The sound gave me the answer before my hand had time to pull back.

  A snake.

  Not the kind I knew. The serpents of the Oasis operated on a scale that made the largest ones on Earth irrelevant — but what my hand had touched had a thin circumference. Less than twenty centimeters. Young, by what I could estimate in the dark.

  "Sorry, little friend. It wasn't on purpose."

  I began retreating slowly, with no sudden variation in movement. Young serpents reacted to vibration before anything else — pressure on the ground, displacement of air, any signal they read as a threat. I needed to get out of the strike radius without triggering the reflex.

  And then the hatchling cried out again, this time more intensely.

  It wasn't the sound of pain. It was the kind of signal that travels through walls of rock — sharp, directional, shaped by evolution to reach exactly one thing.

  The mother.

  The shadow arrived the moment the sound ceased. A mass that blocked what little light existed beyond the waterfall, making the flow of water tremble as though the entire rock had taken a deep breath. The cave ceiling groaned. Stones fell. The waterfall's trajectory shifted for a few seconds — displaced by something too voluminous passing through the curtain.

  The nostril appeared first. Wide as a window, sweeping the damp air in slow, deliberate arcs, with the patience of something that never needed to hurry. The forked tongue that followed was larger than my arm, and moved in spirals — not random, but systematic.

  She knew something was here.

  I calculated: front exit blocked. Retreating through the river gave me margin, but not resolution — I would return to the dark, to the alpha, to the previous impasse. I needed an exit, not a postponement.

  The tongue passed less than half a meter from my face.

  I didn't move.

  It swept the air above me. Below. To the sides. The serpent was scenting in layers, assembling a three-dimensional image of the space. I was within range, but motionless — without the heat of movement, drained by hours in the ice-cold water, and without any variation in pressure that would betray an escape attempt. For now, I was merely an anomaly. Not yet prey.

  For now.

  That was when the rattling and clashing of teeth returned.

  Behind me. Rhythmic. Too close.

  The Alpha had located me. Three others came with it — and among them, I recognized the torn uniform of the girl who had now fully transformed. They screamed when they spotted me. The sound echoed through the entire cave.

  The serpent's tongue stopped in the air.

  Reoriented.

  Two threat vectors converging. One blocked front. And now — the serpent had two sound sources to process simultaneously.

  The Wendigos advanced without hesitation.

  The Alpha stayed back, watching.

  The tongue touched my back.

  Location confirmed.

  The head began moving in my direction — slow, calibrated, with the precision of something that never wastes energy on unnecessary movement. The jaw was closed. That meant she hadn't decided to attack yet. She was still evaluating size, position, angle of approach.

  The Wendigos were less than fifteen meters away.

  I had maybe three seconds before both problems merged into one.

  The solution appeared not as insight, but as elimination: there was no way to face the serpent, no way to flee the Wendigos, no exit that didn't pass through one of the two. The only variable I controlled was which of the two encountered what — and when.

  I bit my own hand.

  The previous cut opened without resistance. Warm blood ran down my palm. I turned toward the tongue, which was still sweeping the air near my shoulder, and pressed my open hand directly against it.

  The reflex was instantaneous and total.

  The serpent's head contracted backward in under a second — not out of fear, but positioning. It was the movement that preceded the strike. I dropped at the same instant, pressing my body against the cave floor, and the jaw passed less than thirty centimeters above my head with enough velocity to displace the air audibly.

  The impact was deafening.

  Four meters of mass crossed through the space where I had been and met the Wendigos in the same movement. Two disappeared so abruptly that for a moment I didn't process what had happened. The converted girl along with them. The jaw closed with the dry, definitive sound of something that had no equivalent in any context I knew.

  There were screams.

  They ceased.

  The serpent coiled upon itself, repositioning, and the volume of its body blocked half the cave. The third Wendigo stopped at the edge of its reach, and it stopped making noise all at once — not by choice, but by instinct. There was something larger than it in the equation now, and its nervous system knew that before its mind did.

  The alpha, at a distance, didn't move.

  It only watched.

  I was already running.

  With the serpent's mouth occupied and reorienting, the window existed — it wouldn't last. I ran toward the waterfall without calculating anything beyond speed and trajectory. I crossed the veil of water in the next step.

  And then the ground ended.

  Twenty meters of freefall. The water swallowed me with impact enough to knock the air from my lungs all at once. I swam upward on pure reflex, surfacing with burning lungs and heavy arms. I shook the water from my eyes.

