~Vruuunnn~
The pitch-black spherical ball of void within Soren suddenly buzzed to life, seemingly sensing an intruder that was taking from what it was feeding on, stealing its food.
Then with an abrupt surge in its gravitational pull, the Brine-Veil Gnat realized to late that it had inadvertently entered into a predator's den.
The retaliation was as brief as a viper's bite on a rat that wandered across its face.
That abrupt pull was enough for the orb, and the creature was sucked dry of all its soul energy, as it crumbled into spores that lost their effectiveness and simply drifted aimlessly within the atmosphere.
Soren regained consciousness gasping for air, his hand shaking in subconscious terror. He could feel the mental scar the pain had caused him, but more than that, the subconscious scar of what he endured when he lost consciousness.
He had survived, but the encounter had cost him. His heart was laboring, each beat sounding like a wet thud against a drum. His 3D Energy Flow view was still messed up, but now, not from spores but his own dwindling menta focus.
Nonetheless, his terror was soon amplified when he heard multiple flapping sounds echoing from all over the place.
He managed to gather his sight to realize that he was in a den of Brine-Veil Gnat. They were perched all over the place, perfectly camouflaged into the area, and now, they all just felt the effects of their queen's spored vanish.
It was a nightmare, because Soren sprinted into a level of gear his body couldn't endure, which was why, by the time the Brine-Pit came into view, he had become a ghost of a child.
The Brine-Pit was a jagged, circular depression in the earth, roughly twenty yards across that sat within a tectonic scar, its surface shimmering with an oily, chemical luster.
The scent here was a suffocating mix of concentrated salts and the sharp, stinging aroma of boiling minerals—like a sun-baked ocean that had been left to rot.
Around the edges of the pit, the bones of previous "offerings" were visible—bleached white bones of animals and maybe people—white skeletons covered in salt crystals, like statues in a museum of death.
This was where the House of Ignis sent people they really hated, letting the salt preserve their bodies while the acid destroyed their lives.
Soren stood at the edge, his violet eyes turning the turquoise of the Brin-Pit as a golden glow of the Fifth-Grade Golden Body Elixir reflected of them.
He could feel the atmospheric pressure here; it was heavy, like being submerged in invisible lead. The high-density minerals in the pit created such a crushing pressure that made his chest feel tight.
"The cage," Soren whispered, his voice a dry rasp.
He looked at his skeletal frame, then at the water, and ran through the brutal logic of his situation.
He knew he couldn't drink yet; If he drank the elixir, and the golden fire hit his heart now; he would be incinerated from the inside out before his feet can even touched the brine.
The golden energy was too vast, too violent for a vessel as thin as he was.
"You have to hold me together, okay." He solemnly pleaded.
However, he also knew he couldn't afford to wait, because if he stopped to think about it, the fear of a seven-year-old would stop him.
He stripped the Shadow-Cat hide from his shoulders, standing naked in the stinging, acidic air.
His body was a map of the Tribe's cruelty: the purple-stained shoulder, the black-webbing veins, and the protruding ribs of a starved outcast.
He stood at the very edge of the pit; the heat rising from the turquoise water was intense, yet his skin, cooled by the "ice" of the poison, barely felt it.
He uncorked the jade vial. The scent that erupted from the bottle was not like medicine; it was celestial; almost like the world's most powerful storm. It smelled of ozone, crushed gold, and the first rain of a new world.
The liquid inside was a thick, glowing molten amber that seemed to defy gravity, swirling within the vial in a continuous, angry golden vortex.
Based on the ancestral knowledge of Shamanic alchemy, a Fifth-Grade Elixir is made from the distilled essences of herbs that had at least absorbed a thousand years of sunlight.
For a body without a strong foundation, it is not medicine; it is a bomb.
"If I die here," Soren said to the silent, red-rock sentinels, "I will die as the only thing you couldn't own."
Soren placed the vial in his mouth but didn't drink immediately, instead he threw himself forward into the turquoise water, and landed with a thud.
The brine didn't feel like water; it felt like plunging into a pool of liquid lead. The high-density salt and minerals immediately clamped down on his expanding frame.
Then once he was fully submerged, He simply tilted his neck, and the content of the vial slid down his throat.
The elixir didn't feel like liquid. It felt like he had just swallowed the very lifeblood of the sun: its very molten essence.
Before his mind could even fully register the intensity of the blazing burn in his throat, the Elixir landed in his stomach, and for a heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then, his world detonated.
The golden energy didn't digest; it exploded outward in a radial wave of thermal pressure.
Soren's vision went white—a blinding, solar white.
He felt his ribs expand with a sickening crack as the energy made his body temperature shoot up so swiftly, that the sweat on his skin instantly turned to steam.
The physical sensation was beyond words.
