He shelved his curiosity and pivoted to the next step. Prime. Analyze the gathered herbs. Synthesize a paralytic toxin, and keep my available tools in mind. He paused, his gaze tightening. Something strong enough to bring down an orc.
His thoughts drifted to those two orcs he'd encountered two days ago. The fear they'd planted in him had slowly subsided, but the remnants still lingered. He didn't want to stop at paralytic, either. I want lethal, too.
[Task initiated. Creating recipes]
[Estimated time: 2 hours.]
"Two hours is good enough," he mumbled, rising.
He turned to Lilly, still sitting between the hot stones, eating her meat with both hands, and smiled. Crossing to her, he settled into the warmth at her side, the heat chasing the last of the cold from his body. He grabbed a slab of meat and tore into it beside her.
"Brother, what's it like outside? Are they still searching for us—the monsters and the bad uncles?" Lilly asked between swallows.
"Probably. But don't worry. They won't find us." He spoke with more certainty than he felt. The two-day deadline the orcs had given was nearly up, and he didn't know what would happen when it expired.
"Hmm. Okay, Brother." She went back to eating.
Aris wanted to keep talking, but he had no idea how to begin a real conversation with a traumatized child. Make a joke? No—that is too stupid, the situation is too grim. Small talk felt dangerous; he feared he might say something Rill never would have, and though she was young, she was sharp enough to notice the discrepancies.
Or perhaps he was overthinking it. Maybe the reason was simpler. Maybe she had grown so quiet not because she had nothing to say, but because she didn't want to burden a brother who was already doing everything to keep her alive.
The thought pained him, and he shifted closer, wrapping an arm around her small shoulders. She didn't resist. For a while, they sat like that on the cold, rough floor, hands greasy with fat, watching the cascade as sunlight refracted through the curtain of water. The sight was almost enough to lull him into a daze.
He jerked himself awake. A massive task still lay ahead. He rose and walked to the cascade. "Lilly, come here. Wash your hands."
He began scrubbing his own, his eyes tracking her as she came to stand beside him and mimicked the motion. Noticing her dirt-matted hair, he reached over and washed that as well, his hands moving with a familiar, almost instinctive tenderness. When he finished, he dried her hair with a corner of his tunic, finally free of the floor's pervasive dampness.
Then his face grew solemn. His hands stilled above her head.
"Lilly." He paused, weighing his words. "I need you to stay at the far back of the cave. What I'm about to do might be… unpredictable."
"Okay, Brother." She said it without hesitation, gathered the hot stones that were still radiating warmth, and retreated into the glooms of the cave.
He watched her go, then turned back to his tools: the bamboo containers, the wooden board, the dagger, and the stone pestle. A bitter laugh escaped him. What a sorry excuse for a laboratory.
He thought of his past life's workspace; the sterile surfaces, the precision instruments, the luxury of having every variable controlled, though he'd only ever synthesized toxic gases there,
The contrast with his current situation was stark. He'd had it so easy. Looking at his primitive tools now, doubt crept in. Will I even be able to make a poison potent enough for an orc?
He pushed the doubt aside. He had to trust Prime, even if he couldn't trust his own hands. Then again, weren't he and Prime the same thing now? His soul had merged with the biochip; its calculations were his, its precision his own.
And though he still didn't grasp the full scope of Prime's capabilities, the vitality-boosting concoction it had already produced was evidence enough of its power.
He put those thoughts aside and returned to Lilly in the dark, settling beside her to wait out the two hours. He made halting small talk, assuring her that they would escape this place. She listened, nodded, and asked little. The time bled away until a familiar chime echoed in his mind.
[Ding!]
[Two recipes stored in new folders.]
Aris rose. "Sleep for now. I'll wake you when I'm done."
He walked to the cascade and stood there, his focus turning inward.
The first recipe was for the lethal poison. It was impressive, given his limited resources, but the limitations were stark. With the herbs and orc blood on hand, he could only produce enough to coat four arrows.
