On the Path of Eternal Strength.

The boar's blood dried on his skin like a second layer of flesh. He did not clean it. Not out of neglect, but instinct. It was a trophy, an invisible shield that separated him from the child he had once been.

And perhaps it also protected him from something else.

He did not sleep that night.

He could not. He did not want to. Something inside him stayed awake, restless, as if his bones still vibrated with the echoes of battle. The images of the confrontation repeated again and again, not as a traumatic memory, but as a lesson his mind did not want to forget.

The crimson glow of the eternal sky began to intensify, marking the start of another cycle. Sebastián was already outside the fissure, his steps slow, his body aching, but steady.

He did not walk out of necessity, but for something deeper.

As if patrolling that piece of land was part of a ritual he did not yet understand.

The hours passed between silence and the distant hum of scavengers. At one point, he found a trail of small hooves. Not the boar's. Fresh. Recently pressed into the thick mud.

He crouched down. Touched them. Felt the moisture.

The old Sebastián would have fled.

This one did not.

He crawled along the ground, covered in dust and dried blood, keeping against the wind as he had learned. He no longer thought in terms of "good" or "bad," only in usefulness and threat. In what brought him closer to life… and what pushed him further from death.

The tracks led him to a cliff. From there, hidden among dead roots, he saw a lizard-like creature, with two heads devouring a corpse with fury. It was the size of a large dog, but its bifid tongue extended with the precision of a snake.

Sebastián did not attack.

He watched.

The creature moved with hunger, but also with caution. Every few seconds, one of its heads lifted and sniffed the air. The other kept eating. Perfect coordination. Survival instinct.

When the lizard left, dragging its scaly body among the rocks, Sebastián descended silently. The corpse that remained still released steam from its open entrails. He did not know what creature it was. He did not care.

Hunger was no longer a complaint.

It was an order.

He tore a firm piece of flesh with his hands. He held it before his eyes for a moment, as if something inside him hesitated… but then he bit it.

Chewed.

Swallowed.

And felt no guilt.

He returned to the fissure when the sky grew more intense, the red burning like a warning in the distance. Night fell without fatigue bending him. Only then did he collapse.

He slept.

During the first night of rest that his exhausted body and mind allowed, Sebastián had a dream. A dream unlike those of his past, one that emerged from his weary mind like a blurred vision. In the dimness of his subconscious, he saw a silhouette. It was not clear, had no defined features. An indistinguishable outline, moving slowly among what seemed like ruins. He could not tell if it was man, woman, or something else. Only a shadow, a presence that vanished as quickly as it appeared. Something strange, something familiar, but at the same time unreachable. He did not understand what touched him, nor why it seemed so important.

He woke with a start, his heart pounding hard in his chest, with the sensation that something had brushed against his soul. He did not understand why, but that dream, that shadow, left him uneasy.

The echo of the dream still pulsed in his chest, as if the shadow he had seen had followed him into the real world. For a few seconds, he did not know if he was still asleep. His eyes scanned the thick darkness, searching for a figure, a presence, something to confirm it… but there was nothing.

Only the same place. The same silence.

The same stench of rot and rancid blood.

With stiff muscles and half-formed thoughts, Sebastián dragged himself toward the corner where he usually slept. He tripped on a damp root, held onto a stone, and when he placed his hands down, he felt the sticky cold of a puddle.

Blood. Already dry in parts, still warm in others.

He froze. Something in that blood called to him. Not as prey. Not as threat. It called with a dull murmur, with a force he could not reject.

He bent down and looked at his reflection.

For a moment he thought it was not him.

The eyes were the same, yes, but they did not shine the same. The gaze was harder, more fixed, more… empty. The face was stained, hardened. There was no trace left of the boy he used to be. Only that thing staring at him from the blood.

He was not a monster.

He was not human.

He was something in between.

His skin bristled, but not from fear. It was a strange mixture: a brutal acceptance, a silent understanding. He had changed. And that change did not hurt him… it intrigued him.

Then, for no apparent reason, he heard it.

A voice.

It was not external. It was not his thought. It was something in between. Like an echo in his marrow, like a thread vibrating softly within him.

—Not enough yet…

Sebastián did not get scared.

He did not react with shock or denial.

He only blinked, took a deep breath, and let those words settle inside.

He did not know where that voice came from. But it felt familiar, close, as if it had always been there, waiting for him to be ready to hear it. It was not a threat. It was a silent guide. Something that did not let him give up. That kept him together.

He did not understand what it meant.

He only knew he must not stop.

That he was still lacking.

He pulled away from the puddle, but not because he feared what he had seen.

