Chapter 4 - Glorious Sleep

  "A family friend who never gave me advice once did. He took me aside, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, 'There are two things you should always splurge on. Toilet paper and the bed you sleep on.' He then proceeded to walk away and never give me another piece of advice again. To this day I'm still not sure if I'm grateful for that."

  -The First Emperor

  Solis briefly considered that he had gone mad, but threw the thought away as quickly as it came. He wasn’t mad, he just hadn’t slept in three— almost four days now.

  There was a strong temptation to fall asleep, pinned to the cliff face, and use the dead monster for warmth. Admittedly, he considered that option for far longer than was wise.

  Brain feeling more like a jelly than a solid, Solis cut off [Resonance] and winced at the cost. Three hundred mana spent since the system descended. He was just shy of two hundred now.

  Pulling up the System in that strange, not quite physical, not quite mental space, Solis checked the corruption levels and the mana regen for the region.

  That woke him up like a bucket of ice water. He began shifting, struggling to push the great monster off of him. In the same breath, he also checked his level cap to see if it had increased.

  It hadn’t.

  Leveling was easy, all things considered. Anyone could gain EXP from cleansing corruption, whether that be from killing monsters or simply naturally regenerating mana, but you couldn’t level infinitely from the latter since your level was capped at the level of the strongest monster you took part in killing.

  Solis’s cap was still level seven.

  Before today, the only Nominal zone he had seen had been tier three, and he had only seen it from a great distance through a telescope from the top of a skyscraper. A beast, hunched, horned, and clawed, draped in ripped rags of flesh, had been at the border, nose to the ground, sniffing at the dirt. Then its nose had turned upwind.

  Through the lens of a telescope, Solis had locked eyes with the beast.

  Fami had gotten a glimpse of the monster days later, and miles away, while they hid in an abandoned shopping mall. There was no way to confirm, but Solis knew it was hunting him.

  It had been level twenty.

  All of that – the level twenty in a Nominal Tier III zone and the fact that the winged beast hadn’t raised his cap at all – led to a simple idea. What he killed was likely a baby; else it wouldn’t have spawned in the area, and even so, it had still almost killed him.

  Maybe there would be more in the cave. He didn’t know. What he did know was that there’d be adults on the outside of the mountains.

  With great effort, Solis managed to unbalance the dead monster, the back of its body slipping from the tree and carrying the rest of it down, its body dashed against the rocks as it fell.

  Solis had no way of harvesting the monster as he had with others before, but he did take his due trophy in the form of handfuls of the creature's feathers. They were soft to the touch, like a down feather, but with a size larger than the largest eagle’s.

  Taking no more time to appreciate his prize, Solis heaved himself back up into the cave, tracing the same handholds he had before. Once inside, he crept forward on soft steps.

  He dared not use the flashlight for fear of alerting others to his presence. The monster, as far as he had seen, had not had eyes, and once the monster was dead, he had not thought to check. He regretted that oversight now.

  Asides from the flashlight, the next best option for scouting was one he was familiar with. Using [Mana Manipulation], he controlled a wall of mana to push in front of him a dozen yards forward. In the dark of the night and the cave he could not see, but with a hand on the wall, he could walk forward and hopefully catch if a monster ran through his mana in time to react.

  He held his pistol as he walked, the gun trained on the path ahead of him, which he couldn’t really see.

  Only when his wall of mana left the narrow cave and expanded into a wider cavern did he stop. He did not trust wide-open spaces, not underground with monsters, and besides, exhaustion was wearing him down.

  Instead, he lay on the ground, pressing himself against the craggy cave wall as he retrieved his mana. He shaped it around himself, molding it into just another rough wall. The mana solidified into stone, leaving a large opening looking towards the cavern. He solidified that wall separately and in two pieces. One larger wall with holes for the barest amount of air, and one smaller section in the center, just big enough for him to press his eye to when he destroyed the section later.

  For all sections, he extended a thin piece of stone that he could easily break, shattering the entire section at once when he did. It was a quirk of [Mana Manipulation I] that when any part of a construct was broken or moved, the entire work ceased to exist. While he would only describe it as a weakness, it was one he’d take advantage of however he could. In this case, a safe, modular, and collapsible shelter.

  All of his supplies were kept inside the impromptu shelter with him, save for the flashlight, which he kept outside. The shelter wasn’t comfortable, and the rocks dug into his back through his shirt, but Solis was too tired to care. Holding the feathers in his palm and thinking of a small pillow made out of them, he drifted off to sleep.

