As soon as Logan stepped through the portal, he felt a wrenching sensation as if he were on a plummeting rollercoaster. But at least on a rollercoaster, you could see and judge the distance between the cart to the ground. In the portal, Logan knew he was moving, but all he saw was an endless void, as if he were standing in a black hole. It was cold—arctic cold. A cold that sunk into your bones.
But as soon as he comprehended the oddities, it ended.
He was out of the portal.
On solid ground.
Looking behind him with wary eyes, he scanned for the portal, but it had disappeared. Huh. That was a way to travel that he could get behind. It was uncomfortable, but if he could use it to travel miles in seconds, a bit of discomfort wasn’t worth complaining over.
As long as he fixed the Karma requirements.
Once again, it was down to power. He needed a higher Karma pool to unlock [Liche Devourer], and now he needed it to travel. In a way, the portal was yet another method for the System to encourage killing—since how else would he increase his Karma than through leveling?
“Is this where we’ll find your brethren?” asked Ernie, climbing out of his pouch and peering over Logan’s shoulder.
Logan glanced at his surroundings. The portal had taken him to the private, secluded beach next to Richton’s Tomb. The beach wasn’t sandy, but rather full of pebbles and dirt. The terrain was another reason that tourists didn’t flock there—they’d much rather go to the downtown public beaches full of ocean-level sand that sparkled in the sun.
The beach was empty.
But Logan wasn’t expecting to step out of the portal and meet Lara on the other side. By his calculations, he was a day ahead of schedule. Tomorrow morning, Lara and the kids should be making their way through the winding path from the downtown core, up the hill and over to the path that led to Richton’s Tomb.
“Tomorrow,” said Logan. “For now, I’m going to set up camp, clean myself up.”
Ernie jumped to the ground and looked around. As he got sight of the beach and the sheltered harbour, his eyes gleamed. “Night is a good time to add minions to my army. I’ll be… around.”
“Don’t you need to sleep?”
Ernie’s skin was pale. Unless he expended effort to give himself camouflage, he resembled the undead Liche he truly was. “I rival all, Logan,” he said in satisfaction. “There’s no time for sleep when you’re trying to build an army! And Ernie is not so far off when he says that you have grown strong, yes?” Crawling towards the lake, he jumped into the water, dipping below the surface.
“Ernie no longer has to worry that squishy human Logan will come to harm. Instead, the monsters should fear Logan.”
A burst of bubbles rose to the surface before the water stilled and Ernie disappeared.
Logan raised an eyebrow. Oh well, he wasn’t expecting Ernie to stick to him like glue; he wasn’t a dog; he was his own person with his own goals and aspirations. And right now, those goals were a rabid need to add minions to his army.
Plus, Ernie was right. Logan’s grandfather had taught him that no one liked a show off and that it was better to be modest than to be prideful, but he couldn’t help strutting a little, puffing his chest. Lara would never let him live it down if she saw him, but Logan was badass. A number two ranking in the world had to count for something.
He had become higher leveled than Ernie, which meant that in a tricky situation, Ernie would be great support, but he wasn’t necessary in one-on-one fights.
Unless Logan came across the person ranked number one in the world, the mysterious Man in Black. Pulling up the Leaderboard, he gave it a quick glance.
Leaderboard:
* Rank 1: Charon: Level 150 --> Level 170
* Rank 2: Idiot: Level 119
* Rank 3: Yogi Bear: Level 118
* Rank 4: Damsel Fuck You: Level 117 --> 118
* Rank 5: Thor: Level 109 --> 112
* Rank 6: Mictlantecuhtli: Level 108
* Rank 7: Scott: Level 108
* Rank 8: King Kong: Level 107
* Rank 9: Xuanwu: Level 107
* Rank 10: The General: Level 105 --> 106
Charon had gone up twenty levels. Holy shit! He’d checked the list hours ago and the fucker had already leveled up that much? Logan ground his teeth, the image of the Man in Black walking down the street and killing innocent people filling his mind.
