By the time Reale reached the western pasture, half the village was already there.
Men carried lanterns. Women called for their husbands from the road.
Livestock were kicking themselves raw against the fence posts, their eyes white in the dark.
The smell hit him before the scene did.
The same sweet, cold, burnt wrongness from the river, from the Academy carriage, from the pork on his cutting board.
Only now it was mixed with blood.
The pasture gate had been torn half off its hinges.
Two goats lay in the mud with their throats ripped open, but the wounds were strange—ragged, yes, yet not eaten.
Flesh had been shredded and left behind as though something had attacked them in frenzy rather than hunger.
A sheep was still alive, twitching where it had fallen.
The farmhand kneeling beside it had a gash from elbow to shoulder, blood pouring down his side.
Lobai.
He was pale already.
Several villagers were trying to bind the wound with cloth. One woman was reaching for a packet of herb paste.
"Don't," Reale said.
No one listened.
He pushed closer anyway. The smell spilling off Lobai's wound was different from ordinary blood.
Under the copper tang was that same cold sweetness, thin but undeniable, as if the injury itself had become a doorway.
"Don't close it," Reale said, louder this time. "And don't use the paste."
A broad-shouldered villager rounded on him. "This is no time for kitchen nonsense."
Reale swallowed back the urge to step away. He hated the sight of blood. His stomach had already begun to twist.
But the smell was getting worse.
If they closed that wound, they would trap whatever was inside.
"He's not just bleeding," Reale said. "Something else got in with the tear."
"Something else?"
"Smell it," Reale snapped.
No one answered.
Most of them couldn't.
The next moment, Lobai convulsed.
The side of his wound twitched.
Not the muscle.
Something under it.
One of the women dropped the herb paste.
The broad-shouldered villager went gray.
Reale pointed at the untouched iron pot hanging from a fence peg beside the shed.
"Get me a pot."
This time nobody told him to shut up.
Garxiu, the old village cook, moved first. He was thin as a broomstick, with wrists like hooked wire and eyes that had seen too much to panic easily.
He took one long look at Lobai's wound, then at Reale.
"Bring the boy the pot," he said.
That changed everything.
People scrambled. Someone kicked open the shed. Someone hauled firewood. Someone else dragged the iron pot into the center of the yard.
Lobai moaned once and nearly bit through his tongue.
Reale knelt beside the fire pit, palms clammy, forcing himself not to stare at the wound for too long.
The smell guided him.
Bone.
Salt.
Bitterleaf.
Heat.
If he could not stop whatever was inside, then he would force it to move.
He only had one chance.
And the first thing he cooked in that pot would not be dinner.