Pretty stared at the partially hidden sun beaming slantingly at her across the little slats of the trees above the pit, and wondered if this was the worst weather for a person to die.

She looked at the clear sky devoid of clouds and wished she was in a different place right now.

It was just such perfect weather to be suffering.

Judging from the sun's position, she estimated it must be either ten in the morning or two in the afternoon.

If it was a normal day for her, she would be somewhere, maybe in the shade of some trees, in this kind of weather, taking the pleasure of napping.

She was absentmindedly following the silhouette of the birds soaring in the sky, when suddenly, images of the events in the Summit came back on her.

Her memories from the past few days that she had forgotten came back on her on droves.

She remembered all the things that transpired before she arrived at the Summit. The chase in the Summit, fighting to the death with Simon, and when her body got shot. Then there were those mysterious cables that suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

There was a book — no — books after, and she was floating in the sky then everything went black.

She then belatedly recalled she woke up somewhere loud and there were women talking around her in a foreign language. Then she woke up here.

What had happened to her?

She was sure her rentom had separated from her body after a bullet hit its head. Why was she in her body now? And why was she in this place?

Was that a dream? No, she was sure it was not. She could still recall the crushing pain she felt when Simon separated her rentom from her body. That was so real to be a dream.

Then why was she still alive? What about her illness? Simon injected her with a substance related to her illness. He said the name of it but she had already forgotten what it was. If he was telling the truth, then why was she feeling only a minimal discomfort right now? Should she be unable to move or probably dead by now?

She touched her head to look for an injury but she could not feel any pain from it. There were also no bullet wounds or injury in it except for some abrasions.

Where was her head wound? How could her body survive a bullet in the head? Was this her new ability? But she had never gotten any ability related to healing in the Repository, neither whole nor partial. It could not also be another use of her existing ability.

Sometimes an ability could work in several ways that she did not know was possible before. Like how she could only turn herself invisible at first but she discovered later that she could turn external things into invisible too.

But she had no ability at all that was related to healing.

She could only think of one possibility. Those mysterious cables.

Did those mysterious cables take her body and merge her rentom with it, then dump her from above the sky to some random city? If that was so then that should explain the falling sensation she felt before.

She continued musing on what happened to her but she could not formulate or confirm any more guesses as she didn't even know where she was now.

She figured she might as well move, seeing that no one had visited the garbage pit that whole time she was figuring things out.

She positioned her arms beside her and tried lifting her upper body into a sitting position but halfway through it, her hands lost energy and she fell down to her back.

Her limbs felt like there were iron bars inside it. They felt so heavy.

She tried again but she found she did not have enough energy to execute it. If sitting was that hard then she could not imagine the possibility of her standing.

She instead turned herself around into her stomach and decided to crawl her way up the slope.

Since no one was coming into the garbage pit for her to ask help for, she had to climb the pit instead. She also doubted if someone could even differentiate her from the trash. Besides, she had more chance to ask for help above than below the pit.

Slowly, she moved her body in a crawl towards the slope. It was not easy for her but leveraging her body to the random things around her helped her.

She had to climb over 20 meters of slope as she was at the bottom part of the pit. With how exhausted she was feeling, that seems like an impossible thing.

Despite this, her mind was active and resolute as she moved her feet and arms to propel herself forward, but after a minute of trying, she was only able to move a few feet before her body slumped on the garbage ground again. She was panting from the exertion and felt drained.

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Her body was protesting every move she made, like it always did, but she had no intention of giving up. She was already used to how despite her mind wanting to work, her body wouldn’t, so it was not new to her. The old perseverance technique always worked on her.

After resting for a while, she crawled back again, gaining another few feet. She was not discouraged by her slow pace. No matter how little she could traverse, it was still a progress. She dropped down almost every minute but she never stopped trying to scale the whole slope after a little rest .

Little by little she was making progress and after an hour of consecutive rest and climbing, she was able to reach halfway up the slope.

Feeling renewed by her progress, she doubled her efforts despite her aching body and moved her feet and arms with vigor

Just as her hand was about to reach for a wooden plank a few feet above her, something passed through her periphery that catched her attention.

She raised her head with effort and saw through the renisas realm, a faint black renisas streaking from above the sky and was zooming towards the pit at her direction.

Without knowing why, her instinct tingled. For some reason, the black renisas gave off a bad feeling

When the black renisas was almost above her, she could instantly sense a type of energy coming off from it. She could not place what kind of feeling it was, she just knew it was trouble.

