He dragged it by the hindquarters.

  The creature scrambled weakly, claws finding no purchase on the smooth limestone, its scream reduced to short, shallow sounds. He set it down in the corridor and held it in place with one hand across the back of its neck.

  Then he began.

  He ran his fingers through the fur first. Pressed the paws, the snout, the joints — finding where the structure was dense and where it gave. Then he pressed his palm flat against the mole's flank and pushed mana into it.

  The mana moved through the body and returned changed — carrying the shape of what it had passed through. He could feel distinct systems inside:

  Something rigid running the length of the body, holding everything else in position.

  Something else pumping fluid outward in rhythmic pulses, branching into channels too fine to follow individually.

  A diffuse network centralizing at the top of the spine, sending pulses outward to every extremity.

  And the zone itself — the interference field, present throughout, woven into all of it.

  His mana disturbed each system as it passed. The rhythmic pulses stuttered briefly. The zone spiked, then restabilized.

  He worked methodically down the length of the body. Pressing. Bending. Testing mobility. The creature had stopped screaming. It lay still.

  He raised one hand — keeping the other flat across the mole's neck — and looked at his fingers. The nails had lengthened, slow and certain, the tips catching a faint light. He turned his hand once, examining it, then brought it down.

  He pressed his thumb against it. Warm — considerably warmer than the surrounding air. Slightly viscous. It carried heat.

  The smell — copper, immediate and dense, filling the corridor. Beneath it something darker.

  He opened the body the way he had opened the wall — following the natural seams of the body, separating layers. The cavity opened. Steam rose faintly from inside. The organs were small and densely packed: a central structure contracting rhythmically, paired sacs expanding and deflating, a long coiled tube — tracing connections, following branching networks of channels, mapping the pale cord-like pathways running from the spine's convergence point out to every extremity.

  The creature's sounds had stopped some time earlier. He had not noted exactly when.

  The red had spread across a wide section of the corridor floor. It was cooling now — the warmth he had felt already gone from the outer edges of the pool, the color darkening where it met air. He worked past it, stepping over it when it was in the way, his hands moving deeper into the opened cavity.

  The zone thinned as he worked. Not spiking — depleting. Losing coherence as the body's internal processes reached their end. He placed one hand flat on the floor beside it and felt the moment the field finally collapsed.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  [SYSTEM: Entity Eliminated. +2 EXP.]

  His mana returned to the region on its own — flowing back into the space the zone had occupied, filling it the way water fills a depression. He felt it reach the carcass and begin to draw inward.

  [SYSTEM: Organic Matter — Absorbing. +3 MANA]

  [SYSTEM: Terminology Acquired — Heart: muscular organ; pumps blood through the body. Lungs: paired organs; exchange air. Blood: fluid; carries heat and nutrients. Spine: structural column; routes nerve signals. Nerves: pathways; transmit signals between body and spine.]

  [SYSTEM: Biological Blueprint Acquired — 'Blind Earth Mole'.]

  The blood on the corridor floor darkened at its edges, then began to recede — pulled inward by the same process, absorbed into the stone. The carcass followed: fur, then tissue, then the organs he had mapped, each layer descending without drama, the dungeon consuming what it had been given.

  He sat back on his heels and stayed very still.

  The blueprint reached from the macroscopic architecture he had just mapped with his hands down to levels he had no sensory apparatus to perceive directly — bone composition, how muscle fiber attached to bone, how blood moved faster through narrow vessels and slower through wide ones, how a nerve signal translated into a muscle contraction. He knew the mole's body more completely than the mole had ever known itself.

  He looked at his hands. Blood on both — dark now where it had cooled on his skin, still faintly warm at the creases of his fingers. It receded from the surface, drawn inward, and his hands were clean.

  The thing that had been pulsing in the mole's chest: a heart. The thing that had been pulsing in his own: the same word. He pressed two fingers against his sternum and felt it — the same contraction, the same interval, the same function.

  He had a heart.

  He held that for a moment.

  The mole had lungs. He pressed his palms against his own ribs and felt them expand and contract. He had those too, but they were not the same. He could feel it.

  He could build this.

  Not as aspiration. As a fact the blueprint presented directly: here is the complete schematic. Here are all the components. Here is every connection. He gathered what mana remained and extended it into the space in front of him. He called up the blueprint. He began.

  Something formed.

  The mana cohered into a volume — roughly correct shape, approximate mass, approximate density. For a moment it sat on the corridor floor and resembled, the way a shadow resembles the object, the creature he had just taken apart.

  Then it collapsed.

  No sound. No flash. The structure lost integrity from the inside out, the mana releasing all at once, and what had been a solid form for perhaps four heartbeats became nothing. Entirely without the warmth or the zone or any property that had distinguished the original from the stone around it.

  The backlash hit him between the eyes — deeper than the previous failures.

  [-2 MANA]

  He pressed both palms against the floor and waited. The seedling's light flickered at the far end of the corridor. The dungeon held.

  The blueprint was complete. The mana was real. The failure was in the complexity — the number of simultaneous processes that had to be initialized and sustained for the structure to remain coherent. A heart pumping blood through vessels while lungs exchanged air while nerves fired while metabolism sustained all of it simultaneously — not a wall being pushed. Thousands of interdependent processes, all of them failing the moment any one of them failed.

  He was not strong enough.

  He needed something with fewer moving parts. Much fewer.

  [MANA absorbed: +1]

  [EXP acquired: +2 (Entity Eliminated)]

  [Status: Depleted | LVL: 1 | EXP: 6/10 | MANA: 2/10]