But because he no longer needed it.

He knew what he was beginning to become.

And though he still could not name it, in the deepest part of his being… he accepted it. The days that followed were silent. Not as they had been before, with that constant echo of emptiness haunting him from within. This time, the silence was something else. It was his. Sebastián began to inhabit it with a new rhythm, one that did not depend on fear or hope, but on repetition, on instinct, on permanence.

He rose when the scarlet sky grew more intense, just before the distant buzzing of the scavengers. He checked the remains of his previous prey, marked safe paths with stones—the ones that did not smell of recent death—and searched for blood. Not water. Water did not exist. Only thick blood, warm or already clotted, that he found in fresh puddles or in the still-warm interior of some dead beast.

He drank it with the same act with which one breathes air: without disgust, without thought. He let it run down his throat while he felt how it returned a different kind of warmth, as if more than liquid inhabited him. It did not just hydrate him. It sustained him. Anchored him. Blood was his water, his food, his bond with permanence.

Sometimes the blood was not enough. Then he warmed it with hot stones, or mixed it with marrow and soft pieces of organs. He learned to preserve it inside hollow bones, to strain it with dry fibers, to use it also to survive beyond hunger: as a signal, as a mark, as a language.

He also began to leave marks. Not like animals do, urinating. He used blood. He wet his fingers, his nails, even pieces of bone, and drew harsh lines on stones, on dry roots, on cracked bark. They were his signs. Strokes that said: I passed here. Other times, more firmly, they said: I hunt here. Or simply: I am. As if each mark were a part of his body that stayed behind to watch while he moved forward.

At times, he used the blood as ritual paint. He wet his face, his chest, his arms. Drew lines he did not understand, but felt were necessary. They were not games. They were his armor. His symbols. What separated him from being just flesh waiting to die.

The voice spoke to him in those moments. Not always with words. Sometimes it was a murmur beneath his skin, a push, a tremor behind his eyes. But it was there. It taught him which piece of bone was best for cutting. Which hide would resist the cold the longest. It showed him with images what he should do: how to stretch a tendon, how to harden meat, how to heal a wound with ash powder.

It sounded like himself, only quieter, wiser, as if it came from a place where fear no longer existed.

He spent hours just observing. He learned the language of the creatures that roamed in the distance. He recognized the ones that crawled slow and silent—the most dangerous—and distinguished the hollow sound of their steps from the dry crunch of giant insects.

He did not speak. He did not cry. But he sometimes muttered. Words he did not fully understand, phrases that came to his mouth as if they were not his, as if someone had planted them on his tongue during the night.

One of those mornings, while searching for roots near a rotten trunk, he heard a short, wet snort, like the sound of something struggling to breathe through its own flesh. He did not startle. Crouched, he only turned his face slightly. And there it was.

The creature was small, deformed, with a hunched body as if it had never known the vertical. It had the rounded shape of a childlike panda, but twisted in structure: arms too long, hanging to the ground, claws black and curved like rusty hooks. Its skin was ashen gray, mottled with bald patches and dark scabs, and its face… its face was a grotesque mask. A single huge, round eye occupied almost half its skull, and within it danced a dilated, black pupil that never blinked. Where the mouth should have been, there was a horizontal slit without lips, from which strips of wet flesh hung. The creature wheezed with a sticky moan, and from its back jutted broken bone spines, as if something had crushed it long ago and it still lived by sheer error of the world.

And when it stopped beside a trunk, it let out a soft whimper, almost like the babbling of a sleeping child.

It had not yet seen him.

Sebastián crouched lower, camouflaging himself among roots and mud. He waited. He watched how the creature sniffed with its single eye, drooling thick saliva over the stones. When the distance was right, he leapt.

He jumped onto the monster's back and clung with legs and arms, driving a sharp stone directly into the base of its neck. The scream was high-pitched, broken, like the cry of a child submerged in boiling water. But he did not let go. He struck. Cut. Tore flesh and cartilage. The creature thrashed, twisted, swung its claws in the air. One of its claws grazed Sebastián's side, tearing skin. He growled, but continued. There was no room for fear anymore.

The beast's blood was thick, black with greenish reflections, and smelled of rotten metal. It covered his face, filled his mouth, but did not stop his hands. He kept stabbing, breaking. Until the giant eye burst like overripe fruit and the creature collapsed on itself with a wet, final sound.

Sebastián stayed atop it a few seconds longer, panting. Then he climbed down, trembling, his hands covered in that fetid blood. He did not cry. He did not laugh. He only tore off a still-hot piece of flesh and put it in his mouth.