  Looking back at the scene behind me, I could perceive the colossal size of the snake as it serpentined across the entire mountain, making me question where that enormous creature ended. Its head, however, remained inside the cave, likely occupied with its new food source.

  On the other side of the falls, the forest had changed. Trees more spaced apart. Light reaching the ground. Low-lying vegetation between the roots — the kind the Compendium listed as edible.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  I looked at the sun.

  Almost five in the afternoon. Almost three hours inside the cave.

  I got out of the water.

  ?

  I followed the river along the bank, maintaining enough distance from the water to avoid being an obvious ambush position, close enough to use it as a navigation reference. Creatures came to drink at rivers — I knew that. The depth of the current here was also different, deeper, which meant what inhabited the bottom was proportionally harder to predict.

  Two hours. The sun was beginning to disappear.

  And then I found it.

  I stopped at the top of a gentle rise and analyzed the terrain below calmly, as though the time available before nightfall wasn't running out.

  A tree with nearly thirty meters of canopy dominated the center of the area — a structure robust enough to serve as a permanent reference point. Five hundred meters away, the river offered water access without direct exposure. But what truly made me stop was the hill.

  Rock. Pure. Fifty meters tall, with the exposed lateral face revealing a shallow cave — explorable in minutes, without the depth and fauna problems of the previous one. And inside it, what I needed to confirm.

  I knelt and pressed my fingers against the rock at the entrance.

  Metallic veins between the layers. Greenish coloring with yellowish patches.

  "Copper and zinc. If the formation follows the Compendium's pattern… eighty percent probability of iron in the lower layers."

  I stood and mentally mapped the radius.

  Water at five hundred meters. Edible vegetation identified along the route. Metal confirmed in the hill. Natural cover from the tree and elevation of the rock combining protection and visibility.

  There was no better point. Statistically, searching longer would mean loss with growing risk, not gain.

  I calculated the geometric center between the resources. Positioned the staff.

  And planted the flag.

  ?

  [ Settlement location selected. Confirm to validate. ]

  I pressed the button that had appeared on the handle.

  The sound that followed was like nothing I had heard before — not an explosion, not an alarm. It was the kind of frequency you feel before you hear, a pressure wave expanding outward in all directions. Territorial branching. Everything within the designated radius that didn't belong to the territory was expelled within seconds.

  Then the plasma rose.

  A beam of light reached nearly a kilometer in height before opening up, pouring a luminous dome over the entire area. It shone with the stability of something permanent. My territory. Visible to anything in the Oasis that knew what it meant.

  Which had two sides.

  [ Terrain validated. Mapping resources... ] [ Please choose the kingdom's name. ]

  The wind struck my face. I thought for a few seconds — not about sophisticated names, not about strategic symbolism. I let the obvious win.

  "Sparta."

  My sister would have found it corny. I didn't care. In here, I was the Lord.

  [ Kingdom registered: Sparta. ]

  The projector appeared with the three initial construction options. I didn't need to deliberate long — I had thought through this choice before arriving at the Oasis, and what had changed since then were the variables, not the logic.

  Hero's Temple: dependent on luck. After seeing what inhabited that forest, I wasn't willing to bet my survival on a random hero who might be useless against the local threat level.

  House of Iron and Steel: my original choice. By my previous calculations, 67% survival rate — mathematically superior, but costly in establishment time.

  Castle: collection, mapping, workers. Depended on having tools already available to be efficient.

  I looked at the ring.

  "This variable changes everything."

  The vampire wouldn't have had time to set a complex password before being transported. Origin, pride, identity — the password needed to be instinctive.

  I thought about what she was. What she carried as her deepest reference. A vampire of ancient lineage, with the bearing of someone who never needed to prove anything — that type doesn't anchor itself to abstract concepts. It anchors to place. To name.

  Dracula. And the name wasn't the castle, wasn't the legend. It was the city.

  "Sighi?oara."

  The ring unlocked.

  Hypothesis confirmed.

  I deposited the contents on the ground: three pickaxes, three axes, three hammers, a sword, a shield. And a book I set aside for later. With tools available, the Castle stopped being the dependent option and became the ideal one.

  "Castle."

  ?

  The ground trembled.

  The structure emerged from the bottom up — not like construction, but as though it had always been there, only buried. First the roof, then the towers, then the walls, until the front gate with its portcullis slowly lowering into place. Ten meters tall. Compact. Functional.

  I looked at them carefully for the first time.

