I left the cave at first light. Within a few steps, I knew the night had brought me a gift. In the tangle of shapes and glimmers that was the forest, certain plants now stood out on their own, crisp and identified, like exhibits in a museum above their labels. A new line had written itself into my perception while I slept.
[FOREST SURVIVAL LVL 1 ACTIVE]
You recognize edible plants. You locate water sources. You detect dangerous areas.
So the System didn't just keep score of my exploits. It also claimed to teach me how to live here.
I picked a berry from a low bush. I knew nothing about the species, yet I knew it was edible, with a borrowed certainty I only half liked. On principle, I ate just a handful, then sat on a stump for half an hour waiting for my stomach's verdict. All it did was ask for more. The stream stirred no such certainty. Neither the System nor I trusted its water.
A few berries won't feed a man who has spent three days welding granite. I needed meat, and meat called for a weapon.
My flint knife, knapped the day before with another stone and sharpened with Ether, didn't look like much but cut remarkably well. I used it to free a dead ash branch, still sound under the bark, that the weather had warped along its whole length. Its fibers, worn by damp, let the Ether through only sluggishly. I laid my fingers on the bark and pushed without quite knowing how, holding a precise image of straight, firm wood that would keep only the curve I meant to give it. The branch straightened under my hand.
It took me the next hour to turn it into a bow. A climbing plant gave me vines, which I checked three times for poison before twisting them into a string. In a forest where I knew no one, paranoia seemed a cardinal virtue. Every change I made to matter cost me a wave of fatigue. It had grown lighter since I'd leveled up, but it was so stubborn over time that it felt like running a marathon while solving differential equations.
I drew the bow to test its strength. Forty or fifty pounds at best, with a vine string that creaked at every pull and wouldn't see winter.
"I'm not planning to hunt bears anyway."
The words had barely left my mouth when another thought followed.
"I hope there aren't any bears, actually."
That worry was still on my mind when a latch clicked open in my head. No fanfare, no blinding light, just the sudden certainty that I had crossed a threshold. A new menu was waiting at the edge of my perception.
[LEVEL 3 REACHED]
[OPTIMIZATION: ATOMIC PRECISION LVL 1]
Critical failures reduced by 30%.
[CLASSIC SKILL: WOODCRAFT LVL 1]
You understand the properties of wood, its fibers, its weaknesses. Crafting 25% faster. Quality 15% higher.
A craftsman spends years acquiring what I had just received in one go, sewn into my flesh like a manual. Cheating? Probably. I had no intention of filing a complaint.
I cut shafts from straight saplings and lightened them by tightening their fibers, then went down to the stream for milky quartz pebbles. Split into flakes and honed to an edge, they gave me bone-white points that gleamed in any light.
To hunt, I crouched by the stream, where the tracks were thickest. The hare I'd seen the day before had stared at me with scornful curiosity, like an animal that thinks, and I doubted it would let me get within range of a fifty-pound bow.
I laid a hand flat on the ground. Near the water, the Ether thickened and beat with a slow oscillation, closer to a pulse than a sound. An idea came to me with no scientific basis whatsoever, the kind you don't admit to in a team meeting. If I could perceive that beat, maybe I could impose another one on it. I closed my eyes, pictured a slow, steady wave like the heartbeat of a sleeper, and pushed it through my fingers into the earth.
At first, the undergrowth stayed perfectly still. Then a bush quivered, and a hare stepped out cautiously, nose twitching, its forehead crowned with horns that made me doubt my eyes first and my sanity second. Its black eyes rested on me for a second before it went back to grazing, calm, less than five meters away. Around it, the Ether rippled to the rhythm I was imposing. To the hare, I was just one more oddity in the landscape.
I drew the bow slowly. It raised its head but didn't run.
"Sorry, buddy."
The arrow went clean through it. It fell without a sound.
I ran to it, hands shaking. When I picked it up, its body was still warm, and nausea hit me all at once. I sat down heavily in the grass with the hare on my lap. I had eaten meat all my life without ever facing that cruel reality.
I took a deep breath before pulling out the knife.
The fire took longer than the skinning. I ended up turning my bow into a bow drill, its string wrapped around a dry stick that spun in the notch of a piece of deadwood. It took me about twenty minutes, two blisters, and a string of curses to coax an ember out of the wood. When the first flame caught in the tinder, I nearly applauded like a kid at the circus.
The meat had only just started to sizzle when a low growl made me look up.
Between two trees, about ten meters away, a wolf was watching me.
Big, gray and white, it had golden eyes that threw back the firelight above half-bared lips. The Ether all around converged on its body in tight eddies. Yet its gaze was nothing like a predator sizing up prey. It was studying me.
I set down the knife without any sudden move and held out an open hand.
"Easy, big guy."
It growled again but didn't charge, and closed the distance to two meters, step by step, never taking its eyes off me.
"Let's make a deal, you and me. You don't eat me. And as for me..."
I tossed a piece of raw meat, which landed between us. The wolf sniffed it, then raised its head toward me.
"...I'll leave you alone."
It took the meat in its jaws, stepped back, and vanished between the trees as silently as it had come.
I ate the hare straight off the coals, scalding and unsalted. It was the best meal of my life. Somewhere in the shadows, I was sure of it, golden eyes followed every bite.
"Someday, maybe we'll be friends."
In the afternoon, I climbed back to the cave with the rest of the meat, after leaving a share for the wolf to keep it in a good mood. A half-dead oak languished a few meters from the entrance, and its swollen bark reminded me of another one. It looked like the oak where I had arrived, but this one stood at my door. Now I had what I needed to try.
I spent a good two hours on my knees among its roots, persuading their atoms back into a stable alignment. Evening found me slumped against its trunk, fingers sunk in the gray earth.
The soil had a strange texture, halfway between dust and rotten mud, that worked its way into every crease of my joints and outlined every scrape. The threads of Ether clung to its particles before snapping clean, drawn toward a fault I couldn't see. In places, the earth had turned black, charred from the inside. Elsewhere, bluish veins ran through it with a faint glow.
"This world is dying."
Around the oak's roots, however, the earth had taken on a brown tint again, close to normal compared with the rest. A down of pale green moss already ringed the circle I'd worked, though moss usually needs weeks to colonize bare ground. A little farther off, a few shoots that had lain dormant under the sick soil had straightened their stems, their leaves still curled in on themselves.
I came from a world where we measure the jiggling of atoms with lasers, and where matter, even at its most chaotic, obeys equations. Here, nature was bleeding. And I, who had never managed to grow decent copper sulfate crystals in a lab class, was apparently able to stitch its wounds closed.