Arthur sighed again, for the umpteenth time, as the anchor disappeared above the ceiling. He was starting to think he had to abandon this idea, because he had been throwing the damn thing for what had to be an hour in his mind, and he had still gone nowhere.
Pulling on the rope, he tried to brainstorm for unrealistic ideas, searching for some inspiration among the impossible. Maybe he could just build a pick and dig his way out?
He pulled again and thought it over. Nah, I'll probably die of old age before digging five meters into the rock.
Another pull, another stupid idea. Build an entire staircase? Would probably be faster to go through with the ladder option, maybe add a floating platform to go with it, extend out the island he found himself on.
Another pull. And now the rope is stuck, I can't fucking believe- Arthur stopped pulling. He looked up. The anchor was still in the ceiling.
"I'm a damned idiot," he exclaimed in a moment of self-reflection. He honestly wanted to slap himself, but was afraid letting go of the rope too hard would dislodge it, if his continuous pulls hadn't already.
So, he gently lowered more and more rope in the water, until it was perfectly straight under his only way of escape, and then let go of the rest. He hurriedly put on his equipment, tying his belt with the water-filled gourds and strapping on his quiver, breastplate and buckler, all of which were firmly tied to his body with rope and string.
Since he didn't want to lose his sandals in the water or while he was climbing the rope, he also attached them to his belt, together with the gourds. Finally, he didn't wear his shirt, since he would take it off again once he was out and use it as a turban, but rather tied it at his waist, over his belt.
He took a deep breath to prepare himself, but coughed as he took in a breath of smoke from the smouldering fire. Now that he thought about it, Arthur wasn't sure if he would survive this attempt failing since he had no idea how much oxygen the place had remaining. While there was an opening to the outside, considering how long the tunnel was he didn't like his chances of not dying in his sleep in a couple of days.
Now that he had grim thoughts of a slow death in case he failed hanging over him he felt truly ready to go. He lowered himself in the water and swam to the rope, where he once again took a steadying breath before gripping what amounted to two days of work, and heaving himself out of the water.
The climb was slow but steady, although it was also much harder than he had considered. This wasn't the first time Arthur had tried his hand at rope climbing, obviously, but he still had severely underestimated just how much a waterlogged set of cotton clothes and an armoury of wooden weapons could weigh down an individual who had lived on fruits and water for three days.
Still, as long as his trusty anchor and one and a half centimetres thick rope held on, he wasn't going to give up and fall down again. In just a few minutes of slow climbing, Arthur reached the lip of the hole and didn't hesitate a second to heave himself over and out.
Lying on the ground, taking in deep breaths of air which already felt hotter than the one below in the underground lake, Arthur started to chuckle at the implausibility of his situation, not daring to bark out a full laugh in fear of waking up whatever had made these tunnels, if it was even still around.
After a while he decided he'd had enough rest and stood up to his feet, his head almost brushing against the ceiling of the tunnel as he remembered it had when he had first gone through it.
He looked around in the darkness, realizing that, without his fire, he was in actual total oblivion of his surroundings. He put a hand on the nearest wall, and put the other on the ground, crouching down and searching for the hole he had come from to recover his anchor and rope.
They were quickly found and wound up, his anchor still in great shape as far as he could tell from just touch. He draped the bundle over his head, letting one side over his left shoulder and the other fall over his right side.
He turned around, confident that he could still remember just by touch the way he had come from, even though his mind had been a little addled and tired at the time, and set out.
Conversely to what he remembered, his inability to see faded rather quickly, and he realized, after not even ten minutes of walking, that he was nearing an exit. He wasn't sure if it was the same exit he had come from, but as long as he could see the sun again it didn't really matter to him.
He welcomed the sunlight blinding him and quickly drying him up, although he would have preferred to stay fresh for as long as possible, and took off his shirt from his waist to wear it around his head. It should stay wet for some time, allowing him to ward off the heat.
From outside the tunnel, he noticed that the sun was currently positioned towards where he had emerged from, meaning that if it were the same entrance he had used when he was injured, then it was also in more or less the same position he was following before.
Considering he didn't have much else to orient himself by, he started walking towards the sun, a spear as long as he was high in his right hand and his left arm equipped with a small buckler.
Arthur's feet sank in the sand as he marched through the desert for several hours, doing his best to conserve the water in his gourds by eating conjured fruits filled with as much water in them as he could fit.
As he walked, Arthur set his mind to two tasks, making sure he wasn't ambushed by some murderous creature or that he didn't fall in a trap by himself, and finishing to decipher the last tidbits of information the Skill Gem had granted him together with his magick ability.
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Biting into a juicy peach, he mulled over the information, still quite unable to understand himself the process he was going through to review all of it. It was like remembering what he had done the day before exactly, just with a year of lessons he had never taken.
It reminded him a bit of university, which didn't help much with the homesickness he was starting to develop now that things had started to calm down.
Taking another bite and finishing with processing the information, Arthur stopped walking and slowly lowered the peach from his mouth, letting it fall into the sand. As he 'read' the last paragraph of what looked to be some kind of sick terms of use of the powers he had been granted, his mental view went over the same line three times before he caught up to what he didn't actually want to read.
