Cal sat motionless, staring at the flickering flames of the afternoon campfire. The dancing light cast shadows across his face, highlighting his furrowed brow.

"Cal, are you okay?" Temp's voice cut through the crackling fire.

Cal's eyes remained fixed on the flames. "What's there to talk about?"

"You absorbed five beast organs after reading the letter. That was not a good idea."

Cal's hands clenched into fists, knuckles white. Inside, he felt like he'd been sucker punched in the gut. His mother had known about his fate, this madness, all of it. And she hadn't warned him.

Her attempts to prepare him were a series of equally dangerous life-threatening missions. She just threw him to the wolves as a sacrificial lamb.

Temp was an AI – how could he understand this. He wouldn’t understand that the letter was paining him much more than whatever the organs were doing.

Cal took a deep breath, exhaling through his nose. "I'm fine. I have to be fine, Temp. Please, just not now. If you want to be helpful, analyze the patterns. I’m done with this place, and I don’t think we will be coming back."

He knew that absorbing so many organs at once was reckless, but he felt lost, stumbling blindly through this nightmare. The only thing ahead of him was that he had a path to more power right before him. With no allies, no guidance, and no clue who or what he was up against, he felt that he could only rely on his skills now. Even his instincts were questionable, with the constant whispers in his mind clouding everything.

Temp studied Cal's stony profile. "If you say so, Cal. I am here if you want to discuss further."

Cal didn't respond. There was nothing to respond to, and Temp would not understand his underlying frustration. Who could he trust in this strange world? Not his mother, clearly. Not Temp, an aberrant AI. And the whispers...he didn't even trust his own thoughts lately.

He had been dodging the topic of landing in this foreign realm. He had hopes of a path back home, but he knew now that he was alone. Lost. He couldn’t help but wonder what this meant for him.

There was no rescue coming.

This wasn’t a mission anymore.

No goal, no end in sight.

Only survival.

He hadn't done much after reading the letter, mind churning with doubts and questions. In a haze, he had prepared a direhog armor piece, though it was more a hide wrap, than armor.

He pondered on questions, while hammering his frustrations on the hide stitching. Cal had never heard of the Divide nor The Ancient Compact, but he had heard of the Great Schism.

There was an ideological difference between the people of Old Earth on the direction and future of their world. Although Cal was not privy to the details, he knew there was debate on the nature of souls. Cal had been taught from a young age by his mother that your soul was your own and to give up ownership was the greatest sacrilege.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Cal knew there were unanswered questions waiting here, but he was done with this place. He would not be a puppet to his mother.

After crafting the hide armor, cal gathered his meager belongings and organized his still functional spike traps, hesitating over the letter and ring from his mother.

After a moment he shoved them both into his satchel as well.

He yanked the energy crystal from the wall, plunging the room into darkness. Although he wanted to take the larger crystal as well, he found that it refused to move from its bindings.

"Time to go, Temp."

The chair silently disappeared from view. Temp's voice steady, a stark contrast to how Cal felt, "Go where exactly?"

A prompt suddenly entered Cal’s view.

[Quest failed: The matriarch is dead and so too is her kin to follow]

[Escalation, stage 1: Defeat the Zelari wolf pack before they overrun the direhogs]

"I don't know yet." Cal turned toward the passage leading out. "But anywhere is better than here."

He strode forward resolutely, the forest swallowing him. Wherever Cal went, Temp would follow.

Cal followed the stream, hoping it would eventually lead to humans or civilization. Or at least somewhere less likely to be overrun by wolves. He did not know the implications of this escalation, but he felt it wasn’t his problem to solve, just like how he wasn’t a puppet of his mother’s scheme.

Cal chose to go upriver. He knew there were other species in the north. He had seen hints of it while hunting the direhogs. The stream seemed endless, meandering through the earth.

Temp, hidden from view, was uncharacteristically silent.

Cal welcomed the quiet. He needed space to think, to process everything that had happened since he awoke in this strange world. His arrival, the whispers, the creatures, the room...it was a lot.

Mostly his thoughts circled back to his mother and to Sari.

He thought about his mother’s lies, to the secrets she'd kept. He replayed every interaction, seeking clues he'd missed. Had she ever really cared for him? Protected him? Or had he just been a means to an end?

As Cal mulled over these questions, they ate at him, threatening to swallow him whole. So, Cal shoved them down, focusing on survival instead. And hope. Hope that he would see Sari again in this life, separated as they were by worlds.

Keep moving forward. Answers could come later. Cal had been off world before, it was his job. But this place felt different. He knew it in his bones.

Days turned, blending into one another. Temp was worried that the constant life and death battles that Cal was pushing himself through were having an impact on his mental health. Temp would take opportunities to assess battle risks as a means to passively inform Cal of his recklessness.

Even in the relative safety of makeshift hideaways, Cal now exuded a faint bloodlust.

The concept of bloodlust was curious to Temp. Cal had suggested it was a form of his soul exerting pressure into their dimension. Back in New Earth, many warriors did something similar with their oversoul to prevent needless fights.

But unlike those warriors, Cal had no way to control oversoul now that he was without bloodline. Temp was worried that this bloodlust would give away their location, but it appeared that it was not noticeable from a distance or that the beasts did not have the capacity to detect it.

Endless confrontation had sharpened Cal's battle awareness as well – unfortunately, the battles had also added scars to his body and possibly his mind. Cal was familiar now with direhog patterns, but even the most planned out encounters were unpredictable, and he survived near-death encounters barely on several occasions by sheer luck.

Cal now crouched in the shadow of a gnarled banyan tree, his blue eyes scanning the dense underbrush. Fingers played over the rough bark, grounding himself in the present moment. The past skirmishes with direhogs flickered in his mind. He remembered the way they charged, how their snouts could upturn boulders as if they were mere pebbles. With each encounter, he collected data, analyzing their behavior like a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Today he was hunting a new beast.