The taste was acidic, greasy, with hot veins that made him shudder. He chewed with a jaw numbed by tension. He sat beside the corpse, breathing raggedly, and ate more. Afterwards, he covered part of the body with stones and branches, not as a burial, but as a claim. That was his spoils. His prey.

He stayed there a while. His breathing calmed. The heat of the blood wrapped him. Even with trembling muscles, he stayed alert.

Then he felt it.

A vibration in the earth. Barely perceptible at first. Then a whisper, a crackling beneath his feet.

The ground split open like a living wound, and from the fissure emerged a long, viscous figure, covered in dark scales full of ancient wounds. It was a creature that resembled a serpent, but had two pairs of thick legs, which it used to propel itself quickly through the muck. Its tiny eyes shone with an ancient hunger, and its breath left bloody steam in its path.

It went straight for the panda-monster's corpse.

Sebastián stepped back, but the creature smelled him. Felt him. Turned its head toward him, and its mouth—an annulus of spiral teeth like a nightmare trap—opened with a wet snap.

It lunged.

Sebastián tried to dodge. A fang tore his leg. He fell, screamed, dragged himself to a stone—the same as before—and when the creature pounced again, he stabbed the stone into one of its eyes.

The scream was bestial. Sebastián climbed onto its back and struck with blind rage. Blow after blow. Shout after shout. Until the beast convulsed, spat black blood, and collapsed in a dry spasm.

He lay on top of it, gasping, with his leg bleeding. The wound burned. Deep, ugly. He crawled away, his hands trembling.

And then the voice returned. This time, clearer:

—Look at what remains. Look at what you can become.

His eyes, clouded with blood and exhaustion, focused on the remains. On the skin. The bones. The jaws.

—Learn —whispered the voice.

And Sebastián did.

With effort, he dragged the corpse to his refuge. There, in his marked territory, in what once had been a nest and was now a den, he set himself to listening.

The voice spoke to him calmly. It showed him, step by step, how to cut without damaging the skin, how to pull out whole tendons, how to use the hardest scales as protective plates. It taught him to dry with smoke, to sew with muscle fibers, to harden with ashes.

Sebastián learned. Trembling with fever, his leg still bleeding, he transformed his enemy into a cloak, a tool, a part of himself.

When he finished, he covered himself with what he had created. The cloak made of scales, the protection of bones. He tied sharp fragments to his arms. And for the first time, he felt less like a child. More like something else.

He no longer remembered clearly his voice, nor what a mother's embrace felt like. What now inhabited his body did not need those things. He only remembered that once it hurt more not to eat than to kill.

Every fallen monster was now part of his body. Part of his form. Part of him.

And in the silence that remained, something inside him—still, ancient—kept him company. During the following days, Sebastián remained in his refuge. The wound on his leg was slow to close, but he did not stop. He kept exploring the uses of the corpse, experimenting with tools, testing different combinations of materials. He learned to adapt bones into short spears, to sharpen scales into blades, to braid muscle fibers into resistant cords.

The voice no longer had to guide every step. It only corrected, suggested, like a patient shadow that accompanied him from a warm corner of his mind.

That day, while adjusting one of his hardened bandages with mud and dried tendons, something stirred in the air. It was not a sound. It was a smell.

One he recognized.

Old blood. Acid sweat. The stench of flesh he had not forgotten.

The monster that had first wounded him.

The one that left the scar on his belly.

It returned.

And Sebastián, with the cloak of scales over his shoulders, stood up.

He did not run.

He took his spear. Drew in a deep breath.

And waited for revenge.

The monster did not take long.

It emerged from the dry thickets, the same one that had opened his belly weeks ago. It did not look bigger, but it did look firmer. Sebastián recognized it by the way it arched its back before moving: the elongated body, covered with bony plates that jutted like black spines. Its multiple legs clawed the earth like lances seeking to bury themselves. From its back sprouted short, wet tentacles, vibrating with repulsive sensitivity.

The earth trembled.

Sebastián did not retreat.

He waited.

The monster charged.

The impact lifted him off the ground. He rolled among stones, swallowed dust, and the improvised spear broke in his hands at the first clash. He tried to rise, but his bad leg did not respond well. The same pain that had never left now pulsed like a broken bell.

The monster struck again.

Sebastián barely managed to throw himself aside.

One of the beast's legs grazed him as it passed. It was not a clean cut. It was a brutal, deep tear that opened his left side from below the ribs to the hip. The pain was immediate and wet. He felt the blood run down his skin like a hot, sticky tongue.

He screamed.

But not like a child.

Like something broken.