On the inside, the Golden Elixir was pushing outward with the force of a mountain being born.
On the outside however, the mineral-heavy brine was pushing inward with the crushing weight of the deep earth.
Inside, the Golden Elixir was pushing out with the force of a mountain. Outside, the heavy brine was pushing in with the weight of the earth.
Soren felt an anvil between two hammers.
As the density of force trapped within him increased, Soren gradually sank until the turquoise water swallowed him completely.
Then the external torture descended, as the salt began stung his open wounds like millions of needles.
As the golden heat diffused into Soren's bloodstreams, every bit blood began to boil, turning his insides and veins into the hottest of kilns.
Deep inside his cells, the Tranquil Poison screamed. For the first time, the poison—an organism with its own growing, dark intellect—felt true terror as it was suddenly confronted by an energy that was its polar opposite—pure, bright, and tyrannical.
Realizing that if the golden fire burned Soren to ash, it would die too. The Tranquil Poison did something it had never done before out of a desperate need to survive.
Instantly, the poison's instincts shifted. Instead of fighting for territory and keep trying to eat Soren, it began to lash out at the burning elixir, lapping it and absorbing it as it grew stronger and more potent.
Normally, a heart would stop from the experiencing such a horrible shock. But the moment Soren lost consciousness, the black spherical ball of spinning void within his soul suddenly thrummed to life once again.
As the Golden Elixir's energy rampaged through Soren's body, the Void began to pull at it.
It didn't take the liquid or the salt, instead it began to suck in the raw heat energy of the transformation.
It acted like a vacuum, pulling the golden heat while leaving the elixir itself and the now violent Tranquil Poison within Soren's body.
Upon sensing the dwindling heat energy from the Golden Elixir, the Tranquil Poison became bolder as it began to retaliate.
However, before it could do much, something within the deepest recess of Soren's blood; deep into his DNA, where the various genes he had inherited from his lineage were stored was suddenly stirred awake.
Then as if responding to the three different extreme environments dwelling within its own habitat, this specific Gene began to act like a master builder.
As if sensing Soren's need for a stronger vessel compared to his currently decomposing fragile boy, it began to use the golden energy as a tool.
It diffused the Golden Elixir into his bones and then used the external weight of the Brine-Pit to "staple" the elixir's power onto his crumbling skeletal frame.
Soren stood suspended at the bottom of the pit, his eyes wide and glowing with two colors—violet on the edges and molten gold in the middle.
He wasn't drowning. The Golden Elixir was providing a frantic, high-octane oxygenation to his cells, while the brine was forcing his skin to thicken, to toughen, to become something that could contain the storm.
And in there, being hammered on the inside and outside, and having four different entities push-and-pull at his insides, the first stage—The Bloodskin—began not with a meditative breath, but with a silent, underwater roar.
Soren was snapped awake by the sensation of being squished from both within and without, but the euphoric relief the absence of the burning sensation brought to his nerves, made him clearminded enough to start sensing and seeing the changes happening within him.
He felt his blood coagulate and then liquefy, over and over again, as the salt from the pit seeped through his pores and merged with the iron in his veins, making it thicker and more powerful.
He was being unmade. Every bad memory, every bruise, and every tear he had ever shed for a mother he barely knew—it was all being hammered by the forest and burned away in the alchemical forge of the Brine-Pit.
He wasn't a boy anymore. He was a piece of raw iron being hammered by the Wastelands and tempered in the sun.
He was the filter. And for the first time in history, the filter was beginning to taste the power it was meant to refine.
The pressure at the bottom of the Brine-Pit was absolute. To anyone else, the salt would have eaten their eyes, and the acid would have melted their lungs by now.
But Soren was no longer "anyone else."
He could see the sense his genes battling with the black threads of the Tranquil Poison. They weren't merging; they were fighting. The poison wanted to consume the elixir; the gene wanted to "temper" its vessel.
The Tranquil Poison's activity reached a fever pitch. Its tiny, dark consciousness understood a simple truth: if it didn't take some of the Elixir to evolve now, he would have to settled for the diluted version within a strengthened Soren.
That was going to be to much of a hassle for it, because not only would it only have access to the diluted version of the elixir, but it would also have to put extra strenuous efforts to extracted it from Soren's stronger vessel.
However, the gene understood its enemy too well, it had spent seven years fighting it and holding it at bay, preventing it from taking its host's life, and as such, the moment the gene began to absorb the elixir too grown stronger, the Tranquil Poison understood it was in for a rude awakening.
Its instincts screamed at it to flee, and instantly, it discarded its poisonous husk and fled with its instincts and essence straight into Soren's heart, blending with his very lifeblood in an inseparable bind.
Now, if the genes wanted to get rid of its existence, then it would have to take Soren and itself along with it; a three-way mutually self-destructive path.