The recipe claimed it would kill an orc of average strength—roughly four times the mass of a human adult—in five seconds. That assumed, of course, that the handful of samples he'd analyzed were representative of the species as a whole. But Aris understood the gap between data and reality regardless. Five seconds in combat was an eternity, especially for a fragile human standing against something that size.
The second recipe was for the paralytic. He had resources enough for thirteen arrows, but only if he abandoned the lethal poison entirely. If he split his supplies, he could make eight arrows in total.
The paralytic was potent, and provided he could keep sourcing the right herbs—which, in this forest, didn't seem to be an issue—he hypothesized it might be enough to drop those two orcs. Their strength still lingered in his memory, a ghost of the ease with which they'd snuffed out that middle-aged man.
But none of it would matter if he couldn't hit a target. Archery was a weapon he had almost no real experience with. He searched his memory folders, grasping for anything relevant—videos, movies, documentaries. Most of it was absurd: eleven arrows loosed at once, or projectiles that curved mid-flight to find their mark.
His references were too exaggerated to trust. Perhaps mythical races could pull off such feats—and since orcs existed, maybe elves did too—but a human? Not unless he dedicated years to the craft.
Could he master it now? Some shortcut Prime hadn't revealed yet? He asked, and the answer dampened his excitement: Impossible without real data, not fictional references. What's more, Prime could only supply knowledge. His body's actual capability was a variable he had to discover for himself and hone.
In the minutes that followed, he washed the tools. Even for poison-making, cleanliness mattered; an irregularity could kill him in this cave long before he ever loosed an arrow at an orc. Once clean, he carried everything outside and laid the tools to the left of the pool, where the sunlight fell strongest.
He waited in the undergrowth. Two hours later, the afternoon sun had done its work. He retrieved the tools, guarding them from the cascade's spray as he slipped back inside.
Inside, Lilly lay sleeping deep in the cave, curled atop his dried clothes like a makeshift mattress. He smiled for a moment, then turned away.
He wrung out his vest, picked up the dagger, and laid the poisonous herbs across the wooden board. Immediately, grids of red and green from Prime bloomed across his vision, projected onto the herbs. He cut along the green lines, more meticulous now than he'd been with the nourishing herbs.
The cave began to fill with an acrid stench. Prime monitored his vitals constantly; the fumes weren't lethal, as he had initially feared, but they were punishing, biting at his throat and eyes with every breath.
For the next hour, the rhythmic snick of the blade mingled with the roar of the cascade and his own hacking coughs as the stench thickened near the cave's mouth. Fortunately, the wind wasn't blowing inward—lest it wake Lilly, or worse, cause her to inhale the caustic fumes.
By the end, his throat was raw, his nose was running, and his eyes were bleary with tears. But the herbs lay before him in precise, glistening pieces, cut exactly as the recipe demanded.
Carefully, he swept them into an empty bamboo container.
He took the pestle and moved to the waterfall's edge, positioning himself where the sunlight was most intense. He began to crush the cuttings into a paste, and the stench intensified—foul enough to make his throat itch, his nose stream, and his vision swim.
He washed his face at intervals, fighting the fumes and shaking his head to clear the haze between strikes. He fantasized about proper gear: a fume hood, sealed goggles. In that moment, he swore that if he ever escaped this forest, he would build the finest laboratory this primitive world had ever seen.
When the herbs had finally been reduced to a fine paste, he stepped away from the waterfall. The critical moment had arrived.
He took the last empty bamboo container and the one holding the orc blood, pouring a quarter of the fluid into the fresh vessel. Then, using the dagger, he measured out portions of paste as guided by Prime and folded them into the blood.
The mixture hissed on contact, releasing a foul, purple smoke. He immediately held the container at arm's length, grabbed a lid from the ground, and sealed it tight. He set it aside, the recipe required two days for the paralytic to fully mature.
Now for the lethal dose. He poured the remaining paste into the original blood container. A thicker, more acrid cloud of dark purple smoke billowed up, but he was ready for it this time. The draft caught the fumes and carried them safely out of the cave. He sealed this container as well and placed it beside the first.
He exhaled, long and slow, and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
Now, only the waiting remained. But he had no intention of staying idle.