Being watched by ill intentioned gods like that, made into their plaything on a screen, would have been a rather terrifying reality.
But that same thought led Magna somewhere else entirely.
If those gods were real, and everything happening right now was every bit as real, wouldn’t that make him, the very one who had created them, something like the God of Gods himself?
Was that even possible? A paradox of that sort?
It put him in mind of a film he’d seen once, about a time traveler who turned out to be his own father.
He found himself running through the terms for it: bootstrap paradox, grandfather paradox, predestination paradox...
Maybe he was living somewhere in a timeline where, off in the distant future, he’d go on to create those very gods. Maybe his present was, in fact, their past, long before any of them had been born at all. Or...
’Wait, what was I even thinking about?’ A sudden blankness swept clean through his mind.
He’d gone so far down the rabbit hole that his own train of thought simply snapped. He was left without the faintest idea what he’d been mulling over only a second before.
Under ordinary circumstances, a thing like that might have kept him up at night until he finally dredged the thought back up. But just now, he had more pressing matters on his plate, choosing his path of evolution, for one.
Taking a few deep breaths to gather himself, he finally settled on his choice.
[Option 2 selected. Utilizing gathered energy to enhance the five senses by 2x. Prepare for sudden physical pain...]
It was an all-round sort of enhancement, leaving him a jack of all trades rather than a master of one.
Then he waited, tense, for the countdown to reach zero.
3...
2...
1...
The pain hit him again as he dropped to the ground with it.
Every scrap of it seemed to gather itself in his head.
His ears rang with a pain past bearing, his eyes burned as though they were melting, and his nose crackled, as if some tiny men had taken hammers to every bit of cartilage inside it.
His tongue swelled too, choking his throat, cutting off his air.
His skin felt as though some heavy handed woman were waxing every inch of him at once, and though that part alone was probably the least painful piece of the whole business, combined with everything else, it turned into agony he could barely stand.
This time, rather remarkably, he held out for nearly five seconds, a small point of pride, before his brain shamelessly shut itself down again and dragged him into darkness.
’I should get pain tolerance or something similar from the future options...’
Magna slowly pushed himself up off the ground, taking in the cave around him.
Morning light was seeping in through the cracks overhead, which meant a fair stretch of time had gone by since he’d blacked out.
Knowing he’d been lying there, unconscious and entirely defenseless, for that long left him unsettled.
Scanning the familiar cave walls and the charred bodies of the goblins, he was struck by just how much detail he could now make out.
All at once, everything in his sight had sharpened, gone crisper, as though the world had jumped from HD straight to UHD.
The low hum of the wind grew far more noticeable too.
When he focused, he could even make out the wind moving through the corridor deeper in the cave, feel it against his skin more accurately, pinpointing exactly where it struck him.
His sense of smell had sharpened just as much, made plain enough by the reek of burnt meat now hitting his nose with a good deal more force.
A twofold boost to senses that had already been rather decent turned out to be a considerable upgrade.
A slight headache began to creep in. He found himself slowly rubbing at his temples.
The sudden rush of input from every sense at once was overwhelming him badly, setting his head spinning.
He gave himself a few minutes to adjust, sitting there and doing nothing at all.
It was only after half an hour or so that the headache finally began to fade, and he felt steady enough to stand again.
He wasn’t tired, at least, having already gotten what sleep he needed during his blackout.
He was hungry again too.
The slight swell in his stomach had already gone down, and hunger had crept back in its place.
’So spending energy speeds up digestion as well,’ he noted, filing away another piece of how the system worked, as he made his way back toward the goblin to start another grim meal off its flesh.
He’d have liked nothing more than to leave the cave and start exploring, but before that, he wanted to be properly prepared, at least until Gaia decided there was no more energy left to draw from the goblin meat.
Carefully picking up the red metal once more, he cut another piece from the goblin’s other leg and started eating again.
Sharpened as his senses now were, the taste was utterly vile. Even so, he forced himself to keep chewing, swallowing it down through sheer stubbornness.
[Energy particles detected...]
[Converting nutrients into energy...]
It was something of a relief that the meat was still triggering messages from the system, meaning he could still unlock another round of options from what remained of the goblins.
Still, no matter how much he ate, even forcing down extra bites until he was one step from a food coma, the message telling him Gaia had fully charged simply never came.
"Feels like... burp... I’m gonna need four or five more rounds of this just to fill up the system," he mumbled heavily, flat on his back.
Which meant how long he’d need to stay in the cave now came down to one thing, how much food his stomach could actually hold in a day, and how quickly his body could digest it.
Since there was only so much he could manage in one sitting, he reckoned it would take another three or four days to charge Gaia up fully.
But there was a snag in that plan.
Water wasn’t the issue. At the edge of the cave sat a small, roughly carved stone basin, filled with rainwater, more than enough to keep him going for three days even if it didn’t rain again.
The real trouble was the food.
Even with the goblins’ outer layer burned black through, and even with the cave’s natural coolness slowing things down, the meat would only stay safe to eat for about one more day, maybe less.
Push it further than that, and he risked poisoning himself on meat gone bad.
He’d already gambled once, eating goblin meat without knowing whether it was even naturally toxic to him, so he wasn’t keen to gamble twice.