  What felt like no sooner than he drifted off, he woke again to what he could only assume was the world's slowest steam engine. He couldn’t see out of his shelter, nor did he want to risk opening any part of it up in case it gave him away.

  There was something outside. It let out low and deep whistles. Solis couldn’t place the other noises, but it wasn’t far off to a gear getting stuck, tensioning, groaning, and snapping with enough force to rip flesh, all before moving to the next tooth to start the cycle again.

  Despite his shelter existing in pitch blackness, he still closed his eyes and, with great effort, drifted off again.

  —

  The next time he woke, it wasn’t to some horrible monster mere meters away from him. It was a completely natural awakening, and through checking how much his mana had regenerated, he was able to tell he had been sleeping for upwards of fourteen hours.

  Still somewhat groggy but certainly refreshed, Solis took a moment to check in with himself.

  The last week had sucked. Not that such an assertion mattered much since he would go back and do it all again exactly the same if it came down to it. It sucked, but he had gotten what he wanted for the most part. His sister was safe, Lyla was safe.

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  The only regret he had was that he didn’t know where Ricky was. The man had been his best friend for the past two years, and as soon as they met, Solis knew the two of them would be friends.

  Ricky… Ricky was a better man than Solis. Not a high bar in his opinion, but here it mattered. The issue was that his friend, while a good man, wasn’t a particularly smart one. Academically gifted, socially adept, and with more than a few talents, yeah, but his heart was large. Larger than the rest of him could support.

  Over the month they had survived, Ricky had picked up stragglers, survivors, and the dredges of humanity left and right. Old people's homes, the homeless, gang members, suburban moms, dads, sons, and daughters, it didn’t matter. Anyone and everyone he came across who needed help and wanted to stay, he brought into the fold.

  The issue was that gathering and protecting that many people slowed them down on the way to the safe zone. They wouldn’t have made it, so he had told Solis to go on ahead, and he’d catch up.

  Solis still didn’t know if leaving was the right choice, but at least two people he cared about were safe.

  He thought about the night before they left.

  —

  “It’s a new world. I think I’ll make a city.” Ricky said.

  “A city?” Fami had questioned.

  “Yeah, gotta have a home somewhere. Even in the Apocalypse.”

  “What are you gonna call it? RickTown?” Lyla had joked.

  “Nah, I’m gonna call it Bremen.”

  “Why?” he had asked.

  “Well you know how I always say you’re a dog?”

  —

  Solis stifled a chuckle at the memory and filed it away. He had done his mental check-in. He was fine. It was time to get back to work.

  Reaching out, he broke the small edge of stone for his peephole and stared through. He had expected to be greeted by pitch-blackness. The plan had been to use [Anchor] to turn his flashlight outside on, but that wasn’t necessary at all. He saw clearly. A ray of sunlight pierced through the cavern roof, almost blindingly bright as it reflected off mounds of white bone and— Shit.

  Yeah.

  That was a lot of monsters.

  Covering the cavern floor, specifically around the beam of sunlight, hundreds of half-flesh, half-bone worms the size of Solis’s forearm writhed. There seemed to be no love between the monsters as they routinely tore and ate each other for the choice bits of light to sunbathe in.

  Then there was the giant one. At least twenty times larger than the one he had killed before. Its maw, without stretching open to feed, was so wide that an eighteen-wheeler could squeeze through.

  Suddenly, taking his chances by jumping off the mountain seemed a lot more appealing.

  Luckily, the great worm did not stay long. Twisting its body, it sprang into the air and out of the open hole in the cavern's ceiling. The monster's absence let Solis think a little clearer. Which is when he noticed the corruption levels had changed.

  The corruption had decreased by two tiers. A rush of excitement filled Solis. He had seen other cave paths in the cavern beyond. If he could get through and into one of them, maybe the levels would keep decreasing.

  He had to admit he didn’t really have many other options. It was die descending the mountain, die fighting to find somewhere safe, or live trying to find somewhere safe.

  Trying anything would have to wait three days as his [Shielding] remained shattered and would stay that way until he regenerated half.

  Joyous days.

  Weaving his mana into a wall, he blocked himself off from the cavern. He proceeded to break his shelter, grabbing onto as much of the mana as he could before it dispersed to build the opposite wall. That took significantly more effort than using his own mana, but it let him reuse around half of what he spent on the shelter initially.

