One depressing fact I found is that the white fin fish didn’t taste anywhere near as delicious when cooked. Sure, the slimy texture was gone, but so was that rush of vitality whenever I ate it. Still, I’d be cooking my food from now on. I just couldn’t risk food poisoning while I was living alone in the woods. I needed to be in top form always.
I did, however, hit the jackpot on some of the tall grasses growing in the shallows of the river bed. I tried cooking them to eat, only to find they were extraordinarily stringy. They were no good for food, but once dried the fibers were long and tough. I’d started weaving it into some crude string.
The crude string was immediately useful as a vital component of my cone-style fish trap. I’d throw some of my food remains in there and when I pulled it out there’d invariably be one or two white finned fish in there, along with a bunch of the three-clawed crayfish.
I was still desperately lacking in tools. I’d tried to cut down a tree with my bronze knife, but that was an exercise in futility. In the end, most of my tools were made of sticks and wood. The lack of a proper axe was really hindering my ability to build structures. That and my aching arm.
Although that problem had been fixing itself at a remarkable rate. Every day it seemed a little bit better than the day before. I’d pin it on the clean outdoor living, but I couldn’t help but in my mind I knew there was something more to it. There was a certain vitality that infused the world of this place. A zeal in every substance that could bend the physical laws in its own favor.
That was what I felt, and it was my best hypothesis, but I had no real way of testing it at the moment. Whatever was happening though, I was healing abnormally fast. I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but the skeptic in me couldn’t help but think that there must be a drawback somewhere. At the very least, I doubted the magic of this world was out to assist me exclusively.
Eventually, I traced my steps back to the entrance to the cave. I marked it out and started burning wood and collecting charcoal. That was mostly carbon, right? Hopefully, it would be good enough for Mac.
By the time my arm finally healed, I’d been able to wrap both forearms with some thick tree bark bound onto my body with my homemade string. I’d crafted something for my back and chest out of two bigger sheets and had made something akin to a loincloth out of some remaining pieces. My best spear was sitting on my shoulder, tipped with my bronze dagger. The weapon was getting a bit dull from all the use it was seeing, so I really hoped I’d be able to find another one on my way back.
I decided to leave the charcoal behind for the first dive. I wanted to map out the top layers of the cave network before I started going lower and looking for chamber Mac and the inter-dimensional ship I’d inherited ended up. I rubbed at the symbol that the pocket watch had burned onto my chest. Instead of lightening with time, it had seemed to only grow deeper. The man in the circle had started as a dim gray and was now a more vibrant black, matching the broken circle that surrounded him.
That symbol was connected to the ship, and probably responsible for me getting this interface overlayed on my vision. If I could understand and unlock its secrets, I was certain I’d be able to return home.
And so, I set off, armed and armored, ready to dive into a cave full of deadly monsters.
***
The first thing I ran into was fairly mundane. It was a giant snail with a big snail shell. I would have freaked out if I saw it while first coming up through these tunnels, but now I saw it as more useful than dangerous.
The thick shell would make an excellent bowl. I hadn’t perfected my clay-firing technique yet and hadn’t gotten good pottery going. If this snail shell could take the heat of a fire, I’d be able to boil water! At the least, I’d be making sure what I drank was sterile. Failing that, at least I’d be able to make a soup.
Killing the snail proved difficult. It simply tucked its head into its shell and hid until I got close. At that point it would emerge and try to rip my face off.
Luckily it wasn’t too intelligent. I waited very quietly until it thought I was gone. Then when it stuck its head out I jammed my spear through the open gap its shell as its jaws thrust outward. I stirred its insides up with my spear until it stopped moving. Then I had a fancy new bowl. I tried eating the snail itself, but it was just too gooey for me. I think that maybe I prepared it wrong, because this definitely didn’t taste like a delicacy.
Enemy defeated. Resources have been added to your inventory. 5 points awarded.
After a few more dives I had the top layers of the caves mostly memorized. Anything further than that and I’d need to bring a light source. I still had the glowing piece of glass I’d taken from the ship, but the light it provided was dim. I was somewhat afraid of bringing a torch. All the varieties I’d tried to craft thus far were made of tree sap and billowed smoke. I’d hate to fill the tunnels with smoke from my own torch and choke to death.
Although that did give me the idea of lighting a fire at the mouth of the cave. I chose a windy day and walled most of the place off. The pine-like trees had leaves that produced enormous amounts of smoke, and I funneled as much of that as I could into the cave system.
I got a few rats to come charging out, but nothing as big as the alpha rat I had fought before. With my new spear and bark armor they weren’t much of a challenge.
Enemies defeated. Points awarded.
After giving the smoke a few days to clear, I decided now was the time to look for Mac. I had amassed over two hundred points by now from all the little things I’d been fighting and was eager to find out how to spend them. I almost blew them all on what the interface could show me, but instead I decided to wait for Mac’s opinion.
