoke, then uncorked them and filled them all with the parasites’ venom. To begin reforging his muscles right now would be a terrible idea, but he could at least gather the ingredients.

  Then, speaking so softly the others wouldn’t head, he asked Ethbin, “What did River do to me?”

  She bonded her echo to yours. Your assumption was correct.

  “Okay.” Blake let out a sigh of relief. “But how does that work?”

  For someone of your stage, it is incredibly rare. Binding echoes is a Foundation-level activity. But cultivators are unique among Men and similar races: to be a cultivator is to be capable of binding echoes. All other creatures donate their echoes to a cultivator, sometimes forming a pact.

  “So I have to form a harem of tiny little animals?”

  I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. Ethbin paused for too long. Actually, in fact, no—someone like you might take that as approval. Please don’t. Do not do that.

  “Okay, but like, harem jokes aside, other than little spirit beasts, where do I get echoes to bind?”

  The most common method is by taking the echoes of monsters you kill and bind them to your nine echo sockets. Not all of them will grant you an effect, but a similar set of echoes—say, all swamp creatures—will give you a passive effect when they are all combined. You will have to find a book listing all the types of effects, because I cannot recall them all at once.

  “But clearly, you can do it in other ways,” Blake said.

  Most cultivators socket echoes from different sources. A few echoes taken from the beasts they slay, some from companion creatures, some from lovers—Way companions can lock an echo into each other, but that is a tale for another time. Lastly, you can lock in the echo from an enchanted weapon.

  “Enchanted weapons have echoes?”

  That is how they become enchanted—by pushing an echo into the weapon. And then, when a cultivator binds himself to a weapon at the end of the Foundation stages, he becomes ‘wand-wed.’ He has taken the echo of the enchanted weapon and socketed it into his own echo. Usually, those come with abilities that you can activate, much like what River gave to you.

  Blake pushed his perception inward for a moment, and sure enough, the little blue light that had flooded his echo now remained locked into a socket on its shoulder. “How do I trigger it?”

  A problem for later.

  “Hm?”

  Your friends are finished, and you need to keep moving.