Even as I bent down to begin the work, the Lightning left me, and what remained behind was broken; however, there was no pain.

I catalogued the damage that my body had suffered, while the chitin Khaaz across the basin were still in the process of collapsing under the Narghul Sorcerer’s soul-death scream.

Both femurs cracked, and the right humerus fractured along the shaft. The pelvis split at the left wing.

Ribs broken in seven places. The right lung is compromised, and the pleural cavity is filling slowly.

Half the body’s secondary channels burned through. The Anima Depth reservoir was at approximately seventy-eight percent structural integrity, down from the eighty-three percent I had begun the loop with.

The Khaazim claw on my left arm was still operational but reverting, as the chitin was softening, and the four-jointed structure beginning to lose its tapered point, with the red glow beneath the surface dimming.

I had approximately three minutes before the body’s structural failure would force termination.

The reforged shell construction would take longer than three minutes by any standard the Avatar’s framework recognised.

The Stone Oracle would have specified the proper timing, quarter-hours at minimum, possibly hours, possibly days, for a process this fundamental, but the Stone Oracle was still unreachable, and three minutes was what the body could provide.

My work would not be finished in this loop, and the construction would have to be compressed.

I was breaking so many rules, and after every demon was dead, I would submit myself to the judgment of the Stone Oracle.

I began the work of reforging the body of this defective species.

The cube core of the shadow construct lay approximately two metres from the Narghul Sorcerer’s torso, where it had fallen when the construct dissipated.

I retrieved it with the Khaazim claw. The cube was smaller than expected, perhaps six centimetres on each edge, and it was warm to the touch through the reverting chitin.

The geometry was precise, the angles exact, the surface smooth enough to suggest manufacture rather than growth.

Whatever had bound the shadow construct to the demon was not organic. It was built.

I set the cube on the ground, and the crystal was still where I had dropped it, in the pulp of the demon’s smashed skull.

I retrieved it with my right hand, the skin was scarred and the fingers stiff, but the grip was functional. The crystal was warmer than the cube.

I did not look at it for long. The categorising would come later. The work was now.

I set the crystal beside the cube.

The flame essence remnants in the demon’s torso were the harder retrieval. The Narghul Sorcerer’s body had fallen forward after the head separation.

The torso had begun to smoke as the demon’s life-substance escaped, and the flame essence that had been gathering for the cast’s hand-discharge was now distributed across the demon’s chest cavity.

The substance was visible, red-orange threads of compressed essence woven through the demon’s internal structure, the residue of magical capability that had not had time to discharge before the cast disintegrated.

Essence was present everywhere, and gathering and controlling Essence on a vast scale was one of the greatest strengths of demons.

Following the grading scale for strength in this world, for a mage to be able to gather and compress Essence to this level, they had to be at least an Arcanist, which was the stage after Adept.

However, this demon was technically at the same level as an Adept, but he could already gather such rich essence inside his body.

I rolled the demon’s body over with the Khaazim claw.

The torso’s underside had a small crack where the demon’s chest cavity had partially ruptured, and the flame essence was visible through the crack.

With this degree of compression, it would either slowly degrade over weeks or it would explode in a calamitous wave that would spread over hundreds of meters, and the core of the explosion would be as hot as the surface of a star.

Not even an Arcanist would survive an explosion like this if they were in its range.

This flame essence was waiting for direction, and I provided direction.

The Khaazim claw, its tapered point still functional despite the reversion, opened the demon’s chest cavity at the crack, revealing the internal structure of the Narghul Sorcerer’s torso.

Inside was dark-red tissue threaded with the same yellow-light channels that had run through the brain, the structure that powered the demon’s body during life and continued to glow faintly even after the body’s death.

The flame essence was concentrated at the chest’s centre, gathered around what would have been the demon’s heart if Narghul Sorcerers had hearts in the human sense.

They did not. The structure at the demon’s chest centre was a hollow chamber, lined with the yellow-channel tissue, where the demon’s living essence had circulated through life.

The chamber was now empty of the demon, but the flame essence remained inside it, held in place by the chamber’s structure as if the chamber had been designed to hold flame.

I understood the design now. The Narghul Sorcerer’s body was a forge, and he had hoped to make flame the center of the power of his third horn.

Not very ambitious, but flame essence was easily found everywhere, and I could see that the demon preferred stability.

The chamber was the crucible, and the demon’s life had been the process of operating the forge, circulating flame essence through the chamber, threading it through the yellow-channel structure, producing the cast configurations the demon had deployed during the engagement.

Even dead, the forge was still operational, and the crucible was still hot.

I had the ingredients, and the forge was provided.

I reached into the chamber with the Khaazim claw and gathered the flame essence into a single concentrated mass.

The substance responded to the claw’s grip, as if the claw’s authority over the demon’s substrate was recognised by the substrate itself.

Which was essentially the case; I built the claw, but the corruption came from this demon, and its signature was part of it.

If the demon had greater control over his first horn, which should be linked to his corruption, then he would have been able to take control over the Khaazim claw and tear my head off with it.

The flame essence pulled together into a sphere approximately the size of my fist, red-orange and pulsing, hovering above the claw without falling.

I brought the sphere out of the demon’s chest, and I positioned it above the cube and the crystal on the bowl’s floor.

Now the work could begin in earnest.