Chapter 166: First Signs of Intelligence
Chapter 166: First Signs of Intelligence
The thought of using fire to his advantage, taking much inspiration from how Rudith did, filled Rohan’s mind.
Rohan remained crouched beside the gully for a little while longer, fingers half buried in the ash still, watching the change spread across his skin, as if he was standing in the midst of a volcanic eruption and letting the soot rain coat his body.
It wasn’t as dramatic as he’d expected. There were no molten cracks crawling over his arms anymore, nor any explosive burst of power that made him feel like a walking volcanic disaster.
Instead, it was as if the ash was much more calm than his molten element and settled into him without much fuss involved.
His fingertips darkened first, then the colour crawled past his knuckles, up the backs of his hands and toward his wrists. The grey, blackish texture was rough, and it made his skin look drier, denser, as though a fine layer of compacted ash had been pressed into every pore. When he flexed his fingers, tiny dull specks glittered under the violet sky before vanishing again.
Rohan rubbed his thumb against his forefinger.
A faint scrape answered him.
’That’s... not unpleasant.’
It felt like his skin had become slightly more abrasive. Coarse enough that if he dragged his fingers across soft material, it would probably leave a mark. He tried to pinch a little of the loose ash between his fingers, only to realise that it clung to him far more steadily now. The grains stuck to his hand as if they belonged there, then thinned and faded as Molten Assimilation drew something from them.
Not the ash itself, perhaps. Not physically.
More like its nature.
Dryness. Weight. Lightness. Heat hunger. The fragile memory of flame.
Rohan frowned at that last part.
Combustibility was a very useful property in theory. In practice, realising that he had just willingly made part of his body more willing to burn was not exactly reassuring. His first instinct was to withdraw from the ash entirely and cut off the assimilation before he discovered that he had transformed himself into a walking pile of kindling.
But his body did not feel vulnerable.
That was the strange thing.
He could feel the ash’s relationship with heat, but not in the simple sense of weakness. It was more like the ash had already been consumed once and remembered the process. It had passed through fire and survived only as what remained afterward. It could catch, smoulder, choke, scatter, and cling, but it could also bury heat beneath itself and even quash it entirely if needed.
Rohan stared at his hand for several seconds.
’Okay. That’s pretty useful. Terrifying, but useful.’
He carefully increased the flow of Molten Assimilation.
The change moved farther up his arms.
His breathing improved even more, though the bitter metallic taste remained. The scraping sensation in his throat faded until it became little more than an annoying dryness, like he had been walking for hours through dust without water. His body continued to feel strangely invigorated, as if the very particles that should have been damaging his lungs were being dragged into the orbit of his skill and turned into fuel.
Not energy in the same way Origin Energy had felt. This was different. Cruder. More physical.
It felt like his body was learning to waste less.
Every breath became slightly more efficient. Every step across the uneven slabs felt less draining than the one before it. He could still feel the ache in his legs from the long journey through the Ashen Marches, and the weight of Hestia’s spear was still very real in his grip, but some part of him had stopped fighting the land and begun borrowing from it.
That realisation should have comforted him.
Instead, it made him more cautious.
’Nothing here has been generous so far. If the environment is giving me something, I need to assume it’s either temporary, conditional, or the first stage of a very slow murder.’
Rohan pulled his hand out of the gully and shook off the loose ash. Most of it fell away, though a thin film remained across his fingers and palm. He scraped the butt of the spear against the side of a nearby slab, then used the polished edge of the black stone as an improvised mirror.
The reflection was poor, distorted by dust and faint silver glimmers, but he could see enough.
His eyes were still his own. His face had not turned into ash. His hair was still black rather than grey, which was a relief he hadn’t known he needed. The change had remained mostly on his hands and forearms, with faint smoky veins crawling beneath his skin where the assimilation had spread inward.
He exhaled slowly.
"Not dead. Not on fire. Good start."
His voice sounded too loud in the empty field.
Rohan immediately shut his mouth and listened.
The wind answered first, whispering through the gaps between the slabs. Ash shifted in the gullies with a dry, dragging hiss. Far away, something cracked, but it was impossible to tell whether that sound came from stone settling under its own weight or from something large moving where he couldn’t see it.
Nothing came charging at him.
Nothing rose from the ground.
Rohan waited a few more seconds just to be sure, then stood and continued onward.
The Ashen Marches opened before him. With the fog valley now reduced to a pale scar behind him, the world ahead seemed even more endless than before. There were no trees, no grass, no rivers, no obvious landmarks besides the jagged black slabs and the occasional low ridge of darker stone cutting across the plain. The violet sky made distance difficult to judge. Objects that seemed close were sometimes far away, while distant ridges occasionally looked close enough to touch whenever the silver streaks in the clouds brightened.
He moved carefully, but not quite as painfully slowly as before. The ash assimilation gave him enough confidence to step across thinner drifts without treating every patch like a hidden maw. He still tested deeper sections with the spear, but the smallest layers no longer made him stop for half a minute.
That confidence lasted until he found the first footprint.
Rohan froze.
It was half-filled with ash and partially distorted by the wind, but it was unmistakably a footprint.
Not his.
He crouched beside it, keeping the spear ready in both hands as his gaze swept over the surrounding slabs. The print had been left in a narrow strip of ash between two black stones. It was not especially deep, which meant whoever had made it was either light, careful, or both. The shape was close enough to human that Rohan felt his heart kick against his ribs.
A heel. A sole. The faint suggestion of toes or the front of a boot.
He leaned closer.
’A Boot. Definitely a boot.’
The edge was too clean to be a bare foot, and there was a faint pattern pressed into the ash, like worn ridges from a sole. It was not the kind of boot pattern he recognised from Earth, nor from the simple leather footwear he had seen on some Awakened in the Origin Realm. This print was longer, narrower, and slightly curved inward near the arch.
More importantly, there were more of them.
Once he knew what to look for, Rohan spotted the trail continuing between the slabs. The prints were sparse because the walker had stepped mostly on stone, but every time the path crossed ash, another faint impression appeared. Some were old enough to have softened at the edges. Others looked fresher.
Human activity.
Or at least something close enough to human that it wore boots.
Rohan’s first reaction was relief so sudden it almost made him dizzy. If there were people here, then there might be shelter. Water. Food. Information. A way to understand where he was beyond Hestia’s infuriatingly vague explanations and his own increasingly grim guesses.
His second reaction was suspicion.
’People living in a place like this are either very strong, very desperate, or very dangerous.’
Possibly all three — no, definitely.
He followed the tracks for a short distance, slow enough that he could stop at the first sign of movement. The trail did not move in a straight line. It curved around the trembling patches of ash, avoided places where the slabs rose too sharply, and crossed several sections where small black stones had been arranged in pairs.
Rohan stopped beside the first pair.
Two stones, each about the size of his fist, had been placed upright beside a narrow gap between slabs. They were not natural. They had been wedged deliberately into cracks, both leaning toward each other like a crude gate.
A marker.
Rohan looked ahead and spotted another pair thirty or so metres away.
’A path.’
Not an ancient road after all, but something more recent. Something maintained by people who knew this field well enough to mark safe crossings. The placement was subtle, probably invisible to anyone who didn’t know to look for it, but once he had noticed the pattern, more signs emerged.