He’d thought the men at the cabin were bad, but if this asshole were going around killing hundreds, even thousands of people… no wonder he was leveling up so quickly. And worst of all, Logan doubted that the situation would resolve on its own.
Talk about the Scourge of Arcopotal. Rather than Logan and the Cursed Rope, it could very well be this man. His eyebrows furrowing, Logan cracked his knuckles, his anger building. The fucker needed to be stopped; the fucker…
He was angry again.
Shit.
Logan took a deep breath and tried to calm his nerves. If he were already this angry after only a couple of hours after his fight with the snake swarm, he could be in trouble. And on top of that, thinking about the problem was making him angrier.
As for the others on the list, they were also leveling. That meant Logan’s rank was in jeopardy. He had confidence in his abilities. After all, his level was over a hundred, but due to the True Grit Rings, he considered himself the ‘stealth player’ Asthea had accused him of being. However, the problem was that Logan had no idea whether the other high rankers had access to other resources and System items that gave them the same advantage.
Either way, he was lacking information. He could speculate all he wanted, but the only thing he knew for certain was that Charon was bad news. The others were powerful, but it was possible that they were like him… just trying to survive.
It was possible. But it wasn’t certain.
Logan’s rose-tinted glasses were long gone, and violence had remade him into a different man. He needed to be cautious. As far as he was concerned, Lara, the kids, Tasha, and Jack… those were his people. For the others, he’d give them the opportunity to prove their case, but he wasn’t trusting anyone. Not when the Save Humanity Quest was on the line.
Cracking his neck, Logan let his armour dissolve so that he could prepare for Lara’s arrival. He suspected that he resembled a crazy mountain man more than anything—with his hair standing on end, his face covered in the beginnings of a beard, and his swim trunks filthy with blood and dirt.
Logan set up a campsite on the shore, taking out blankets and a pillow from his spatial collar. The sun was dipping on the horizon, the haze of the wildfire smoke turning the sky purple and orange. It was still hot—boy was it hot, but at least he’d get relief when they lost the sun entirely.
Sitting down, Logan took out the mirror, and then… stared.
He didn’t recognize the person staring back at him.
The unkemptness was there. His hair looked like a hedgehog, his eyebrows were half bare from being burned away in the perception trial, and he had whiskers… but that wasn’t the shocking part. The shocking part was his body. Holy shit, his stomach was ab city, his biceps were those of a body builder, and his upper thighs were like tree limbs.
Fucking hell.
And oddest yet, he was convinced that he’d gone up at least an inch in height.
Lara wouldn’t recognize him.
Logan set out to make himself as presentable as possible: brushing his hair, shaving with a disposable razor he’d grabbed at Jack’s, and taking out his extra white dress shirt so he wasn’t bare chested. Unfortunately, the kitten-patterned swim trunks would have to stay—he didn’t have anything else to wear.
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That was the best he could do.
It wasn’t fully dark yet, but already, he was flagging, exhaustion eating into him now that he was at the place he needed to be without the threat of death surrounding him. He hadn’t had a full night’s rest in days. Last time, he’d nodded off in the tunnel he’d created in the tactician trial; the day before that, it had been in the hallway of the attribute trial.
Logan let the darkness take him.
***
[Countdown: Day 10 of Day 365 before species culling. Only the worthy survive.]
[Current rank: 2 out of 6,005,889,113.]
[You are currently in the 1%.]
He jerked awake. The System had woken him from a nightmare about a dark shadow spreading and engulfing him, a void that was all encompassing, all consuming. Even though it was already ninety degrees outside, Logan shivered, cold sweat breaking out on the back of his neck.
He knew why he’d dreamed that, and it wasn’t because of a batch of bad green beans.
The Man in Black.
The vision he’d seen of the man walking down the street was one thing, but it was seeing him climb up the leaderboard that brought it home. He was a serious threat.
Logan glanced around. The sun was up, and the smog seemed moderately less severe, with spots of blue sky showing in patches. The wind must have blown it away. Ernie was nowhere to be seen—still looking for minions.
