The next day Danny woke up feeling well-rested. He lazily stretched his arms and back while still on his bed, before getting up, and started getting ready for the day.

Danny swapped his spare clothes he was currently wearing for the gear he had cleaned the previous day, which was already completely dry by this point, before storing the removed pieces of clothing back into his pack for whenever he needed them once more.

Afterwards, Danny ate a hearty meal of canned fruits and vegetables, accompanied by a few mouthfuls of snacks that he had scrounged up from the vending machine downstairs in the previous day here and there in between spoons of the canned goods.

His increased appetite satiated, Danny got up and wiped his hands on one of the towels that had been spared from being permanently stained yesterday, but sadly could not escape its fate of being dirtied today.

Danny then proceeded to make his bed before leaving.

Although some might say that making his bed made no sense in this context – given that he would be leaving the place and most likely would never return here – Danny did not think it was a pointless chore. At least, he did not think it anymore.

In one of the orphanages Danny had lived in the past – one that was managed by a religious institution –, there was a particular nun that was very passionate about the importance of making one’s bed.

More than once, Danny was caught skipping the morning task and had to endure a long-winded lecture from that woman about the relevance of bed making in someone’s day as a consequence.

She would often say that to have a proper day, one had to start it properly. She believed that more than a simple chore, making one’s bed was an important ritual in one’s routine that dismissed the lethargy of sleep and prepared one’s mind for the difficulties of the day to come.

At that time, Danny hated the nun and her, in his young point of view, annoying beliefs. As a kid, Danny would much rather be punished for getting out of line in a more straightforward way, like a slap in the bun or being assigned some kind of manual labor, than having to listen the woman preaching about the sanctity of dedicating oneself to keeping one’s own bed nice and tidy first thing after waking up.

After all, it was just a bed and not a freaking temple, right?

However, as he grew up, Danny begun to appreciate and understand the woman’s words of wisdom. The nun was not worried about the organization of the place, neither did she have some king of OCD.

He came to learn that it was not about the chore itself, but about getting yourself in the right frame of mind. It was somewhat of a ritual that allowed Danny to clear his thoughts and quickly shift the gears of his mind, shaking off the drowsiness and sharpening his thinking.

In fact, it was not that different from meditating or psyching yourself up, but it was much, much easier, simpler and quicker than those activities.

That was just one of many things he learnt from the old woman, and came to appreciate as he became older and more mature. Sadly, however, Danny never had the chance to thank the wise lady for her patience and care.

Before Danny grew up to understand the wisdom and love behind the nun’s teachings, she had already passed away. Time had no mercy for anyone, and she was already quite old by the time Danny was under her guard.

However, even if he never got the chance to say it out loud, Danny liked to think that she knew he would eventually come around to accept her ideas anyway, and that her efforts would not go unappreciated, meaning that, in the end, no words of thanks were needed.

After completing the morning task and getting everything that he needed ready, Danny strapped his bag on his back, took his hammer from the nightstand, and left the room before locking it.

Even if he had made a complete mess of the ground floor in his unhinged search for the keys, at the very least Danny had spared the one room he had stayed in from his wrath, leaving it no worse than he found it. Well, that is if you disregard the pile of stained towels now lying in the trash can of the bathroom, but those were mere details.

Afterwards, Danny went downstairs and left the keys where he had found them previously, before going back to the open-air corridor in the second floor and jumping over the rail and down to the concrete ground floor.

There was no point to taking the keys with him, and if he left through the main doors without the keys, would mean leaving them unlocked. Doing so might allow the undead to wander inside after he left, so he felt it was best if he exited the place through the second floor to keep the motel inaccessible to the zombies.

Even if Danny did not think he would be coming back to this place, there was no harm in leaving it secured, right? Just as he found it.

One could never know the future, so if he could keep the place safely closed off, without too much trouble, why wouldn’t he? At the very least, some lucky survivor might stumble on this place further into the future and make use of it to rest while reasonably protected.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Therefore, Danny might as well make a little detour in order to leave the motel in the best possible condition he could– and by condition, he was obviously referring to its zombie-free state while disregarding the complete mess of papers and other random stuff he left behind lying on the ground.

The jump from the second floor was a piece of cake to him with his increased endurance and strength. Danny did not even feel a thing after landing on the ground. His knees had barely bent from the impact after his feet touched the concrete pavement.

After taking one last look behind, Danny turned around and left the place for good. It was time to get back to his quest.

Danny then checked his wristwatch and the rising sun. He had only slept for six hours, so there was still around one more hour before he could take another crystal. He could not say for certain, but ever since he started consuming the little things, he felt that his need for sleep had slightly diminished as well.

