After the initial experiment to acquire a core from one of the Bitumen was an abject failure, I tried a few more things, but none of them worked as I wanted them to. Sure, I learned quite a few interesting, and some fairly disgusting, things in the process, but ultimately, I wasn’t able to confirm any of my suspicions.

What I was confident in was that the Bitumen weren’t individual life-forms; if they could be considered alive at all. They were outgrowths of another being, generated to project power in a way similar to my scrying constructs, only that they held that core within themselves, allowing them to wield a lot more power than I could project through the Astral River and use with my constructs. Why that made them eligible to provide EXP upon their death was a bit of a mystery to me, though it also made me wonder if I could create something similar as a training aid. A way to funnel EXP to somebody I wanted without putting them into serious danger, but as I thought about it, I quickly realised that it most likely wouldn’t work. And, given that we had just recently seen what happened if the system deemed somebody had broken its rules, knowingly or not, I wasn’t about to try and cheat it. Sure, there might be no consequences at all, or the consequences might be severe, with no way of knowing which way that particular pendulum would swing until one tried it out. Not something I was willing to do, especially not without some seriously worthwhile rewards.

Sadly, my experiments didn’t reveal any obvious weaknesses in the Bitumen; they might just be too simple to be dealt with easily. They only had a single vital spot, their core, while every other part was essentially unimportant. They didn’t have sensory organs one could attack in some fashion, they didn’t have nervous, circulatory or respiratory systems, leaving virtually no way to wound them, beyond the destruction of their core and their ability to regenerate any lost parts meant they were either alive or dead, with no steps in between. To make matters worse, the coarse, oily goop they were composed of was consistently unpleasantly hot and, when tested with some rats I caught, it also proved toxic, retaining its ability to emit heat while within the area of burned ground. All in all, ingesting even a small amount would be horrifically unpleasant, unless one were weak enough to succumb to it, then it would just be deadly.

Which, obviously, meant that Silva and Sasha were almost useless against these foes. Sure, both had their claws and paws, respectively, but their primary means of offence were their powerful jaws and sharp teeth. Silva might be able to take a bite out of a Bituman and survive if she rinsed her mouth soon after, but Sasha likely wouldn’t be able to make it; she was a little too weak at the moment, her level simply not up to snuff.

Given that humans had laboured under a lack of natural weapons for much of their existence but compensated for it by making and using tools, that was the obvious way to go. Silva had the spiked helmet we found back in the cursed inn dungeon, though she hardly used the spike for its intended purpose, mostly because her fighting style and instincts didn’t include ramming people head-first. Now, that helmet was transferred to Sasha, who looked incredibly strange wearing it. Additionally, I made a few extra armaments out of Ice, allowing her to strap blades to her limbs in a way that wouldn’t hinder her movement. Silva, too, received a new set of weapons, though I wasn’t sure they would help all that much. Ultimately, the Bitumen were dangerous and deadly when engaged in melee, so the obvious solution was to stay out of their range, giving us more than enough space to evade their attacks. Those attacks were generally telegraphed waves of burning goop, something one could dodge or block fairly easily when staying away from them. Lia, on the other hand, could use her Shadow Steps to evade those waves even while in melee, allowing her to disrupt and distract our foes, if we had to face multiple of them.

Luckily, while the Bitumen had some incredibly deadly abilities, their overall strength was fairly imbalanced. Outside of their regeneration and utterly redundant bodies, they had little else. Even their fairly impressive offensive abilities were an outgrowth of their redundant bodies; they literally flung pieces of themselves at the enemy. Everything else about them was lacking. Their speed was mediocre at best, their Intelligence was incredibly limited, and their Intuition was highly focused and specialised, leaving the rest of their senses and instincts wanting. They could detect sources of magic unless they were concealed, which was how they managed to shoot down my scrying constructs, but that was about all they could do. As soon as magical concealment was involved, they essentially turned blind, to the point that I could jump around right in front of them, as long as I concealed my magical presence. Sure, not everyone could accomplish such concealment, but I was capable enough to hide my entire group.

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And with that concealment in place, the burned soil became a tremendous source of EXP. All five of us, Sasha and Silva wearing leather boots to protect their otherwise naked paws, had started to probe the outskirts. While my focus was on keeping all five of us hidden, Lia acted as our primary offence, striking down the Bitumen with highly accurate and swift thrusts, piercing their cores with ease, while Luna switched between supporting me and keeping an eye out as her divinely granted eyes allowed her to detect things I couldn’t see, especially when it came to magical connections not rooted in Astral Power like the ones connecting the Bitumen’s cores to whatever was deeper in the burned area, providing them with the power they used to burn the land.

And there had to be some stronger entity deeper in their territory. Every Bituman we fought had connections leading in that direction, and the Bitumen themselves were just too simple to create a mess like the one we saw here. This was an almost cancerous territory spreading out by burning the soil and converting the ground into a source of raw materials to be used to further their expansion. And then there was the overwhelmingly devastating response to my initial attempt at drowning the area. That sort of response hadn’t been repeated, though that might be because our efforts were quiet and fairly small scale, at least when compared to that initial ritual. All in all, there were the simple Bitumen we faced at the moment, but there also was some sort of cunning foe waiting further in.

But, for now, we were simply harvesting the Bitumen for EXP, allowing Sasha to gain a few much-needed EXP, though given that her involvement with their destruction was minimal, it would take a lot of time for her to get anywhere with the trickle of EXP she received like this.

While our efforts were focused on the edge of the burned territory, we didn’t completely stick to it. Instead, we ventured along the edge for two, maybe three hours each night, then took a gander deeper into their territory, exploring and trying to find out what drove these creatures.

Within their territory, we came across a few interesting objects, spots where things stuck out from the burned soil. Investigating those spots yielded a few strange metal objects, too uniform and, well, too metallic to have occurred naturally, too crude, warped and broken to be man-made, making us collectively wonder what they were. Lia had taken those and was using her days to investigate, while Luna and I had come across a handful of crystals and were trying to figure them out. Otherwise, the area was a burned wasteland of ash and smoke, the ground still on fire in more than a few spots.

We truly needed to figure out how to counter the relentless advance of the Bitumen and the burned territory. Killing them individually only helped so much, and only while we kept doing it. Sure, we managed to halt their advance along a fairly long stretch, but given the sheer size of the infection we were dealing with, that didn’t help a whole lot. We hadn’t even managed to find out how big the area was, though I was considering using a scrying construct to fly around it, once the bound Spirit had completely recovered. That way, I didn’t need to keep focused on the construct. Instead, I could use the spirit as a link to it, allowing me to continue with my usual tasks while the construct obtained the information we needed.

And we needed information on this monumental mess we had stumbled across, or we might as well give up and venture on, hoping that the burned area would eventually stop growing. While fearing that it might not.