Chapter 384: The Nest That Breathes

Cold came first.

It wasn’t the usual bite of the cold air in Nirvana. No — this was heavier, damp, the kind of chill that clung to skin and bone and refused to leave. It pressed against Sophia’s senses before her mind fully caught up, seeping into her awareness like fog rolling through a sleeping field.

Her eyelids fluttered open, and everything before her was blurry. Unfocused shapes bled into one another. Her head throbbed violently, a deep pulse that made her wince even before she consciously tried to move.

She groaned softly and lifted a hand to her temple, fingers pressing into the ache as if she could physically push the pain away.

The motion made the world tilt, and she sucked in a shaky breath and forced herself to slow down. One thing at a time.

She told herself and breathed first, taking it slowly.

Her vision began to sharpen in reluctant increments.

Darkness dominated her surroundings — thick shadows layered over deeper shadows — but faint streaks of dull greenish light filtered through jagged gaps overhead, fractured by interwoven branches and massive roots tangled together like skeletal fingers.

Sophia frowned. Was she still in the forest or somewhere else?

She pushed herself into a seated position, muscles protesting the movement. The ground beneath her felt wrong — damp, spongy in places, gritty in others. The air was heavy with moisture and a strange, metallic tang that made the back of her throat prickle.

Her nose wrinkled.

The smell wasn’t rot exactly, but then she wouldn’t know. She had never been around rot and had never even perceived it, but it smelled a bit like blood.

Her pulse picked up.

Sophia slowly turned her head, scanning the space around her.

At first glance, it looked like a cave.

The curved walls rose unevenly around her, dark stone and packed earth forming a crude bowl. But as her eyes adjusted further, she realized the ceiling wasn’t solid rock at all — thick roots, fallen trunks, and collapsed earth formed a crude canopy overhead, blocking most of the sunlight while allowing faint slivers of dull illumination to creep through.

Rather than saying it was a cave... it was more like a nest.

Her stomach tightened instinctively.

She shifted slightly — and her boot nudged something solid.

Her gaze dropped to the floor, and she froze as her eyes snagged on what was there.

Bones.

They were scattered randomly across the floor — bones of different sizes, some small, some big. And Sophia knew, even without being told, that these were human bones.

As if that wasn’t enough, a few feet from her lay a man staring back at her with his eyes gouged out. Empty sockets looked back at Sophia. She noticed his face was frozen and his mouth wide open. The other half of his body was gone, and only the head remained.

Sophia’s stomach lurched violently.

"Goddess tits!" she exclaimed in shock.

But her voice was barely above a whisper. She didn’t say it out loud for fear that whatever lingered here would hear and approach her. She still had no idea where she was, after all.

She scrambled backward instinctively, palms slipping against the damp floor as panic surged through her nerves. Her back collided with something large and rounded.

It shifted slightly beneath her weight, moving back and forth on the floor.

Sophia froze. She turned her head slowly, heart in her throat as she did, to see what could possibly be in a place like this — and noticed it was an egg.

But it was not a normal egg. It was not like the ones Cook had told her to get from the chicken pens when she went there to help during the festival. It wasn’t even like the ones they ate in the pack. Actually, she doubted one could even eat eggs like these.

It was massive — taller than her torso when she was seated. No, rather than that, it was more accurate to say the egg was taller than her even when standing.

Sophia was short, so it wasn’t surprising — at least that’s what she tried to use to convince herself — but even she knew that it was wrong. Eggs shouldn’t be as big as this was. They shouldn’t be competing to be the same height as Orion.

She noticed that its surface was smooth and faintly translucent in places, glowing with a muted green hue that pulsed subtly beneath the shell like something alive breathing inside.

Her skin prickled violently.

Her instincts screamed at her. Sophia’s breath became shallow and uneven.

She shook her head, refusing to believe that this was happening — that she had come to the one place Orion had told her to run from.

She remembered his words as he trained her. His warnings as he trained her, telling her to run if she ever saw a nest where the eggs were this exact colour — and now she was deep in it.

Sophia’s eyes widened as she forced herself to look around fully now, even as her hands shook violently, as her pulse increased, her heartbeat thundered violently in her ears like she could hear it beating.

There wasn’t just one egg. Perhaps if it was just one, then things would have been better. But no — there were six eggs, she realized after counting.

Six enormous olive coloured eggs nestled into shallow hollows in the earth, arranged in a crude circle around the center of the nest. One of them bore long spiderweb cracks across its surface, faint dampness seeping through the fractures. Another was already split completely — its broken shell collapsed inward like a peeled fruit, slick residue still glistening along the edges.

Her heartbeat slammed against her ribs as her eyes snagged on the broken egg. One of the Trihydra eggs had hatched.

Her gaze darted around the nest frantically, scanning every shadow, every dark crevice, every narrow gap between roots — checking to see if it was there with her, if it would attack her at any chance it got.

But nothing moved. There was no sign of any creature. She didn’t hear the hiss that she knew belonged to a Trihydra, no multi-headed silhouette, no venom dripping on the floor.

The space was quiet. There was no sign of a newly hatched Trihydra — but on second thought, she wouldn’t really know what one would look like. There was also no sign of the other two.

Which brought her to the question...

How did she get here?