[Basic Waterskin] = 2 Hide (level 6+, 0.3-0.4m) + 1 Twine (Any, 1-1.2m) + 1 Twine (Any, 0.2-0.3m)
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Couldn’t rest yet.
Jay hacked into the mahogany tree, his stone axe shuddering against its bark. Sweat continued to build as he wore the trunk down, even with his sunhat equipped. Though overwhelming heat no longer plagued him, his body only had so much energy left to spare, especially after all this running.
He took a quick break and munched on the dried komodo dragon meat. Thankfully, the power of his drying racks had bought him much time. Any raw meat placed on it would turn into a “dried” version after a couple of hours, preventing it from spoiling immediately at the cost its overall vitality boost. Jay could afford to take the hit though. The level 18+ komodo meat was so strong that it kept his vitality just below 40, where the cut-off would change.
He sucked down some more cocoa tea from his now larger, lizardscale waterskin, feeling that fledgling sense of fatigue drift away yet again, along with his thirst. That was another benefit of the monster he’d slain. The komodo dragon’s scales were strong enough to hold fluids in a waterskin, and did not leak on hit like the weaker variants he had used until now. Coupled with his increased repertoire of drinks to cook, Jay could survive much longer away from home by keeping this upgraded gear on hand.
It made for an interesting realization. Slaying monsters didn’t just give Jay more cores to level. The stronger the creatures he killed, the better the gear he could craft from their bodies, and the easier it was to survive. So long as he made use of every part he could, his chances would only go further up. Even with his Stats so hard to manage during times like this, it was still far easier than when he had started to keep them moving.
Except sleep. Every hour slept recovered two back to fatigue, but Jay could never get enough of that during the day to compensate for the loss at night.
With a sigh, he went back to work. The mahogany tree gave way after another couple of minutes, crashing into the jungle floor. It did not take much longer to hack off smaller pieces for use.
Time to see if this works. Jay opened his leather backpack and grabbed the mats he’d stashed. Eleven pieces of palm wood and eighteen lengths of vines to use as twine. Fashioning them into a workbench was second nature at this point.
He grinned at his own cleverness. Sure, Jay could not bring an entire campsite wherever he went, but nothing prevented him from disassembling and recrafting his precious workbench, and it only filled a third of his backpack when properly packed. After coming up with this trick, he’d been able to speed up his harvesting without hiking back home.
With his crafting speed once again enhanced, Jay gathered the bits of mahogany wood and started forming fresh gear. First, he disassembled the +4 flint spear by unwinding the hemp and removing the core. Then, he replaced the palm wood shaft with the new mahogany wood and went through the process again of tying the core between the tip and shaft with a length of hemp. The magic of the monster core radiated upon completion.
He checked the Inventory section of the Guide and chuckled.
[Flint Spear+4] (Reinforced), (Hardened) – A spear with a tip made of flint. This [Flint Spear] has been modified for added durability and toughness.
He went to the nearest palm tree and [Thrust]. The wood shattered on impact, but the spear itself held firm. When he brought it back to the workbench, only the tiniest length of twine was needed for repairs. About what happened before.
He repeated a few times, checking the durability loss with each attempt. The result was consistent.
So, it worked just as Naomi had claimed. By merely swapping the shaft for harder wood, the amount of durability drained was lessened on use. Not only did that increase longevity, but when coupled with the reinforcement when hemp instead of vines, his spear’s hardiness compounded. Like balancing out a character’s Stats, his weapon was now stronger than ever, even compared to using cloth from his T-shirt.
If only I had more left. Jay shifted the scaled chest armor against his bare chest with a frown. Only his cargo shorts remained from Earth, and it was a step away from being underwear.
Jay skimmed the Crafting page and realized more entries had trickled in. Apparently, mahogany hardwood was the reagent he’d been missing for several tools in the same way hemp unlocked better weapons and armor. He could make stronger wooden spikes and walls, a longbow, and a better roundshield. Why hadn’t he tried this earlier?
He looked to his own tools and their weaker palm hilts and the collapsed mahogany tree, with more wood than he knew what to do with. Time to go nuts.
Within the hour, Jay had upgraded all his tools to support the hardwood and crafted a new roundshield, this one using his excess komodo scales bounded over a sheet of mahogany hardwood, and hemp for the handle. Even his backpack became stronger, now with hardened sticks for support instead of regular driftwood.
Jay tapped his shield and considered the next logical step. With the vessels strengthened, all that remained was to fill them each with the power they needed. That would require monster cores. More than he’d collected until now.
He stared into the jungle and watched the distant plume of dark, magical energy rise, perhaps only a mile away. The last time he’d tracked down that anomaly, it had almost claimed his life. But this time, he’d enter better prepared, with stronger gear.
Jay tapped his sunhat in place and wrapped his hands around his new spear and shield.
It was time for another dungeon run.
