The morning after the leap, the cottage felt smaller. The stone walls that had once been a fortress of safety now felt like the bars of a cage.
Zephyr sat at the wooden table, staring into a bowl of untouched porridge. His senses were still dialled to a hauntingly high frequency.
He could hear the rhythmic scritch-scritch of a beetle behind the floorboards and the heavy, uneven breathing of Flor as she paced the kitchen.
To her, the world was still a place of quiet chores; to him, the air was thick with data, scents of damp moss, the metallic tang of the well water, and the distant, thrumming heartbeat of the forest.
"I'm going back," Zephyr said, his voice cutting through the silence. "I need to find it again. That cat... it did something to my soul, Flor. If I find it, maybe I'll remember why I was running three years ago."
Flor stopped mid-pace, her hands trembling as she clutched a dishcloth. "No."
The word was sharp, final. She turned to him, her eyes red-rimmed from a sleepless night.
"You don't understand, Zephyr. That... that thing you did. The way you moved. It wasn't human."
"People in the villages tell stories of the 'Old Blood' and the monsters that roam the high peaks. If this is what you are, then this is why someone was hunting you."
She moved toward him, her voice dropping to a desperate whisper. "The world didn't just break you, child. It tried to erase you."
"If you go out there chasing this shadow, you're lighting a signal fire for whatever was chasing you in the first place."
Zephyr looked at his reflection in the water bucket near the door. His eyes were normal now, the feline slit gone, but he felt the potential lurking just behind his irises. Flor was right. The fear that had kept him inside for three years wasn't gone; it had simply changed shape. If he were a "Chimera," a freak of nature, then he was a prize for someone. Or a target.
"I'll stay," he whispered, bowing his head. "For now."
The compromise was simple, born of a curiosity that neither could suppress. If the power came from the cat, they would find the cat together.
For Flor, it was a way to "undo" the curse or understand it. For Zephyr, it was a hunger he couldn't name.
For the next three quiet days, they scoured the perimeter of the woods in the forest.
"Puss? Kitty?" Flor's voice was thin and shaky as she ventured further from the garden than she had in years. She carried a small bowl of dried fish, a peace offering for a creature she secretly feared.
Zephyr walked beside her, his body coiled. He wasn't calling out. He was sensing. He kept his hand brushed against the bark of trees, hoping for another blue prompt to flicker into his vision.
[Scanning... No Compatible Biomass Detected]
The message appeared in his mind like a cold taunt. They spent hours near the moss-covered stone where the encounter had happened.
They searched the hollow logs and the high branches. They found tracks, the tiny, four-toed imprints of a feline, but they were old, filled with rainwater and dead pine needles.
The cat was gone. It was as if the forest had swallowed the creature once its purpose was served.
By the fourth day, the frustration between them grew like a physical wall. Flor's relief that the cat was gone was obvious, but her curiosity remained a jagged edge. She began to watch Zephyr differently.
She would drop a spoon on purpose just to see if he caught it before it hit the floor (he did, every single time, without looking).
She would ask him what he heard in the woods, and he would describe the sound of a hawk's wings three miles away.
The "normal" life they had built was dead. The silence in the house was no longer peaceful; it was a question that no one knew how to answer.
One evening, as the sun began to bleed orange across the horizon of th farm, Zephyr stood by the window. He felt a strange, gnawing sensation in his chest, not a hunger for food, but a hunger for connection.
"It's not just the cat, Flor," he said softly, watching a moth flutter against the glass.
"What do you mean?" she asked, not looking up from her knitting.
"The prompt... the 'Link.' It said 'Feline.' It didn't say 'Cat.'" He pressed his palm against the glass, his eyes reflecting the dying light. "I think the cat was just the beginning. I think I'm meant to be... more."
Flor's knitting needles stopped clicking. She looked at him, and for a second, she didn't see the boy she had rescued. She saw a predator in the skin of a man.
"What if the next thing I touch isn't a cat?" Zephyr asked, his voice a mix of terror and thrill. "What if it's a wolf? Or something bigger? Something that doesn't want to be touched?"
The house was suddenly plunged into shadow as the sun slipped below the mountains. In the dim light, a new prompt flickered in the corner of Zephyr's vision, unbidden and glowing a deep, warning red.
[Warning: Chimera Core Unstable]
[Requirement: New Biomass Integration Required within 48 Hours]
[Penalty for Failure: Neural Degeneration]
Zephyr's breath hitched. He felt a sharp, stabbing pain in the base of his skull. The power wasn't a gift; it was a parasite. It was demanding more.
He turned to Flor, his face pale in the moonlight. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her that the "safe" world she wanted for him was a lie. But at that moment, a heavy, rhythmic thud came from the front door.
It wasn't a knock. It was the sound of something large, something with heavy claws, scratching against the wood.
The forest had stopped waiting for them to come out. Something had come to find them.