Blood dripped from Rudra's daggers.
Slow. Patient. Like the forest itself was counting each drop.
The Jackal lay still beneath his feet. Its red fur had already begun to fade — that vivid, burning crimson bleeding out of it the way colour leaves a dying fire. A moment ago it had been alive. Snarling. Dangerous. Now it was just weight on the earth.
Rudra exhaled slowly.
Then a stream of white energy, the Panch-Tatva Shakti rose from the corpse. Pure and quiet. It moved the way smoke moves against a windless sky — without hurry, without destination — until it found him, and entered his body like something returning home.
The warmth spread from his chest outward.
Down his arms.
Into his fingers.
Then deeper. Into the place where the poison lived.
He closed his eyes and simply let it happen.
There was a particular feeling to absorbing Panch-Tatva energy. It wasn't quite pleasure. It wasn't quite relief. It was something older than both — the sensation of a body receiving what it had been quietly starving for. His limbs felt fuller. His breath came easier. And for a few seconds, even the constant dull ache of the toxin in his veins retreated to the edges of his awareness.
Then his eyes opened.
"Thirty percent."
His voice was calm. Empty of the excitement the number should have carried.
Five years.
He turned that thought over once, the way you turn a stone over to see what lives beneath it.
Five entire years.
Most cultivators at his level would have crossed the Initial Stage threshold in months. A few exceptional ones, weeks. But Rudra's body had never seen a fair battleground in both his previous life and the current one. Every drop of spiritual energy he absorbed was met immediately by the poison — that old, patient enemy living inside his veins since before he could understand what it meant. The poison took its share first. Always. What remained reached his cultivation. What reached his cultivation had to be enough.
For five years, it had been enough.
Just barely.
He looked at his hands. Still stained. The blood of the Jackal had dried in the lines of his knuckles, making him look older than he was. In the dim fog-light of the Gurukul forest, Rudra looked less like a five-year-old and more like something the forest had shaped itself.
"Still a long way to go, only if I had an adult's physique." he said quietly.
Not with frustration.
With the simple clarity of someone reading a map.
He moved without wasting time.
The nearest towering tree went up thirty, maybe forty feet before the fog swallowed its higher branches. Rudra climbed without hesitation — small hands finding holds in the bark, feet pushing off in short precise bursts, body moving the way it had learned to over years of making do with less than it should have had.
At the top, the fog thinned slightly. Not enough to see far. But enough.
He scanned the four directions once, methodically.
North. South. East. West.
Then his gaze settled northwest. Something in his memory sharpened — a piece of information from before the trial began, filed away while other disciples were asking about the Grand Library's location and the safest paths between them.
A faint pull appeared at the corner of his mouth.
The Grand Library was north. Every disciple with a functioning brain would be moving that direction. Competing. Colliding. Wasting energy on each other instead of on accumulation.
Rudra was not interested in the simplest path.
Not yet.
His black eyes steadied.
"Top ten is enough. Timing matters more than position."
In Rudra's list of things to achieve from this trial, time matters the most. Every second had to be planned and the plan had to be executed with upmost precision.
He dropped from the tree without ceremony and landed in a low crouch. Then he ran.
The forest moved past him like a dream you're already forgetting.
Branches. Roots. The occasional gap of grey light through the canopy before the fog closed it again. The fog still remained one of the most problematic hinderance in Rudra's path. His footfalls were quiet — not silent, the ground here was too uneven for silence — but measured. Controlled. The kind of running that could be sustained.
Fifteen minutes later, four jackals lay behind him. Hints of pain, wrath and unwillingness remained in their dead eyes.
Four. In fifteen minutes.
It wasn't pride that made him note it. It was arithmetic. Four sources of essence. Four small additions to the accumulation inside him. Panch-Tatva Shakti's accumulation increased to 33% mark. He still required 67% to enter rank one of strength hierarchy. His perception had stretched from its suppressed range of perhaps four hundred meters to nearly seven hundred.
But Rudra had to move with all the suppression of fog and his strength.
But now things had gotten a bit better.
He kept moving.
And then, gradually, something changed.
Not a sound. The absence of sound.