The new wound burned differently than the previous one. Dirtier. More personal.

He fell to the ground. Coughed bile and earth. His body no longer responded as before. Every muscle was a rusty nail. Every attempt to move, a dull blow.

The monster turned to finish him.

But Sebastián did not crawl away.

He lunged.

With bare hands, he climbed over the body full of spines. Some tore his arms, his thighs, his palms. But he did not let go. The monster's body twisted, and every vibration was a threat of falling. One of the tentacles brushed his face, wet and cold. Sebastián tore off the tip with his teeth and spat it out.

He screamed again.

Struck.

With a splintered fragment of his broken spear, he stabbed it into the base of the neck. The bone cracked. The monster shrieked. Sebastián did not stop.

He struck with a stone.

With his elbow.

With his clenched, bleeding fist.

He drove his fingers into the beast's bony joints and pulled. He felt the crack, felt the resistance, felt the heat spilling when the bone gave way.

He leapt to its back.

Drove the rock into the living flesh between the plates.

The creature collapsed.

Shuddered. Thrashed. Screeched. Died.

Sebastián lay atop it. Still.

Trembling.

Bathed in blood, both his and not his.

The wounds burned like open mouths:

The leg, old, never healed, oozed.

The new one on his left side bled without control.

The previous scar on his belly creaked with every breath.

His hands… his hands were raw flesh: torn open, bleeding, shredded.

He crawled.

Slow, shattered, back to the refuge. Every inch hurt him. Every stone beneath his feet mocked his overwhelmed body.

He lit the fire.

The smoke burned his eyes, but the heat sustained him.

He skinned the monster with rage. He did not think. He only did.

He tore the hide with a stone. Pulled tendons. Cracked ribs.

Then, the voice returned.

—Do you see?

—Weapons break.

—Your body does not.

—Your body survives.

Sebastián lowered his gaze. The spear was splintered. The stone, dulled.

His hands, open, bleeding. But firm. Alive.

—Make it flesh.

—Make it yours.

With fingers still trembling, he began to cut.

He separated the bony plates from the monster's back, and sewed them into an improvised breastplate using burned tendons.

He tied small fangs to his forearms.

He crowned his head with a fragment of the beast's skull, until it formed something like a helmet of bone and rage.

Spine-blades reinforced his wrists.

When he finished, he tore off the breastplate.

Removed the helmet.

And stayed there, alone, covered in blood and ash, before the fire.

He looked at his body:

—The first wound: an old scar on the belly, from the first encounter.

—The second: the fresh gash on the opposite side, still throbbing.

—The leg: infected, swollen, carrying weeks of pus.

—The hands: shredded, palms and fingers covered in raw flesh and new scabs.

That was him now.

A patched skin.

A body sewn with fury.

A creature marked by what it had survived.

He no longer needed more proof.

The world had claimed him.

And he had answered. Dawn came without warning, like a pale stain creeping across the sick sky. There were no songs, no breeze, no true rest. Only light.

Sebastián opened his eyes before the dry heat of the blood on his chest had finished hardening.

His leg ached. The new wound, torn open by the monster, burned as if it had been filled with embers. He felt each breath as a rope of thorns piercing his abdomen.

The improvised bandage—strips of tendon and ash, stuck with dried mud—barely clung to the wounded skin.

But he did not complain.

He turned his face and saw the remains of the monster. Its form no longer seemed so invincible under the dim light of day. Split pieces. Ribs rising like twisted fingers. Dried blood on the ground like broken ink. The stench was thick, metallic, and clung to the tongue like soot.

Sebastián did not look away.

He sat slowly, his muscles stiff from the previous day's strain. He felt bones creak, tendons stretch, and even so, he rose. He leaned his weight on the less-damaged leg, dragging the other. His movements were slow, raw, but never hesitant.

The pain was constant. The old wound—the one that ran from ribs to the lower abdomen—felt like a living, throbbing memory, while the new one on the other side oozed hot, fresh, still trembling with every step. His arms were covered in smaller cuts, claw marks, burns from friction, and a deep bruise wrapped his shoulder where he had fallen against a stone.

But he was not a broken child.

He was a body under construction.

He dragged the monster's hardest bones into a corner of the refuge. Then the hornlike shields from its back. He sat on a stone covered with dead moss and began to work. The rhythm was different this time. There was no euphoria. No rush. Only method.

A spear.

Another blade.

An armguard.

A brace for the injured leg.

But when he tried to lift one of the larger pieces, his arm gave way. The weight of fatigue pushed him to the ground. He struck hard, left lying face down among dust, blood, and ash.

