The transition between the East Orchard and the foothills of the Grey Mountains wasn't visual, but thermal. The heavy, sugary air of rotting fruit vanished, replaced by a cold, mineral breath laden with moisture.

  Adrian tightened the straps of his backpack. He had just left a pantry to enter a tomb.

  He paused for a moment to contemplate his hands. The absence of tremors struck him; IRIS had stabilized his nerves so well during the engagement with the goblin that he felt coldly, almost artificially efficient. He wasn't a warrior, but IRIS's processor made him a functional tool.

  Before him, the entrance to the Weeping Caves opened like a jagged wound in the limestone rock. No door, no guard, just absolute darkness that seemed to suck in the moonlight. He didn't rush in immediately.

  "IRIS, initiate active echo-location mapping."

  Adrian waited for the mental "ping" of return. It never came.

  [ERROR: ZERO SIGNAL RETURN] [WALL ABSORPTION COEFFICIENT: 99.9%]

  Adrian swore internally. Of course. The moss didn't just dampen footsteps; it literally swallowed sound waves. His acoustic radar was useless here. He was flying blind, or close to it.

  "Cancel sonar. Switch to strict visual amplification. We'll have to do this the old-fashioned way: with our eyes."

  Adrian frowned.

  He took a step inside.

  The sound of his hobnailed boots on stone should have resonated. Clack. Clack. A sharp echo.

  Instead, the sound died instantly. Muffled. Swallowed. It was disorienting. His inner ear sought auditory feedback that didn't come.

  He lit a torch—no, he had no torch. Too visible. Too primitive. He relied on IRIS's night vision, which painted the cave in shades of grey and cyan.

  The walls weren't bare. They were carpeted with a fuzzy, grayish substance that seemed to vibrate slightly with the passage of air.

  Whispering Moss.

  This was the culprit. A hyper-absorbent vegetal structure capable of trapping sound waves within its micro-alveoli.

  For an adventurer of this world, it was a nuisance. For Adrian, it was the key ingredient for "Target 2" of his plan: the Silence Ointment.

  His buffalo boots clacked too loudly on the stone. With the oil extracted from this moss, he could impregnate the leather and muffle his own steps. Stealth would no longer be a talent, but a chemical property of his gear. He approached the wall...

  He had to be quick. The moss reacted to body heat by retracting.

  He delicately scraped the rocky surface, harvesting shreds of the fibrous matter. It was soft to the touch, almost silky.

  [OBJECT: WHISPERING MOSS (SUPERIOR QUALITY)]

  [PROPERTY: ACOUSTIC INSULATION] [USAGE: STEALTH / SILENCER]

  He filled two vials, packing the moss in as tightly as possible. With this, once distilled, he could create an ointment that would render his boots completely silent, or a paste to "mute" the sound of a forced door.

  He continued his advance.

  The cave descended in a gentle slope. Humidity increased. Water droplets fell from the ceiling, but they made no sound hitting the guano-and-moss-covered floor.

  It was a world of forced silence.

  Suddenly, IRIS illuminated an area on the right wall, about ten meters from the entrance.

  It wasn't moss. It was a whitish crystallization, resembling dirty frost, running along a fissure from which water oozed.

  Adrian approached. He ran his finger over the crystals, then brought it to his tongue.

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  Salty. Sharp. Cold. His heart skipped a beat. This wasn't table salt.

  "Chemical analysis."

  [COMPONENT IDENTIFIED: KNO3 (POTASSIUM NITRATE)] [PURITY: 78% (RAW)]

  Saltpeter.

  He had charcoal (easy to produce or find). He could find sulfur (often present in volcanic caves or via mineralized guano). And he had Saltpeter.

  The equation flashed, blinking, in his mind.

  KNO3 + C + S = Black Powder.

  A firearm. The temptation to become a god of war with a simple metal tube.

  He drew his dagger to scrape the saltpeter, his hand trembling with greed. But he stopped dead.

  Silence.

  This cave was a natural acoustic chamber. A detonation here wouldn't just kill his target. The shockwave, unable to dissipate, would bounce indefinitely or saturate the moss to the breaking point.

  "If I shoot, I deafen myself or collapse the vault," he realized with a shudder.

  And above all, the smell. Black powder stinks of rotten eggs and hell. An olfactory and sonic signature that would attract everything living for miles around. Not to mention the questions such "magic" would raise in town.

  Too risky. Too dirty.

  He scraped the saltpeter anyway...

  He filled a second vial to the brim.

  He wouldn't make a bomb. But perhaps he could exploit local chemistry differently.

