Chapter 8

  The surge of clarity hadn’t faded.

  Raime stood motionless for a moment, listening to the calm that had settled inside him. Not the kind born of rest — no, this was sharper. His thoughts moved like a blade across silk, clean and uninterrupted. The pressure that had clouded the edges of his awareness since his arrival was still there, but now it bent around him, less oppressive. The air felt thinner. Or maybe he was just moving through it faster.

  Even the fatigue he’d expected after the battle, the weight of spent adrenaline and exertion — it wasn’t there. He felt steady. Alert. Ready.

  His gaze shifted toward the two carcasses near the broken archway. The ichor had already begun to congeal into dull puddles beneath them, for now there was no stench of rot, but it would come. He took a breath and moved.

  He had no real tools — just a sharp-ish metal fragment he scavenged before and the edge of his own resolve — he looked at the creature’s claws, they weren’t long as knives but still they were sharp and clearly composed of some kind of metallic alloy. He tried to pry one from the dead beast’s finger. It was stuck fast, but with time and effort, it came loose. It was nearly five centimeters long and that strange cartilage and tendons keeping it attached to the bone gave it a semblance of a handle. A really short and uncomfortable handle. The chitin gave more resistance than he anticipated even with his new tool. Beneath the shell, it was layered in dense fibrous tissue, slick and gray. They weren’t uniform; the curve of the carapace shifted subtly along the creatures’ backs, but some pieces were broad and flat enough to be useful.

  Armor, maybe. Or reinforcement. If he could bind them somehow.

  Raime glanced down at his own clothing — torn sleeves, makeshift wrappings from what had once been a shirt, a torn jacket, and nothing more than fabric and stubbornness holding it all together. No wire. No rope. Not even a shred of synthetic thread. Just him and these alien remains in a forgotten ruin.

  He tested one of the plates against his forearm. It would fit. A little overlap near the elbow, but light enough to move with. But for now, there was no way to secure it. Nothing but the idea — and even that was enough to note down mentally for later.

  The smell, though, was becoming a problem.

  He dragged the heaviest parts of the carcasses toward a side chamber he’d passed earlier — a narrow hallway branching into what might once have been a storeroom, collapsed on one end. With a few shoves and a lot of grimacing, he pushed the bodies inside and stacked some fallen stone near the entrance. Not a proper seal, but it would at least contain the worst of the rot. Or the attention it might draw.

  As he returned to the main chamber, the glow of the vine roots seemed a touch brighter, or maybe his sharpened senses were still adjusting. The room felt less suffocating now. Cleaner. Like he’d carved a little more space for himself in this world — not just to survive, but to begin shaping it in return.

  On to other matters. I needed fire.

  The eggs wouldn’t last long raw, and neither would he if something worse than hunger showed up. A fire meant warmth, light, maybe even protection. But there was nothing burnable here — the stones were dead and ancient, the vines damp and laced with that faint glowing sap. Maybe outside. The trees he’d seen beyond the ruins had strange shapes, but they bore wood of some kind. He hoped.

  Raime stood and gave his gearless form a glance. Still nothing but torn clothes, bruises, and stubborn thought.

  The pain in his side was under control. The wound was clean — or at least not festering yet. And his mind? Sharpened to a point.

  He crossed the chamber with long strides, casting a last look at the hidden room where he’d stashed the bodies. The air was still clean. He took that as a good sign.

  Then he moved the stone slab and slipped out into the open.

  The light outside no longer pierced like it had before. It still pressed against his mind with that diffuse weight — not quite heat, not quite pressure — but it didn’t claw at his nerves. Not the same way.

  Raime paused just beyond the threshold, letting his eyes adjust. The sky above was a canvas of fractured silver and lavender haze, rippling slowly like a submerged current. The ruins lay quiet around him, draped in hanging vines and weathered stone, the ambient hum of the Rift quieter now — as if the world itself was watching, waiting.

  He descended the steps and retraced his path across the outer platforms. The same broken pillars. The same half-swallowed archways. No sign of anything new. But now, with his thoughts moving faster and his memory clearer, he knew that. Before, his mind had filtered details with the haze of fatigue, trauma, and slow cognition. Now it was different. He could feel the absence of change like a fact, like an equation with no missing terms.

  No new tracks. No movement in the dust. The same signs of long-abandoned habitation — just stone, silence, and ruin.

  Satisfied, he turned toward the trees.

  The patch nearest to the ruins was sparse, a cluster of tall trunks with curling crowns that clawed at the air like skeletal fingers. Up close, they were even stranger than they’d seemed from afar — tall and lean, their bark a dark, burnished silver that caught the Rift’s ambient light like dull metal.

