A full hour passed with Shen Zuo still underground, perfectly still, not making a sound. He waited for any sign of movement above. As the noise gradually faded away, he began crawling out carefully, taking care not to touch anything that might make a sound.
When he finally emerged from his hiding spot, the air was thick with the smell of ash and blood. He looked around.
Before him lay four Craigar corpses, their charred hides still letting off a faint wisp of steam. Scattered around them were nine Caligra, some with their heads crushed, others missing a wing or with their chests torn wide open.
He approached one of the Craigars and got to work quietly. He reached his hand into the lower side of its body, near the stomach, where he knew the poison core formed. It was round, a dark, pale green, with a faint shine to it, formed over years of accumulated toxins the body had never been able to expel. He pulled out four of them.
Then he moved on to the Caligra.
Their bodies were covered in black feathers with a bluish sheen, their wings spread out on the ground like massive blades, and their eyes, even in death, still glowed a bright red. One of them still had an intact beak, so he went to that one first. Long, curved, and serrated on the inside, this beak was what let these creatures tear through their prey's flesh with such speed, and it was precisely this beak that counted as the Caligra's core.
He extracted three of the beaks, setting them carefully alongside the other cores, then looked around one last time to make sure the area was clear... and started moving again.
Beast cores aren't all alike; they differ from creature to creature, shaped by the beast's nature and biological structure. In the case of Craigars, the core forms near the stomach, a result of excess toxins the body couldn't expel, gradually building up over the years until it hardens into a dark solid mass known as a poison core, a powerful source of toxic energy.
Caligra, on the other hand, have no poisonous organs or internal masses; their core is the beak itself, being the most lethal and distinctive part of their body. It's curved, lined on the inside with fine serrated teeth, and capable of tearing through both flesh and bone with ease. And because it's made of an extremely hard material that doesn't degrade even after the creature's death, it's classified among beast cores.
That's not all, either. The front of the beak carries a unique property: it absorbs traits from whatever material the creature pecks at or consumes. That's why Caligra are sometimes seen pecking at rocks or metal, not out of hunger, but to gain extra hardness in their beaks. Over time, some of these beaks become capable of scratching iron or piercing bone in a single strike.
And, as with other cases, like the Frelta deer, a core can also take the form of internal leather sacs, each carrying different properties. Every beast has its own "core," forming slowly within it, like a signature of its existence.
Shen Zuo sat underground for nearly an hour, occupied with extracting the important parts from the beast corpses. He worked in silence, doing the math in his head:
"So... that puts me at sixteen kills now. Not bad."
Once he finished collecting everything, he stood and dragged the corpses, one by one, toward the pit he'd dug earlier for hiding. He tossed them in carefully, then buried them under a thick layer of dirt, trying to hide any trace that might draw in other predators.
He stood over the freshly turned dirt for a moment, thinking, before shaking his head and muttering:
"If only I had the right equipment... I could've turned these corpses into a trap that could take down dozens of beasts. But it's fine..."
He looked around and remembered that some of the traps he'd set had already been used up in the earlier struggle. He clenched his fist and thought to himself:
"I've wasted enough time already... I need to fix them right now, no time to sit around thinking. Come on... back to work."
Then he moved lightly between the rocks, checking on his traps and rearranging his tools, getting ready for the next round.
The sun was beginning to set by the time Shen Zuo made it back to the small cave. He gathered a few powders and tools he'd already prepared for emergency use, then headed straight back to the battle site.
He scattered the powders carefully over the blood and the footprints, covering the main spots where the fighting had happened, until the signs of the site were reasonably dulled down. The goal wasn't to erase every trace completely, but to reduce the chance of drawing in other creatures.
Once he finished, he headed back to the cave, unrolled the leather map, and pulled out his writing tool. At the spot where the battle against the Craigars had taken place, he marked a bold symbol and wrote beside it:
"Temporarily off-limits."
Then he rolled the map back up, took a deep breath, and got ready for the next phase.
With the Craigars dead, the northern side had grown considerably safer, giving Shen Zuo more freedom to expand in that direction. And thanks to the four poison cores he'd taken from the Craigars, he now had a unique weapon in his hands, one capable of killing dozens of beasts if emptied into a main water source.
Even though he recognized that possibility, he decided against wasting the poison that way. He had a different use in mind, something far more precise. An early idea for a large-scale trap was starting to take shape; a single trap that could potentially wipe out at least thirty Shao wolves he'd spotted from a distance, hazily, at the western edge some time ago. Back then, he hadn't had the nerve to face them and had pulled back immediately, but the circumstances were different now.
Over the following days, he stayed busy repairing his old traps, without adding any new ones. His goal for now wasn't building more traps, but expanding the Growing Map. He searched carefully for any old weapons, anything sharp, even a discarded arrowhead. The forest he was moving through clearly bore the marks of some old conflict, maybe a war, maybe just a series of forgotten chases... who could really say?
After a few more days of searching and wandering the forest, Shen Zuo muttered, turning one of the arrows over between his fingers:
"So far... I've found two arrows. Alright, that's good enough for now."
A strangely shaped bow hung across his back, clearly his own handmade work. He'd used a branch from a specific tree after testing its hardness and flexibility, tying both ends together with an old piece of string cut from one of the broken bows he'd found. The bow wasn't perfectly balanced, but it was functional, good enough to get him through for now until he found something better.
Shen Zuo's eyes were scanning the surrounding ground carefully, inch by inch, even though his mind was preoccupied with other thoughts. Still, he made use of the quiet moment to memorize every detail of the area.
He pulled the new map out of his pouch, freshly drawn, wider and more precise than the previous version. Some points on the map were numbered or marked with small symbols, apparently indicating the locations of various traps, the nearest of which sat just 200 meters from the traps he'd set up a short while ago.
He knelt down, pulled out his drawing tool, and began sketching a new extension for the northern region. Directly ahead of him, massive ant colonies came into view. A single ant was about the size of a seven-year-old child's index finger, and their movement was orderly, marching in lines that wove between roots and stones.
But not all the ants looked the same. Shen Zuo noticed a few that were larger than the rest, nearly double the size, moving slowly and deliberately. Their bodies had a glossy hardness to them, a darker color, with interlocking front mandibles like pincers, and long sensory whiskers that never stopped moving, as if constantly watching everything around them.
It was clear these weren't ordinary workers, but individuals of some real importance within the colony. Shen Zuo didn't get too close to them, but he noted their location on the map, marking a small symbol beside it, then thought to himself:
"Maybe this colony could come in useful later on... but for now, it's outside the scope of my plan."