Rocks fall down a path tread by death and sully embers.

***

I opened my eyes to the faint daylight of cloudy skies reaching down my chimney, and could feel the chilly morning cold due to the fire running out of wood. Like clockwork, the blaringly loud noise of an alarm clock starts buzzing on my nightstand. I cover both of my ears, close my eyes and try to lay back down to sleep again, just to realize that I’d been sleeping on a sofa chair and not my bed.

I don’t even own an alarm clock. What the hell is making that sound anyways?

I slowly open my eyes again and take my hands off my ears to witness that same faint daylight in my chimney. I sluggishly place my blanket to the side, stretch my arms and legs while a yawn at the same time. After which, I stood up from the sofa to immediately re-light the fireplace to warm up my abode once again. At this I felt the ache in my legs from sleeping upright, but just decided to ignore it and figure out what was making that noise.

It appeared to be coming from my room, as the closer I got to the door, the more clearly I could hear it. With a heavy heart, I open my bedroom door to find a mass of green glowing energy, the source of the noise, with two pairs of yellow eyes staring back at me.

Ohhh, it’s ‘dog’.

Yes, ‘dog’ is his name. I’ll figure out his name later. God… I always say that.

I walk over and crouch down in front of him and pat his head, of which the alarm clock buzzing halts subsequently. ‘Dog’ can mimic sounds perfectly, but I’ve never had an alarm clock, so it’s as if he had had a previous owner or some sort.

I… forgot to feed him when I got back home, so that’s probably why he’s making such sounds. I passed out right after I started the fire, so I hadn’t eaten nor showered since last night either. Obviously a mistake on my end, so I’ll prepare… something, for both him and I.

I put my boots on and exit from the gateway… doorway… I guess it’s a secret passage. As I step onto the steps of my house, I feel a wave of light cold on my face and through my longsleeve shirt. I don’t need to wear my jacket, since I’ll only be out here for a minute or two. It’s still ‘summer’ anyway, warm enough to not immediately repulse upon the cold.

*thud, thud, thud

My boots consecutively thud as I step down stone.

*crunch, crunch, crunch

Light snowfall crunches beneath me.

It’s surprisingly bright out today in spite of the familiar encompassing cloudline, now gray instead of black. I’m pretty sure it’s June, so the sun must be high up in the sky, beyond the clouds and skyline of this god forsaken tundra.

I’d love to see the sun again someday.

I and other survivors have adjusted and accepted the fact that as long as the Decay exists, we won’t ever see the sun again. That’s why people continue to fight on and become stronger to redeem our past failure at the Liberation War.

A lot of the remaining survivors are adolescents or children. While not visible at first glance, most of them are mentally ill or of the sort. It’s a given for the children though. Most of them are orphans who lost their parents either when the Decay began or the Liberation war. Not that I know of their conditions, of course. I’ve been living here in desolate Korguire for a year and a half now.

When I look down at the snow as I tread around to the back of my house, I can barely make out the faint blue reflection that the snow gives off. Yet the further into the distance I look, the more apparent it becomes, until it looks like water. It cuts off as a shade of ice blue on the horizon, where I can once again see only the white clouds that condemn us to Decay in frost.

The crunch of snow stops as I reach a large stone box, a few feet taller than myself. I manipulate the stone to form an entrance in the box, revealing several hanging corpses suspended by white ropes stained red by blood.

Sorry, I meant the monster meat I’ve been storing in here. This box is basically just an outdoor freezer.

The unusually bright day lets me see the meat hanging in the back and more meat stored on stone shelving on both sides of the freezer room. Most of the shelving on the left is empty, while the right side has some spread out. Most of my rations are hanging from said ropes, so I make a cleaver out of stone in my left hand and cut a chunk of ribs off of some random monster's ribcage ( probably a Folatr ). The rib chunk falls and almost touches the ground, but I narrowly catch it before so. I had cut off 4 ribs out of 26, yet this amount alone on its short side is as wide as the length of my forearm.

I couldn't possibly eat this much in one meal, so I save the extra for later or when I know for sure I can’t finish what I’m cooking, I turn it into Folatr jerky. It tastes… acceptable, but it activates my Alchemy Amulet for the strength buff.