And then the voice returned. Calm. Direct. Inevitable.

—You cling to tools that do not understand the world.

—What…? —he murmured, his forehead pressed into the hot earth.

—Everything breaks —the voice continued, like an ancient truth that needed no proof—. Weapons. Protections. The bones of others.

—But I…

—There is only one thing you can harden without depending on anyone.

Silence.

—Your body —it whispered.

Sebastián remained still for a few seconds. Then he sat up, with difficulty. He looked at his hands. The wounds. The marks. Each one told something. Each one was part of the world's language.

He tore off the breastplate.

Removed the helmet.

Stayed there, alone, covered in blood and ash, with two wounds marked on either side of his body.

The first, from side to abdomen, weathered and ugly.

The second, fresh, on the opposite flank, still hot.

His left arm battered. His right leg with the deep bite.

His shoulder bruised. The burns from friction.

His fingers splintered.

His nails black.

Everything in him was testimony.

And still, he breathed.

And still, he moved.

With clumsy movements, he dismantled the largest pieces of the broken weapon. Fused the fibers with the bandages. Reinforced the wound with small plates, not as armor, but as containment.

He did not think of victory.

He did not think of returning.

Only of resisting.

When he finished, he no longer looked like a child.

He looked like a fragment of something old.

A piece of creature that the earth itself had refused to swallow.

And the day, like a blind eye, opened fully over him.

The refuge was left behind like a decomposed memory. Sebastián did not look back.

The air outside smelled different. More acidic. Denser. As if something were rotting in the bones of the world.

He moved forward. Limping slightly, but not stopping. He had bandaged the damaged leg with dry strips of cured muscle and small branches for support. Every step was a lash of fire, but pain no longer frightened him. It was part of the rhythm.

He searched for things his body could use. Not to build weapons. No more.

Now he wanted heat, endurance, strength.

He sought stones that warmed the ground, holes where he could sleep curled, tough plants to chew and force his jaw to grow.

He bit roots even if he did not know if they were poisonous. Swallowed pieces and waited. Learned through spasms and chills.

When something burned his tongue, he spat it out. When his stomach revolted, he forced himself to keep walking.

He did not stop.

Every part of the landscape offered a new form of violence. And he took them all.

He jumped over cracks. Sank to his thighs in gray mud.

Dragged his body beneath a branch covered in thorns that split his scalp.

He screamed, but did not stop.

He licked the blood clean with his tongue and went on.

The sun of the Plain did not warm. It only burned.

It seared the broken skin on his neck, dried out his lips.

His back began to peel. The scabs of his wounds mixed with the dust, forming a second skin, rough and calloused.

Sweat was rare. It no longer came as before. His body was learning to conserve.

Every fall was a lesson.

Every scrape with a stone, a scrape with the real.

The voice did not return that day. But Sebastián did not need it.

He had already understood.

Every piece of the world wanted to kill him.

And he respected it for that.

When night fell, he found a fissure between two plates of old bone. He crawled in like an insect and slept there.

Without fire. Without shelter.

Only with his body, shivering, but unbroken.

He had begun to change.

Not as someone seeking to return.

But as someone who finally understood there was no going back. At dawn, with muscles taut like wires and tongue dry from dehydration, he walked again.

The body was slow, but not weak.

It hurt. But it moved.

And then he saw it.

A deformed lizard, as big as a lying child, with a tongue split into three and a tail dragging like a living rope.

Its skin was rough, patched with shining plates, and its gait was uneven, as if it crawled by hunger alone.

It had no visible eyes, but its tongue sniffed violently, beating the air near some broken bones.

It was not as massive as the previous monster, but it looked strong. Sticky. Lethal if he moved wrong.

Sebastián did not think.

He launched himself from a ridge, elbow first, letting momentum bounce him against the lizard's back.

The impact knocked the air out of him. He fell badly. But his arms locked around the creature's fibrous neck.

The beast shrieked a broken sound, half hiss, half crack.

It tried to shake him off. Sebastián clung with his whole body.

He bit. Tasted the salty, acidic flavor of its flesh. The coarse hairs scraping his palate.

The tail struck him in the hip, then again in the thigh.

Finally, the creature twisted sharply and flung him to the ground.

And then came the strike.

A dry blow of the tail, straight to his left side.

He felt the flesh split, mirroring the old wound from the first monster.

The pain was piercing, deep. A hot stream ran down his torso.

Sebastián roared.

Not like a child.

Like something that no longer wanted to look human.

He crawled toward the lizard's neck, drove his nails into it, struck its snout with his forehead.