  He reached out and ran his fingers along one. Cold. Coarse. It didn’t feel like bark at all — it was fibrous, yes, but there was a hidden tension to it. A weight. When he leaned closer and scraped at the surface with the claw he’d kept, the edge dragged against something tougher than wood.

  Not just metallic-looking, he thought. There’s metal in it.

  He dug a little deeper — the makeshift knife skidding, then finally catching where the fibers gave way. He pulled back and examined the splinter.

  The inside was wood — a pale, fibrous grain laced with veins of glinting gray. As if metal and cellulose had grown together, braided at the root. He snapped the piece in two. It didn’t crack like dry wood — it resisted. Bent. Then snapped with a brittle sound halfway between wood and wire.

  Would it burn?

  He didn’t know.

  But he gathered what he could — a few dry branches from a half-dead specimen nearby, ones that hadn’t absorbed as much moisture or sap. He bundled them under one arm and turned to the grass.

  The same grass he’d first seen from the portal — tall, lush, and thick, colored like stormcloud ash. Up close, it rose past his waist, its blades curling slightly at the tips. Smooth to the touch. Not wet, but not dry either.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  He gathered handfuls of it, tying it into a bundle. Maybe when it dried, it would burn. Or fray. Or twist into cordage. He couldn’t be sure. But it was something.

  With both arms full, Raime cast one last look at the sky. It was getting darker… then turned and retraced his path into the ruins — footsteps careful, steady, each movement marked by an awareness not just of space, but of pacing, of rhythm. His body still lagged slightly behind the tempo of his thoughts, but the gap was closing.

  But he was adapting. He would have to do better though.

  Raime made his way back into the ruins, moving with deliberate care despite the weight of the branches and grass pressed against his side. The faint throb in his ribs reminded him of the earlier scratch — a warning that infection might still set in — but for now, he ignored it. He had other priorities.

  He didn’t go back to the central chamber. The ichor stink still lingered, even after he’d dragged the carcasses into an adjacent hall. Instead, he settled in a small side-room near the outer edge of the complex. It was partially walled on three sides, collapsed on the fourth, and had a rough gap in the ceiling where the strange light filtered in like cold fire.

  A natural chimney.

  The floor was covered in ancient grit and vine fragments, dry enough in places to use for kindling. He swept them into a corner, then set the bundle of gray-black grass and wood down carefully. His breath fogged slightly in the air — not from cold, but from something else in the Rift’s atmosphere. He didn’t trust it yet.

  Raime crouched beside the pile and began sorting the pieces. The twisted grass he laid out to dry. He took one of the strange tree branches — lighter than it looked, dry, with fibers that glinted faintly in the shifting light. Using his makeshift claw knife, he began shaving it, small curls of hybrid wood falling to the ground. With every stroke, tiny sparks jumped from the friction, flashing like fireflies.

  Raime paused.

  That wasn’t normal. He frowned, sniffed the slivers, ran his thumb along the gritty metallic dust. His memory, sharper now, pulled forward flashes of old science documentaries and chemistry classes. Magnesium. It had to be magnesium — or something damn close. The sparks, the lightness, the subtle sheen in the fibers — it fit.

  “But how the hell does that even happen?” he muttered, staring at the branch like it had personally offended him. “Metal in the xylem? This isn’t how biology works.”

  Then again, Ithural wasn’t Earth. Trees here had evolved — or been made — for different rules.

  The motion came to him not from instinct, but memory — a scene replayed from deep in his sharpened recall. An old survival show. Grainy footage. A man kneeling in the dirt with a bent stick and a string, carving a notch into a plank and rotating a thinner branch with a bow, the cord taut and looping in a controlled sawing motion.

  Friction and pressure. Then a lot of patience.

  Raime scavenged through the stone fragments nearby and found a flat one with a small dip he could use as a base. Another one, narrow and rough-edged, would do for shaping and weight. He used a length of the most dry vine he could find as the bowstring, tying it tight around a curved stick he’d split and stripped from the metallic-wood branch.

  He took a breath.

  Positioned the spindle.

  Braced the stone with his foot.

  And began.

  At first, the movement was awkward. The string slipped. The spindle bucked. His hand ached from the pressure needed to keep it steady. Sweat beaded at his brow.

  But he didn’t stop. His mind stayed locked in. Focused. He controlled his pace.

  The bow moved back and forth in a steady rhythm. The spindle spun, digging into the baseplate. A faint trail of dust began to gather at the notch he’d carved.

  A few sparks jumped again — then, with a dry snap, a burst of white flame exploded outward in a brilliant flash. Sparks scattered against the walls and up into the air like a swarm of fireflies on amphetamines.

  “Shit!” Raime jerked back, shielding his eyes. His heartbeat punched into his throat. “What the—!? What kind of tree detonates?!”

