Nate slowly opened his eyes and immediately stifled a groan; his first thought was one of fear. Was the cat about to get him? That adrenaline gave him focus, and his eyes darted around as he sat up too quickly. The wave of dizziness from doing so almost made him black out again, but he stabilised himself on one arm and tried to breathe. His head ached, his arm still hurt, and the fog of confusion was still heavy on him. Controlling his breathing, he sat still for a moment, his eyes closed. That was how he had learned to handle the panic and anxiety. He needed to take his time to centre himself and get his emotions and thoughts in order. Only then could he take stock of his situation. Closing his eyes and breathing slowly, it took longer than he would’ve liked to get himself under control, and he thought at least a few minutes had passed. It was dangerous in an unknown place, but he figured it would’ve been more dangerous to explore while on the edge of full-blown panic attack.
As Nate felt himself calming down, another emotion crept up on him. Elation. He was alive. With a quick glance around, it was obvious Nate was alone. He had survived the cat. With that realisation his mind was clear enough to start taking in his surroundings, and his surroundings made absolutely no sense to him. He had squeezed into a cavity in one of the giant redwood-like trees. But looking around, he wasn’t in some dark, dirty space inside a tree. Instead, the closest thing he could compare his surroundings to was inside the ruins of some southeastern Asian temple.
The ground beneath him was red dirt; however, stone had been laid in several places, creating walkways and corridors. There were trees around him that had grown within the ruins, roots burrowing into and beneath stone. The stone monoliths and walls were covered in moss and vines and some alcoves he could see statues made of the same pale-yellow stone used for the walls and walkways. He had seen a short documentary once about the ruins of Angkor Wat, and this place reminded Nate of that. Nate rubbed the side of his head with his uninjured arm. How could this be inside the tree? Just as he was about to continue that line of thinking, he noticed a flashing in the corner of his vision. Focusing his eyes and mind on it brought The System message to the fore.
You have entered a Dungeon!
The Assessment Period will begin now. You have five minutes to leave the dungeon before the entrance is sealed.The Assessment Period has expired. The dungeon has been sealed.
Enter a Dungeon before being level 1 in any Class.Your achievement has been recorded.
Walk your Path. Reach your Goal. Become One with Mana.
He sighed. Not only did that not sound good to him, but he’d trapped himself inside because of his little panic attack. Somehow, he had entered whatever a Dungeon was. He knew what they were in the games. He had played them a few times at Michael’s house. But this was definitely not a game. The message said the dungeon was sealed. That meant he was stuck in here. The best he could do was try to carefully explore the area a little and see what he’d gotten himself into. Get the lay of the land, so to speak. But first, he needed to check himself.
He carefully peeled himself out of his black hoodie and checked over his arm. He’d clearly been unconscious for a little while as the blood had already dried, and Nate could see he sported three very straight and clean scratches on his upper arm. It was hard to tell with the blood dried, but he thought they might only be half a centimetre deep. All he could do was thank his lucky stars that it hadn’t been worse. He might've lost the arm if the tree hadn’t been in the way of the cat’s paw.
The pain throbbed and Nate initially worried about infection. He’d need to find some water in here and a way to boil it so he could clean the wound. Who knows what that nasty monster had had on its claws? At least the skin around the wounds didn’t look excessively inflamed, so Nate was pretty confident there wasn’t some venom on the claws. Lizards used venom sometimes, he knew. Maybe the monster did but he thought lizards usually applied such venom through their teeth. Either way, small mercies.
Gently running his fingers over the back of his head, he could feel that it was slightly bruised from his fall, but it didn’t feel like there was any dried blood, so he probably hadn’t broken the skin. Or his skull, he thought with a pained snort.
Finished with his assessment, it was pretty clear he had a few things to do. He was sealed in a Dungeon. The System had made that clear. He needed to figure out how to get out of this dungeon, though he already had some suspicions about how to achieve that. Suspicions he hoped he was wrong about if this dungeon had anything like that cat in it.
Apart from that he needed to find water. Cleaning his wounds was only part of it. Not only was he going to get thirsty, but he knew bad hygiene was a quick path to getting sick, and he could not afford that right now. Nate decided then and there that if he could raise any of his stats, he would focus on Endurance and Constitution first.
Last on his list was food. He was going to need to eat. He’d read somewhere that you could go weeks without eating. Nate was not keen to try that. But food had to come after water. He couldn’t even survive a few days without water. Shelter might have been a concern normally, but given that he was in what looked like ruins in a Dungeon, he would hold off on focusing on that till he had explored a little. Not far, though. He needed to be quiet and careful.
That line of thinking reminded him that he really needed to focus. His perception stat told him he wasn’t as good as he thought at noticing things, and his few forays into roleplaying games had taught him that dungeons invariably came with traps. With his lower perception stat, Nate wasn’t confident of noticing something like that on his first or even second sweep of an area, so he would have to go very slow.
Doing a last-minute check of himself, he noticed that the prickling on his skin had grown stronger again. Stronger even than it had been in his passage between universes. Based on what The Wanderer had said about the mana density on his research station, that meant that the mana density inside this dungeon was significantly stronger than outside of it on the planet he’d been dumped on. Nate filed that information away for later and did his best to ignore the tingling, knowing it was an itch he couldn’t scratch.
Cautiously, he levered himself up and tested his legs and balance. There was a short moment of dizziness, which quickly faded, and after patting himself down and checking he was still wearing the silver ring, Nate knelt down to pick up his hoodie and pull it back on. No point leaving anything behind. It was warm in the dungeon and some sort of natural light was filtering in from above, like a fake sun, but he could always use the hoodie as a pillow or blanket later. He’d need to rest soon. It had been almost two in the morning back on Earth when he’d been sucked into the portal, and Nate was pretty confident another couple of hours had passed since then. That meant his biological clock thought it was almost five a.m., so no wonder he was flagging.