Rudra slowed without consciously deciding to. It was his body responding to something his mind hadn't named yet — the particular quality of a silence that was wrong. The forest had been alive with small noises. The shuffle of movement in underbrush. The distant calls of birds. Insects.
Now there was nothing.
He stopped completely.
His fingers found his daggers.
The fog moved. Not from wind — it shifted the way it shifts when something large moves through it slowly. Deliberately.
Then came the steps.
Step.
Step.
Step.
From the grey wall ahead of him, a shape solidified.
Rudra's breath stilled, hair on the back of his neck stood.
The wolf was enormous. Its fur was the deep orange-red of cooling coal, rose through with lines of actual heat that made the air around it shimmer. Its eyes were not animal eyes — they carried something colder and more intelligent behind the red glow. It stood nearly at Rudra's chest height even on all fours, which meant that when it raised its head to regard him, it was looking slightly down.
Drool fell from its fangs.
An Ember Fire Wolf.
Rudra had known they lived in this region. He had accounted for the possibility of encountering one. He had not particularly wanted to, but the forest didn't consult his preferences.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
The wolf saw prey.
Rudra saw a problem that needed solving before it solved him or create more unnecessary problems.
He drew both daggers.
The crimson blade caught the light first. Then the black crystal one — darker, eating the light rather than reflecting it.
Something shifted in the wolf's posture. A lowering of its huge body. Its fur brightened, the heat lines intensifying, and Rudra felt the temperature around them rise by several degrees in the span of a breath. The leaves closest to the wolf's feet began to curl at their edges, browning.
Then Rudra moved first.
The wolf didn't panic. It watched him approach with that terrible intelligence in its eyes, body settling into a defensive weight. Waiting for him to commit. All the wolf saw was a feeble and small creature in front of him. It gazed at Rudra like an appetizer.
Rudra shot forward like an arrow released from a bow towards the wolf head on.
He crossed the distance in an unimaginable speed moving straight ahead — and then he changed.
At the last possible instant, he shifted left, feeding Panch-Tatva energy into his legs. Speed spiked. His path changed. The wolf reacted — its massive right paw swung around with a speed that had no business belonging to something that size.
Heat rose in the upcoming paw. The knife like nails glowed like a molten lava coming straight towards Rudra.
CLANG.
Suddenly Rudra's dagger came up and struck the claw with all his might, the impact hammered through his arm like a struck bell. Heat exploded across his hand. The skin along his knuckles burned immediately, and for one bright second his entire right arm felt distant from him, as though it belonged to someone else.
Searing pain enveloped Rudra, he gritted his teeth and swallow the pain without flinching. The pain inflicted to the body does not matter to Rudra who had faced death and nearly got perished in Vaitarini Passage. What matters to him the most was results.
He didn't stop.
He parried the collision — and let the momentum of his charge carry him forward rather than backward from the impact, dagger slid along the wolf's claw in a grinding shriek of metal. Spark of metal flared.
The beast tried to pull back and redirect.
It was half a second too slow.
SHHK.
The crimson blade opened and slid into a line across the wolf's face — entering from its right eye, angling back toward the shoulder. Not clean. Not precise. But not deep enough to mortally wound the beast. But Rudra completed his purpose. He managed to take wolf's right eye making him partially blind.
"Heh, if you can't find a blind spot, then all you have to do is make one."
Rudra sneered at the wolf.
Blood sprayed black-red in the fog.
The wolf's howl of pain shook the air.
It turned towards Rudra with the wound still fresh, and what had been dangerous before became something else entirely. An injured predator is a different creature than an unwounded one. The calculation behind those eyes was gone. What replaced it was older and simpler and worse.
It lunged towards Rudra in a fury.
Fangs wide.
Pure rage moving at speed.
Rudra crossed both daggers in front of him.
The wolf's jaws closed on the blades rather than on Rudra, and the force drove him backward. His feet tore furrows in the mud. His muscles burned under the weight of it. His bones felt the shock all the way to his jaw.
But he held.
Energy poured through him — down his arms, into his planted feet — keeping him from being simply swept away.
Then he saw it.
Deep in the darkness of the wolf's throat, past the fangs and the rage, something was glowing.
An ember. A bright ember of fire was developing inside wolf's throat.
A single, building, terrible ember.
