It had taken him nearly a day to get ready to leave the basin. He had collected a wide variety of plants and other various ingredients and was lacking a basket or backpack to carry everything.

His superhuman dexterity still allowed him to weave a container using bamboo strips in a few hours. The basket looked like a giant trash can made from natural fibers and he had added two straps for easy carrying.

The squirrels had helped him get enough nuts to finish his quest, which he’d snacked in between work. In the end, the result was somewhat disappointing.

Quest completed. Gained 10 BLP

He didn’t even get a new quest. All that had changed was that he only needed 90 more points until the next level.

The first skill had already proven its worth, even if he could only test a tiny part. Still, he was excited to unlock more.

The squirrels had led him to the cliff opposite to the waterfall. It was a part of the basin he’d barely explored before, which made him wonder what else he’d missed.

The entrance was well hidden and tiny.

It was so small, in fact, that Joseph would barely fit at all while crouching. He’d need to pull his basket behind him using a long rope.

He stared into the darkness. He had collected some bioluminescent flowers, earth and all, that he’d put on top of his basket to get some light into the tunnel. But seeing the darkness in front of him made him wonder if this was the right call.

He sighed. At this point, he’d experienced pain, exhaustion and other uncomfortable things that a dark hole couldn’t scare him.

The goodbye with the squirrels was surprisingly emotional. The squirrels had managed to find some weird giant mutated nut and made a helmet out of its shell. He nearly teared up when Tiny called him a honorary member of the clan. Even if their time together had been short, he would miss the mischievous critters and their antics.

As a joke, he took one of the bioluminescent flowers and attached it to the helmet, creating something akin to a stone-age miner’s helmet. A few squirrels liked the idea so much that they started decorating their helmets with flowers too, which created the first fashion trend in squirrel society.

But it was finally time for him to leave. He crouched and shuffled into the opening. The makeshift light was barely enough for a meter of light, but it was better than nothing.

He slowly made his way inwards. Besides a cool draft coming from behind, the tunnel was boring. The walls, ceiling, and floor were made from the same gray stone and looked excavated.

After a few minutes, the path started to move upwards. Instead of following straight lines, it went left and right in a slightly serpentine manner.

Even his superhuman constitution didn’t stop his back hurting from the permanent crouch-hobbling. Whenever he tried to relax his spine, he hit his head on the low ceiling. The squirrel-made nut helmet had already proven its worth multiple times over.

At some point, the air acquired a slightly musky scent and got noticeably wetter. His hands touched moss in places where he previously had only found cold stone.

The ground was no longer rock, but covered in a bed of moss and algae, with dripping water running in between. It got so slippery that he struggled to get up the slope. He was forced to prop himself between the walls to not slide backwards. His arms started to hurt from the continuous strain.

He started to cough from the moldy air, which made his hands slip. Every time it happened, he slid backwards and was forced to ram his limbs into the tunnel walls to stop, acquiring an ever-growing amount of scratches.

His bioluminescent flower had gotten weaker and weaker. He was navigating more by touch than by light.

But he didn’t let go. Going backwards and sitting around cultivating until he could climb the cliffs safely would have been the easier choice.

With gritted teeth, he pushed himself forward. The tunnel might be uncomfortable, but he had gotten used to the pain.

At some point, the airflow had gotten stronger again. The air lost its moldy smell and he could finally take some deep breaths again. With renewed strength, he pushed onwards.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

After another bend, he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. He stumbled forwards like a thirsty man in a desert.

Then he finally broke into the sunlight.

Panting, he took off his makeshift backpack and laid on the ground, not even caring about where he had arrived. His lungs filled with fresh air full of a pleasant floral aroma, and his heart could finally rest.

It took him minutes until he had calmed down enough to sit back up.

Joseph was sitting in a curated garden. He had been laying in the middle of a bed of peonies, creating a large indent in the carefully arranged flowers. Surrounding him were a variety of other species of plants, carefully arranged in aesthetic that created natural displays you could appreciate from the serpentine path going in between. The whole was framed by small streams that could be traversed using tiny, elegant bridges.

Surrounding the garden was a tall wall on three sides, with a large house on the last. The shutters were currently closed, and no one seemed to be out.