Logan felt anxious, a gnawing worry eating away at his stomach. After a week of go go go, it was difficult to not rush off or look for a monster to fight. But for the first time, he needed to stay put. Lara was meeting him here. The worst-case scenario was them overtaking each other while Logan was off wandering in the woods.
At least there was something he could do in the meantime.
[Life Fabricator].
He’d unlocked the skill. If it did what he suspected, that meant it was an upgraded version of [Life Cycle Master].
This time, he didn’t have to look for a seed; it should allow him to assemble something out of nothing. But how?
Logan needed to test the skill, but he also had something else in mind.
The Save Humanity Quest.
[Quest: Save Humanity! Save 5.9 billion people in less than one year by catching and storing 930 billion tons of carbon. This is a running Quest, and your progress can fluctuate up and down.]
[Reward for completing the Quest: You will save 5.9 billion people.]
[Penalty for not completing the Quest: You will kill 5.9 billion people.]
[Quest Progress: -1% complete. 355 days remaining.]
Logan blinked, then blinked again. What the hell was this bullshit? The Quest wasn’t 0% complete—it was negative? That wasn’t possible! In what world could your progress go down? Fuck’s sake! Was the System penalizing him for not tackling it right away? He still had 355 days remaining!
Logan growled and kicked the ground, sending a pebble flying through the air in a curve, then over the hill—as if he’d hit a homerun with his baseball bat. So much for a new, fair System. As far as he was concerned, the glitchy AI minion might as well be back.
Huffing, Logan ran a hand through his hair and tried to calm himself down, taking deep breaths. Letting his anger escalate wouldn’t get him anywhere. Besides, he had a feeling that shit like that just fed the Cursed Rope, an endless cycle of rage. It was like a dam exploding—once it started, it never stopped.
And 355 days was a lot. He had a long, long journey ahead of him, and he was hoping that [Life Fabricator] would give him an advantage.
[Through intricate and highly precise work, this skill allows you to build, repair and control the life cycle of beings by cutting, bending, and assembling. Level is commensurate with your Karma pool and Karma regeneration rate. KarmaCoin awarded is based on carbon capture impact.]
Logan didn’t just want to create a lone pine tree. That would hardly make a dent. No, it was back to visualization. Whatever he could imagine, he could create.
Cracking his neck and jumping on the balls of his feet, he looked for a good place. Further up the beach and onto the dry ground, there was a wide clearing, wide enough for five picnic tables with room on either side. Pine trees surrounded it, but only off to the far side. The city had cleared this area to give everyone a big enough gathering place before they went down to the beach. It had sunlight. Healthy soil.
Perfect.
Logan considered a way forward. Although he wanted to try the skill without a seed, every instinct rebelled. He’d gotten used to [Life Cycle Master]. Envisioning creating something out of nothing seemed impossible. And yet wasn’t everything he’d gone through also impossible?
Hell, he had a Pink Sock that gave him the ability to fly. The System allowed you to bring people back from the dead with a resurrection crystal! If anything, his experience had taught him to disregard rationality and to think of the fantastical.
Logan studied the area around the picnic tables, and then did what came natural to him when visualizing.
He closed his eyes.
In his mind, he envisioned a seed. But this seed was unlike the pine tree seeds, the tomato plants, or green beans. This seed was the size of a cantaloupe. As if a colossal, mammoth world tree had shed a mutated seed.
And this time, although he hadn’t dug a hole in the ground, he still envisioned the seed deep within the earth. Fine root filaments spread like cobwebs, looking for moisture and nutrients.
On the opposite end of the mammoth seed, a sprout exploded that was the size of a vine five inches in width that sought sunlight and air. Burrowing, burrowing, burrowing, it burst through the dirt and then climbed, width doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling.
The sprout turned into a trunk, a thick trunk that grew fat as roots sucked in moisture, continuing to spread until they’d burrowed their way to the lake, and then gulped down water like a buffet, sucking it up like a reverse garden hose.
With that moisture, the trunk continued to thicken, so solid it was beyond an oak, beyond concrete. And then the first limb spread up to the sun like reaching for the stars.