The creature tried to bite him. He forced its jaw open with both hands, until his fingers broke.

He did not want to kill it.

He wanted to temper himself.

To become something useful.

The creature, defeated, retreated dragging its belly. Its blood traced a winding trail.

Sebastián let it go.

He could have hunted it.

But he no longer needed to.

He collapsed beside a warm rock.

Rested his back carefully, panting.

He bled from the left side, his leg still bandaged, his scalp split, his neck raw, his back cracked, his lips crusted, and his hands broken.

He tore off the breastplate.

Removed the helmet.

Remained alone, covered in blood and ash, with two wounds marked on either side of his body.

One old, from the monster of the earlier fight.

The other, fresh, burning, throbbing.

And others more: his knee scraped to the bone, his back fissured, his fingers bent, his forehead streaked with dry blood.

The body spoke for him.

It was the only language the world respected.

And then the voice returned.

Soft. Dry. Like the breath left after wind.

—Weapons break.

Your body, if you do it right, does not.

Sebastián did not respond.

He did not smile either.

He only breathed.

Short, ragged, steady.

The day, like a blind eye, opened fully over him.

And he, that hardened piece of earth, that fragment poorly swallowed by the world, moved again.

The air was quieter on the second day.

Not because the world calmed.

But because Sebastián had become part of the noise.

He no longer walked as before.

He advanced as if his body weighed less than hunger.

His arms trembled. The fresh wound on his side burned with every breath.

His fingers were bandaged with plant fibers and ash, his legs covered in old dust, and his jaw tense from chewing tough roots.

Sometimes, while walking, his vision blurred.

But he did not stop.

He continued.

It was the body that commanded now.

Pain no longer spoke. It only pushed.

He crawled between bone plates, climbed a slope of earth where thick mud dripped.

There, at the base of a dry mound, he saw it.

A pool.

Different.

It did not smell of death, nor rot like the others.

It was dense, like thick blood, but without clots.

It had a dark tone, almost black, with tiny bubbles floating on the surface.

The air around it felt warm. Not hot: warm. Like the skin of a living beast.

Sebastián approached in silence, kneeling first.

He did not know what it was.

But his body recognized it.

Something inside pulled him toward it.

And then, the voice.

—This does not cleanse.

—This repairs you.

Sebastián did not ask what it meant.

He crawled to the edge, lowered his torso, and let the thick blood lick his chest.

The heat clung to his skin like a soft bite.

The wounds did not disappear.

But they stopped oozing.

The swollen flesh receded.

The trembling in his arms became a steady pulse.

The voice did not speak again.

It did not promise anything.

But Sebastián understood.

It was not a prize.

Not rest.

It was a resource.

Like chewing roots.

Like sleeping under stone.

Like hardening the back under the sun.

He sank up to his neck.

Let the blood cover his ears, his chest, his belly.

When he came out, hours later, the body was not new.

It was the same, but more stubborn.

More resistant.

Like wood that no longer burns easily.

He spat what had entered his mouth.

It tasted of rust, earth, and old bone.

And he kept walking.

It no longer hurt.

Not because he was healed.

But because the body had learned not to scream so much.

The landscape seemed wider.

Or perhaps it was him, walking with longer steps.

That day he found no food.

No shade.

But he did not collapse either.

And when he slept again, it was stretched out on a warm rock, arms open, as if the world were a battlefield…

and he, a tool that still worked. The third day found him on a hill that cut the horizon like a poorly closed wound.

It was not high, but it was dangerous.

It was made of dry rock and cracked bone plates, covered with dust that would not settle.

Each step released a fine cloud that clung to the eyes, the tongue, the back of the throat.

Sebastián did not hesitate.

He only measured with his eyes, gauged the angle with his calloused fingers… and began to climb.

His hands, hardened by days of crawling, gripped with more precision.

His feet, once clumsy, now found support in invisible cracks.

His balance was different.

Not perfect.

But sharper.

He did not think of the pool.

But he remembered it in his bones.

Halfway up, one of the plates gave way beneath his left foot.

He toppled to the side, but his body reacted before fear.

His arm stretched without trembling.

His fingers found a crevice.

His torso twisted without the wound in his side burning as much as it should.

He held on.

Strong.

With a tension not of a starving child.

It was something else.

Something weaving itself in his muscles from within, as if the body remembered another way of being alive.

He climbed the rest of the slope without thinking.

Only feeling the right weight, the correct movement.

His breathing was steady.

His sweat, scarce.

His eyes, attentive.

And when he reached the top, he did not celebrate.

He only looked at the landscape.

An irregular plain, of shattered ground, dotted with giant ribs and bottomless pits.