  The fire had caught — not gently, not patiently, but with the raw eagerness of something meant to burn. The flames flickered white and bright, with trails of smoky silver. It smelled like wood and metal and something more acrid beneath.

  Raime stared for a long moment, breath catching, then barked a laugh — dry, startled, slightly manic. “Magnesium trees. Of course. Sure. Why not? This place makes perfect sense.”

  He stood slowly, watching the “wood” burning itself out in the next few seconds. No fire for now, but this could become an excellent starter, even a weapon. He needed another kind of fuel.

  Nothing burned anymore in the improvised hearth. Raime sat beside it, elbows resting on his knees, breathing in the scorched-metal tang of the burnt shavings. But the tension in his shoulders didn’t ease.

  He hadn’t meant to nearly blow himself up. He’d just wanted fire — something so basic, so human. Warmth. Safety. A way to keep the dark from creeping too close.

  He glanced at the bow-drill lying on the stone beside him, then down at the odd branch that had ignited like flash powder. Even with the System rewriting his biology, sharpening his thoughts and speeding his instincts, the work had been clumsy. Sloppy.

  His dad wouldn’t have failed like that.

  Raime let out a slow breath. “He’d already have a forge set up by now. Or a shelter with proper insulation. Maybe a water trap too, if he found a decent slope.”

  He could still picture his father’s hands — calloused, confident — setting a snare in the woods behind their old house, making a fire with damp tinder on a camping trip, patching a broken pipe without ever stopping his half-joking commentary. Man could fix anything. Survive anywhere.

  Raime stared into the flames.

  And what would his mother be doing? Would she still be in the kitchen, cooking like always, fussing after the twins? Or had the System Integration torn the world apart before he could even return home?

  And Alice…

  A soft ache bloomed in his chest at the thought of her. Her laugh. The way she rolled her eyes when he rambled about his studies or the last good book he read. Her hand in his. The unsolved issues.

  Was she alive?

  Is anyone still alive?

  His breath caught. The fear returned, raw and cold. He’d thrown himself into surviving here because it was immediate — urgent. Shelter. Water. Food. Safety.

  But the bigger picture hovered at the edge of thought, and now it loomed.

  The Rifts were open on Earth. The System had begun Integration. He had no way of knowing What had happened there. No understanding of what rulebook the System followed. Could it rewrite a world in days? Would monsters spill through, just like the one that had tried to kill him?

  Was his family safe?

  His hand clenched around the haft of the lever beside him.

  He was still in the tutorial. He hadn't even Awakened. He didn’t have a class, or a build, or even a basic understanding of what rules governed this place. And yet the System had dragged him here — alone and unprepared.

  “What if I can’t make it?” he whispered to no one. “What if I never get back?”

  He stared at the cold metallic wood at his feet. But then something shifted inside him — not a rush, not a surge, but a pressure, slow and insistent. Resolve. He could almost feel the stat behind the thought now — deeper than emotion, more solid than hope. A weight that held his mind together.

  He didn’t know what would happen. But if he gave up now — if he curled up and waited for a miracle — he knew what wouldn’t happen.

  Raime stood.

  The fading light caught on the lever as he lifted it, its crooked form now almost familiar in his grip. Not quite a weapon, not quite a tool — something in between. Something adaptable.

  Just like him.

  He breathed in, focused, and began to move.

  At first, his swings were slow. Experimental. He adjusted the grip, shifting his balance, testing the weight and feel. Then again — tighter arc, quicker snap. Time stretched as he struck, his awareness narrowing, refining. Perception sharpened. Every twitch of his muscles, every adjustment in force or angle echoed back through his mind, clearer than it should have been.

  His Mind Flux spun again — a silent tick of comprehension.

  Raime took little rocks from the ground and threw them up in the air, He watched them fall and he could swear when he focused they fell slower, he tried to hit them with the lever. He hit one by chance, it wasn’t the one he was aiming for, so he did it again and again and again. He practiced in this strange slowed state, his body responded later, but his mind was running so fast that he was calculating how to move better and better, the speed of his actions were more similar to those of his reactions the more he trained. There was a great potential yet to uncover from his mind, something that the System didn’t acknowledge, but it was real nonetheless.

  He began adding footwork now. Timed steps. Repositions. Imaginary opponents formed in his thoughts, and he struck where they would be, where they might move, correcting before he finished the motion.

  It wasn’t instinct — not yet — but it was faster than learning had ever been before.

  The fear didn’t vanish. The ache for home didn’t fade. But they no longer held him still.

  They moved with him.

  They drove him.

  He will use the emotions to his own ends.

  And like this, he prepared to delve deep into the temple. Decision already made.

  Using his mind to direct his body to become a deadlier version of himself, because it was true that he didn’t know the rules of this knew reality, but what he knew was that violence and power were needed to escape this accursed place.