Mira’s ironclad verdict jolted Varie; not for how bold it sounded, but for the blade-steady resolve hidden inside it.

What storm do you survive to stand this firm against a foe made of fog and silence?

Varie hadn’t been there every moment, and the road between then and now lay misted; yet even she, no sage of hearts, felt it—Mira wasn’t the long‑eared, blond human from their first meeting anymore.

Good change or bad, trust or trap—uncertainty pricked like nettles; but after weighing like a merchant at dusk, Varie grabbed Mira’s offered hand and hauled herself up.

“Fine. A long‑stalled fart won’t come out—either way we pick, trouble’s bound to bloom. We’ll do it your way!”

She slapped leaf‑specks from her hips like fish scales, then the two of them charged the meat mountain, twin arrows whistling toward a swollen hill.

As the mountain swelled in their sight, her face soured; agitation fell back, and raw nausea surged like bile in a tide.

“What the @#$% is this—gods, that’s vile!”

For an exile who roamed desert and mire, few things earned the word “vile.” This did. From afar, the pulsing meat mass was only uncanny; up close, its skin told a rot‑bright story—dark red muscle glazed by one slick layer of slime, bulging veins throbbing like strangled snakes, patchwork pale dermis knitted with butter‑yellow fat, and, in the creases, eyes of all sizes with pupils blown wide like dying stars.

The stench hit like a breaking wave; even without it, that tumor‑born shell begged your stomach to revolt. And they were going in—through an entrance pretty as a chrysanthemum.

The tower was almost sealed, sheathed edge to edge in muscle fibers, hide, and fat. Only one “opening” breathed the inside out—just wide enough for one to crawl, pfft‑pfft, as pale mucus spatters misted the lip.

After circling, after admitting no other path, Varie stood before the “mouth,” staring at its tight flesh folds. The entrance pfft‑pfft’d again, a thin spray of slick, and she turned, jaw stiff, toward Mira.

“Hey, maybe we gamble and just shoot this thing to pieces—w‑wait, you’re going in?!”

Her words couldn’t snag Mira. As the orifice sighed open, Mira’s splendid shape cut forward and slipped inside, decisive as a falling blade. Varie had no choice. She squeezed her eyes shut, glared at the unseen watcher in the sky, and yelled, “I’ll stuff your bastard face into a Karolai camel‑beast’s butt sooner or later—wait for it!!!” Then she pinched her nose and dove.

Then came the expected ride up the wrong road of a gut. Slime and meat walls squeezed and ferried her, a slow churn through living clay, until—pfft—she popped out, landing on a narrow patch of flat ground.

“Ptoo—ptoo ptoo ptoo ptoo!” Varie shook her hair in fury, a big cat flinging river water. “I swear I’ll pick a rutting male Karolai camel‑beast for you—and let you feel it too!”

Mira had dropped first. No dramatics—only white arcs flickering over her clothes to purge the slime, her gaze fixed straight ahead like a spear.

“Wow, you really don’t mind dirt, huh—” Varie’s gold slit pupils tightened. Silence snapped her tongue shut.

She looked up and saw it—the “flat” wasn’t narrow at all. Overhead, space opened wide, wider than a throat could hold, too wide to match the pointed tower outside. A belly of sky curled inside flesh.

Space folded, like the tricks woven around the tower’s shell. But what pressed the air thin wasn’t the void—it was the heaps around them—gray‑black scales piled like little mountains, layered tight as slate.

“These… all belong to the Soul Devourer Sormaidon,” Mira said, voice low. “The Stimulant Elixir uses that dragon’s parts. This looks like the factory.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Varie muttered, confusion shadowing her face. “But this is… way too much. These piles could weigh more than the dead lizard itself!”

The scales carpeted the chamber, so thick Varie felt squeezed when she landed. Mira only shook her head. “That evil dragon carries chaos‑gifted regeneration. Given time, gathering this much isn’t hard. The real question is—”

—Why would it willingly give up so much? And more urgent—where did the elixirs go?

Varie’s face tightened. Mira was right. Judging by the ratio of dragon material in a single vial, this stock could supply the Nacha Tribe after meals for ten years. Reality said otherwise: only a trickle of Stimulant Elixir reached Sanda, mostly in black markets, barely a drip. The math didn’t match the mountain.

Why? Bottlenecks in production? Or is most of it stored somewhere, sleeping? If it’s the first, fine, time and tools. If it’s the second—what scheme needs this much dangerous brew?

It wouldn’t be charity. A cold premonition pooled in both their hearts. They started moving, hunting a way forward.

The path came easy. Varie’s senses pricked; she caught a thread of scent off‑key in this meat‑sweet air. She signaled Mira and ran toward it, and there, just as expected, a corridor opened deeper in.

They shared a look. Varie took point; Mira guarded the rear. They slipped into a passage grown of flesh, careful feet on a living road.

What greeted them twisted their guess again.

They’d hoped for a clean workshop where dragon parts were processed. Naive. This corridor fed into a place that did make the Elixir—but more than a factory, it felt like… a gallery of organs.

The tower’s tumor skin, the chrysanthemum entrance, the reverse gut ride had been foul enough. But outside, the shapes didn’t quite link to something living. Here, machines were built out of bodies—and they were “alive.”

A conveyor made from a mosaic of tongues—long and short, thousands stitched end to end—ran to a wall. Sormaidon’s gray‑black scales clattered onto it, surrendered to a crusher wrought of shinbones and ribs. Hard scales rasped against meat‑smeared bone, a tooth‑itching screech, grinding into fine chips ready for the next stage. Those chips rolled along the tongue belt and fell into a giant mouth—only jaws, no head, no skull, a hunger built in bone.

“I—fuck—what even is this…?”

The huge mouth chomped and swallowed. Shards poured down its throat, bulging the tube like a street tough’s bagged bottle‑flail, glass ready to bite.

The moving shards sliced the esophagus raw, pulling a bright red gash, only to be wrapped in fresh growth, again and again, carted into a “processing bay” made of a swollen, monstrous liver. Secretions slicked them. They softened. They melted.

“Urgh—!”

Varie gagged. They’d found where the Stimulant Elixir was born, but the sight tore past her limits like a bad dream with teeth.

Not just meat. Life—living machinery.

It dragged up the memory of newborns born wrong in human tribes—cranial seams that failed, two eyes squeezed into one midline socket, a cyclops babe breathing under a dusk of pity.

Innocence wasn’t the point. Their existence rang with death and yet refused to die—a paradox breathing—the same blasphemy as this gargantuan meat‑caterpillar of a line. Its mere being spat on life.

Things like this shouldn’t exist. Varie choked back her surge of bile, snatched the shortbow from her back, and in a heartbeat a golden arrow kissed the string, ready to end the profanity.

Before she loosed, a voice rasped out—hoarse, pained, and yet quivering with excitement. Almost joyful.

“Free… free… dom… Kill… kill…”

—Kill me!