Morning light filtered through the leaves, pale, muted by an atmosphere the sun struggled to pierce. It had rained a little during the night: the piece of bark beneath the overhang held a little water, which I drank in one go, knowing full well that at this rate I wouldn't last much longer.
Returning to the crack I'd repaired, I noticed a thin strip of green moss had grown along the repair, a rich, almost luminous green that stood out against the grayish moss elsewhere in the cave. The Ether flowed more freely around it, in steadier currents.
"Looks like I repaired a circuit along with the crack."
The night had taught me something less encouraging, too: the cave was dry, but exposed to the wind, and I'd woken up three times from the cold. I needed to close off the entrance, at least partially. An awning, a low wall, something to retain the warmth of a future fire. Wood first.
I surveyed the area. Every tree bore the marks of its illness: flaking bark, dead branches that no longer even had the strength to fall, leaves with charred edges despite never having burned.
I reached for a dead branch lying on the ground. It was fairly dry, still heavy, and my fingers brushed its bark. The cellulose fibers were stretching under an invisible pressure, and the Ether flowed through them in spirals, as though waiting for someone to lend a hand.
"Okay. Breathe."
I placed both hands on the branch, closed my eyes, and shifted entirely into the other reality, the one that showed me atoms as trembling nebulae bound by unstable threads of gold. I focused on a crack in the wood, where its structure was weakest and the Ether poured in, then channeled my intention into it.
The crack healed.
I opened my eyes. The branch was intact, smooth, almost new, and lighter, too, as if I'd removed whatever had been wrong with it.
"Cool."
A gentle warmth rose along my spine, like a sip of warm water after hours of walking. Something inside me realigned, my body relaxed, my heart slowed, and even the relentless, stressful hum of the atoms quieted, the same hum that had been drilling into my temples since I'd arrived here.
I suddenly had a better sense of where to put my feet, as though someone had installed a new driver for my perception: beta version, still a little unstable, but more functional.
I tapped my chest with my fingertips.
"That's a relief."
[LEVEL REACHED: 2] Skill Unlocked: ATOMIC REPAIR (Lv. 1)
You can stabilize simple atomic structures through direct contact.
Range: hands | Efficiency: low | Fatigue: high
These messages weren't magically projected into the air: they were written directly into my perception, and the universe had just sent an email straight to my brain with the subject line "You're making progress."
Thanks for stating the obvious. And shit, I was already starting to think in XP.
"Have I become a... quantum carpenter?"
I tried to rationalize it. Nanoparticles. Something like that. Except I didn't have tweezers to manipulate those nanoparticles, only my will, the Ether as a medium, and a branch that had been fit for the fire five minutes ago and was now as solid as a freshly cut stake made from the finest wood.
I repeated the operation on three more branches, feeling the same tingling in my fingers each time and the same resistance giving way under the pressure of my mind. That left the stones.
Near the cave, outcrops of weathered granite dotted with lichen would be perfect for a low wall. Their bonds flickered like faulty neon lights, and the Ether swirled through them in tiny cyclones. One grayish block was streaked with fine golden lines. I knelt and placed my hands on it.
The stone appeared to me as a puzzle whose pieces refused to fit together, with the Ether encountering obstacle after obstacle inside it. I followed the golden lines, which corresponded almost exactly to the cleavage planes of its feldspar crystals, and pulled, mentally, along those planes.
A crackle. The stone split cleanly in two, leaving smooth, almost polished faces.
"Son of a..."
I ran my thumb along the edge: not a single rough spot. Two perfect slabs for a doorstep or a foundation.
We're making progress.
I spent the next two hours gathering wood, repairing it or cutting stones the way I'd cut the previous one, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing. Every time my fingers brushed a material, I saw its flaws, its microscopic cracks, its impurities, its pockets of stagnant Ether, and every time, I corrected them. Not always with the success I'd hoped for, as when a branch exploded into dust because I tried to stabilize it too quickly, or when a stone shattered into sharp fragments because I pushed too hard against its fault lines. Little by little, a pile of usable materials accumulated near the cave entrance.
One problem remained, and I'd been carrying it with me since the mine. The piece of quartz still glowed faintly, and whenever I increased the area of contact between it and my skin, the humming in my head diminished. But I couldn't work with both hands while holding a stone in one of them. I needed to fasten it against my skin, and in its current shape, like an irregular tooth, it would roll around beneath my T-shirt instead of staying in place.
