Infinite Extraction System Can a Beast Reach Havenly Tier?

CHAPTER 2: THE ANATOMY OF A RAT

The silence that followed the second extraction was not a clean one. It settled heavy and thick, smelling of sulfur, iron-rich grease, and the sharp, ozone sting of dark mana that hung in the humid subterranean air.

Lucian remained down on one knee for nearly two full minutes, his palms resting flat on the cold, damp stone floor of the Inverell Catacombs.

Inside his ribcage, his heart was beating with a heavy, rhythmic thump that felt entirely alien to him. The warmth he had chosen from the prompt—the +3 Strength and +4 Agility extracted from the hound’s core essence—wasn't a magic trick. It felt like hot lead poured directly into the marrow of his long bones, unspooling through his tendons and tightening the slack muscles along his shoulders and spine.

He took a slow, deliberate breath. The sharp, stabbing ache in his right floating rib—a gift from a stray kick during an alley scrap in the Lower Rings three months ago—was simply gone.

He looked down at his left hand. The knuckles were scabbed over, permanently stained with dungeon grime, but when he curled them into a fist, the movement was precise. Tremorless. Fast.

So this is what real mana density feels like, Lucian thought, opening and closing his hand. Not the fake, temporary high from those cheap stamina salves the guild hawkers sell for ten coppers a vial. Real weight.

A soft, metallic clicking sound broke his focus.

Lucian turned his head.

Pip was standing near the torn remnants of the leather supply pouch that had given out during the force-graft. The creature—if it could still be called a rat—was breathing slowly, its expanded black ribs rising and falling beneath interlocking plates of dull, obsidian-colored bone.

Where its tail used to be—a thin, pink, hairless string—there was now a segmented chain of smooth dark scales ending in a blunt, heavy tip. The red light burning in its eye sockets wasn't chaotic like the frenzy-mana of the Dread-Hounds; it was focused, steady, and terrifyingly cold.

"Pip," Lucian called softly.

The shadow-rat turned instantly. Its massive, five-foot frame shifted with an eerie, weightless grace that defied its bulk. It trotted over, its broad paws making surprisingly little noise against the gravel, and rested its heavy snout near Lucian’s shoulder.

Lucian reached out, his hand hesitating for a fraction of a second before touching the plate covering Pip's brow.

The bone armor felt cold to the touch, smooth as polished slate, but underneath the ridge, he could feel the faint, humming pulse of a living mana core. Pip nudged his palm with enough force to push Lucian back an inch, letting out a deep, clicking rumble from its chest—a sound that vibrated straight through Lucian's boots.

[Companion Analysis:]

Species: Obsidian Shadow-Rat (Mutated)

Tier: Class-E (Upper Peak)

Core Stability: 92% (Graft fully integrated)

Active Mutations: [Obsidian Carapace], [Shadow-Step (Minor)]

Next Evolution Requirement: 0/3 Class-E Soul Cores or 1 Class-D Core

Lucian stared at the dark blue glass of the system panel floating in his field of vision.

"Three Class-E cores... or one Class-D," he muttered, his voice raspy from the sulfur fumes.

That was the logic of the system. It didn't care about guild registration cards, tamer licenses, or noble bloodlines. It was a raw, mathematical equation of dead meat and extracted soul traits.

He looked back toward the narrow fissure in the wall—the breach where the two Dread-Hounds had entered. Beyond that gap lay the Outer Sinks, a sprawling network of flooded sewers and collapsed drainage vaults that formed the secondary buffer zone of the Inverell Catacombs.

A normal Class-F scavenger would cut off the Dread-Hounds' ears for the low-tier bounty (four silver bits a pair at the Guild Registrar), pack his bag, and run back to the surface before the smell of blood attracted a pack-leader or a stray subterranean predator.

Lucian looked down at his trench-blade.

The tip was bent sideways at an ugly forty-five-degree angle, jammed full of bone fragments and black fat from the first hound’s eye socket. It was useless for fighting now.

He leaned over the carcass of the first hound, gripped the iron hilt, and pulled hard. The steel groaned, but the blade snapped cleanly off at the crossguard with a sharp ping.

"Useless trash," he muttered, tossing the broken hilt aside.

He began searching the dead hound’s body the old-fashioned way. He rolled the heavy creature onto its side, using a small iron skinning knife from his belt to slice along the soft belly where the obsidian bone armor ended.

Even with a dead monster, skinning took work. The hide was tough as boiled leather, and his knife slipped twice against the grease. But with his upgraded Strength, the blade moved through the tough muscle fibers with far less resistance than before.

He cut free the beast’s rear legs—the thick, tendinous meat loved by the gutter-cooks in the Lower Rings—and pulled out the small, murky blue mana crystal embedded near the sternum. It was low-quality, clouded with impurities, but the local apothecary in the border camp would give him fifteen silvers for it.

Fifteen silvers was three weeks of dry rations. Or one decent steel dagger from an ironmonger's scrap pile.

[Target Corpse Fully Harvested.]

[Remaining Biological Essence Depleted.]

The blue panel flickered and faded.

Lucian wiped his skinning knife on his trousers, sheath-bound it, and tied the hound's hind legs together with a length of frayed hemp rope, flinging the heavy load over his shoulder.

He didn't feel the weight like he used to. Two hours ago, dragging forty pounds of monster meat through three miles of wet catacomb tunnels would have had his knees buckling by the second turn. Now, the load felt light—almost negligible.

