Dr. Elwood Cringe walked into the hospital wearing a stolen white coat and a name that was not his. He carried a forged provider's badge, a peppermint stick in his cheek, and a shopping list he had written on the back of a boar hybrid's dental chart. Bile butter numbed his tongue. Blood magic kept his hands steady. He had been awake for two days, and he needed parts before his newest specimen finished thawing on the slab back home in the woods. The hospital rose in tiers of green copper and humming crystal, an open-air sanctuary of mana pumps and healing wards. Nurses moved between beds with glowing vials. Elwood nodded to a triage clerk, signed a false name into the ledger, and turned down a service corridor as if he belonged there. He had rehearsed the walk for a week. A slim man in a clean coat, moving with purpose, drew no questions. In the salvage room he found what he wanted. Prosthetic sockets. Copper nerve-line. Two mana regulators still in their wax paper. A glass jar of green fluid he did not recognize but pocketed anyway. He filled a canvas satchel, weighed it against his shoulder, and walked out through a laundry door. A boy pushing a mop cart saw him. Elwood smiled, offered him the peppermint stick from his cheek, and kept walking. The boy took it. The boy would remember the coat, not the face. By dusk he was knee-deep in swamp water, wading toward the sunken crypt where Vexxidrn Wither kept his garden. The cat-folk necromancer met him at the door in torn robes, bone staff planted in the mud, one ear freshly notched. Elwood set the satchel down on a slab. "I need liver tissue," Elwood said. "Something with a pulse still in it. And a spinal cord if you have one." Vexxidrn considered him with yellow eyes. "You gave me the pump last winter. I owe you one cut." He turned and walked into the dark of the east tunnel. When he came back he carried a wet bundle wrapped in oilcloth. "Boar. Fresh this morning. The liver is intact. The cord is not." He paused. "The boar screamed like a child. That was funny." He handed it over. "We are square. The fruit cutting still stands." Elwood poled his flat-bottom boat home through the reeds and climbed the stilts to his lab. Inside, his surge coils were already humming, blue arcs jumping between the two junk-built towers. The specimen waited on the table, half-boar and half-something else, mana coils bared along its spine. He unpacked the satchel. He unwrapped the oilcloth. He put the peppermint jar within reach and set a three-day timer on the wall. He had every part he needed now, and no one knew he had them. The cutting began before the light outside was fully gone.