And something more.

Creatures.

Not many, but different.

One had bird legs and a fish snout.

Another looked like a slug with bones exposed outside, dragging a spine like a saw.

And one more—the closest—was tall.

Thin.

Like a giraffe, but twisted.

Its neck was disproportionately long and nervous, with a head swinging as if hung by a thread.

Its legs were thin as stakes, but firm, and its skin was not smooth: it was covered in hard, cracked plates, like armor of dried mud.

It smelled him from afar.

And Sebastián descended the slope, not hiding.

The animal tilted its head. Its tongue hung black. One eye seemed larger than the other.

Then it charged.

The legs made a hollow sound striking the ground.

Sebastián did not move aside completely. He only calculated.

When the creature neared, he shifted at the last second, sinking beneath its legs, rolling in the dust.

The beast turned sharply.

Its neck descended like a whip, trying to strike him with its bony forehead.

Sebastián dodged. Once, twice.

The third time, the head grazed him and flung him onto his back.

He felt a rib crack.

But he stood.

Ran toward the creature's side. Jumped.

His fingers clung to one of the cracked plates. He climbed its flank.

The beast shook, tried to kick him off, but Sebastián's body moved with precision. Like a small, obstinate claw.

He reached the neck.

Clung with legs and arms.

And when the animal hoisted him with a shake, he used his own weight to twist over the thinnest part of the spine.

Then he squeezed.

Not with brute force.

With persistence.

With every muscle of his body tensed into a clamp.

The neck began to give.

It cracked.

The creature screamed.

Tried to rise higher, to twist, but Sebastián did not release.

He squeezed until something inside broke.

The scream turned into a death rattle.

And the long body collapsed.

Slowly.

Like a sick tree.

Sebastián fell beside it.

Then crawled to the creature's throat and found a pool: a dark pit of blood, thicker, hotter than before.

It seemed to move on its own, as if it did not need a body.

The voice returned, low, from within:

"Take it. Not for hunger. To endure."

Sebastián did not hesitate.

He plunged his mouth.

Drank.

He did not know if it was blood.

Or something older.

He felt cold first. Then a slow, deep warmth.

It did not burn.

It did not heal either.

It only pushed.

Something inside expanded, without breaking.

His muscles did not grow.

But they stopped hurting.

His body did not change shape.

But it no longer faltered.

When he rose, he did not feel strong.

He felt inevitable.

And he walked.

With steps that were no longer those of a child.

With habits that were no longer human.

He hunted without thinking.

Slept in fissures, with one eye half-open.

Sniffed before approaching.

Spat dense saliva to mark what was his.

He no longer spoke.

He no longer cried.

Only the body.

And the world.

And the day, like a blind eye, opened fully over him. Sebastián paused for a moment. His breathing was deeper, heavier. His heart beat differently, more in tune with the earth around him. The air, hot and bitter, was no stranger to him; it embraced him, as if it were part of him.

The dry pit was before him. The same hollow where, days ago, he had let himself fall searching for answers. But today, something was different. Something inside his chest twisted, as if the earth itself spoke to him through his bones.

"What am I now?" he murmured, more to himself than to the voice.

The silence was heavy, full of broken promises.

"Seed."

The word was a whisper, but it thundered in his mind. It was not an answer. It was a key. As if that word were the germ of something larger, something he did not yet understand, but that was already within him.

Sebastián clenched his teeth. The air scraped as it entered. Old blood stirred beneath his skin.

"Tell me what it means!" he roared at the void, clenching his fists until blood seeped beneath his nails.

The air grew tense.

"Seed. Grow. Here."

The voice slid into his mind like a blade sinking without pain, opening something that had once been sealed.

He lowered his gaze. His body trembled, but not from fear. He took a sharp stone from the ground. Held it for a moment, as if waiting for something to stop him.

Nothing.

Then he drove it deep into his own arm, just below the shoulder, on the inner side where the skin was still soft. A clean cut, direct, without hesitation. The blood gushed thick, hot, alive.

And it ran down his arm… to his wrist, where he still wore a red bracelet.

It was the last thing left from before.

A worn, frayed thread his mother had tied to him an eternity ago. He had forgotten her touch, but not its existence. He had never taken it off. Never wanted to.

Now, without thinking, he tore it from its place and pressed it against the wound as an improvised tourniquet. The fabric absorbed his blood, turned darker, rawer. It was no longer red. It became his.

It was no longer a memory.

It was a living scab. Another part of his body.

"Grow…" he murmured, teeth stained. "Is that what I am?"

