I'm two hours out of Blackwater when the Blight starts talking.
It always talks the same way. A squeeze behind the sternum. Tight and steady. Like it's got one hand on my lungs and it's just reminding me it's there. Then comes the cough. I spit into my palm without slowing the horse.
Dark. Not black yet. I wipe it on my jeans and keep riding.
I stop at a petrified forest where the trees are all stone and the branches reach up like hands. I tie the horse and build a fire from sulfur-weed. It burns blue and low. I pull out Vance's notebooks.
By the third notebook, I understand.
Vance wasn't just brewing poison. He was engineering a delivery system for the Witherlord's vanguard. Airborne dispersal. A plague-seed that locks onto the nervous system, incubates for forty-eight hours invisible, then hits all at once. By the time a town knows it's sick, the vanguard has already moved to the next one.
And Vance sketched the cure in the back of the last notebook. Three ingredients. A compound he called BANE. Then he wrote, in different ink, almost like a joke: As if you'd ever get all three. I cross out that line.
I read the ingredient list again. Goliath adrenal extract. Luna Serpent mercury. Pure Euphorionite as a stabilizer.
I look at the Ledger glowing under my skin.
LEDGER BALANCE: 118 Hours, 03 Minutes. AVAILABLE BLOOD-IRON: 500.
Five hundred Blood-Iron. That's what I earned from Vance. I pull up the Mutation Pathways and study them in the blue firelight.
Vein Calcification costs three hundred. Builds a bone-cage inside my arteries so they don't blow when combat stimulants spike my pressure. Hepatic Bypass is two hundred. Rewires the liver to stop filtering heavy toxins and deliver them straight to the CNS at full strength.
Together they're the only reason I'll survive using the Grave-Rot Epinephrine.
I confirm both purchases.
* * *
Pain is an interesting thing when it comes from inside the bone.
It's not sharp. It's not localized. It's everywhere and slow and utterly inescapable, like the whole skeleton deciding to register a complaint at once. My veins feel like they're filling with concrete. My liver feels like it's being disassembled and rebuilt without anesthetic, which is more or less what's happening.
I bite through the collar of my duster and press my back against the stone and hold very still for ten minutes while the horse pulls at its rope and the blue fire burns and the petrified trees stand over me like they've seen worse.
Then it stops. All at once.
I press two fingers to my neck. My pulse is different. Heavier. Deliberate. Like a clock wound with extra care.
"Alright," I say to nobody.
In the distance, the ground is still faintly shaking. The vanguard is moving, patient as weather.
I need a fresh Goliath gland, a deep-trench serpent, and Bio-Baron Vexar's private stockroom.
There's only one place on the frontier twisted enough to have all three in walking distance of each other.
I get back on the horse and aim at the yellow smog on the horizon.
Next stop: Iron-Vein City.