The remainder of our journey was uneventful. After the sounds of the centurions marching faded away, the husks returned to their eerie, hypnotic state, staring at the old church.
We kept moving and made it to Owl's hideout shortly after sundown. That phenomenon was strange here too. The sun didn't rise and fall but instead disappeared on the left side of some huge shape in the distance. The Black Mountain. Owl said it could be seen from anywhere in the heavens. It was the very center of the world.
This hideout was clearly better equipped than the previous one; it was built underground, in what had once been the wine cellar of a rich family. The wine storage had been completely removed, replaced by a fully equipped workshop, with crates filled with materials, mostly wood, brass, and iron. The walls and ceiling had layers of runes carved on them, with slots for up to five cores at the same time; interlocking circles of grooves connected several working stations, an anvil, and a forge.
Owl caught me trying to read them and explained.
"This is my workshop hideout. The runes are for powering the equipment and the forge."
"What about those?" I pointed at an outer set of runes, whose grooves didn't seem to interlock with anything else.
"Those are for utility; sound dampening, clearing the air of smoke and smells, light. We can stay here for a few weeks—enough for your leg to heal—before we start attracting unwanted attention." He fit a core into the slot for those runes, lighting up the underground workshop.
He set down his bow on one of the working stations, going about removing its string.
"Make yourself at home," he said, gesturing with his head to a door on the side. "There is only one room, as I never intended to have guests, but you can make use of it. I'll just stay in the workshop."
I thought about suggesting staying in the workshop myself—the hideout was his, after all—but I imagined he'd assigned the room to me so I wouldn't touch or break any of his equipment.
"Alright, thanks." I made my way inside the room, opening its surprisingly solid wooden door. It was simple, with a bed a few sizes too big for me. I was tall for a sixteen-year-old, measuring 183 centimeters (6'0''). But I would still take at most two thirds of the bed in length.
In the room there was also a dresser, with clothing similar to what Owl wore, mainly some leather coats and linen clothing that reminded me of old Victorian fashion.
"Do choose something for yourself to wear; I'll make the adjustments to your size." I turned around to Owl leaning against the doorframe. "Your clothes are in shambles, not that they would look much better if they were whole. Your people have a very questionable sense of fashion."
I rolled my eyes. That was not a discussion I was having with an owl-man dressed in Victorian clothing.
"I'll see about that later. I want to get some reading done."
He nodded, leaving and closing the door.
My eyes scanned the rest of the room, coming to a stop on a full-body mirror much taller than I was. Dropping my backpack beside the bed, I stood in front of it.
My brown hair was caked with dirt and grime, tangled into a mess, and my face was smeared with soot. My eyes had large bags under them, the brown color almost black in the dim room.
'After all, it's still you.' I thought with a chuckle.
It had only been two, now almost three days. But it felt so much longer. If I were home, I would be training right now, probably. Or maybe I would be at home, hearing mom talk about her day. A feeling caught in my throat, tightening it. I could see my eyes water a bit in the mirror, so I turned away.
Taking some time to breathe, I went out to the workshop. Owl was cleaning his bow; he showed great care for it.
"Hey, is there a place to clean myself?"
He didn't take his eyes away from his task.
"You can take a bucket, it's right beside the water tank. If you need to use the bathroom for... other reasons, there is a door leading to a latrine right beside the tank. Don't waste too much water though; there's only so much moisture the runes in the tank can gather from the air in a week."
'That's how he gets his water then, huh.'
I picked up a bucket, going back to my room to clean myself. In the end, the water turned completely murky and I dumped it down the latrine. Looking again in the mirror, I had regained most of my dignity. I didn't look like a sewer rat anymore—more like a stray dog now. My hair was clean, my clothes had been piled on one end of the room, and I was just in my underwear.
These last few days had taken a toll, but they showed as definition in my muscles. I looked lean, but muscular.
I sat on the bed, fishing out "Basics of Body Strengthening."
I was ready to start getting stronger.
"The fundamental part of body strengthening at the lower levels, is that muscle effort and damage, followed by healing, leads to an increase in strength. That is the root of the basic methods discussed in this book."
[...]
"The question lies not in workout methods or medicine applications that can help in the process. Working out is slow and reliance on the body's natural healing capabilities take too long. That is why our methods focus on the basics of runic circuitry and treating the body as an artifact."
[...]
"Should the practitioner have a core, the following process can be skipped, otherwise, the following instructions describe the process of using gathering runes to acquire the ambient energy necessary for prolonged muscle excitation."
[...]
"The conduits must follow the solar-plexus from the energy-gathering circle, runes must be inscribed over every muscle group following the diagram, for best results, smaller support runes should be drawn over every muscle."
