The sun beat down hard on the bare rock.
Since my first hunt, I had been living on hare, berries, and whatever rain the bark under the overhang managed to collect. The last two nights had been dry. My mouth felt like cotton all the time, I had headaches that had nothing to do with Ether, and I was starting to look at the stream with a whole new sense of forgiveness.
It flowed down there, about a hundred meters below, still just as murky. Drinking from it still seemed like an equally bad idea, though.
I crouched and placed my hand on the ground. The rock was warm, almost burning beneath my fingers. Between the grains of quartz and the feldspar crystals, filaments of Ether intertwined in patterns I couldn't entirely understand. In places, they gathered into dense knots, pockets of flickering light; elsewhere, they almost vanished, drawn downward.
I focused on the idea for a moment: rainwater didn't just fall into my piece of bark. It seeped into everything, passed through meters of sand and fractured rock, and every meter filtered it a little better than the last. Somewhere beneath my feet, there had to be water cleaner than the stream's. The question was where, and how to reach it without a shovel.
“If Ether flows through everything, then it flows through water too. And if I can follow it…”
I stood up, encouraged by the idea, wiped my hands on my pants, then took from my pocket the new piece of quartz I had spotted on the streambed the day before, larger and clearer than the one I had collected in the cave when I first arrived. I already had my necklace, which was practically a talisman by now. Clutched in my palm and pressed against the ground, this new crystal brought that quantum reality into even sharper focus than the necklace alone. The Ether filaments were less chaotic and therefore less painful to observe.
“Okay. Let's take this nice and easy…”
I chose a spot halfway between the cave and the stream, where the soil seemed a little looser, and knelt with both hands flat against the earth, the quartz beneath my right palm. Warmth rose through my hands, which wasn't unpleasant at all. Quite the opposite.
I closed my eyes. At first, there was only that noise, the constant hum inside my skull, like an electrical transformer about to burn out. Then, slowly, the outlines took shape. The rock's crystal lattices appeared, with Ether running between them in irregular filaments. Some areas were denser, almost blocked. Others seemed hollow, and that empty space slanted down toward the stream.
“That's where the water could pass through.”
I took a deep breath. I didn't want to dig; without the proper tools, I couldn't have. I wanted to open a passage. First, I focused on a specific point about a meter below my hands and imagined a fissure, a narrow path running from there all the way to the stream.
I pictured a pump drawing water up from below.
At first, nothing happened. Then came that now-familiar sensation of pressure being released all at once.
I opened my eyes. The earth beneath my palms had cracked along an irregular but precise line, and a fine golden dust was escaping from it: released Ether.
“Argh!”
I jumped back, hands raised, feeling as though I'd touched a hotplate. The fissure slowly widened, sinking deeper into the ground with a growing crackle. Then water appeared. It didn't gush out, although I could feel it rising along the walls of the fissure. It was clear, almost timid, as if reluctant to emerge.
I dipped my fingers into it. It was cold and fresh. There was none of that waxy film, no suspicious smell, and above all, it seemed free of the murky agitation that filled the stream. I touched it to my lips, waited, then took a proper mouthful. It had no taste, apart from that peculiar taste of pure water I knew well, having already drunk distilled water from the lab.
“Seriously. It worked!?”
I sat back on my heels, my eyes fixed on the little trickle beginning to collect at the bottom of the fissure. Ether danced across its surface, forming ever-changing patterns. It wasn't a well yet, just the beginnings of one, but I finally had water.
The next three hours were a mixture of intense concentration, breaks, and desperate trial and error. First, I had to widen the fissure, searching for areas where the Ether yielded and breaking through every obstacle that resisted, until I had a small basin about fifty centimeters across. The walls crumbled as I worked. I ran my fingers along the edges, imagining a smoother, stronger surface, and the Ether responded in fits and starts, hardening the stone here and making it brittle there. I had to start over five times before I got walls I was satisfied with.
The hardest part was getting the water to rise into the basin. Ether didn't merely flow through rock: it interacted with it, with me, with everything, really. When I tried to guide the flow upward, it resisted, like a current refusing to change course, and sometimes it rebounded in eddies that made my fingers tremble.
“It's like trying to steer a river with a drinking straw.”
I lay on my stomach, my face almost against the ground, and watched with my new eye. The water was there, just a few centimeters below the surface. I could make out the molecules bonded together, and the flickering bridges of Ether holding them within the rock. If I wanted it to rise, I needed to undo a few of those bridges, just enough to open a path for it.
I closed my eyes and searched with the sense growing inside me. I found a knot, a place where Ether accumulated before stagnating.
“Come on.”
I pulled, as though flipping a switch with my mind, and the water rose. It slid upward rather than bursting out, finally filling the new basin I had just created to the brim.
I sighed and sat cross-legged before my handiwork. It wasn't a well. Not yet. It was a hole in the ground with water at the bottom. But it was my first hole with a magic pump.
The message appeared in my mind like an equation finally solved after hours of calculation, crisp and utterly devoid of anything mystical.
→ Level 4 reached.Optimizations:
Extended Range (Lvl. 1):15 cm of range to manipulate Ether without touching matter.
Material Affinity (Lvl. 1):Better understanding of mineral structures. Less energy used when shaping rock.
I weighed the pros and cons as I scratched my growing beard. The range was tempting, since I wouldn't have to press my nose against every rock anymore. But the affinity… If I wanted to dig this well properly, understanding the rock would be crucial.
“We'll see about that later. First, I'm celebrating.”
CLASSIC SKILL acquired by default:
Hunting (Lvl. 1):Accuracy +20%, noise reduced by 15%.
At last, maybe I'll be able to catch a rabbit without scaring it off with the slightest wrong move.
I laughed to myself, a little nervously. Skills, just like in a game, except that here the rabbits had horns, the water glowed a little too much, and my fingers were still trembling at the thought of what I'd just done.
I leaned over the basin and drank deeply from the water I gathered in my cupped hands. It tasted almost too clean, with a hint of fizz that lingered on the tip of my tongue.
“Maybe it's the Ether that gives it that peculiar taste.”
I got up, my legs a little shaky. Four levels. Four fucking levels in just a few days. If this was a dream, it was the strangest one I'd ever had.
I looked at the makeshift well, the water shimmering in the setting sun. Tomorrow, seeds. Tomorrow, maybe something to eat that wasn't dubious berries or hare meat, which I was starting to get tired of.
Tonight, I would sleep within earshot of my well's gentle lapping, and for the first time in a long while, I felt almost competent in this new laboratory the forest had become.