Oh.
Rudra had perhaps one second.
Maybe less.
Instead of continuing to resist the wolf's bite — instead of pushing back against that jaw — he pushed up. Both daggers angled skyward, driving the wolf's head upward with every ounce of strength he had.
The beast's head tilted toward the canopy.
The ember erupted.
WHOOSH.
Fire tore upward through the fog. A pillar of it, brilliant orange, hot enough that Rudra felt it as a physical thing pressing against his face even from below. He smelled his own hair burning at the edges.
But the fire went up.
Not through him.
And that single redirected moment — that one second of the wolf's body committed entirely to its breath — was the only opening there would be.
Rudra twisted beneath the wolf.
The black dagger drove upward.
Crunch.
Stabbed into the throat. Deep. The blade disappeared to the hilt. Then Rudra twisted the dagger with force shattering the wind pipe.
The wolf's howl became something wet and broken. It lurched backward, trying to create distance, trying to find a way to still survive this. Blood poured freely. Its movements lost their terrible certainty.
Rudra was already moving.
The crimson blade came forward.
SHHK.
Into the chest. Angled inward. He felt the resistance of bone — tore through it — felt the moment the blade found what it was looking for. The heart of the beast.
Heart of a creature is a very beautiful thing, working diligently without rest, but once stopped there is no coming back all that remains is silence, pure silence of death.
The wolf went still.
Not all at once. The life left it in stages — first the fury, then the strength, then finally the red light in its remaining eye. It looked at him once, in that last moment, with something that was difficult to read.
But it was not fast enough for Rudra's liking. In it's last breath he did something Rudra feared the most.
*Awoooooooooooo*
The wolf howled at the top of it's lungs.
Then it was just weight, settling to the earth.
"Shit, why does it have to howl, just to mock me. I even crushed his wind pipe."
Rudra's aim from the start was to kill the wolf silently. So the situation does not get worse. That was the reason of him taking the risk to fight the wolf head on.
His right hand throbbed. The burns across his knuckles were already tightening. His muscles ached in that particular deep way that meant tomorrow would be unpleasant.
He looked at the wolf for a moment. At the scale of it. At what it had nearly been.
Scout of the pack, probably. That's why it was alone.
He reached toward it to begin drawing the essence—
And then the howl started.
Not from the corpse this time.
From the forest around him.
AAAAAAAAWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
But this wasn't the dying wolf. This was the dead one's last act — a call thrown out in that final breath, carrying through the fog and the trees and the grey distance.
Answered almost immediately.
Rudra stared at the corpse.
Then put his face briefly in his free hand.
"...Wonderful."
He turned around and ran.
Not strategically. Not calmly. He ran the way living things run when the alternative is being eaten — fast, and then faster, branches exploding past his face, roots blurring beneath his feet, fog swallowing everything behind him.
From that fog behind him, shapes were starting to emerge.
One.
Two.
Three, four, five—
Six Ember Fire Wolves broke from the grey wall at his back, their fur blazing, their eyes locked, their collective killing intent pressing against him like heat from an open furnace.
Rudra glanced back over his shoulder at them.
He laughed. Actually laughed — a short, genuine sound, entirely out of place.
"Not much trouble individually," he said, mostly to himself, legs pumping, the wolves gaining ground behind him. "But for them quantity creates quality."
Fifty meters between them.
Forty.
The trees blurred. The fog rushed past. The howls layered over each other into something that filled the entire forest.
Thirty meters.
Rudra grinned — the dangerous kind, the kind that appeared not because things were going well but because they were interesting — and poured more energy into his legs.
"Come on then."
His eyes found the northwest. Found the direction he'd already chosen. Whatever waited there — opportunity or disaster or something in between — it was waiting at the end of this run.
"I'll show you what human adaptability looks like."
From the words alone it looked quite heroic like a warrior standing alone in front of adversaries. But the visuals told another story.
And with six burning wolves closing behind him, Rudra ran deeper into the fog.
"Oh, come on it attacked me first I was only defending myself." Rudra shouted while running into the forest in a zig-zag manner.
Toward the northwest.
Toward whatever he had decided was worth finding.
Toward whatever the fog had decided to put in his way.
To Be Continued...