I left the shelter at dawn. Something had changed.

  Before, the forest was a chaos of shapes and lights.

  Now… it still was, in truth, but I saw new things…

  [FOREST SURVIVAL LVL1 ACTIVE]

  You recognize edible plants, locate water sources, avoid dangerous areas.

  — So the system doesn’t just manage Ether. It’s teaching me how to live here.

  I picked a berry. I knew it was edible.

  Not because I’d seen it before.

  Because the system told me.

  The forest was sick, and its sickness had a voice. Not the silence of death, but an unsettling hum—as if every tree, every stone, every scrap of moss groaned at a frequency too low for human ears, but my bones could feel it.

  Because the forest wasn’t just a forest. It was also a network, a tangle of energy serpentines weaving between trunks, dancing around branches, clinging to leaves. An invisible spiderweb.

  The Ether. Always there. Always loud.

  I touched my quartz pendant. Without it, the world was just a fog of colliding atoms, a chaos my brain refused to interpret. With it, it was… bearable. Not clear, no. Just less worse. Like seeing the world through a darkening filter.

  — I’m starving. I absolutely need to eat.

  I crouched near a bush, fingers digging into the damp earth. The moss was soft, almost spongy, but when I closed my eyes and focused, I saw something else: water molecules clinging to leaves, carbon chains in the roots, and above all, those Ether bonds flowing through it all like an underground river.

  Ether rarely stagnated. It moved, reacted, as if it knew I was watching.

  — If I can see it, maybe I can use it.

  I took out the knife I’d made the day before by chipping flint with another stone. Not a masterpiece, but it cut well. I’d refined and strengthened the edge with my new "powers."

  I picked up a nice dead ash branch—looked like ash—still in decent shape. That should work.

  I closed my eyes.

  — Focus. You already repaired wood yesterday. You can do it again.

  I extended my awareness toward the branch, fingers barely brushing the rough bark. In my mind, I saw the fibers unraveling, the molecular bonds weakened by time and moisture. And between them, unstable Ether in slow motion.

  — If I can strengthen the bonds…

  I didn’t know how I was doing this. No theory, no equation. Just intuition. Like pressing a button without knowing what it does, but hoping it works. I pushed again, visualizing what I wanted and putting intention into it.

  The branch straightened, firmer, more solid while keeping the natural curve I’d envisioned. The fibers had tightened, the molecules realigned.

  Not perfect yet. But enough to hold, apparently.

  — Done. Next.

  I spent the next hour assembling wood pieces, binding them with vines I’d torn from a climbing plant (after checking three times that it wasn’t poisonous, because yes, I’m paranoid, and so what?).

  Every time I modified a piece of matter, even slightly, a wave of fatigue washed over me—but less so since my level-up (ta-da!).

  But it was still exhausting. Imagine running a marathon while solving differential equations.

  Still, it worked.

  In the end, I had a rudimentary, asymmetrical bow with a twisted vine string, reinforced as best I could.

  I drew the bow, tested its resistance.

  — Not great. 40-50 pounds at best. But better than nothing. Not planning to hunt bears anyway.

  — Shit, now that I think about it, I hope there ARE no bears…

  — I’d scared myself so bad I’d almost ignored the system alert.

  I’d leveled up by making the bow.

  A little click in my head, like a lock turning. No fanfare, no blinding light. Just a sudden certainty: you just leveled up. I mentally checked my "stats," as if my brain had suddenly accessed a video game menu.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  [LEVEL 3 REACHED]

  [OPTIMIZATION: ATOMIC PRECISION LVL1]

  30% reduction in critical failures.

  [CLASSIC SKILL: WOODCRAFT LVL1]

  You understand wood’s properties, its fibers, its weaknesses. Crafting 25% faster, +15% quality.

  — Translation: you can now fix things without blowing them up. Probably. No guarantees.

  I looked at my hands. Now improvised tools.

  — Before, I forced matter. Now… I work with it.

  Locals take years to learn these basic skills.

  Me? I’ve got an integrated manual.

  Cheating? Probably.

  But I’m catching up on 20 years of delay, after all…

  I sighed.

  — Alright. Now I need arrows.

  I whittled straight branches, sharpened them with my homemade knife.

  For the arrowheads, I used quartz shards—because yes, I had a pocket full of shiny rocks, so what? Every time I modified an arrow’s structure to make it more streamlined, lighter, the Ether around it reacted stronger, as if it applauded.

  Or maybe that was just my imagination.

  — OK. Now the hard part: catching something.

  I crouched near a stream where footprints were most numerous. Rabbits, probably. Or horned hares, like the one I’d seen yesterday that had looked at me with that strange mix of curiosity and disdain.

  As if it could think.

  I placed a hand on the ground.

  The Ether was denser here, as if pooling near the water. I focused, tried to feel its frequency. Not like sound. Like an… oscillation.

  — If I can emit something that calms animals…

  I had no idea what I was doing.

  But I closed my eyes and imagined a slow, steady wave, like the heartbeat of something asleep. I pushed it outward, through my fingers, into the earth.