The change could very well be caused by something else, like the tension of the situation he was suddenly thrust into with the world’s upheaval, or maybe the physical exertion he went through every day with all the combat and travelling, but he still felt that the crystals were the ones responsible for it.

Not that he was complaining, mind you. If he could sleep less and still feel energized the following day, then Danny was all for it. The more hours of sleep he could save and instead invest into doing something else, something more productive, the better.

Danny looked at the road after checking the time. He still remembered the route he had to follow to reach Clear Water village – given that it was not that complicated in the first place anyways, he just had to follow the highway for the most part –, so he did not delay and started running alongside the road again.

He had managed to travel quite a good distance yesterday, so depending on how much fighting there was waiting for him along the way later that day, Danny might be able to reach his destination by the time the sun begins to set.

Lara would never guess that he would be able to reach Clear Water village so fast, but Danny had the crystals to thank for his increased travelling speed.

If we were to take into account the average person, carrying all the necessary supplies to survive while also having to deal with zombies along the way – be it through combat or sneaking past them –, something akin to Danny’s condition at the start of his trip from Lakeview city, then that person would probably be able to travel something along the lines of 10 to 15 kilometers a day.

That in turn would mean that it would take about 5 days to one week for someone to reach Clear Water village from Lara’s farm.

However, with his improved condition, Danny could travel in a faster pace tirelessly, drastically cutting short that time and reaching his destination in a matter of a couple of days or even less.

As he breezed through the highway, Danny took out any straggler zombies he laid his eyes on, rapidly extracting their crystals before continuing on his way.

Since he had a clear goal in mind - finding Lara’s family along the way, or reaching his destination -, Danny pressed on without making any detours, only stopping to consume crystals whenever it was time, or to eat a meal when he felt hungry.

Despite fairly quick, his pace was not that excessive as to demand periodic stops for resting other than the ones he was already making to eat and take another soul gem. Danny’s stamina could easily accommodate the exertion.

There also weren’t that many zombies along the way. At the very least, it was nothing that he couldn’t handle. He didn’t have to sneak away once, since most of the time he fought with no more than five undead grouped up together.

Luckily or not, there didn’t seem to be too much traffic when the apocalypse started and ever since, so he wasn’t facing any larger groups of undead at a time.

Danny came with a different scenario that day just once. A travelling bus had swerved off the road and fell on its side after crashing into a tree, no doubt killing some of its occupants at the time. The fortunate ones to have survived the accident were not that fortunate after all, since after the crash, the rising undead made short work of the wounded and unwounded alike.

There had been over twenty passengers inside that bus, and - Danny thought that no one managed to get out alive after the chaos begun. After seeing the wreckage and the shambling shapes of the zombies still trapped inside the metal death trap, he felt the chances of any of the passengers managing to escape with their lives was slim.

Being chomped to death was a truly poor way to go, and Danny could not help but click his tongue and shake his head after witnessing those poor souls fate.

“They never even had a chance.” Danny thought while looking through one of the broken windows at a zombie still stuck to his seat by the seatbelt.

The old man had clear markings around his face and neck, while his nose, mouth and cheeks were also completely deformed, making it easy to guess that his face had been chewed by other undead while he was still alive.

His wounds had already mostly closed, but left terrifying ugly scars, the tissue of his skin regenerating fueled by the energies of the soul crystal inside the zombie’s head. It was not hard to imagine how agonizing it must have been for the pitiful old man.

Danny had already seen many undead, each with the marks of a wound more gruesome than the previous one. However, most of those wound were closed off already or in the process of closing.

Danny knew that the energy contained in the crystals was responsible for the recovery of those flesh wounds after talking with Tutu. Besides allowing the dead corpses to rise again and start moving, the crystals also restored the damage done to those cadavers.

That recovery was not flawless though.

Despite being miraculous, the crystals were not sentient. The energies released were not directed or precise enough to accomplish that perfectly. Additionally, the human body was a complex machine that took countless years to reach its current composition. Therefore, the soul gems were ill suited to replace any and all functions of the human body.

Reinforcing what was already there and speeding up processes was well within their capabilities, but completely remaking something from nothing was a little bit too much.

That was not to say that it was impossible to do it, but in order to accomplish that, a more hands-on approach was needed, something that no mindless creature could do. In fact, that was also way out of Danny’s reach at the moment, given that he had no way to manipulate those energies, but he knew it to be possible.

One had to remember that the zombies were in fact… well… dead, and therefore their bodies had all its functions stopped, including healing. That, in its turn, meant that the energies had nothing to reinforce or speed up. Consequently, to repair the damage done to the corpses, the energies had to conjure the missing body parts from nothing.

To do so perfectly and without mistakes was obviously complex and beyond what the crystals could do by themselves.