As if confirming her hunches, the dark renisas passed by her and headed towards the bottom part of the pit. She could not see where it went due to her facing forward but she was not concerned about it as seconds later, the slope of garbage she was in started to shake, growing in intensity by the seconds.

The rubbish and trash around her started rolling down the slope. She looked up above the slope and the garbage above was rolling towards her. She knew if she did not get out of her position, she would be buried by these rolling garbage materials.

She mustered her strength to roll herself to the right but before she could execute it, the whole slope of garbage collapsed and she found herself bounced off and rolling somewhere.

She only halted when she slammed into something soft and wet. She shook her head to remove her dizziness and after a minute she could see around again.

She looked at the thing she slammed and saw that it was a rotting log of a banana tree. She pushed herself away from it but her hands slipped from the slippery banana log and slid behind it, and touched something cold.

She jerked her hand back and looked at the thing she touched. Her eyes widened when she saw it was an arm of a person. She checked further and a body was attached to it, hidden behind the banana trunk.

She could not see clearly the features of the person but it looked like a corpse. It was dirty and muddied beyond recognition, and she would not recognize it as a body if not for the arm and the hand that she could not mistake as a branch or a twig. As well as a faint white cloud fluttering around it.

Her shock subsided, then she increased the renisas density in her eyes to see if the person was alive.

There, glittering and forming a circular aura around the body was a dense cloud of renisas, signifying the person was indeed still alive.

But it did not mean that the person could not be dying in a moment.

Everything that was alive in the world has a rentom. Humans, plants, animals, and even small organisms like bacteria had one, though they were little to begin with to be seen by normal renisas eyes.

Rentoms were things that a person could not normally see. Even for a rentom user like her, seeing a rentom was impossible. But what she could see though and those who trained for it, was the protective layer of the rentom of a person, the renisas. The aura-like thing that revolves around a person like a cloud.

It differed from person to person. Some were too loose and some were compacted. Some were in ever changing shapes while some formed a circle or a stable shape around them.

As long as a person lived, they will always have their rentom with them, it’s part of who they were. Only dead people had no rentom, and the person in front of her was very much alive.

The person had a very dense renisas that she had only seen rarely in some people. It was even denser and bigger than those renisas’ users in the Summit. If this person wanted it, they could try training to be a renisas user and the Summit would definitely recruit him or her. If they were not one already and if they survive this first.

A dense renisas though did not indicate that a person was healthy. In fact, a person's renisas' forms and movements could even tell the state of a person.

The person’s renisas in front of her, was shaking erratically, pulsing, and changing its shape every second. Which were all signs of a person in distress. It was also unstable and flickering. She was not an expert of reading someone's renisas but she knew enough to evaluate one. The person's renisas indicated a lot of things and not any one of them indicated that the person was in a stable and healthy condition.

And she could do nothing about it.

She laid her head to a dry patch of leaves and took a disappointed breath. Another person was with her and god knows if there were other bodies, dead or alive, in this pit too. But that wouldn't still change anything in her situation.

She had rolled down to the bottom of the pit, and the slope was now gone. She would have to climb around ten meters of soil, with no leverage to hold, to get on top. Even in her own top form, she was not confident if she could scale that wall. Climbing was obviously not one of her talents.

She thought back about the black renisas. She was sure it was connected to how the slope collapsed. She might not be lucky, but it was definitely not due to bad luck that the slope suddenly collapsed. It arrived and shit happened

How she wished it arrived an hour later when she had already scaled the pit. At this point she might just call it bad luck then.

Without any good idea, she tried her next best choice of action. Which was her useless attempt of activating her rentom ability, summon a phone and hoped she was somewhere with coverage, triangulate her location and call for 911, or 119 or any number that corresponds to the local emergency service.

But no matter how she begged to different saints she could think of, it was still not working.

Without any good idea to save herself. She instead moved her renisas around her and formed them into shapes, hoping it would jumpstart her ability. She was forming random figures of shapes, numbers, letters and animal figures when one of the figures resembled a bleeding heart.

She stopped and looked with wide eyes at the floating heart figure and then to the other renisas around her.

She rubbed her eyes but it did not do anything other than to add some dirt to her eyes. She looked at it again but it was still there.

Red.

Her renisas had now changed in color. It was pink before but now it was a baffling color red.