  He took the fragment of Ironbark Beetle carapace and the small mana stone stolen from the Goblin out of his pocket. He knew what saltpeter was (a powerful oxidizer), but he was ignorant of the exact composition of these alien materials.

  "IRIS, run mass spectrometry on the beetle chitin and the mana core. I want their elemental composition."

  A red light swept over the objects in his hand.

  [ANALYSIS COMPLETE]

  [SAMPLE A (CHITIN): DENSE CARBON POLYMER. HIGH TRACES OF ORGANIC MAGNESIUM AND PHOSPHORUS.]

  [SAMPLE B (CORE): UNSTABLE CRYSTAL STRUCTURE. HIGH RAPID ENERGY DISCHARGE CAPACITY.]

  Adrian's eyes gleamed.

  Magnesium. On Earth, it was the key element in sparklers and old-time photographic flashes. Nature had endowed these beetles with fire-resistant shells thanks to metallic components.

  The equation changed.

  If he mixed Saltpeter (Oxidizer) with fine powder from this magnesium-rich chitin (Rapid Fuel) and used the instability of the mana core as a detonator...

  He wouldn't get a destructive thermal explosion like with classic charcoal. He would get instantaneous combustion at blindingly high luminous temperature.

  A violent photo-chemical reaction.

  A Flash-Bang.

  A tool for escape. A dazzling grenade.

  It was perfect. Cave creatures lived in absolute darkness. Their eyes (or sensors) were hypersensitive. A light of 5 million candelas would leave them blind and panicked.

  Adrian didn't need a simulation to guess the result. He knew the periodic table. Magnesium burns at a blinding temperature, and the unstable mana core would act as an impact detonator.

  He sat on a rock. Grinding the chitin with the pommel of his dagger was a struggle; the material was designed to resist shock. He had to persist, sweating, to obtain a coarse dust which he poured into the vial with the saltpeter.

  Came the critical moment. He took the Goblin's mana core. The small stone vibrated against his skin, warm, unstable. A miniature radioactive leak. Holding his breath, he wedged it into the center of the powder. If it touched the magnesium now, he'd lose his hand and his eyes.

  He sealed the vial with a cork stopper, forcing it in, praying the pressure wouldn't trigger the reaction. An impact grenade, crude and terrifying.

  He slid it into his most accessible pocket with the gestures of a bomb disposal expert.

  He stood up.

  He pushed further in. The air grew colder.

  After ten minutes of walking, the moss began to thin out.

  It gave way to something else.

  Threads.

  At first, it was just a few silvery filaments, strung between two stalactites. Adrian avoided them carefully.

  Then, the threads became sheets. Diaphanous curtains glimmering faintly in IRIS's night vision. This wasn't ordinary spider silk. It was rigid, sharp as spun glass.

  "Analysis," Adrian breathed.

  [SUBSTANCE: CRYSTAL SILK] [HARDNESS: EQUIVALENT TO TEMPERED GLASS]

  [DANGER: SHARP + VIBRATION CONDUCTOR]

  He looked up. The sheets of silk didn't just bar the way; they all converged toward a single point far ahead.

  The cavern suddenly opened up, immense, a veritable underground cathedral whose ceiling was lost in darkness. The air was different here. Drier. Charged with static electricity.

  He was in the arena.

  In the center of the room, suspended over an abyss, a gigantic web stretched out. It didn't catch flies. It caught light itself, refracting it into a complex prism.

  And in the middle of the web, she waited.

  The Crystalweaver Spider.

  She was enormous. Her body, the size of a small horse, was composed of translucent chitin that revealed internal organs pulsing with pale blue light. Her eight legs ended in sharp crystal spikes.

  [TARGET IDENTIFIED: CRYSTAL SPIDER (GRADE 1.8)] [STATUS: STANDBY]

  [THREAT ASSESSMENT: LETHAL]

  She didn't move. She waited for prey to touch a single one of her conductive threads.

  Adrian was fifty meters away. If he stepped on the wrong pebble, if he brushed against the wrong thread, she would descend upon him at a speed no hammer could stop.

  But Adrian wasn't looking at the spider. He looked at what was beneath the web, on a stone ledge inaccessible from the ground.

  Cocoons.

  Not prisoners. Eggs.

  Spheres of pure silk, radiating concentrated energy. And right next to them, oozing from a broken stalactite the spider seemed to use as a watering hole... drops of a viscous, dark violet liquid.

  Pure venom.

  Adrian smiled in the dark. He couldn't kill the queen. But he was going to heist her treasures.

  He had his flash grenade, and his boots made no sound on this floor. He had the audacity of one who knows monsters are afraid of the light.

  The burglary could begin.