Since I had everything I needed, I walked back onto the sunless tundra, cold and desolate, and traced my steps to the front of my house. Before I turn the corner, I turn back and throw the stone cleaver in my hand into the freezer room. Right as it’s in the doorway, I lift my hand and manipulate the stone into a wall once again, the cleaver assimilated into said wall.

I turn my head forward and walk around the corner of my house. Snow crunches underneath my boots as I turn another corner, the front steps of my house entering my vision once again.

I enter my house from the steps, take off my boots and walk over to the kitchen to the right of entering the house.

I placed the ribs into the oven dish I had placed on my counter beforehand. Before I put the lid on the dish, there are three little steps.

First, it always had to be the seasoning. Nothing interesting, just salt, black pepper and some mysterious herbs grown from the Guardian of Nature artifact,

Second, I wrap the ribs in aluminum foil. Aluminum foil is far more common when looting than I’d ever had imagined, I have like six rolls in spare.

Third, I heat the stone oven I made. I opened the bottom cabinet ( which I modified to be fire resistant ) which has firewood in it. Using my ignition bracelet, I fine tune the amount of fire to heat the oven to 215C* ( 420F* ).

As soon as I deactivate the artifact, I pull my hand away to avoid burning my finger.

I haven’t eaten or made something like this in a while, but the last time I ate it I was pissed about how dirty my hands were, so I’m using a fork this time.

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***

This is fine.

The food tasted exactly as I expected it to, since I didn’t do anything special with it. Also, it was a little. chewy

My dish was ⅓ of those ribs, ⅓ rice, and ⅓ of these vegetables I can grow from the Nature Guardian Artifact.

To describe what Folatr meat normally tastes like, it would be something like bitter beef. Despite being frog shaped, their bone structure is more similar to a cow.

‘Dog’ must still be hungry, so I grab my plate and walk over to my bedroom. He’s sitting patiently in the doorway, the glowing mass of energy in the shape of a dog, all of his innumerable pure lamp-yellow eyes on me. I stop in front of him, I squat down low enough where my hand and his head are at the same height. As I tilt the plate in his direction, the mass of energy I assume to be his mouth expands while the bones on the plate fall and disappear within the abyss.

His mouth presumably closed and he shut all of his innumerable eyes at once while tilting his head. I swear, he formed a smile with that green energy. RIght then, I could see a wave of near white energy pulsating throughout his body for a second.

Oh, and to be clear, he can take up any shape he likes. It seems that he prefers the dog shape though.

In my house, he is the only other source of light beside fire. A sort of light I could find solace in.

“Solace…”

That’s a nice name. I’ll name you that.

Solace.

My solace after almost losing everything thrice.

To find solace within the failure I am.

I smiled to myself silently when I named Solace. He probably didn’t even notice nor care, but I did.

It’s not like I lost anything of personal value when the Decay began… did I?

My legs were getting tired from sitting in that squat position and my arm was getting tired holding the plate upright, so I got up silently and walked over to my sink and simply dropped the plate in to clean up later. It makes a clunk sound when it touches the bottom. I ran out of weak paper plates a while ago, the ones I’d found after the 3,5 year mark had started deteriorating, so I use these… plastic plates? I think they are. The fancier kind, if that’s a thing.

I rinsed my hands and dried them off. I didn’t shower after the gory battle last night, so I hopped in the shower, turned it on, bore with the cold for a bit and had a nice, long hot shower.

***

Here it is…

The ol’ White Reaper corpse I forgot to harvest.

I shifted here with a stone I had summoned during the battle right after I prepared everything necessary. Changing from a dark gray sweatshirt and black sweatpants to a different pair of the exact same general description. Wearing the same dark-gray oversized coat, of course.

It may seem a little thin to keep me warm, but I have the ignition bracelet on me, so the cold is negligible.

In front of me lies the deceased white reaper from yesterday’s encounter, squashed by the massive stone block, around 4.5 meters in all parameters. That’s around triple the average person's arm span.

“Now, to take what I need~”

Ugh— that was a little too expressive… But it doesn’t really matter who sees me now, no? Slurring my lines, it's a little too unlike me.

Now back on task.

