"At a certain point, the cutting edge of science became so abstract and complex that it was very hard to make a breakthrough, even a small one. [The low-hanging fruit] had already been [plucked], and the [high-hanging fruit] was increasingly out of reach. So we needed [a ladder]."

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Feeling much more sober, Alex took a step back in disgust, shocked that his emotions had taken control of him so completely. He had never had anger issues before the integration, much less a propensity to torture a living being. Was this some sort of corruption to his thought processes and emotions caused by this new world? By now, the rattle had stopped, and Alex quickly put the kaphdor out of its misery. He barely registered the surge of energy entering his body from the kill. Now drained of adrenaline and his rage having abated, his wounds started to throb with alarming intensity. He grabbed some weeds to try to stem the blood flow, but it was simply too much. With startling lucidity, a thought came to him: I will die here from these wounds if I can’t get help. There was only one option that he could think of. “Open Shop.”

The shop screen popped up in front of his vision. He was surprised and somewhat dismayed to find that there were only three items available in the shop.

Shop

Enhancement Pill (Tier 0-D) … 1 Ł

AI Assistant (Tier 0-D) … 64 Ł

Outpost … 1024 Ł

He noticed that the System particularly favored powers of 2. The numbers 1, 64, and 1024 were all powers of 2, and his beginning stats were 8, with 4 free points. He filed the thought away for future reference.

Alex held off on making any purchases, because he wanted to check on something. As dishonorable as it seemed, the dead were dead, and if they had items, then they would be of much more use to him. So he stumbled over to the corpse of the young woman that he had tried to save. Her spatial bracelet was loose around her wrist now and in the shape of a ring. He tried to take the bracelet, but upon touching it, it dissolved into his skin. Intrigued, Alex opened his own spatial bracelet. Inside were three small translucent white disks, with a concave center and rounded edges, somewhat resembling a red blood cell. He also saw a dark round crystal that was presumably the [Nature’s Rage Pill], but based on the name, it didn’t seem like it would help with his current situation.

He tried reaching his hand in to pull the translucent disks out, but his hand passed right through the image of the space. But then, he felt something intangible brush against his attention in the interior of the spatial bracelet. He tentatively reached his awareness inside, and to his amazement, he was able to move the disks with his mind. He didn’t have great control, though, and the disks plopped out onto the ground.

The three disks glowed with a white light, although one of them was dimmer than the other two. Alex picked the disks up, and upon feeling the energy contained inside them, he immediately realized what they were. These were the physical form of lucens, and these three disks must be the lucens that the woman had managed to gather in the few hours’ head start that she had had over him. He began to absorb them into his body, a process that felt like it would take almost a minute, judging by the rate of flow. He willed it to go faster, not wanting to waste any time due to his current state of injuries. He felt a slight burn, and the disks were consumed within seconds.

As it stood, he thought, his only option of survival was to try to buy an Enhancement Pill from the Shop, even though he didn’t know exactly what it did. He first checked his current balance in the Status screen.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Energy: 4.4 / 19.0 Lucens (Tier 0)

He was troubled to find that something else had changed in his Status screen:

Channel Condition: Excellent

The condition had previously been ‘Perfect’. It seemed that forcing the energy into his body was not such a good idea, after all. Hopefully his channels would recover on their own — if not, then he might have crippled himself. Shaking the worry off, he was happy to see that the three lucens that he had gathered from the young woman’s body had more than doubled his energy stores, and buying a pill didn’t seem like such a huge loss anymore. He completed the transaction with a crude push of mental energy, wanting to get more comfortable using his mind to interact with System interfaces.

When nothing happened, he checked his spatial bracelet. Sure enough, a small white pill had appeared. He was about to take it, but then he noticed something odd. His Status screen was still open, and he saw the energy tick down, from 3.4 to 3.3. This was strange. Something was draining his energy. Cautious, he waited a bit. After about a half minute, Alex’s energy ticked down again. And he noticed something: he was feeling slightly better. His wounds were no longer bleeding as much. He decided to stop trying to activate the pill and instead wait and see what happened — a risky decision considering he was still losing blood, but curiosity had overtaken him.

Then, something remarkable happened: in a few minutes, giant scabs formed across his body where he had been wounded, and the bleeding stopped. Over the next hour, he lay down on the grass in the clearing as the healing process took hold. He was assaulted by an unbearable itchiness, but that soon passed as well. His skin began to knit itself together, and he could feel the deep flesh wounds repairing themselves. And to top it off, his clothing repaired itself where it had been torn. The whole time, his energy was slowly ticking down.

While he was healing, Alex took advantage of the time to get the hang of mentally opening System screens and creating physical lucens. He was able to create a lucen out of very little energy, but it was very dim until he channeled more energy into it. After this experiment, he began to feel what energy flow was like. Alex noticed that there was a faint source of energy flowing throughout his body, from his core into his wounds. This was presumably what was healing him. It was a mere thread compared to what he was able to channel into the lucen. He also noticed that if he focused too much on creating a lucen, he felt the thread of energy flowing into his body disappear, and his healing stagnated. There were lucky moments when he was able to have the flow of outward energy creating a lucen without disrupting the healing, but he didn’t have enough control. So he decided to wait until he felt better before experimenting further.

By the time he felt like he was not in danger of dying due to his injuries, he only had 1.5 lucens left. Before he ticked down to below a full lucen, Alex spent a few minutes creating a full glowing disk and then absorbing it back into his body. He noticed that his channel condition had been restored to ‘Perfect’, and his worries were for nothing. So he then experimented with forcing the energy in and out of his body, and sure enough, this was much faster, but changed his channel condition to ‘Excellent’.

From this experiment, Alex deduced several important principles about energy flow. First, his rapid healing seemed to be a natural process that would consume about 2 to 3 lucens per hour in his current state. Second, unless he forced it, he was able to move energy into or out of his body at a rate of about 3 lucens per minute, which was much faster than his natural rate of healing, which is why the flow of energy from healing was just a thread compared to his natural control. Third, it seemed that his energy flow rate limited all sources of energy, in and out of his body. So this would explain why the thread of healing stopped when he was creating or absorbing physical lucens.

Alex then realized something: perhaps the woman had intentionally emptied her energy reserves into physical lucens right before she died just so that he could have them. That would mean that she had already killed at least five or six of the ant-like creatures, judging from the fact that killing three of them had awarded him at least 1.7 lucens (after taking into account the drain from healing). Moved by this act of generosity, he suddenly felt more acutely the pain of seeing his first potential ally die in front of him.

By the time about an hour had passed, something he kept track of by looking at the Hunting Trial prompt using the View Quests command, he had almost fully recovered. Just as he was beginning to feel like he was in shape again, the warmth left his body. He realized that his lucens had ticked down to 0.0, and he cursed himself for having purchased the pill. Alex hoped that he would be able to obtain more soon, since he still hadn’t fully recovered. He experimented a bit more with the System screens, but after just a few minutes, Alex was interrupted when the forest started to emit an ominous humming noise.