He wondered if he had some kind of affinity for landing in the wrong parts of a garden.

Joseph sighed. He hoped the owners were mortals and not some crazy cultivators. He’d already spotted three different types of plants commonly used in alchemy, so his chances were slim.

He looked at his outfit. His skin was full of scratches, dust, and sweat. The pajama was a faded mess of holes, primely the one on his chest where the snake-spit had hit him, and one of his pant legs missing. His hair was a tangled mess with patches of straight up felt that could probably only be cut out.

His only belongings were a variety of slightly expensive plants and other alchemical ingredients carried in a makeshift backpack that looked like it belonged to a rice farmer.

In conclusion, anyone who’d seen him would think he was a homeless man trying to steal plants from an expensive garden.

Joseph looked back at the hole he had come from. The entrance had been hidden by the now flattened peonies. He thought about just sliding back into the basin instead of trying to escape some random cultivator compound.

But he was tired. So he stepped through the plants onto the footpath and slowly made his way through the garden. He had seen no people so far, so he hoped that he could just quietly escape.

He made his way over to one of the walls at random. It was slightly higher than a basketball hoop and topped with a tiny decorative roof. Joseph crouched, grabbed his backpack straps and jumped with all his power.

He barely reached the shingles on top of the wall, but his hands held. With a pull up, he pushed himself up and straddled the top.

Instead of a street or any other structure that would denote outside, he found himself encountering a training yard. It was empty besides a single blue-haired young woman training. Her clothes looked similar to the Azure Sky Sect robes he’d worn previously, but they were slightly more elegant. The combination of blue on blue worked surprisingly well.

She was hitting a training dummy with various melee strikes in a beautifully arranged, flowing dance. Her speed was easy for him to follow, suggesting that she was at a roughly similar level of advancement.

He was so mesmerized by her performance that he forgot to hide. When she took a break, face full of sweat, her eyes went up and she inevitably found him.

For a tiny second, he wondered how he looked from her perspective.

Then her previously exhausted face morphed into a grimace of aggression as she screamed for guards, before charging fearlessly in his direction.

Joseph fell out of his trance and jumped up, then started sprinting along the thin roof of the wall. Some shingles were loose or cracked, which nearly made him slip multiple times.

He could barely look behind himself to see the woman pulling herself up the wall behind him before the wall ended in front of him, splitting into two directions. Because of his speed, he moved in a straight line, jumping into a courtyard. He ran for his life, crossing into a Pavillion were two elderly people were having tea.

Without a care, he tried jumping over their table, missed his target, then slid the last half, grabbing a random teapot on the way while spilling all the other expensive looking porcelain. The two seniors started to scream behind him, but he was already out of the Pavillion again, sprinting through the sand.

He headed slightly left, following the path through a gate, arriving in another courtyard that only ended in another housing complex. He came to a full stop, since he didn’t want to enter any of the houses at all. A quick look behind him showed that his pursuer was still hot on his tail.

Having no better idea, he threw the random teapot he’d grabbed at her before scaling another wall randomly. He heard a clinking sound and some angry curses behind him, but then he’d already dropped on the other side again.

He should’ve looked. Instead of another new courtyard he could’ve run through, he was greeted by two men in blue cultivator robes. For a moment he was thinking about trying to evade them too, but the two looked vaguely familiar, so instead he just stopped.

One of them was a tall, thin man in his mid fifties with a short triangular beard that was manicured into such sharp lines that it could probably cut. His hair was put into a ponytail with not a single strand escaping. Even his eyes held the same sharpness, as if a single look was enough to part steel.

The other one was the complete opposite. A rotund man with a merry grin on his face, legs slightly apart and solid like a tree. His head was a polished bald dome reflecting the sunlight. He wore a large chain of red prayer beads around his neck that seemed to float slightly.

Then he heard a soft plop behind him. He turned around and was affixed by blue eyes sitting between blue hair. The young woman was rubbing her head as if she’d been hit by something and stared daggers at him.

“That’s the intruder I’ve found,” she spoke.

The thicker of the two cultivators started to laugh. “Ah, you must be mistaken, young miss. This man is no intruder. He’s one of our guests. His uncle already explained that he’d be arriving late.”