* * *
This cairn looked completely different from the last. Rather than being an old radio tower, the magical darkness shrouded a pillbox bunker that could have been ripped straight from a World War 2 movie. Concrete formed a ring where the trees reached their end, with vines growing along its cracked length like blackened tendrils choking the life from all it touched. The grass turned gray nearby, corrupting the entire hill where the pillbox lay. Wisps of black fog continued to rise unabated. The sun made no impact as it continued its mid-afternoon descent.
Jay gulped. Once again, that strange sense of unease trickled down his spine as he stared at the cairn’s infernal essence. He looked at his waterskin filled with cocoa tea and realized that more preparation remained.
Setting up the campfire was child’s play, as was the process of starting a fire and getting a bunch of improvised torches together, strapped together in a makeshift bandoleer to maximize free space in his backpack. With the power of the workbench available, he breezed through in minutes what once took more than an hour. Collecting lifeberries for the tea to offset the cairn’s sanity loss took extra steps, but those bushes were a dime a dozen.
Jay emptied the last of his materials outside the cairn’s entrance and checked his Stats.
Name: Jay Reis (Primal Age)
Vitality – 39/39
Hunger – 68/72
Thirst – 22/24
Fatigue – 3/8 (Poorly Rested+4, Stimmed)
Sanity – 85/100
Jay sighed, seeing his fatigue. He had three hours to make this work. Three hours before taking a nap to recover even a fraction of his lost fatigue. Three hours to collect as many cores as possible for the fight tonight. Three hours before he’d keel over and die from lack of sleep, Stimmed boost or not.
No use dragging this out. He lit his first torch and stepped inside the cairn’s entrance.
The darkness swallowed him at once, the torch’s light magically dimmed. Jay’s lizardscale boots crunched against the concrete floor, but there was no echo. Indeed, the world’s sounds disappeared the moment he crossed the threshold of the black.
Jay waved the torch about, but there was no need. Some light leaked through the pillbox’s windows, though it was more accurate to say that the light could be seen from inside, but did not penetrate itself. Every way he looked, he saw nothing but a veil of black, interposed by the occasional window. A mere whisper to the outside world.
Then his foot thrummed where it had once crunched. He looked down and saw a hatch, its steel tinted brown under a shell of rust. He wrenched the handle, and the hatch screeched open, revealing a second layer of dark.
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Jay lit a second torch and tossed the first down. It fell far too long before reaching the bottom, passing by a ladder the whole way. The wood echoed out as it struck stone, now a tiny dot in an ocean of darkness, with no details to note, other than the base of the ladder.
Great, just great. It wasn’t enough to walk into the spooky dungeon. Now, he’d have to climb. Just how far down there was it? Over a hundred yards, by his count.
But Jay knew that he had no choice. He tucked the torch into the hatch’s side, secured his armor in place, and began to climb down.
Into the abyss, Jay descended. Within moments of moving down the ladder, he lost sight altogether. Though the torches still burned bright above and below, the cairn’s power reduced their luminosity between, leaving him to grope blindly for each rung.
He continued, Little by little. Jay glanced up and down every so often to check his progress, but catching the torches’ glow was difficult with all the disorientation. He could only lower his foot until it hit the next rung, then do the same with his hand. Foot, then hand. Hand, then foot. As long as he kept moving steadily, he’d reach the bottom, sooner or later. Sound and sight need not apply.
Then the whispers started.
They were just faint murmurs, at first. Jay wasn’t sure if he heard anything amiss at all, or if it was his own heavy breathing echoed back. He kept trudging along, convinced that his mind had played tricks on him.
But the deeper he moved, the more pronounced they became. What had started as a quiet repetition in a miasma of opaque shadows slowly grew in intensity. The sound of his own breathing soon became eclipsed by it as these whispers rose in tandem with his movement.
He paused in response and held his breath. The whispers quieted, but only a bit. Jay could still hear them. On all sides. At every angle. Something was out there. Or, by Jay’s count, a large amount of somethings.
He fingered a torch and grimaced. Regardless of how desperately he wanted to give himself light, without being able to place it down and have both hands free, it was impossible to smack the flint into a sustained fire.
Jay glanced down for progress, and was thankful to see the bottom torch getting ever closer. He raised his head to gauge how far he’d come.
But as he looked back up, his heart froze in his chest. Though the hatch had shrunk into a fraction of its original size and the fire still burned strong, something else now formed within the circular hole above.
The silhouette was humanoid in shape only as it stared down the hatch, right at Jay. The matte black circles formed where the eyes should have been against a backdrop of gray skin, but there were no other features of note. No nose, ears, mouth, or even hair. Just two perfect black spheres, cast in shadow as this thing watched him from the top of the ladder.
Jay blinked, and the specter disappeared. He blinked a second time moments later, but it did not return.
The hair rose on the back of his neck. Don’t think about it. Just keep going. That was just another trick of his mind. Maybe even a drop of sanity. Not anything else. He just needed to move quicker. Faster, even. Foot, then hand. Hand, then foot. He’d gotten this far that way, and there was only so much more of the ladder left to climb down. The whispers continued to grow in strength, but Jay need not concern himself with that.