  They had human form — correct proportions, two arms, two legs, faces with nose and mouth and eyes. But it was as if someone had used people as a reference without understanding what made people… people. No muscular tension that wasn't functional. No eye movement searching for something. No visible breathing beyond the bare minimum. They stood still with the naturalness of objects that hadn't yet received a purpose.

  Tools. With the wrong packaging.

  [ Congratulations. Castle completed. Select workers and assign functions. ]

  "You two. Pickaxes. Cave to the east." They advanced without hesitation, without exchanging glances, without any micro-expression indicating that the order had been received by anything beyond a mechanism. They simply stopped being still and began to move.

  "Scout. Edible flora."

  I didn't need to list anything. The book was clear on that: workers operated with knowledge proportional to their Lord's — not as their own memory, but as direct access. What I knew, they knew. What I didn't know didn't exist for them.

  They weren't intelligent. They had no initiative, judgment, or anything approaching consciousness. They were the Lord's knowledge with legs — executing with exact precision what I was capable of conceiving, nothing more, nothing less.

  An extension. Not a mind.

  Efficient. For now, sufficient.

  I spent the following hours cutting wood manually to understand the scale of the system before trusting it. Three hours. Hands that were already in bad shape got worse. At half the estimated efficiency of a worker, I produced three units.

  The low numbers in the menu made sense — each unit represented complete cycles of collection and processing, not individual strikes. The system wasn't generous. It was precise.

  The logistics problem appeared early: workers only registered collection upon depositing material at the castle. The journey between the cave and the storage point added considerable time between collection and actual availability.

  Then I remembered the cube. When depositing material into it, the system computed normally — it functioned as an alternative storage point, at least for me. If the workers could use it the same way, the problem would be solved.

  I positioned the cube in the middle of the route. Then at the cave entrance. The workers passed by it both times, as though it simply didn't exist.

  Limitation registered: the cube was my advantage, not theirs. A solution that solved half the problem didn't solve the problem.

  I would need to think of something else.

  When the collected volume crossed the minimum needed for the next construction, I didn't wait.

  "Build house."

  [ Calculating materials... Materials available... Initiating construction. ]

  Three more workers. Six now. I redistributed: two collecting wood, three on ore, one on flora reconnaissance.

  The sun had completely disappeared when I entered the castle. The interior was simple — five hundred square meters of open area, nothing wasted on space that didn't serve a function. At the center, the Lord's cabin: five square meters. Low ceiling, bare walls, without any comfort that wasn't strictly necessary. Small. I knew that. But I also knew the cabin grew along with the castle — each structural expansion reflected directly in the Lord's space. What stood before me wasn't the destination, it was the starting point. For now, it was enough.

  But before shutting off, one thing wouldn't leave my mind.

  "Who was that woman?"

  She was no common noble. The ring's contents were disproportionate to any definition of casual help. Someone who donates that kind of equipment isn't being generous. They're being strategic. The expected return existed. I just didn't know yet what it was.

  "No one can know about this ring."

  The adrenaline ceased. I shut off.

  ?

  The sky was orange when I opened my eyes.

  For a second I miscalculated — I thought I had slept less than an hour, that the sun was still rising. Then orientation corrected itself. That was the orange of dusk.

  "How long did I sleep?"

  [ Lord Leonidas slept for thirteen hours. Do you require any further information? ]

  Thirteen hours. My body had taken what it needed without asking permission.

  "I'll need to come up with a name for you. Responding to the void is going to drive me crazy."

  [ Name function enabled. Please enter new name. ]

  "Interesting. You have that fun—"

  [ Name selected: Interesting. Confirm this name? ]

  "Hey, no—"

  [ Name cancelled. Awaiting new designation. ]

  I sighed.

  "Zeus."

  [ Zeus. Confirm this name? ]

  "Confirmed."

  [ Name registered. Assistant Zeus activated. ]

  "Zeus. Report on resources collected over the thirteen hours."

  The response came immediately. Iron confirmed in the lower layers. Wood above projection. Flora mapped within a three-hundred-meter radius.

  The territory had existed for less than twenty hours. Fifty-two hours of protection remained. Six active workers, iron confirmed, tools available, unlockable constructions.

  Most Lords spent the first two days fighting not to die.

  I was structuring expansion.

  The gate opened. The light of dusk was bidding farewell on the horizon.

  Sparta had survived the first day.

  Knowing that someone took the time to read my story and share their thoughts truly warms an author's heart.

  I hope this journey is bringing you as much enjoyment as it is bringing me while writing it.