For a while, all he knew was the feeling of critters moving under his skin. Crawling through his body like they were exploring a new home.
He twisted and rolled without thinking, trying to crush the sensation out of himself, trying to scrape the motes off on the damp earth. He dragged his shoulder through the dirt, shoved his back into the ground, flipped to his side and then his stomach. By the time he stopped, his shirt and jeans had turned into rags, torn open at the seams, streaked with mud and bits of crushed leaves.
The motes didn't care.
Tiny pinpricks slid under his skin in slow, stubborn waves, clustering around the worst spots like they already knew what needed fixing and where. They crawled along his arms, his ribs, the side of his neck, too small to see and far too vivid to ignore.
He lay there, breathing hard, and waited for the panic to turn into something worse. For them to start chewing. For them to push outward.
They never did.
With the kind of tired logic only pain allowed, Hao decided the motes probably weren't going to eat their way out of him and spill from his skin like beetles from rotten bark.
He let out a shaky breath and forced himself to go still.
They also weren't leaving.
That much was obvious.
He raised his forearm to block the sunlight, then turned his palm toward his face.
A thin cut ran across the center of it. Still fresh, messy, and rimmed with dirt. Or at least, that's how it should've looked. Instead, tiny motes crawled over the wound in tight formation, swarming across the torn skin like they were inspecting what happened. Wherever they passed, the blood vanished, pulled inward before it could escape. The raw edges of the cut twitched, tugged closer together, knitting themselves shut one slow thread at a time.
It didn't look like his body was healing. It looked like the motes were rebuilding whatever was missing, without asking for permission.
The skin around the cut pulsed faintly as the motes burrowed deeper, pushing out a grain of dirt, then another, dropping them onto his wrist like little black crumbs. The electric feeling they left behind wasn't comforting. It felt more like a doctor sewing his skin shut from the inside.
Hao planted his bruised forearms against the ground and used what was left of his strength to lift himself up. The grass brushed against the scraped patches along his sides and elbows, making them itch and burn at the same time, like his whole body had been downgraded to one big, badly healed scab.
His legs protested when he tried to stand. Each step of getting upright felt like an argument with gravity, and he was not winning, but he forced himself through it anyway, teeth clenched.
When he finally found his balance, his head drifted upward.
Tall trees surrounded him on every side, rising from the long grass in endless, straight trunks. They seemed to stretch for at least a few hours of walking. Maybe more. They could easily have gone on for days, but his eyes couldn't see that far. The canopy swallowed the sky and turned it into strips of pale light and shadow.
As he stretched his back, a pulse of movement rippled under his skin.
The motes were still working.
Of course, after throwing himself against the forest floor and even into a tree, the cut on his palm wasn't the only place where the motes had decided needed sewing. That same crawling feeling moved across his shoulders, his knees, his side, dragging tiny dirt fragments out from under his skin and shoving them up and out. Each little grain stung as it broke the surface.
It felt weird. Too aware. He could feel every cluster of motes moving through him, as if someone was dragging their fingers along the inside of his veins.
"Just… why couldn't I get something like a sword," he muttered, wiping his dirty hand on what remained of his jeans that looked more like rags now, "or maybe even a magic book."
His eyes swept the forest, searching for anything that might look like help, or a hint, anything that would actually matter for the trial.
Trees. Rocks. Even more trees. A ribbon of water glinted between the trunks a short distance away, a narrow river cut through the undergrowth.
"Why am I even trying?" he breathed.
His gaze drifted upward.
The sun hung low and lazy on the horizon, pressed up against the tree line. Fiery orange along the edges, deep crimson bleeding out from the middle, with a soft gold core that threatened to spill sideways and cast long shadows over the forest, stretching everything thin and black.
Night was coming. Whether he wanted it to or not.
"I guess we are camping here tonight," he said, mostly to hear his own voice.
His eyes drifted once more, this time to his side.
Near one of the taller, older trees, a scatter of branches lay half-buried in the grass. Some were thin and brittle, good for kindling. Others were thicker, rib-like pieces of fallen limbs, stripped of leaves and almost dry.
Something to work with.
He walked over, knees complaining, and crouched to grab the first branch. As his fingers closed around the wood, a pulse moved down his wrist, like the motes were checking what he was doing.
"Relax," he muttered. "I'm not gonna throw myself at another tree."
He dragged the thicker branches closer to the big tree he'd chosen, the one with the thickest trunk and roots like fingers clutching the dirt. The ground was soft, probably from recent rain, easy enough to dig into with his hands and the end of a branch.
He dug a few bigger ones into the earth in a rough semicircle around the trunk for support, shoving them in until they stood at an angle, leaning back slightly into the tree. Then he arranged a few more along the side, trying to convince them to behave like walls instead of reminders he didn't know how to build anything more complicated than a blanket fort propped up on random chairs.