  Nothing.

  Then…

  A rustle in the bushes.

  A horned hare emerged slowly, nose twitching. Its eyes—black, bright—locked onto mine for a second before it went back to grazing calmly, as if I were just another rock in the landscape.

  — Oh. It works.

  I froze.

  The hare came within five meters. I could see its muscles contracting under its fur, the subtle play of its ears catching every forest sound. And around it, the Ether swirled in gentle waves, as if dancing with the animal.

  — OK. Now I just need to…

  I drew the bow slowly.

  The hare lifted its head but didn’t flee.

  — Sorry, buddy.

  I shot.

  And pierced the hare clean through.

  It collapsed without a sound.

  — …OK.

  I stayed still for a second.

  Then I rushed toward it, hands shaking.

  — It’s meat. You need to eat. It’s normal.

  But when I lifted it, felt its still-warm body under my fingers, a wave of nausea hit me.

  — Fuck.

  I sat heavily on the ground.

  The hare was dead.

  And I had killed it.

  — Alright. Now you skin it—a first—, gut it, and eat. Because otherwise, you’ll starve before the week’s out.

  I took a breath.

  And got to work.

  Somewhere between starting to skin the hare and finally getting a fire going to roast it (after three failed attempts because of course I didn’t know how to start a fire without a lighter), I’d felt a presence.

  A low growl.

  I looked up.

  Between two trees, ten meters away, a wolf watched me.

  Not a stray dog. A wolf. Large, gray and white, with golden eyes that caught the firelight like mirrors. Its lips were slightly curled back, revealing fangs that could’ve torn my throat out in two seconds.

  I froze.

  The wolf didn’t move either.

  It watched me.

  Not like prey.

  Like… something else.

  The Ether around it was agitated, forming tight vortices around its body, as if it were surrounded by an invisible magnetic field.

  — So either you’re a normal wolf hesitating to attack, or you sense I’m weird and you’re wondering if I’ll explode.

  I slowly set down the knife.

  Extended a hand toward it, palm open.

  — Hi.

  The wolf growled again but didn’t charge.

  — You sense the Ether on me, huh?

  It came within three meters.

  Two.

  Its eyes never left mine.

  — Deal. You don’t eat me. I…

  I tossed a piece of raw meat toward it.

  It landed between us.

  The wolf sniffed it, then looked at me again.

  — …I leave you alone.

  It took a step back.

  Then two.

  Finally, it turned and vanished between the trees as silently as it had arrived.

  I sighed.

  — First predator encounter and still alive! Not bad!

  I turned back to my fire.

  The roasting meat crackled.

  And somewhere in the shadows, a wolf watched.

  — Maybe one day we’ll be buddies.

  I’d slumped against the gnarled trunk of a half-dead oak a few meters from my hut, fingers dug into the gray soil that radiated sickness.

  The dust clung to the micro-fractures in my joints, outlining every fold, every recent scar. It had that strange texture—neither quite dry nor quite damp—as if the earth itself hesitated between dust and rotten mud.

  I held my hands up, palms open.

  Dark streaks lined my forearms where I’d rubbed the sickly earth between my fingers.

  The Ether here didn’t dance.

  It hiccuped.

  Golden filaments clung to soil particles like electrified spiderwebs, then snapped abruptly, sucked into some invisible fissure.

  In places, the earth was almost black, as if scorched from within. In others, it glowed faintly, veined with bluish pulses beating to the rhythm of… something. A distant heart? A broken mechanism?

  — Hypothesis one: this world—or this region—is dying.

  I turned my head toward the areas I’d repaired—if you could call it that.

  Around the oak’s roots, where I’d spent two hours convincing atoms to realign into a stable structure, the earth had regained a brownish hue, almost normal. Pale green moss spread in concentric circles from the epicenter of my intervention, as if life itself had hesitated before an enemy, then decided to advance.

  A little farther, fragile shoots pushed through the soil, their thin, trembling stems bearing leaves still curled upon themselves.

  — Hypothesis two: Ether isn’t just energy. It’s either a poison, or an antibody. Maybe both. Maybe something else entirely.

  — Hypothesis three: my little magic tricks don’t heal. They just compensate a little.

  A shiver ran down my spine. I came from a world where we dissected atoms to make tools. Where we measured their dance with lasers and equations. A world where matter was predictable, even in its chaos.

  And now?

  Now, I was sitting in a place where matter bled.

  Where the laws I’d spent ten years studying unraveled like wet paper.

  Where I—the guy who’d barely managed to grow copper sulfate crystals in chemistry lab—was apparently the only thing capable of stitching the holes back together.

  — Hypothesis four, and this one stings:

  I looked up at the canopy, where the leaves of the few healthy trees—the ones I’d touched—glowed with an almost aggressive green amid the surrounding grayness.

  — I didn’t end up here by accident.

  Somewhere, in an underground lab in Grenoble, my body probably lay in an overheated quantum scanner, neurons fried by an experiment gone wrong.

  And here?

  Here, I was sitting in a world where reality had the consistency of old, moth-eaten fabric.