Groaning, Leon attempted to angle his head away from the light. The sun was shining into his eyes, stabbing them like each ray was a knife. He could feel a migraine lingering in the back of his skull, waiting to come alive at the slightest prodding. He gently tilted his head and immediately regretted it. The muscles in his neck spasmed for less than a second, and yet the migraine came to life, a dull ache spreading over his entire head and neck.

Leon focused on nothing but his breathing. The air had a metallic, ashen quality to it. While he had never been in a smithy before, that was how he imagined the air to be. A fire roaring in the background, hot metal being hammered on an anvil. Smoky.

Was Leon somewhere in the subway tunnels? He must’ve broken a hole in the roof if there was sunlight.

Content to wait for his migraine to settle, Leon focused on the condition of his body. He’d been deep asleep moments ago and was now battling to take a breath without wincing in pain. Some of his ribs were definitely broken. His entire body was also covered in dull aches, meaning his right leg must’ve been pretty bad if he could feel that pain through everything else.

The oversensitivity began to fade, allowing Leon to gently open his eyes and acclimate to the brightness. He glanced up at the leafy canopy above him. The leaves were green, each one speckled with flakes of gold that glittered in the warm sunlight. That was odd, but not that out of the ordinary compared to what he had been through recently. And then he noticed that the branches and trunk were the complete opposite, the brown wood holding a dark red tinge the colour of dried blood.

The tree being red and the air smelling funny was abnormal, but it was nothing compared to realising he should be underground. Or maybe he was? Had the creators of the omniscient System generated some kind of magical biodome under the earth that Leon just happened to fall into? No, that couldn’t be right. The sky was blue and the sun was shining down on him, the air fresh despite the ashen, metallic smell.

He was obviously on the surface, but his mind struggled to make sense of how he got there. Who had pulled him out from a million tons of collapsed rock? The only way he could’ve been saved was if he fell into a hidden tunnel beneath the subway line and was then dragged out using heavy mining equipment. Of course, that didn’t make any sense considering the whole nuclear apocalypse thing going on in the city.

It was almost like he had been teleported here. Leon glanced at his surroundings and found that he was alone in a vast, red and gold forest. Not a single person was nearby. Stretching his arms, Leon touched a few bits of rubble surrounding his body, reinforcing the idea that he had teleported.

He made to sit up but quickly lay back down. His entire body was bruised, his ribs were broken, and his right thigh was sliced open from his knee to his hip. The cut wasn’t bleeding anymore and even had scabs forming on its very corners, making him smile. Half-healed injuries meant an infusion of life essence after he had collapsed the tunnel and injured himself. Only a horde of dead phantoms could partially heal a wound that big, meaning his friends were probably safe for the time being.

It had worked.

Leon basked in the warmth of the sun for a moment, simply enjoying his victory. He was alive and so were his friends. Then his stomach rumbled, the pain of bruised organs and an empty stomach becoming too prominent to ignore. How long had he been asleep? Hours? Days? His joints were stiff and most of his body had turned purple with bruises, meaning it must have been a few days at the very least. Bruising usually took a day or two to turn really dark purple like his were now, but that was only a vague guess since his body had been changed by cultivation.

With Qi running through his spirit, Leon could probably stay up for a whole week and then sleep for two without interruption. Meanwhile, a regular person would’ve died long ago from starvation and thirst, their body unable to cope with starvation. The fact that he was so hungry didn’t necessarily mean he had been asleep for long. He was badly injured, and injuries required energy to heal. It made sense that he would be hungry after a day or two without eating anything, especially when his body was trying to repair itself.

His stomach grumbled again.

Angling his head, Leon searched the forest with his eyes. He needed food, water, and shelter in that order. What was the saying? Three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, and three weeks without food? The weather was quite nice so shelter wasn’t on the very top of his list. It might get cold at night, though, so finding somewhere warm to sleep was still up there.

Food and water were his highest concerns. Leon still had a few muesli bars, a bag of jerky, and half a litre of water in his backpack, but that wouldn’t last him very long. He didn’t even know where he was right now. It might take him weeks to find anything edible-

Leon stared at a bush directly behind his head, its thin branches heavy with red berries. Well, that solved one problem. Biting back tears, Leon rolled over onto his stomach. His ribs creaked and the grass felt like knives stabbing into his purple and black skin, but once he began to crawl, he quickly found a comfortable rhythm. If weeping every time he moved could be described as comfortable, that is.

Once he made it to the bush, Leon wracked his brains to try and remember what learned about wild berries at school camp. There was something about colour and shape, but it was all fuzzy now. White and green berries were poisonous, red berries were a coin toss, and the rest were…

He couldn’t remember.