The second he got back to the light, he’d be safe. Somehow, he knew.
Jay pushed as fast as his hands were able. The noises bombarding him began to adopt a stranger, more alien hue. Though their ululations held no words, they shared a language. Archaic. Primordial. A set of dissonant chords that contradicted the ordered universe they were within.
And as these voices called out to Jay, he recalled this sense yet again.
They wanted him. Needed him, even. As his arms and legs moved down the ladder, their tones coiled around him, tightening the muscles in his legs further and slowing progress.
Oh, how easy it would be to stop and take a breath…
But he couldn’t. Jay knew that if he did not reach the ladder’s end soon, he never would. He could feel it.
The base of the ladder was just ahead too. Though the torch’s light had begun to fade, the fire still held firm enough. An island in this ever-tightening noose of shadow. He was so, so close.
Or, perhaps Jay could take a break. Only for a moment, of course. The air was cooler down here, while the fire would burn hot. After days of oppression by the hot, unforgiving sun, why not let himself sit and relax in cold darkness?
His limbs slackened despite himself, and he breathed in comfortable darkness.
He didn’t need to reach the bottom just yet. Jay could close his eyes and let his mind run free, and nothing sinister would happen to him. The ladder rungs became a vertical bed as his fingers wrapped around them tight. Yes, this wasn’t so bad.
Jay closed his eyes and began to drift away. It was okay. He’d already experienced this fate once before. What harm could come from going through it a second time?
Second time… That’s right! Jay shifted uncomfortably in his blackened tomb, remembering where he’d heard these voices before, back in the hospital.
When he first died.
But where that chorus had called out from the abyss to bring him somewhere else, these ones wanted him to never leave. They whispered sweet nothings so that this ladder would become his final resting place.
His heart beat with a fury as Jay fought back. He glanced down again. The coveted base could not have been more than thirty feet away, but with the weight pressing against him, it might have been miles. Each rung was more impossibly sticky than the last, and he could not bring himself to move another rung. How would he climb all the way down to there?
Perhaps he didn’t need to. Jay considered the possibility, his joints slowly hardening into stone.
Before weighing the risk, he pushed all his strength into opening his fingers up.
The result was immediate. Gravity took control, and Jay plummeted below, the air caught in his throat. His body jolted when it struck the stone floor, and a burn coursed through his arm where the torch’s fire licked his flesh, but he no longer felt constrained. Jay coughed up blood with a laugh. He was free!
He quickly rolled onto his side, yanked a torch free from his bandoleer, and ran it against the first. The light exploded out, forming a pocket of protection against the darkness’s fell magic. He breathed deep, feeling himself safe yet again.
What the hell was that? Jay held the torch up high. Though he could not see more than ten feet away, that was enough to make out the boundary of the cairn’s entrance. It turned out that a stone ring sat just outside arm’s reach of the ladder, and painted eyeballs covered its length, stretching into the shadows above. As Jay leaned in, he could vaguely hear the whispers emanating out.
Jay grimaced. So, cairns didn’t just contain monsters to fight, but traps as well. This one seemed to play off the darkness, and he’d barely escaped its grip. Would he be as fortunate going back out?
One problem at a time. He breathed deep. At least he’d gotten through the hardest part.
Hisses rolled down a nearby hallway. Groans followed. Jay raised his shield and held his spear tight. Now that he’d reached the bottom, there was no chance to go back and retreat.
Not when the monsters were coming for him…
Name: Jay Reis (Primal Age)
Vitality – 39/39
Hunger – 68/72
Thirst – 22/24
Fatigue – 3/8 (Poorly Rested+4, Stimmed)
Sanity – ??/100
Main Crafts: Armor Crafting 1, Base Building 1, Cooking 0, Medicine 0, Tailoring 1, Tool Crafting 1, Weapon Crafting 2.
Weapon Crafts: Axes 0, Bows 3, Spears 5.
Armor Crafts: Heavy Armor 2, Light Armor 2, Medium Armor 0, Shields 2.
Armor Skills:
Heavy Armor: [Push]
Light Armor: [Dash]
Shield: [Brace]
Weapon Skills:
Bows: [Sharpshooter]
Spears: [Thrust], [Sweep]
Armor:
[Lizardscale Helmet] (Hardened+1)
[Lizardscale Chestpiece] (Hardened+1)
[Lizardscale Leggings] (Hardened+1)
[Lizardscale Boots] (Hardened+1)
[Lizardscale Gauntlets] (Hardened+1)
[Scaled Roundshield] (Hardened+1)
Weapons:
[Flint Spear+4] (Reinforced), (Hardened)
[Flint Spear+2]
[Bone Dart Pouch+1]: Contains 15 [Bone Darts] (Poisoned)
[Wooden Bow+2]
[Crude Quiver]: Contains 20 [Flinthead Arrows]
Tools:
[Flint Knife]
[Stone Axe]
[Stone Hammer]