  With a click of the flashlight, Solis looked around his new home. It wasn’t much, but he could add a few touches here and there. At the very least, a smooth rock bed. He only had stone to work with around him, so he couldn’t make it out of any other material, but at least it wouldn’t be sharp.

  “Lets get started.”

  —

  Three days passed in a mind-numbing blur. He ended up raising large sections of the ground into smooth stone so as not to have to wear shoes. The only other notable feature was a trash can that he made to store trash and refuse.

  He had practiced his [Mana Manipulation], but had gained no additional ranks, staying stuck at rank six. [Anchor], on the other hand, gained three whole ranks, increasing it to rank four.

  The first and second breakthroughs came fast and ended up being an extension of what he had done to pull the grenade pin, except instead of using two separate streams of thought, he could use one and separate the mana instead.

  Turned out the only reason the skill thought the grenade was one object was that his mana had enveloped the entire object with no gaps or holes. The second was a further extension of that concept, anchoring separate points on an object to cause it to move or rotate in specific ways.

  Each time the skill ranked up, the discovery settled into the skill mold. In practice, once a discovery was made once with great effort, mimicking the feat from then on became easier and easier until it was trivial. When he had theorized about [Skills] with the others, he had described it as water flowing through a clogged section of river. The more one used their skill, the clearer the river became until it flowed freely.

  The third breakthrough with [Anchor] came on the last day, when he realized he could anchor himself to his mana; a portion of his mana then moved with him without him having to think about it. The inverse proved true as well. If he moved with the mana, he was slightly faster, and if he moved against it, slightly slower.

  Of course, he had also tried lifting himself, hoping that he could fly or hover, but the skill could not lift anything heavier than a handful of rocks, and not particularly fast either. The effect wasn’t much for the time being, like walking into or away from a particularly stiff breeze, but he knew it’d get better with time and ranks.

  The only other thing he did all that time was read in the light of the spare flashlight. The bestiary Greenly had provided his, admittedly, was pretty useful, but only in a 'if you were already in a situation you'd survive this will help you not get injured' way, not a 'get out of fucked up situation that will kill you,' way that he was currently in.

  The bestiary outlined general traits and tags that monsters had from ones he was familiar with, like [Swarm] and [Elite], but also ones he had never heard of, like [Mad]. That last tag was apparently a rare and special one. Monsters usually just wanted to kill humans and took the most efficient route to get there, but monsters with the [Mad] tag rarely immediately killed. Instead, they could kidnap, imprison, or otherwise capture humans. Most of the time, this still led to a human's death, but the fact that it wasn't immediate was strange.

  As Solis bed down for the night, his [Shielding] ticked over the halfway point, and he could activate it once more. He would not move yet. The great worm slept in the cavern in the nights and awoke in the morning to hunt and bring back food.

  No humans, thankfully, but it had regurgitated half-alive beasts of all sizes and builds. Some lion or wolf-like, others resembling something more like a dinosaur. Once it had brought back a large wooly creature that had only pretended to be dead. It rampaged through the tiny monsters, crushing one or two with each hoof stomp.

  The great worm had watched, disinterested, as its children swarmed the other monster. They burrowed inside of it and ate it from the inside out.

  No bones, blood, or meat were left after each meal. All was eaten.

  Solis thanked everything in the universe that [Shielding] stopped all attacks and damage until it broke. The thought of one of those things burrowing into his leg sent goosebumps and shivers through him each time he thought of it.

  It was that, the idea of what the worms would do if they caught him, that Solis thought of as he tried and failed to fall asleep.

  He kept running through his plan.

  Wait for the mother to leave, then throw the grenade to the far side of the cavern to the left of him. If the monsters heard the noise – reverberation or whatever – and ran towards it, he’d dash to the three tunnels on the opposite side and pick one based on the mana levels he could feel through [Mana Manipulation]. If the worms ran away, he’d run into the only tunnel in that area.

  The only other eventualities to consider were the one where they chase him anyway and the one where they didn’t care about the explosion.

  In the former, he’d just have to build walls as he ran and hope they gave up before they ate through all of them, maybe throw an MRE at them. The latter was more complicated, because it meant he wasn’t immediately in a life-or-death situation… he didn’t know what he would do free of one like that.

  He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.