The voice did not reply. But the silence was no longer so cold. He was no longer alone with his rage. Something was there, waiting.

Sebastián rose slowly. Looked at the pit. Looked at his arm. His reflection in the blood dripping down.

He was not a child.

He was not a man.

He was something else. Something that did not yet have a name, but was already beginning to sprout.

The body did not lie. The Plain did not end in a day.

Nor in a week. Nor in a month.

It ended slowly, like an infection crawling through the body until it touched the heart.

And Sebastián did not cross it.

He inhabited it.

He tore it with his steps.

And it, in return, deformed him.

He no longer had an age.

But days passed.

He knew it by the taste of the air that changed with each season of death, by the new wounds piling over the older ones, by the way the skin hardened where it had once been soft, and how it broke where it should not.

Time in the Plain was not counted by sun or shadow, but by pain.

By blood.

By what remained after surviving.

He slept in caves formed by giant ribs, like shelters abandoned by colossi long dead.

He drank from thick pools where eyeless larvae swam, and at first he vomited. Later, he swallowed without feeling.

His feet learned not to sink into the flesh of the ground, his hands to climb skeletons as if they were dry branches.

His body was no longer just body.

It was tool, refuge, trap, weapon.

The scars were no longer isolated lines.

They were layers. Belts of memory.

He had a loose rib that cracked when he breathed.

Three crooked fingers that no longer straightened.

A back arched like a tense bow.

An ear that no longer heard, buzzing as if it still held trapped screams.

But he went on.

And each day he hunted something more dangerous.

Because if he did not, he died.

The first that pushed him to the edge was a creature with a serpent's neck and a deer's body, legs long as lances and eyes vibrating with fever.

Sebastián did not flee. He let himself be seen.

The creature charged.

And he, instead of running, rolled beneath its belly and sank his teeth into an exposed vein.

It dragged him several meters, smashing him against stones and bones. But he did not let go.

The beast's neck bent back like a wet rope.

Sebastián climbed over it, hands and knees bloodied,

and broke it.

Snapped the vertebrae with his own body, levering with his back.

He felt the crack.

And did not celebrate.

He only sat awhile on the corpse, watching the blood that was not his mix with the blood that was.

There was no rest.

The journey continued.

On another stretch, on a moonless night, a swarm of insects with human legs covered his body while he slept.

He woke with bites even on his eyelids.

Screamed without voice.

Rolled over hot rocks, scraping his skin, tearing them off with nails and teeth.

For three whole days, his flesh oozed pus.

For three whole days, he walked anyway.

It was not long before a beast with four mouths, resembling a blind hyena, bit his back while he fed on the meat of a dying animal.

The fight was silent.

Quick.

Instinctive.

He broke one of its jaws with headbutts, feeling his own skull crack in response.

He lost part of his back.

And carried it for weeks.

He healed the wound with mud and bone ash.

Not because he knew how, but because he had to.

And the body adjusted.

And the mind as well.

Not in calm, not in sanity, but in endurance.

Thus months passed.

He did not count them.

But he carried them.

And one day, without fully understanding when or how, the landscape began to change.

At first, it was almost imperceptible.

The sun—that immobile sun that never set—was no longer white.

It was dark green.

Filtered.

As if between it and the world endless black leaves had stretched.

The ground was no longer dry and thick.

It was damp.

Dense.

Covered with roots that moved faintly, as if breathing.

The earth no longer rejected him.

Now it awaited him.

It absorbed him with every step.

And the wind…

The wind carried a new murmur.

It was not the lament of bones, nor the shriek of hidden creatures.

It was something deeper.

Slower.

As if the world, at last, had begun to whisper.

Sebastián stopped.

His body trembled.

Not with fear.

With memory.

The dried blood covered his chest like a second skin.

The weathered hide hung from his shoulders like old bark.

His eyes burned, but stayed open.

And then, the voice returned.

Not as a scream.

Not as comfort.

But as a truth that had always been there, buried, waiting for him to be able to hear it.

—Six years. —said the voice—. It is time.

Sebastián did not answer.

He did not need to.

He knew.

He touched his chest.

Counted, without words, the breaths that separated him from the child who had crawled into the Plain.

And he found none.

"Where am I now?" he asked, without moving his lips.

Silence.

And then, from somewhere that was neither outside nor inside, but both:

—The Forest of Shadows.

The name brought no peace.

Nor fear.

Only certainty.

The journey was not over.

It had only just begun.

The body did not celebrate.

It only moved forward.

And the earth, for the first time in a long time, seemed to open before him.

Not as one who receives.

But as one who recognizes.

END OF CHAPTER 3