A Huge piece of mountain cracked and dropped by a handspan, it seemed to hesitate for a moment before leaning out and away. Then, amazingly slowly, it roared down the rest of the slope. I watched, stunned and clinging to the side-wall of the ledge, as a chunk of stone the size of an office building crashed through the forest below, clearing a swath of trees and leaving nothing but rubble in its wake.
I froze, terrified that the ledge I was on would be dragged down with it, but captivated by the sheer scale, proximity, and overwhelming cacophony of noise. My world shook, my ears rang; and amazingly, the ledge I stood on held. After the noise of the crashing rock settled, the silence was filled with the sound of angry birds, flapping and shouting warnings as they rose from the canopy around the field of rubble.
I crept closer to the edge, looking down and watching the dust settle. Another massive tree slowly gave up and toppled, barely audible from my vantage above.
I turned back to the mountain, following the ledge up to where I had been working for the last week. The cut had split the cliff face in half, causing the entirety of the cliff on one side of the vein to crack and shear off, taking a piece of the ledge and the slab I had cut earlier with it. Higher up the remaining mountain, I could see a dark line of weathered and water-worn stone that worked its way down the seam that I had split. Following the stain with my eyes down the cliff face, I saw a dark spot where it intersected with the quartz vein that looked to open up into a natural cavern.
The path just ended, the entire cliff face it used to dead-end against now laying in the jungle below, the fallen away portion of the stone revealing the trail of erosion that ran along the fault that the prompts had guided me in splitting. The opening was lower than the ledge I stood on, and farther away than I thought I could jump.
I stepped back from the ledge and weighed my options. I was positive that Rosso would not be happy with the destruction of the jungle below, but knew that he would also not be too angry. The valley below was not his Grove, but on the far side of the mountain in the next valley over. Still, I figured it counted as mass destruction, and instead of extracting the stone I had moved it elsewhere. I needed to get something out of this, something to distract or pay Rosso off with. The lights were supposed to lead to valuables, not breaches of contract, and while it was difficult to trust the people in the game, the UI itself was generally useful.
I walked back up, cautiously kneeling as close to the brink of the ledge as I dared. It was close to a straight drop down for more than a hundred feet, the stone having scooped out a gouge that followed the gentle curving slope of the mountain.
The vein of quartz led across the sheer cliff face and right to the cavern entrance. It would make for terrible climbing, but I could try to use the cracks and crevices within the vein to hammer in some climbing spikes. The cave had to be what the game wanted me to find.
New Quest!
Follow your Heart
Your actions have revealed a mysterious cave. What awaits within; Natural treasures? Terrible beasts? Noxious fumes?! Go find out!
Surprised by the text box that suddenly appeared, I scrambled back away from the edge and fell onto my ass before I managed to read the first line.
A quest? I had never seen or heard of anyone getting a quest from the system before. As far as I knew, they were not even part of the game. Players could post Bounties and Tasks, but those all came directly from other players. One of the worst parts of the Factions “Game” was its total lack of intelligent NPC’s. All part of the ‘Player Driven Economy’ that's ‘the best way to encourage unique emergent gameplay experiences and Player interactions’.
Maybe this was some Beta feature that they unlocked for me? My eyes widened at the thought, that might also explain the weird short payment cycle and confusion when I woke up. Was it possible they had randomly selected me as part of a first wave test run for a new system? The Coreworlds were so opaque in their relations with the players it was impossible to tell, the only updates and announcements I’d ever received from them were to sign up for their Engram auction lottery, as if I could afford to place any bids even if I were to win a ticket.
In any case, it was clear that the game was guiding me this way for a reason. If I died, I didn’t have much in my inventory to drop, and could hopefully make it back to my body before anyone else. My work-site was off the main paths and only half way up on the far side of the mountain, the bulk of the quarry work was being done by teams from the top down. The few other solos like myself tended to follow similar strategies as my own, seeking out isolated pockets and veins of more valuable resources to slowly chip away at, or venturing around the island in search of bounties.
I pulled my rarely used safety harness and strapped myself into it before removing some rope and spikes from my inventory. I hammered one of the pitons, steel spikes with a smoothed ring built into the heads, into a crack in the vein of quartz and gave it a tug. Just to be safe, I pounded a second, and then a third into the cliff at various points. The last only after I had tied myself to the first two, and as far out along the cliff face as I could reach.
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After securing myself to the spikes with just enough rope to allow me to cross, and triple checking my harness, I took a few deep breaths to psych myself up and stepped out, clinging to the cliff as best as I could, but forced to put most of my weight and trust in the climbing gear. Adrenaline pumping through my veins, I started to work my way across the gap and down towards the cavern.
