Chương 57: Chapter 58: The Echoing Cistern

The heavy mud-brick walls of the abandoned cistern kept out the worst of the blinding Levant heat, but the air inside the ditch remained thick with the scent of stagnant dust and copper. Ethan sat flat against the crumbling earthen floor, his soot-caked fingers carefully adjusting the wet linen compress wrapped around Hilkiah's upper arm. He kept his movements slow and rhythmic, manually dipping a fresh cloth into his water skin before pressing it against the jagged crust of the old man's wound.

I could close this laceration right now if the engine allowed it, Ethan thought, his jaw tightening as he watched the dark crimson fluid pulse beneath the wet fibres. His mind tracked back to his accidental discovery deep in the limestone fault trenches during his early tool trials. Back then, his Linguistic Genesis Engine had initialised a hidden loop.

The unique parameters of his Yotzer HaRishon class allowed him to map his own damaged flesh as a broken vessel, letting him manually bind his own tissue back together to instantly recover his stamina. But as he focused his attention onto the old man's burning shoulder, no interactive target vectors appeared. He tried to force the linguistic code to bridge the gap, but his interface simply flickered a cold, silent error prompt.

The system's logic was absolute: his biological restructuring authority was hard-coded exclusively to his own master character frame or the unformed earthen silicates of his craft. He could heal his own skin, but a foreign human body was an entirely invalid target. Good, Ethan grumbled internally, a wave of cautious relief clearing his focus. Even if the engine permitted it, how am I going to explain this to this NPC? A low, trembling wheeze cut through the dark corner of the ditch.

The old man's chest rose in a jagged, painful expansion as his fever finally cracked, his lifelike, procedural eyes slowly focusing on the charcoal ash smeared across Ethan's face. His fingers simply tightened with a fierce, trembling desperation around the tattered leather bundle clutched to his chest.

"The blood..." Hilkiah whispered, his voice a dry, rasping thread. He stared at the wet cloth in Ethan's hands, his eyes wide with a lingering, feverish intensity.

"I told you... it defiles the stone. You can wash the skin, traveler, but you cannot wash the ground. The stains are too deep. They have baked it into the very bones of the valley..." Before Ethan could ask what the old man meant, a sharp, brittle sound tore through the quiet canyon air outside the cistern mouth. SHHHHHHK. It was followed instantly by a rapid, echoing succession of high-pitched, metallic pings that bounced off the steel-gray rock cliffs like anvil strikes.

Ethan rose slowly, shifting his weight onto his heels as he crept to the lip of the mud-brick ditch. He didn't need a system tracking window. He didn't activate an overlay frame. Instead, he simply focused his 78 points of Perception to the lower valley paths two kilometres away. Through the dust haze, the ravinelands were in absolute chaos. Ethan's sharp vision locked onto a player, who was frantically unbuckling his weapon harness and hurling his red-glowing composite khopesh deep into a wadi ditch.

The weapon didn't shatter upon impact; it lay thumping in the gray silt, its crimson core fracturing with deep white lines while emitting a horrific, multi-voiced screech into the wind. All across the lower basin, the abandoners were scrambling away from their thrown weapons. But the strategy only saved those who moved fast. Ethan watched three players who stubbornly refused to drop their swords running blindly toward the distant stone gates of Beth Shean, their screaming blades flashing red error lines.

Behind them, the canyon ridges swarmed with clicking mandibles and scaled tails. The invisible hatred meter of the regional monster AI had completely inverted, pulling an unstoppable, hyper-aggressive wave of elite dune-back scorpions out of the caves, tracking the frequency of the glass like homing beacons.

Down in the shadows of the cistern, Hilkiah struggled to sit up, his weathered face tightening with a profound, historic horror as the distant metallic shrieks vibrated directly through the mud-brick flooring beneath his palms. His voice rose, matching the exact rhythm of the canyon screams.

"Listen to the Tzo'akim of the Adama," Hilkiah rasped, his gaze locking onto Ethan with a terrifyingly clear, feverish intensity.

"The outlanders have opened their mouths to devour the blameless. They have poured out life upon the gravel, and the ground has swallowed it. Do you hear it, traveler? The earth refuses to hide the slaughter. It is vomiting up the cries of the spilled blood!" Ethan didn't answer. His focus wasn't on the old man's warning. A sudden, terrifying realisation hit him, turning his blood completely cold beneath his soot disguise.

The raw clay, Ethan thought, his fingers locking tightly around the strap of his canvas tool-bag. If the pieces out in the valley paths are shrieking because they were dug from that same blood-stained earth vein... what is happening back in the underground cavern? His hidden fault-line cavern was currently packed with bulk storage containing tons of finished wholesale units made from that exact same Dmei-Adamah layer.

If those newly crafted blades caught the same spiritual fracture wave traveling through the bedrock, his secret base camp wouldn't just be compromised—it would become the largest aggro magnet in this region. He had to move now, or watch his entire operation be overrun before the sun could set.