Every now and then, a sharp sting ran through his palm. A few bits of wood found their way under his skin, burying themselves like tiny, painful barbs. The motes made easy work of pushing them back out. He felt them swarm to the spot, cluster, then drive the splinter toward the surface until he could brush it away.
Far off, deeper in the trees, something moved through the grass.
Not wind. A slow, uneven rustle, like weight pressing the blades down, then letting them spring back up. Step. Pause. Step.
The sound crept along the ground and slid up his spine.
Hao froze, hunched over a half-buried branch, listening.
Nothing followed.
The forest went back to its fake quiet.
He swallowed and went back to work, forcing his shoulders to relax.
On one trip out from his half-built shelter, he almost stepped into a shallow depression in the dirt. He stopped just in time and looked closer.
Three long marks pressed into the mud, spaced too far apart to be human footprints. Too deep to be anything small. Almost like someone had stomped down with enormous toes and then walked away, bored.
A faint chill crawled up his back.
"Great," he whispered. "So there's another monster. Fragment. Thing. At least it doesn't look as bad as the thing in the cabin."
He stepped around the print and pretended he hadn't seen it.
A little farther from his chosen tree, he found another clue that he absolutely didn't want.
One of the trunks had deep, parallel grooves raked down its side, long, thin claw marks carved into the bark. The edges were dark, not fresh, but not ancient either. As if something kept coming back to this spot whenever it felt like it.
He didn't touch those.
Just looked once, memorized the direction they pointed, and then made sure his shelter was being built on the opposite side.
Near the roots of another tree, almost hidden under damp leaves, a short plank of wood stuck out at an angle. He tugged it free.
The surface was too smooth for natural breakage. It had been shaved with something sharp long ago, edges worn and splintered now, but the shape was clear: something had cut this far before he ever arrived.
Someone had been here.
Or some anchor had tried the same idea he was having now.
That thought made the back of his neck prickle.
He tossed the plank aside and went back to his pathetic attempt at a hut.
A tiny, bitter laugh almost slipped out. Kinda funny how every time he actually looked for a hint, the forest gave him nothing, but the moment he stopped paying attention, it started leaving clues under his feet.
By the time he was done, the sun was almost set.
He stepped back and wiped his forearm across his forehead as if brushing away droplets of sweat that weren't really there, more out of habit than need.
"Well," he said under his breath, "I had no idea building a simple hut was that hard."
What stood in front of him looked more like a pile of wood than any kind of shelter.
Two big branches stood firm against the tree trunk, acting as the main supports. The smaller ones, though, refused to cooperate. Most of them had slid all the way down, collapsing into a crooked heap at the base, half hidden by the grass, leaning at awkward angles like they were drunk.
He sighed.
"It counts," he told himself. "It absolutely counts."
Hao dropped to his hands and knees and crawled between the two big branches. Inside, the pile of smaller ones rose up to his chest when he sat with his back glued to the broad trunk of the tree. There was no space for him to lay down. His knees had to stay bent; his feet stuck out at odd angles against the roots.
Still.
He felt… weirdly comfortable.
Cramped, bruised, exhausted, but the narrow space wrapping around him made something in his chest loosen. Like the hut would actually protect him in some way, even if all it could realistically do was fall on him.
He let himself believe in the lie.
Just for a bit.
From behind the twigs curling off the bigger branches, he couldn't see anything except inky, deep darkness. The last light leaking through the forest had already stretched itself thin. Past the woven gap of sticks, the world was pure black, a wall of nothing waiting just outside arm's reach.
The forest had gone quiet in a way that didn't feel like peace.
Somewhere out there, something shifted its weight. A long, wooden creak rolled through the trees, like a trunk bending under a shape that was standing on it instead of growing from it. A moment later came a soft, deliberate thud, then another, each one spaced too far apart to belong to anything small.
The motes reacted before he did.
They shifted under his skin, moving as one. For a moment, they all seemed to gather along his left side, crawling toward the outer edge of his arm and ribs, as if adjusting themselves to face whatever was out there.
Hao held his breath without meaning to.
The air felt thicker. Colder.
A single, distant thump echoed through the trees. Then nothing.
No attack. No scream. Just that one reminder the forest wasn't empty.
Slowly, the motes spread out again, returning to their mindless repairs.
His heartbeat didn't calm as fast.
He let his head rest back against the rough bark, eyes fixed on the darkness beyond his crooked wall of branches. His eyelids felt heavy, each blink staying closed a bit longer than it should. The bruises along his arms and legs throbbed in a steady, dull rhythm. His whole body hummed with tiredness that went deeper than muscle.
The motes worked.
The forest watched.
Sleep dragged at him, slow and insistent, like a tide coming in.
His eyes fell heavy, just like his head. His chin dipped toward his chest. The shadows outside his makeshift hut pressed closer, turning the gaps between twigs into narrow lines of pure black.
"If anything tries to eat me, you're waking me up… right?" he muttered.
They didn't answer, obviously.
He let the last of his resistance slip.
The forest disappeared behind darkness.
Hao slid under with it.