Followed by the next and the next until—
Logan felt dizzy, a gush of blood dripping from his nose, his airways tightening.
Karma deprivation.
10/2028.
90/2028.
180/2028.
He’d increased his Karma pool and regeneration rate so much that he’d gotten lax. With a gasp, he released [Life Fabricator] and opened his eyes.
Stunned, he could only stare.
While he’d been immersed in the image, Logan’s senses were blunted to anything but his creation. That was the only explanation for how he hadn’t noticed the carnage around him.
He’d come up with an image, an image that had become reality. In front of him stood a tree that towered over him, its trunk as big as a house! Sap dripped from the trunk, drizzling to the ground. The bark was mahogany brown, solid, immovable.
Roots had torn through the earth, huge trunks that would have taken hundreds of years to grow in a normal world. They’d disrupted the picnic tables, throwing them to the side, some overturned and upside down.
But that’s where his success ended.
The tree was huge, the trunk like nothing else, but it only had one tree limb bare of foliage, the rest half formed. If he’d come across it, he would have said it was a mutated, diseased tree.
That wasn’t going to help him with the Save Humanity Quest.
But Logan wasn’t done. Monitoring his Karma pool, he waited until it had fully replenished, and then closed his eyes again.
Clenching his fists, a vein on the side of his neck bulging, Logan willed all his willpower and mental fortitude into making [Life Fabricator] obey. He envisioned limbs shooting from the tree, a network of mini branches that burst from the main trunk, reaching for the sun and continuing to climb. At the same time, he kept the image of the trunk in mind, and pushed, forcing it to climb higher, higher, higher.
Now, the limbs grew at the same rate as the trunk, until he pictured each limb sprouting leaves, interconnected green foliage like a maple tree. Foliage so numerous it blotted out the sun.
But he didn’t stop there. For this to be anything other than a mutated tree, he needed something special, something that wasn’t any old tree.
Logan wasn’t a scientist, he knew basic biology only; other than picking up a few random facts from college, it was never his strong suit. He didn’t know the science of how a tree absorbed carbon, beyond knowing that the leaves absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere, converting it to sugar and storing it in the trunk and limbs of the tree.
He'd already done that automatically as soon as he’d grown the thing, but for this to work more than on an ad hoc basis, he needed the tree to absorb more carbon than normal.
He needed it to be a carbon absorbing factory.
Logan rolled his shoulders, once again trying to calm his nerves. When he’d utilized [Life Cycle Master], he never got anywhere by rushing or without having a clear head.
Within each leaf was a tiny pore, pores that sucked in carbon dioxide and released oxygen back into the atmosphere. In the normal course of a tree’s day, it did this all the time, but it did it slowly. He knew that a tree could absorb up to a ton of carbon over its lifetime… but again, that was over its lifetime. We were talking a hundred years here. Logan didn’t have a hundred years.
On top of that, to tackle the Save Humanity Quest, he needed to capture 930 billion tons of carbon. By that logic, he would need to grow 930 billion trees.
…That was a heck of a lot of trees.
Grinding his teeth and once again trying to supress his anxiety, Logan got back to work. The foliage had to be the answer. And yet again, he was dealing with a skill that should let him create whatever he wanted. It didn’t have to be something that existed.
He could envision it.
Then create it.
Logan envisioned each leaf of the tree like a vacuum. Tiny pores weren’t so tiny anymore. They were vehicles designed to suck carbon at a rapid rate, to pull, pull, pull, like an endless straw that never stopped.
Each leaf had the same, hundreds of endless vacuum pores that kept the carbon funnelling deep into the depths of the tree, continuing to thicken its trunk until it became so tall that it was at risk of tipping over.
But that was an easy solution. He envisioned one of the limbs growing towards the side of the hill like a cable rope. Logan lengthened the branch until it was solid. A second trunk, growing until it slammed into the side of the hillside and lodged into the dirt like an anchor.
Now, the tree continued to grow.
And grow.
Ding!
[Life Fabricator is Level 2!]
[You have successfully deployed the skill, Life Fabricator, in a carbon reduction event! Calculating carbon reduction….]