Thankfully, he only needed the part about red berries. Leon stared at the tiny fruits laid before him. They were bright red and resembled raspberries, their surface made out of little orbs. That was a good trait. If he wasn’t misremembering, the clusters usually meant edible, tilting the scales of the coin toss in his favour.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

They very well could be the berries he was familiar with, but since they were not opaque like normal raspberries, he didn’t want to take the risk and toss them into his mouth. For all he knew, they could’ve been some kind of Qi-infused super poison.

Leon plucked one and held it in the light. Unlike a normal raspberry, the little orbs had a glassy texture. Even the juice inside was a deep, crimson red.

Leon hesitantly rubbed the juice onto the back of his hand. After a few minutes with no reaction, he moved to take a bite, letting the juice touch his tongue. He didn’t swallow any of it, of course, spitting the juices out onto a golden patch of grass beneath him. It didn’t melt or catch on fire so that was a good sign. From there, he simply lay in the warm grass with his eyes half-closed.

He was exhausted despite sleeping for days.

Another few minutes passed with nothing happening to his tongue, which must’ve been a good sign. He even stuck it out to see if it had changed colour, but his fears were unwarranted. The fruit was most likely safe.

Leon took the final leap and ate a whole berry, savouring the feeling of having something in his stomach. With nothing to do while he waited for his body to digest and possibly reject the fruit, he lay his head down and opened his notifications.

[Congratulations! You have evolved your Qi Eruption (Uncommon) skill into Qi Bullet (Rare).]

[Skill limit reached. You must gain insight into the Dao if you wish to create an Epic skill.]

Mila had mentioned the Dao before but only in the context of the stories she liked to read. The general themes, however, remained the same. Dao was another word for the fundamental laws that guided the chaos that was reality. Whether it be the laws of physics or a drop of morning dew resting on a blade of grass, the Dao encompassed everything.

Leon didn’t know much more than that so he opened up the next notification.

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

Leon was now level eight, but that didn’t make sense. He had obliterated around fifty humanoid demons and then caused the deaths of another forty or so Depthstalker Phantoms by collapsing the ceiling onto them. Since his Executioner title hadn’t upgraded, that could only mean he’d killed less than fifty or whatever the next cutoff was, and yet he’d only gained two levels.

Either the phantoms and humanoid monsters granted less energy than the spiders, or something else was going on. Perhaps levelling became more expensive? Or perhaps his body had absorbed the life essence to heal itself before he could use it to increase his level?

Unable to find a definitive answer, Leon checked his titles.

[Inspired II: Create an uncommon-rarity Qi technique before establishing your foundation. +2% to Mind.]

->

[Inspired III: Create a rare Qi technique before establishing your foundation. +3% to Mind.]

[Prodigy II: With superior Qi control, you become able to shape and compress your Qi beyond what is possible by most. +2% to Mind.]

->

[Prodigy III: With strong instincts, you have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt and manipulate Qi even when faced with adversity. +3% to Mind.]

Leon idly wondered about what an epic skill would look like. Skills of a higher rarity were obviously better, but he wasn’t exactly sure how beyond the obvious. The fact that higher skills needed some kind of Dao probably meant they were special compared to regular expressions of Qi. While his Qi supply was topped off, his channels were sore and his mind was heavy, forcing him to hold back on experimenting with Qi Bullet any time soon.

The title upgrades were nice. While Inspired III was largely unchanged, the flavour text of Prodigy III had been updated to reflect how he had earned the title. Leon believed that everyone with the title would have their own version depending on how they got acquired it.

The berries seemed to be safe to eat. After fifteen minutes or so, Leon decided that the berries were not poisonous enough to kill him. He ate a handful before his wounds began to tingle.

Leon focused on the sensations, closing his eyes. A flow of energy drifted out of his stomach and seamlessly fused with his blood. Whenever it passed by his injuries, which were everywhere, the power disappeared inside his cells and healed them a tiny bit.

Leon rested again until the energy was used up. His ribs felt a little better, the bruises had visibly shrunk by a few hairs, and even the massive cut on his leg had gained a few tiny scabs. That needed to be stitched, though. It was deep, running from above his knee to just beneath his hip.

“Holy shit,” He whispered, thrilled to find something as special as magic healing berries.

Leon sat up and decided to get it over with. Best to rush past the bad parts and get straight to the fun. With only a few tears, he gingerly pulled off his backpack and looked through it for the pocket med kit. It only had an antiseptic, thread and needle, tourniquet, and a bandage, making it rather useless as far as a full medkit went.

Luckily for him, Leon only needed the needle and thread. He quickly washed the muddy wound with some water and rubbed in the antiseptic cream, but while trying to ignore the sharp stinging, he remembered that people used to make poultices from berries.

While holistic medicine was largely a crock of shit designed to fleece the desperate and gullible alike, natural medicine did exist to some provable degree; penicillin mould spurring on the invention of antibiotics being the most obvious. Leon couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if he made a poultice out of magic berries.