I swung from the rope, only dropping a few feet down towards the cave before I stopped myself with the brake built into the harness. I had looped the rope through a few more spikes before tying the whole thing off and I hammered them into the vein as I went along a few feet at a time. I did my best to not look down between my feet to the fall below, and section by section, I made my way across the gap, leaving my rope pinned to the wall for when I needed to climb back out.
I came into the cavern from the top of the entrance, dangling for a terrifying moment in free space with nothing but the rope to cling to. I breathed a massive sigh of relief when I finally touched down on the damp stone of the cave’s interior.
I let my weight settle onto my feet and pulled some more rope through my harness to give me enough slack to move around. The cavern was not very large, so I crouched down on the water-worn stone and fished my rarely-used multi tool from my inventory. Fumbling with it for a moment as I still clung to the rope with one hand, I eventually got the small flashlight pointed down into the cavern.
The left wall sparkled and glimmered with quartz crystals, scoured clean by long flowing water in some places and built up with debris in others, while the rest of the surface rippled in waves that followed the natural grain of the stone. The opening was just large enough for me to crouch-walk through, but quickly sloped down and snaked around a corner deeper into the mountain.
I pulled a bit more slack rope through my harness and slowly lowered myself further into the cavern. Things went well at first, the cavern was large enough for me to see where I was going, and the crystals and cracks from the fault line provided decent hand and footholds on the one wall. I lowered myself a few feet at a time, finding a secure grip before pulling more slack rope through to lower myself a few feet again. It was slow going, but I was not in any real rush.
The deeper into the mountain I went, the damper and danker the cave became. My pants had completely soaked through by the time the sunlight from the cave opening disappeared behind me. After worming my way into the mountain, dreading reaching the end of my rope, the cavern opened up and split. The water I had followed dripped down through a tiny crack where the fault and quartz vein continued into the stone. While the larger passage twisted and leveled out into a misshapen circular tunnel that rose away from the waterslide I had climbed down.
My little light barely illuminated the larger space, causing shadows to ripple across the smooth dark walls banded with angled lines of differently colored stone. The end of the tunnel stretched into darkness and the floor was surprisingly clear of stone and debris, with only a thick layer of dust that kicked up in little swirling tufts as I cautiously started down the shaft.
I crept along, following the snaking passageway up at a slight angle, before it curved around a bend and continued back down at an equally shallow angle. I opened my HUD to check the time, and noted I had started my descent nearly two hours ago, leaving me another 6 hours or so before daylight would end back at home.
It was eerie, walking through the silent and dark cave, no sign of life of any kind. I continued to follow the tunnel until it opened into a large domed chamber, circular and wide enough to comfortably park an 18-wheeler within, with multiple passages leading off in different directions.
The floor of the new chamber looked cracked and sunken, like it had been pushed up and broken from underneath, before settling back down into a shallow bowl. A number of spiky protrusions of shiny black rock seemed to pierce through from below, with little mounds of shattered stone around their bases. Three other pitch-black tunnel openings loomed around the edges of the room, two on the far side of the chamber with the third and largest opening off to my right.
I hesitated on the threshold for a moment, turning to look back down the path I had taken so far. My scuffed footprints were clear in the dust that coated the bottom of the tunnel, throwing stark shadows in the pool of light from my little multi-tool. It would be easy to follow back from here, but the new chamber lacked the layer to leave tracks in.
Hesitantly, I took a step into the cavern, testing my footing before putting much weight onto the cracked floor. The broken stone felt solid enough, no rocking or shifting underfoot, so I edged my way around the outside of the chamber towards the larger opening.
I was most of the way across, focusing on moving forward and actively ignoring the panic and anxiety that screamed and shouted for attention in the back of my mind, when I caught a shining glimmer of light in my peripheral vision again.
Turning my head towards the light, my eyes settled on the largest of the stony spikes that rose from the floor, nearly as tall as myself. The same damn little glimmer of light that got me into this situation in the first place flashed from about halfway up the spire.
Overcome by sudden and surprising anger, I strode straight across the chamber and up to the spike to glare at the light, which continued to twinkle and pulse as I approached. The slap of my angry footsteps and crunching of shattered stone beneath my boots breaking the silence that had accompanied me throughout the trip. Without thinking, letting my frustration and anger get the better of me. I reared back and punched the damn light.
The spike shattered like tempered glass, exploding and sending splinters of sharp rock skittering across the chamber in every direction. The shards of stone stung and cut into my exposed face and forearms. The light that had once been like a distant twinkling star, flared and flashed as the stone splintered, blinding me and causing me to close my eyes as I fell back away from the explosion. I felt my shoulders hit the hard cracked-stone floor first, then the back of my head knocked against it and my vision filled with tiny flashing yellow and red speckles. Before I could bring my hands up to my face and really register the pain, the world shifted and I felt the floor drop out from under me.