Finding him actually took a lot less time than I thought. It turns out; he wasn’t that far down, but much of the second layer of the cave system wound around in a big circle. I must have spent hours following the right-hand side of the wall going around in a big circle. A few left hands turns and I would have been out in no time.
“Ah! It’s a barbarian savage!” Mac yelled as I opened the door. The place was much, much cleaner than it had been before. I wasn’t sure how Mac was scrubbing the place without a body, but whatever he had done it was suddenly in better shape than it was when I’d first seen it.
“It’s me Mac. Theo.”
“I know it is. That still doesn’t make you a barbarian savage. Close the door behind you. Last time you left I caught a glimpse of some sort of slug monster. Can you believe that? A slug monster! Absolutely disgusting. This place is dirty and gross, and I hate it.”
“Well, I’ve brought something that might make you feel a little better.” I unslung my pants from over my shoulder. I’d tied off the ankles and used them to haul charcoal down to the lower levels of the cave.
“Whatever you do, do not drop that on my floors.” Mac warned.
I put the bag of pants down as gently as possible. A puff of black smoke still filled the air.
Carbon detected. Add to resource supply? Yes / No
That was easier than expected. I thought I’d have to fiddle with the interface. I selected yes, and the carbon disappeared into a mist of blue sparks, leaving nothing behind but my pants. I untied the knots at the ankles and checked the insides. Completely spotless.
“I know.” Mac remarked. “It’s beautiful isn’t it? The mess just vanishes like it was never there in the first place!”
“Yes, it’s very convenient.” I replied idly as I pulled up the menu to check on how many more kilograms of charcoal I’d need to haul down here. To get that emergency mana generator running.
Repair emergency mana generator [19.823 points]
So, I managed to reduce the resource demand by 0.177 points. That actually wasn’t that bad. Except that I wouldn’t be able to do this indefinitely. The mana generator only required so much raw carbon.
“So, you’re sure that this mana generator thing is going to enable a lot more functions than what we have r
ight now?”
“Definitely. I’ve been talking to the ship’s computers. She calls herself The Wanderer by the way, and she’s shown me some truly spectacular things! This ship has the ability to grow and expand like a living entity, so long as it has the resources.”
“Well then let’s buy the mana generator!” I exclaimed with excitement. Then I frowned. “Wait. I don’t want to waste these points if I don’t have to. Let me max out the carbon demand. That’s easy enough for me to do, and it will save us a few of these points. Otherwise I have to fight for these things.”
It took me a few more loads, and each time I was highly tempted to just throw the points at it and see what would happen. Years of penny pinching had taught me patience though. When the cost for the emergency mana generator stopped decreasing, I finally pushed the button.
Repair emergency mana generator [18 points]
233.49 points available. Yes / No
I watched as the number points I had went down to 215.49. As it did, one corner of the room started moving and shaking. The glass tubes in that area started rearranging themselves in thin air.
Light glowed in geometric patterns, weaving itself into hexagons and cubes. As the light faded, a layer of plasticky material was left behind. It looked like there was an invisible 3D printer rendering the mana generator out of thin air.
After about a minute, the device was built. It was about the size of my head, with a big rotating cylinder in the center, which was turning slowly through no discern-able means.
“Well?” I asked Mac. Maybe he could see something I couldn’t, because from where I was standing there was a lot of nothing happening.
“I can feel the batteries charging, Theo!” Mac said excitedly.
“Oh, so it’s just an electric generator.” Honestly, I was a bit disappointed. Since The Wanderer’s system tacked the word mana in front I expected something… magical.
“Say, Mac. What does this thing take for fuel?”
“It doesn’t! I’m reading the read-me file right now. It converts local ambient energy directly into a fundamental source of energy! The files seem to refer to this energy as ‘mana’.”
“That’s actually… really, really good.” I said with a smile. No hauling endless piles of fuel to feed a furnace. No steam turbines that need to be maintained. This was my kind of magic.
“I’ll say, if I had one of these back home, I might have even been able to go portable! No more need to leave my CPU’s screwed into a wall, I’d be free to take my real body wherever I wanted. I’ve always wanted to visit the arctic circle. All that clean, white snow around, and no danger of overheating…”
“So, Mac.” I tried to snap the AI out of its daydream. “Have you found anything that will help on your trawls through the ships data? Any way back?”
“I believe I have found a method that will allow me to synthesize custom structures using points, which I now understand to be a unit denoting a specific amount of energy and matter resources generated by the ship. It’s not terribly efficient though, which is why bringing the raw materials cuts down on costs significantly.”
“Hot dam! That means we can make tools!” I mentally took back what I said about not having enough magic.
“Yes, simple hand tools should be well within my capacity to make. Although I believe the mechanisms for constructing things out of a material other than the black plastic the mana generator is made out of are not yet functional. That being said, now that we have a steady supply of mana, I can begin rebuilding in earnest.
“Speaking of, I need you to give me asset management rights. As it is, what I can do is extremely limited. This place would be so much cleaner by now if the algorithm controlling the ship would let me rearrange things.”
