The screaming stopped.
Julien lay motionless in the dark, or as motionless as a body with no bones could be said to lie, and waited for something else to come and finish what the mole-thing had started. Nothing did. The silence stretched on, thick and total, broken only by the faint, distant thrum of that other presence he'd sensed earlier, still pulsing somewhere far below, still patient, still not interested in him yet.
He allowed himself something that might have been relief, if relief were a thing a worm's nervous system could produce.
[Level Up!]
The notice arrived without fanfare, a small flicker at the edge of his awareness rather than the triumphant fanfare he vaguely remembered from video games he'd never taken seriously enough to actually play.
[Level 2]
STR: 1 → 1.1
VIT: 2 → 2.2
DEF: 1 → 1.1
Julien stared at the numbers, in whatever way a blind, faceless creature could be said to stare at anything.
...One tenth of a point.
He had killed something. He had nearly died doing it. And in exchange, the universe had seen fit to reward him with an increase so small it barely qualified as a number at all. He tried to imagine what a hundred more of these would even amount to, and the math depressed him enough that he stopped trying.
"Great," he muttered, in the privacy of a mind that no longer had a mouth to complain out loud with. "Truly life-changing. I'll be sure to thank the mole."
But something else had come with the level, tucked beneath the stats like an afterthought, and this one he read twice before he let himself believe it.
[New Skill Acquired: Vibration Sense]
He didn't understand what it meant until, almost involuntarily, his body did something for him again, the same way it had lunged at the mole without asking permission first. A pulse rolled outward from him through the packed earth, the same sensation he'd noticed before, except this time it didn't fade into a vague impression of near and far. This time it came back as something closer to a picture.
Not sight, not exactly. There were no colors, no light, nothing his old human brain would have recognized as an image. But there was shape. He could feel the curve of the tunnel around him, the rough, uneven walls of packed soil, a scatter of small stones embedded in the earth like teeth. He could feel, faintly, the husk of the creature he'd killed a few inches away, small and still and already growing cold, a soft-bodied thing perhaps the length of his own hand back when he'd had hands, whiskered, four-legged, entirely unremarkable except for the fact that it had nearly ended his second life the way an earthworm had ended his first.
A vole, he thought, with something between disbelief and grim amusement. A field mouse. I got killed by a worm and almost got eaten by a mouse. There's a joke in there somewhere, and I hate that I'm the punchline of it twice.
He let the pulse roll outward again, farther this time, chasing the edges of what his new sense could reach. The tunnel bent away to his left. Somewhere above, that same too-regular chamber ceiling he'd noticed before. And then, catching at the very edge of his perception like a whisper he almost missed, something that made every segment of his body go taut with attention.
Water.
Not a flood, not a river, just a small, steady pool of it, perhaps three meters ahead, tucked into some low fold of the tunnel floor where gravity had pulled it and left it to sit. He didn't know, precisely, what a reincarnated soul in a worm's body needed to survive. But he was fairly certain that water belonged somewhere near the top of the list, and the fact that his new senses had found it unprompted felt like the first genuinely useful thing to happen to him since he'd woken up buried alive.
Okay, he thought, steadying himself, or trying to, insofar as a creature with no nerves for anxiety could steady anything. Three meters. That's nothing. That's a sidewalk crossing. I can do three meters.
He was wrong, and he discovered exactly how wrong within the first thirty seconds.
Moving, it turned out, was not simply a matter of wanting to move. It was a matter of contracting the front third of his body, anchoring it against the soil, then dragging the rest of himself forward in a long, undulating ripple, and repeating that process approximately every four seconds, for a gain of roughly two centimeters each time. He did the math with the grim, mechanical precision of a man who had once been reasonably good at math and immediately regretted it. At this rate, three meters would take him something in the neighborhood of two and a half hours.
It took him closer to three.
He got stuck twice on stones he hadn't noticed, wedged half his body between two of them for what felt like an embarrassingly long time before working himself free through what he could only describe as sheer, undignified wriggling. He lost his sense of direction once, pulsed out a fresh reading, and discovered he'd been crawling in a lazy, unintentional arc for the better part of ten minutes, which set him back nearly as far as he'd already come. At one point, roughly ninety minutes in, he stopped entirely and simply lay still in the dirt, contemplating, with real and undiluted despair, the fact that he had once run a marathon in under five hours and was now on pace to lose to a three-meter stretch of dungeon floor.
"I used to have a car," he informed the darkness, with the flat, wounded dignity of a man who has given up trying to sound reasonable. "I had a driver's license. I complained about a fifteen minute commute."
The darkness, unhelpfully, did not respond.
He kept going anyway, because there was, as far as he could tell, absolutely nothing else to do. Segment by segment, ripple by ripple, stone by infuriating stone, until at last, somewhere in what he estimated was the third hour of the single slowest journey of either of his lives, the edge of the water reached his senses not as a distant whisper but as a real, tangible presence, cool and close and almost, almost within reach.
He pushed himself the last few centimeters and felt the front of his body meet the damp edge of the pool, and for a moment, absurdly, something that felt very much like triumph moved through him. He had crossed three meters of dungeon floor. He had done it blind, boneless, and alone, and he had not, in the process, been eaten.
He drank, or did whatever the wormish equivalent of drinking was, some slow absorption through skin that had spent the last three hours growing steadily drier and more brittle than he liked to think about. A notice confirmed it a moment later, small and clinical.
[Hydration restored.]
Finally, he thought, some good news.
It lasted about four seconds.
[Hunger: 17%]
Julien went very still in the water.
...I'm sorry. Hunger.
He hadn't even considered it. He'd been so consumed by the horror of no eyes, no limbs, and a three-hour commute across what amounted to a single garden bed that the question of whether worms got hungry had simply never crossed his mind. Apparently they did. Apparently he did. Apparently somewhere beneath the crushing indignity of everything else that had happened to him today, his body had been quietly starving the entire time, and it had simply waited for a polite moment to mention it.
"Oh, come on," he said, to no one, to the water, to the goddess wherever she was currently enjoying herself at his expense. "I just got here."
He let himself sit with that for a moment, floating in three centimeters of dungeon water, and made himself count, with the same grim precision he'd applied to the crawl, exactly what he now knew about his situation. He was blind. He was slow, catastrophically slow, the kind of slow that turned three meters into an ordeal. He had one skill, freshly unlocked and already indispensable. He had a critical hit rate that meant nothing if he couldn't land a hit in the first place, and a body so fragile that the next mole, or whatever came after the mole, might not give him three attempts to figure that out.
And now, apparently, he also had a clock. A quiet, patient, biological one, counting down toward some version of hungry he had no intention of discovering firsthand.
Fine, he thought, and something in the thought hardened, the way it used to right before an exam he hadn't studied enough for. Fine. Not the strongest. Not even close. Just alive. One day at a time. One inch at a time, apparently.
He gathered himself, drew the front of his body back from the water's edge, and turned, blind and slow and absurdly determined, back toward the dark.
Somewhere out there, in the tunnels beyond the reach of his senses, something was waiting to make his hunger problem considerably shorter-lived than he wanted it to be.