Ideally, I needed a rope or some thread. But all I could find were vines hanging from low branches. I cut the thinnest one with a sharp stone flake (thank you, Ether), then set the crystal on a flat rock and placed my palm over it.
Quartz has no cleavage planes. It breaks with a conchoidal fracture, shell-shaped, like glass, and any stonemason will tell you it doesn't cut neatly. Yet when I concentrated, a golden line appeared on its surface, following a precise angle, and the crystal split cleanly along it, as neatly as a sheet of paper folded and then torn.
I repeated the process until I had several flat fragments about the size of a two-euro coin, then, with trembling fingers, I pierced a hole near the edge of each one by imagining the stone becoming porous at that exact spot. The vine slipped through each hole without resistance. I carefully tucked the offcuts into my pocket and tied the whole thing around my neck, beneath my T-shirt, so the plates rested against my chest.
The relief was immediate. The world stopped vibrating like a badly tuned television; the atoms retreated into blurred points at the edges of my vision, and the Ether became less intrusive, like a distant murmur I could keep at bay whenever I wished. Two blurred images had finally come into focus, sharper than before.
[CRAFTING: STABILIZING NECKLACE]
[First Time / High Innovation / Use of World Energy]
+45 XP Progress: 158/250 toward Level 3
When I looked up, I had the impression that the plants around the cave had changed: fewer translucent patches on their leaves, trees standing a little straighter.
"Am I healing the surroundings just by being here? Or do I just want to believe I am?"
I bent down to brush my fingers against a twig at my feet. There was no migraine or tearing sensation, only a sharp click inside my skull, like a switch being flipped. The twig lost its flexibility. Beneath my fingers, it became hard, dense as the heartwood of an oak.
"Interesting."
The necklace also made the work much less taxing. A slightly nervous laugh rose in my throat. Two days ago, I'd been a guy lost in the noise of atoms. Now I was doing improbable things without giving them much thought.
Now, let's build.
I returned to my pile of materials and grabbed two of the repaired branches and a flat block of stone. The idea was simple**: an awning in front of the cave entrance, strong enough to withstand wind and rain.** I propped the branches into an A-frame, then balanced the stone on top. Too unstable.
I saw where the weight was concentrated: the pressure points glowed beneath the stone like embers. I placed my hands on the whole assembly and pushed. The branches bent slightly, like heated metal, then locked into that position, their fibers reconfigured and reinforced at the contact points.
[CRAFTING: SHELTER CONSTRUCTION]
+45 XP
Progress: 203/250 toward Level 3
I stepped back. The awning held, even if it wasn't pretty or perfect.
The low wall came next, more slowly. I stacked my cut slabs in two rows on either side of the entrance, leaving a passage wide enough for my shoulders. At the contact points, I pressed the grains of the two stones toward each other until they bonded, a tiny weld each time that cost me as much effort as repairing a crack. I would have needed a hundred of them. After the twentieth, I stopped with the wall only half built.
And the windows? I thought back to the offcuts from the necklace. The largest was no wider than a postage stamp, but it was transparent. I placed it on a flat rock and closed my eyes.
Stretch.
The structure of the quartz floated in my mind: a network of silicon tetrahedra linked by oxygen bridges. I didn't really stretch them; I rearranged them, layer by layer, gaining surface area at the expense of thickness. When I opened my eyes, the fragment had flattened into a thin rectangular pane, almost like glass.
[MEDIUM MATERIAL MODIFICATION: STRUCTURAL REINFORCEMENT]
+45 XP
Progress: 248/250 toward Level 3
"Not bad. Not bad at all, actually."
I wedged the quartz pane between two blocks of the low wall. It was barely five centimeters square. My first window onto this world was the size of a door peephole, and I thought it was magnificent.
I slumped onto a rock, palms flat on my knees, to take in the whole thing. Four hours had vanished. I had an awning, a half-built wall, and this quartz necklace that served as my prototype window. The shelter would remain a work in progress until I'd sealed every opening, but it was a beginning.
Since arriving here, I'd survived, observed, and tinkered. This time, I'd actually made something, with improvised tools and laws I still didn't understand, and it held together. A laugh escaped me, rough and a little strained.
Dusk was settling in, and the work wasn't finished. But for the first time, I no longer felt as though I were sinking.
And I was only two miserable experience points away from the next level.