Would you like to bestow your Human Interface Unit with the rights to spend your points and rearrange the customizable areas of The Wanderer?
“Alright, but no spending all the points on cleaning supplies. I want your first priority to be anything that will be immediately useful to me. I know if I give you half the chance you’ll turn this highly advanced alien piece of technology into a carwash.”
Mac muttered something about my dirty, impure soul.
“Oh, there’s one other thing I should mention.” Mac said to stop me from leaving. “I found a video file while trawling through what regions of the ships data banks I have access to. I think you are the intended recipient. It features someone who I believe to match your description of ‘bald alien wizard man’. Also, it was titled ‘Play for Theo’”.
“Well put it up then.” I said with a shrug.
The guy who showed up on the screen was mostly identical to the one I’d seen in the elvish brothel.
“It seems you’ve successfully made it to your destination! Good thing too. Sometimes people get fried when trying to bond to one of our units. I was worried there for the first hundred years, but it seems you pulled through okay.
“Now I’m sure you’ve got a whole slew of questions. I’m going to answer a few of the more important ones.
“I’m sure you’ve already noticed that you’re not on Earth anymore. In fact, you are quite far away from your old home planet, both in terms of space and time. It’s possible for you to one day get home, but honestly? You didn’t seem too happy back there anyway.
“The place you’ve now found yourself is usually referred to as The Ten Thousand Worlds. Mostly because there are, as you might expect, ten thousand worlds orbiting the remains of one my old companion’s ship. He, like you, was granted a ship like The Wanderer, and grew it into that massive thing you see in the sky up there. He built these ten thousand worlds as a playground of sorts.
“You’re on one of those ten thousand worlds now. Your job, should you survive these crucial few months, is to get The Wanderer in working order. Once you’re operational, I’ll start sending you some real missions. Keep in mind though, you’re not the only person we sent here. The other Travelers are not your friends. This is a battle royal, winner take all.”
The screen went black for a moment, before quickly going live again. This last bit must have been edited on afterward.
“I should mention that my old friend was a bit of a pervert, so he sculpted this world according to his fantasies. Have fun with that! Also, stop calling me Baldy!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Mac sent me off with some new tools made out of the black plastic material and his best attempt at a proper shirt. It wasn’t very stylish, and the weave was so coarse that it was practically a fishing net, but it was better than nothing. It was itchy, but at least it did the job. At the very least, it would be easy to loop some of my new tools through it. Plus, the design made it very easy to stick new strands of bark too, making armor repairs fast and easy.
There were a lot of questions raised by Baldy’s recording. Yes, I was going to keep calling him Baldy. In the end, I decided to just table those questions for a later date. Finding security for the next month was what I needed to focus on. The long-term planning could wait.
The plastic Mac made the tools out of didn’t seem to hold an edge well, so our attempts at blades and saws were doomed to failure. I did have a nice shovel though, and a big Viking-style center grip shield. Mac also made me a new spear shaft and a couple of exchangeable grips that would hold my bronze dagger in place better than friction and my homemade string.
I also had a proper bucket which would be useful. Mac assured me it could take full boiling temperatures, but I still worried about putting it in a fire. Still, if it worked at all I’d use it over the snail shell.
Mac had also come up with some thin sheets of plastic that I could fold into a cube. These would be handy for making sunbaked bricks. The clay around here wasn’t very good, but if I cleaned it up a little in the bucket I might be able to start building out of clay.
All those toys were nice, but Mac’s best creation by far were the shoes he made me. Really, they were more like closed-toe sandals, but already
my feet were thanking me for not having to endure the rough stone ground on their own.
All in all, it only cost me another 30 points.
Mac insisted that we get the scanner operational as soon as possible. Apparently, it would allow us to communicate even when I was on the surface, so long as I didn’t go too far away.
I agreed with him that such an ability would be very welcome. It was a little lonesome back at camp by myself, and it was probably even worse for Mac buried underground as he was.
That brought me back to the last item that Mac had given to me. It was a shallow dish in the shape and size of a dinner plate, with a variety of ridges lining the sides. I’d spotted some magnetite in the area around here, but I didn’t have the man power or infrastructure to go mining. So, I’d be panning for precious metals. With any luck, my little camp would be able to enter the iron age soon.
***
Panning in the creek didn’t give me any nuggets of gold, but I got a lot of black sand. Hematite and magnetite probably, which was good. I dedicated a few hours a day to planning and the rest to building a furnace out of clay.
I’d actually gotten quite a bit of metal thus far. Once I got down to a pan full of black sand, I dumped it in my bucket. There were more than a few bits of gold floating around there amids all that iron. Not nuggets, but tiny little specs. Gold doesn’t alloy well with iron and melts at a significantly lower temperature. Gold was always valuable, Mac had assured me The Wanderer could certainly use it to offset some point costs, but I was more interested in having trade goods with the locals. Honestly, with the amount of gold in this area, I suspected that the creek must pass through a rich gold vein somewhere nearby.
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh Page 6