Yes, Yimi had just been knocked into the spring. She'd experienced a full winter-temperature immersion. But the next instant she was in the girl's hand — and her fur was completely dry.
The tiger they'd brought along was also very much alive.
"RRAAUUGH!"
The tiger finally pieced things together. It opened its jaws and lunged for the largest perceived threat in the area — the girl.
"Aah! Where did you come from?!"
The strange girl suddenly showed a completely ordinary expression of fear. She scaled the ancient tree in three nimble steps and dove into a hollow in the trunk — a hollow that, measured against the tree's enormity, was easy to overlook.
The tiger tried to jump after her. Its old teacher clearly had never taught it that move. It scanned for something it could actually reach — and settled on the other two.
"Wuu! Wuwuwu—" The wolf pup pressed his trembling body behind Yimi.
"ROAARRR—" The tiger didn't care that one of them was a pup. It surged forward, jaws open wide. From straight on, it had the mass to flip a jeep.
"Famine!"
Yimi charged straight at it. She ducked under the bite, raked three shallow lines across the tiger's hide with her claws, then used its bulk to launch into a back-flip and landed clean.
The airborne tiger let out a dull cry of pain. Its enormous body — heavy as machinery — was kicked sideways. It hit the spring with a crash and didn't resurface.
Strange.
Even Yimi, whose knowledge of wildlife taxonomy had major gaps, could feel that something was off.
Famine had fed her a small amount — but only a little. The moment the badly-evolved large cat hit the water, the Stand stopped feeding. No more.
Not like Diego, where the injured flesh had simply been carved away. This time she could feel something else intercepting — pulling the food from her mouth before she could take it.
Yimi swished her tail and stared at the spring for a while, then turned and climbed up into the tree hollow after the girl.
Inside: a space barely tall enough for an adult human to crouch. The walls were covered in crude drawings that looked like a child's work. The floor had been sanded flat and divided into neat labeled squares — like a game of house, room by room — though nothing had actually been placed in any of them.
The girl seemed to have completely forgotten there was a world-class apex predator outside. She was arranging rotting leaves and twigs in a small bowl with childlike seriousness.
Her eyes still didn't move. But she seemed to sense Yimi had entered — and suddenly yelped, pointing at a spot a few feet above Yimi's head:
"This guest, you can't just step on someone else's living room."
She meant the squares on the floor.
"Meow?" Yimi — barely past the very beginning of conscious thought — found this impossible to parse.
"Ah — is it a cat..." The girl seemed to only now realize what Yimi was. She covered her mouth in surprise.
Then things appeared beside her — a heap of them, from nowhere. Her unfocused gaze settled somewhere above Yimi's head.
"Guest, it seems you've dropped something again. Is it the lavish banquet on my left — or the body of this ordinary Siberian tiger..."
The tiger, having endured less than three seconds of Famine's effect — perhaps because food was already scarce in the winter — had apparently departed this world.
Yimi didn't understand where any of these things were coming from. Her mother used to produce things from nowhere, too.
She hadn't told a single lie during the encounter with Johnny those days ago. But in this moment, she found herself doing it without having been taught.
Because what the girl had placed on her left wasn't just a "lavish banquet." Braised bear paw, pig's head, cuts of cooked meat from half a dozen different sources — and threaded throughout: the Holy Corpse Parts for both Ears and the Right Arm.
That was what she'd been sensing out here. They'd been here the whole time.
"I dropped... this." The clear little voice stumbled through the sentence. Yimi indicated the Corpse Parts mixed into the feast.
A beat of silence.
"...You're not being honest, guest."
The girl's face was blank as she said it.
The tree hollow above, below, and on every side erupted with thin vines — sealing every opening like a swarm of striking serpents, and wrapping around Yimi's four paws at a speed no cat's reflexes could answer.
"Meow?"
If she'd been able to raise her head the way a person would, she might have noticed: the bark that had seemed smooth and still now protruded with human faces — some afraid, some blank, all disturbingly lifelike, all different.
Like a confirmation of the Saint's warning. The greedy earn blood.
"The punishment for greed is to have your flesh torn and your organs pulled out — that is what the spring does to those who covet what isn't theirs. You only needed to answer honestly to receive everything. Some people are simply not worthy of facing a true test."
"Mrrow!!"
The vines tightened with no care for consequence — sharp as piano wire, slicing through Yimi's fur and drawing thin red lines across her skin.
"It hurts!"
Force had nothing to do with it. The relentless constriction gave her no room to struggle. Eyes turned gold by the Saint's Corpse — those eyes fixed hard on the girl, who had, for the first time, looked directly back at her.
"MEOW!!"
In the end, one of Yimi's forepaws was cut clean through. Blood splattered across the vines in a red wash.
And only then did Yimi calm down.
Compared to the cats mocked in children's cartoons, plants were the truest embodiment of greed. No feelings. No thought. Only life-force — driving them to consume whatever they could, whenever they could, drawing everything in with no hesitation. Exactly as they were doing now, absorbing her blood — and in doing so, activating a Stand that didn't require Yimi to hurt another being first.
"Famine!"
"What—"
In the girl's startled expression, the razor-sharp vines began to retreat. Each step back was like watching them die — shriveling, stiffening, losing all suppleness as they withdrew.
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Not just the vines that had already cut her. The ones sealing the hollow. The ones coiled in readiness. Every last one curved away from Yimi. The girl couldn't see it directly — but she was bound to the spring, and through that bond she could feel it: the thousand-year sacred tree was giving outward form to the spring's emotions. Something that only an animal could show.
Not fear.
Something closer to excitement.
Then came a sigh — sourceless, directionless, impossible to say who heard it:
"Too soon."
"Meow!"
The severed paw — its nutrients returned — grew back. The furious cat swung her paw and snapped a withered vine clean in two. Without moisture, without give, it broke like a twig.
Brittle fragments flew from the hollow, scattering across the snow below in a shape that looked almost like a fence.
At the same moment — as if marking the beginning of something — the wind moved through the space where hollow and vine had intertwined, and from somewhere near the girl's ear, assembled itself into a human voice.