The real problem here is that I crushed it with a massive stone block to finish the battle, and now it is mostly crushed. To get the heavy block off the reaper, I summon a pebble in my hand and throw it a little ways away and shift the pebble and heavy stone block between each other, bathing both in glowing purple glitch effect for a split second.

What lies in the purple light's wake is the corpse of the white reaper. It was squashed by the block yesterday, but it seems to not have been flattened.

Good. That means that I’ll be able to retrieve useful material from this. Though with the block off of it’s corpse, the bloody snow and frozen blood splattered over a wide area is much more apparent.

The amount of salvageable material is questionable, but I don't have the liberty to be picky. There are 4 things I want to harvest from this; the muscle, liver, a special part of its tail and the organ possibly behind the sleeping gas. The tail and sleeping gas organ aren’t for myself, they will serve another purpose.

To start, I very slowly manipulate a stone in my hand. The stone starts sprouting out of my grasped hand of where the handle would be and slowly crawls outward from base to tip of a sleek hunting knife, slightly sharper than what I think a normal hunting knife would be. The only discernible detail is the separation of handle and blade.

I play around with the knife a little bit to adjust to it, flourishing it a bit and mimicking dissection in the air.

Then I salvage the organs I need.

Muscle: Enough to be considered retrieved.

Liver: Damaged, salvaged.

Tail: Intact, retrieved.

Special Organ: Unknown, unretrieved.

After carving out around a dozen kilos/26 pounds of flesh, a quarter of its liver and the special part of its tail, I summon a stone and manipulate it underneath the butchered parts. Once all of the parts are on the stone, I incase it by manipulating the stone into a box.

Following this, I shift the box with the contents inside all the way back home with a pebble left a few meters outside my house. I do the same, shifting in the glowing purple glitch effect.

Instead of shifting beside the box I sent, I shifted with a pebble a little further away from my house. Just a couple dozen meters, nothing special. From my position, I could see the box containing the raw meat I stored in at my front door. As I walked over, I could once again hear the snow crunch under my boots, leaving my footprints behind. Other than that, it was totally quiet due to there being no wind that day.

Once I get close to the box and my home, I telekinetically lift the box and walk around to the back side of my home with the box held on the outer edge while I walk on the side close to my house.

I reach the stone storing room and similarly open up a doorway for myself. I manipulate the stone box I’m lifting, letting the meat fall in like a funnel as the box gradually folds into an upside-down cone like shape. I seal the cone and practically throw it through the doorway into the storehouse.

After that, I summon a pebble in my hand to shift with a rope ( which I could shift because it was touching one of my summoned stones ) into my hand. I walk into the storehouse and telekinetically lift the cone shaped container to me.

By using my telekinesis and stone manipulation conjointly, I tie the various pieces of bloody meat to the stone trusses I made on the roof specifically for this purpose.

This time, I shifted into my house with a pebble on the inside of my doorway. I walk to the bathroom and after messing with the plumbing system, I wash my hands.

Just to be clear, I didn’t make the plumbing system myself or anything. I kind of just dug up a working one and ran with it.

Now, to resume what I was trying to do yesterday.

I’m going out and venturing into Rochefell, a mountainous region out North-Eastward, where my info leads me to an old, abandoned MOTF base. MOTF is a lucrative bioengineering company based in Entoria which essentially dismantled a short while after the Decay despite their technology.

They were originally Entoria’s main biomechanical weapons engineer and manufacturer, which meant it created Pasalana’s and various robots. While I’m investigating the place more-so due to my past with them, it's mostly for Marsh’s research.

After grabbing the necessary supplies for the journey, I shifted near the White Reaper once again. A reg bag slung over my shoulder alongside my satchel. I walked around the White Reaper to face the tall, gray mountains covered in occasional bits of snow. These mountains, while quite intimidating, were for the most part trivial to me. I don't need to worry about Solace. I left a bunch of old bones out for him to eat.

I took a deep breath and exhaled, making a puff of my frozen breath appear in front of me. My face softened and my eyes grew a little wider than they usually do. Holding the strap of the red bag on my right shoulder and my left hand over my satchel, I embark towards those perilous mountains ensuite of the truth behind those words uttered to me that day.