Nate wanted to crawl into an alcove, curl up, and go to sleep, but he knew he needed to clean his wound first. Else, for all he knew, he’d wake up with a fever and die here. Forcing one foot in front of the other, he paused every few steps, scanning the area. He had no idea what he was looking for and was basing it on childhood movies. Slits in the walls for bolts, maybe? Or pit traps? So far, he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary, and the paths were wide enough that five people could have walked abreast. Considering that, Nate clung to the walls, hoping if there was a pit trap, it might save him or at least give him something to grab onto.
Having progressed twenty metres deeper, Nate arrived at a crossroads. In front of him, in an alcove, rested a statue made of the same yellowed stone as the walls and floor. He took a moment to take in the sculpture, roving over it with an artist’s eyes. It looked like a human and was clearly female if he was using his own racial traits to judge. The only exception was what was clearly a third eye in the middle of its forehead. The stone had been smoothed to give the appearance of clothes, and he thought it would best be described as a toga. In its right hand, it held the haft of a hammer with the shaft resting against the ground and the head of the hammer sitting beside its head.
Nate didn’t want to convince himself he could understand the statue's expression, but he thought that perhaps it looked pleased. As though it had completed a great work and was now basking in the afterglow of success. Oh so gently, he ran his fingers over the pitted stone. It seemed time had taken its toll on the sculpture but had not destroyed it.
Faced with the decision now of following the passageway left or right, he harkened back to that old adage of always going left at every turn when in a maze. With that, he turned to the left hallway and continued underneath the hanging vines that partially blocked the path. Nate continued to creep forward, sticking again to one side of the path, close to the wall, stopping every few steps to check for traps or anything hiding, and waiting to jump out at him. He was so focused he almost missed the soft sound of an animalistic squeal in the distance.
Narrowing his eyes, Nate tilted his head to see if he could hear it. After holding absolutely still for a minute, during which he could swear he could hear his slightly raised heartbeat, he finally decided to continue. He was sure he had heard a noise, but with no follow up, he could continue his slow and careful exploration and hope for the best.
Over the next ten minutes, Nate slowly approached the end of the passageway. There was a gentle wind blowing towards him as he approached the end, and it cooled him down while reminding him that his hair was disgusting from the sweat, dirt, and leaves he had encountered. It was obvious that the hallway opened into some sort of room at the end, but Nate could swear he could see the tops of trees, which was odd. It finally made sense as he reached the end of the hallway, and it opened up into the outside.
The outside was all he could call it, even if he were sealed in some sort of dungeon. Before him lay a small valley, which explained the treetops. The temple, as he was now convinced the building was, opened up onto a path that led down into a green valley filled with trees, blue and green leaves swaying in the breeze. He would guess the valley was only a kilometre across, fenced in by mountains on the other sides. Would crossing them be a way out of the dungeon? How vast could it possibly be?
The valley was beautiful, but as beautiful as the view was, that wasn’t what drew his eyes. Nate stared in relief at a small, pristine lake of blue. Water. He hadn’t realised how much it was stressing him out, so focused on his own survival he had been. He judged the distance and thought that maybe it was a hundred metres away.
Looking around the path, he couldn’t see any signs of animals, though the knee-high grass could hide a lot. Creeping forward, Nate started down the path. It was a shorter path if he went directly towards the lake, but Nate didn’t trust himself to notice something like a snake or lizard in the grass and decided it would be best to minimise the time he spent making his way through it. The path down from the temple was just compacted dirt mixed with rock, and Nate kept flicking his eyes between watching where he put his feet and what lay ahead on the path. After the first thirty metres, he walked past the first tree. Checking the branches above him, he didn’t see anything, and these trees were significantly smaller than the ones in the forest he had first been dumped in. The branches probably couldn’t even support that cat, he thought with a quiet chuckle.
The grass was shorter beneath the trees, only coming up to his ankles. Nate took that as a good sign and turned to veer toward the lake. He continued to go slowly and tried to stay near the trees when he could in case he needed to hide. Nate was convincing himself he was just being careful but knew he was afraid. What would happen if the water wasn’t drinkable? Nate forced those thoughts away. There was no point sinking into sadness or worrying about the worst possible outcome. He’d forge ahead and hope for the best. If it all went wrong, he would just have to adapt and keep searching for water. There was still another hallway.
Nate crept forward for another few minutes before he could see the water ahead. The trees made it almost all the way to the lake shore, which Nate thought was promising. He hoped that if the water was good enough for the trees, it would probably be good enough for him. Scanning along the edge of the water, he could see it had a sandy bottom, and it didn’t seem that deep, though he knew with water, looks could be deceiving.
Kneeling at the edge of the lake, Nate scooped up a small amount of water with his hand before raising it to his lips and taking a sip. The water was cool and left a strange but not uncomfortable tingle in his belly. It tasted pure, but Nate wasn’t taking any chances and moved over to the nearest tree, a little back from the shore. He would wait thirty minutes and see if he had any more reactions to the water before taking another drink.
Time flew by, and Nate barely noticed, only able to estimate how much time had passed. His stomach hadn’t cramped, and the tingling feeling had faded quickly. That was enough for Nate, and he hung his hoodie over a tree branch before sitting back down to rest and take stock of his situation. This way, he could drink more as he planned what to do next. Because it was time to start figuring out what he was going to do.