"Let's see what else is in the sink, Pip," Lucian said quietly.

The shadow-rat didn't squeak. It simply turned toward the pitch-black fissure in the wall, its long, segmented tail swaying slowly behind it, red eyes cutting through the darkness like two drops of burning oil.

The passage beyond the breach narrowed into a long, forgotten drainage conduit built by the original architecture of old Aethelgard three centuries ago.

The stones here weren't rough-cut granite like the upper tunnels; they were massive, rectangular blocks of black basalt, tightly fitted together without mortar, slick with centuries of black algae and stagnant runoff.

Lucian walked slowly, keeping his back close to the left wall. Every few yards, he stopped to listen.

In the catacombs, sound was life.

Upper-tier Tamers from the High Guilds didn't need to listen. They marched down the central avenues of the rift with glowing light-orbs floating above their heads, flanked by massive B-rank Iron-Claw Drakes or high-tier Flame-Spite Hounds that cleared the path with sheer overwhelming force. They wore polished plate armor stamped with crests, carried enchanted steel, and had teams of dedicated healers waiting at the surface camps.

Lucian had spent three years watching them from behind the wooden barricades of the staging grounds. He knew how they looked at guys like him—the "Scavs." The rat-catchers. The meat-shields who paid three coppers a day just for permission to crawl through the refuse tunnels and pick up the broken arrows and monster teeth the Guilds left behind.

A Class-F Tamer can't bind a Class-E beast, the Guild instructors had drilled into everyone during the mandatory safety briefings at the frontier gate. The soul-strain will rupture your neural pathways. Know your place. Stay in the low-tier zones.

Lucian glanced at the massive, obsidian-plated monster moving silently through the shadows three feet ahead of him.

They were right about the soul-strain, Lucian thought, a faint, ironic smirk touching his lips. They just didn't know you don't have to bind a beast... if you can rebuild it from scratch.

"Hold," Lucian whispered.

Pip stopped mid-stride, one paw raised off the wet basalt.

Up ahead, where the conduit opened into a wider, vaulted drainage chamber, the sound of water changed. It wasn't the slow, rhythmic drip-drip of condensation from the ceiling.

It was a wet, heavy sloshing sound.

Slurp. Crunch. Slurp.

Lucian pressed his spine flat against the wall and slowly poked his head around the edge of the stone archway.

The chamber beyond was huge—an ancient water-filtering reservoir roughly sixty feet across. Most of the iron grates that once covered the floor had rusted away, leaving deep, flooded pits filled with black, stagnant water that smelled like rotted kelp and old corpses.

Sitting near the edge of the largest water pit, bathed in the sickly green light of a patch of bioluminescent moss, was something that didn't belong in the Outer Sinks.

It was roughly the size of a carriage horse. Its body was broad, squat, and covered in thick, dark-green warty hide that glistened with oily mucus. Its hind legs were folded beneath it like massive, thick-scaled tree trunks, and its wide, flat head lacked ears or a nose—just two milky, lidless yellow eyes and a mouth that split its entire skull from side to side.

In its massive jaws, it was casually crushing the thorax of an eight-foot-long Iron-Shell Centipede, biting through the creature's thick chitin like a person crunching on a dry biscuit.

Lucian’s breath hitched slightly in his throat.

A Mire-Gorged Toad.

Class-D.

Not an E-rank hound. Not a gutter-rat. A genuine Class-D subterranean apex predator that usually lived in the flooded third tier of the Catacombs—two miles deeper down.

Lucian slowly pulled his head back behind the archway, his mind running through everything he had read in the cheap, stained monster handbooks sold at the border market.

Mire-Gorged Toad:

Tier: Class-D (Mid-Grade)

Traits: Acidic Mucus Coating (reduces physical impact), Corrosive Tongue-Lash (range 30 feet), Heavy Kinetic Slam.

Weakness: Slow turning radius, unarmored throat membrane during croak-cycles.

Estimated Guild Bounty: 3 Gold Pieces for an intact core.

Three gold pieces.

In the Lower Rings of Aethelgard, three gold pieces could buy a small timber house, six months of fresh flour, and clean drinking water for a year.

Or... it could provide a Class-D Soul Core.

Lucian looked at Pip. The shadow-rat was crouched low, its obsidian plates shifting silently, red eyes fixed on the archway. It was ready to move the moment Lucian gave the word.

Can an E-rank kill a D-rank? Lucian asked himself, his fingers instinctively reaching for the empty sheath at his belt where his blade used to be.

If Pip charged head-on, that toad’s acidic mucus would strip the obsidian plates off Pip’s skull in ten seconds. One hit from that thirty-foot tongue would snap Pip’s spine like a dry twig.

Against a creature with triple your weight and a higher mana density, brute force was suicide.

Lucian looked down at the dead hound's hind legs tied with hemp rope hanging over his shoulder. Then he looked at the rusted iron debris lining the drainage conduit—shattered iron grates, sharp stone splinters, and old, heavy chains half-buried in the mud.

He didn't have a High Guild weapon. He didn't have a team of healers.

He had a dead hound's meat, an oversized rat that could move like a shadow, and an empty reservoir full of rusted iron.

Lucian unslung the meat from his shoulder, set it down softly on the wet stone, and looked at Pip.

"We aren't going to fight it, Pip," Lucian whispered, his voice barely audible over the sloshing water inside the chamber. "We're going to butcher it."