[...]
"For increased healing, a metabolism enhancing array is drawn between five circles, all connecting to the solar-plexus. The kidneys, liver, stomach and the base of the spine should all be connected into one array-network."
[...]
I rubbed my temples.
'This is really complex, but I'm willing to give it a try. I was worried the methods for Owl's people wouldn't work on me, but they seem very generalized, not relying on their organism's specific biology.'
I asked Owl for some chalk and glue, and with a knowing smirk he lent me some. His parting words were: "Just don't do it on top of the bed, please; we don't have any spare sheets."
'Ominous.'
I went through the lengthy process of drawing over my skin with their specialized chalk-glue mixture. The drawing of the runes had to be very meticulous, but the book went into great detail with its diagrams. It must have taken me two or three hours to complete the process, and afterwards I looked like an indigenous shaman on steroids. Runes were drawn all over my body, over every inch. I used my biology class books that I had for school for reference; they had a few human anatomy diagrams. They didn't go into great detail like the ones from Owl's race, but they were used for fundamentally different purposes. Unfortunately, I couldn't use some of the diagrams in their book for obvious reasons; the muscles making up our bodies were simply different.
With the smell of cooked meat coming in through the door, I greeted Owl in the workshop with a few scavengers skewered through sticks; he had gone to the effort of gathering ten this time, cooked in the forge.
"Are we celebrating something? Why so many?"
He gave me a mysterious smile.
"Just eat as much as you can. And when you can't, just shove another one in. You will thank me later."
Raising an eyebrow, I went on eating until I was absolutely stuffed, feeling like my stomach was about to burst. I ate four scavengers.
"Good luck." Owl shook his head as I closed myself in my room. I sat on the floor, reading the directions on the manual. I was supposed to find a comfortable pose, making sure none of my muscles were too tight and I had no cut-offs in the circuits. I ended up almost in the lotus position, with my legs crossed.
"Now, since I don't have a core, I'll need an external core to kickstart the process, and I won't be able to stop until all my muscles are tired. The book did go over the process of using this method while injured, saying that there will be no further increase in injury, with a wealth of subject testing. And that the increased metabolic rate can greatly help with healing."
Holding the core up to my chest, I took a deep breath.
'I have a bad premonition about this...'
'Ahh, screw it. No pain no gain.'
I touched the core to the center of my chest, the chalk outlines lighting up in blue like I entered some sort of mythical state. 'Huh, it reminds me of that kids show-' That thought was cut off by all the muscles in my body cramping up at once, the air in my lungs being forcefully expelled out. My eyes popped with strain; every muscle burned with effort, and it got worse by the second.
It continued for ten seconds, and when I almost felt like passing out from a lack of oxygen... my body forcefully pulled in a wealth of air, expanding my lungs until my ribs and spine made popping noises. All muscles relaxed at once, giving me a smidge of relief... that was then subsequently instantly taken away again.
To my absolute horror, the process continued over and over again. It didn't hurt so much as it felt like doing the most strenuous workout of my life, working every single muscle fiber to exhaustion at once.
I laid spread out on the floor; I couldn't move a single muscle, barely being able to blink. My mind was blank with exhaustion, and I started to hallucinate a fairy coming down from the light on the ceiling to take care of my wounds. When the beautiful fairy touched my cheek, however, there was no relief, only a jolting sensation coursing through my whole body. The healing process started, my metabolism crashing through the ceiling of humanly possible. My muscles grew, visible to the naked eye—not tremendously, but the me from before the process would lose to the me from after in sheer strength ten out of ten times.
A hunger like never before crashed through me, my body's reserves of fat diminishing with terrible speed. I had to eat; my stomach, once full to bursting, was already empty and begging for more.
I managed to get up and run out of the room. The healing process had my muscles working again, but it refused to stop, taking more and more energy from my reserves of body fat. I looked more and more shredded by the second, but that was not a good sign.
To my relief, like a sarcastic guardian angel, Owl was chuckling and grilling another ten scavengers.
"Come on, eat up before you turn into a desiccated corpse on the floor. There's also water; you should drink as much as you can, too."
I just then noticed how much I was sweating, with water dripping off my skin like I had taken a shower. I would be getting dehydrated soon if I didn't act fast. Surprisingly, the chalk wasn't running off my skin; I didn't know if it was because of the glue or the energy coursing through the circuits.
That was how my first of a supposed twenty sessions of body cultivation went. By the end, I would reach the limit of what a human body could be. When the book had described being able to achieve that with the runes, I admit I had been skeptical. But now? If I was a different person I might even be scared.
Funny enough, I had other thoughts.
'I'm going to get addicted to this.'