Suddenly, his stomach rumbled in protest, as if in sync with his realization, and he bent in half, before falling to his knees and starting to vomit, all the while a voice in the back of his mind screamed something at his insides about preserving fluids while in the middle of a desert.
It took two minutes for Arthur to stop retching out everything he had eaten in the past days, and when he was done a pool of transparent sludge had formed under him, soaking his pants. What mattered more to him though was the phrase floating in the middle of his mind, that which was responsible for this mess.
And remember, magical constructs formed solely out of Will or Mana are unsuitable for consumption by living creatures. They do not provide nutrition after being digested and may cause nausea or other more dire symptoms.
Arthur took a deep breath, which may have been a grave mistake if it wasn't for the fact that the sludge he had vomited was completely without smell, and shouted towards the sky "Why did you put it at the end, you sick bastards?!".
Rumbling from his stomach interrupted his rage, and he realized with dismay that hunger was already starting to creep in; without taking into account the fruits he had eaten lately, he had gone without food for almost three days, and now that was ironically coming to bite him in the ass.
The only way for him to gather food in the middle of the desert would be to hunt whatever creature he could find, a terrifying prospect considering what he had seen inhabiting this world so far. He now also had to drink his water, which would probably not last more than a single day.
Despair started to settle in at his current predicament, not even four hours from departing from his safe place and he already wanted to go back underground where he at least had enough water to last a lifetime. Only problem was, without food it would be a very short time.
He broke himself out of his daze with a long sigh, realizing that having a mental breakdown in a pool of his own magical puke wasn't very dignifying or mature from his part. Was he or wasn't he some kind of magician who could not even feed himself? Yeah.
Arthur stood up with a subdued chuckle and started walking once again towards the sun, now completely focused on keeping an eye out for any living being that may be a danger to his life, in addition to possibly becoming supper for his stomach.
Again, he was supposed to start walking, but another piece of denial had to be faced as he looked up towards the sun. Specifically, he had to ask himself: "Why isn't the sun moving?".
Indeed, it had been three hours since he had set off from the underground cave and tunnels, and the sun hadn't moved even an inch in either direction, which was deeply unsettling for Arthur, who had been taught more or less how to discern the passage of time by looking for that exact movement.
Now that he thought about it, it didn't look like the sun had moved at all since he had arrived in this world, which would mean… well, it would mean that Arthur was very screwed, since night wouldn't come if that was true, meaning he had even less time to live on his current supply of water than he had first thought.
There wasn't much Arthur could do about it in his current state though, since he probably wouldn't be able to move the sun itself, so he just decided to go on with his journey and leave the problem for future Arthur to deal with.
As he had suspected, walking through the desert and climbing up and down its dunes was made much easier thanks to his magick-grown sandals, which helped prevent the sand from giving away under his feet.
He also realized that, while he still couldn't eat or drink his fruits, nothing was stopping him from pouring the water inside a coconut over his head to cool himself, since while they didn't grow at cold temperatures, the fruits were still quite fresh in comparison to the desert's scorching heat.
These factors helped Arthur travel faster through the sands and prevented him from wasting a lot of his water on sweat, although he was still consuming water at a fast pace despite his best efforts at rationing. It was just that hot.
As he reached the top of a particularly high dune, trying his best to keep walking straight rather than taking detours that could only end in him walking in circles, Arthur found himself overlooking a valley of sorts, the massive shape of a creature directly from his nightmares dominating it all from its centre.
Some kind of deformed, hairy spider the colour of burned earth greeted him, but rather unlike a normal spider it only had four legs, and it must have been as big as a cargo ship was long, absolutely titanic.
He fell on his ass in shock, frozen still with fear, until he realized the creature was crumpled up and unmoving, which meant it was either dead or asleep. Arthur hoped it would be the former, because he rather doubted his spear or javelins would cause more than a prickle to it.
After calming down his quickly beating heart, which was seemingly trying to run away and leave him behind, he stood up once again and started circling around the valley, putting his [Hide in Plain Sight] skill to work and searching for any sign the creature was still alive.
An hour after coming out from the tunnels, both [Sun Tolerance] and [Hide in Plain Sight] had reached level 10, but since then he hadn't gained a single level in either, confirming something of a hunch Arthur had about levels. It seemed as if the first ten levels were gained very fast and then slowed down exponentially going from there, as his magick skill had, although he still didn't have much of a sample size to prove it worked that way.
It took him ten minutes to carefully navigate on the lip of the valley, making sure to stay as much as possible behind a dune or the other so that if the thing woke up he wouldn't be noticed immediately.
As he reached the other side of the body, he relaxed as he realized the gargantuan beast was very much dead thanks to a long gash opening up its abdomen, as if a great sword had tried and almost succeeded in cutting it in half.
He gulped, trying to imagine what manner of creature could inflict such a wound, but then put I out of his mind as he didn't see any in the near vicinity, nor would he be able to do anything if there were.
Noticing something moving in the opened up body of the spider, Arthur squinted, trying to make out what the white specks a couple hundred meters away were. He almost gagged as he realized he was looking at some specimen of maggots nearly as big as one of his legs were, writhing around in the dead and rotting flesh, and his gagging doubled as he had a sick, but very necessary thought.
Dinner is served.