Rem stretched, head tilting until the tendons in his neck gave a quiet pop, pressure melting from his shoulders.
He stood at the bottom of the ravine, a wound in the earth so deep the sky thinned to a pale ribbon. Walls lifted sheer on either side, smoothed by ages, their faces banded with mineral memory—ash gray, iron red, river-brown—each stripe a ledger line where old water once worried the stone. The air had a taste. Metallic, damp, like rain licked from iron. It crept cool along his cheeks and into his lungs. A brook ran the floor, quick where it met rock, then slow, pooling into shallow saucers that reflected that thin seam of sky. A ghost-current. All that remained of the river that carved this hollow.
He breathed in and felt the place answer. Echo made the ravine sound larger than sight allowed. His boot crunch doubled back at him. Far drips repeated themselves. If this was the first challenge, it wasn’t just about bashing things. It was an introduction to proportion. You are small here. Act accordingly.
Warmth nudged his palm. Behind him, the wall-glyphs pulsed under his glove, steady as a sleeping heart.
[SYSTEM INTERFACE — TRANSPORT MENU]
Available Destinations:
? Storage Locker (Ref: LOC-ST/001)
? Town Square (Origin Node: LOC-OR/001)
The choices flickered, reassuring as signage. A way out existed. Good. He pulled his hand free and looked down the long throat of the ravine. The far glyphs would be there, marking the exit like lighthouses you could touch.
The notice arrived like a blink.
[SYSTEM NOTICE — CHALLENGE INITIATION]
? All class skills unlocked.
? All traits unlocked.
? All active abilities unlocked.
Quest Objective:
? Clear Level 1 of all Slimes (Entity Ref: MOB-SLM/001).
Quest Reward:
? 30 XP
Compliance reference Challenge Directive §1.2.
Words appeared, then unraveled into air. Exactly what Saskia and Tomas had promised. Inside, the class skill unlocked. Outside, they all locked down again.
Rem hitched his satchel tighter and let his eyes crawl the stone. The system could speak in polished panes and clipped bullet points. The ravine told truths by temperature and echo. He trusted the latter more.
[SYSTEM NOTICE — COMPATIBILITY SCAN]
? Non-Thrive subsystem detected.
? Incompatibilities identified.
? Incompatible subsystems disabled.
? Metrics normalized across platforms.
? Compatible analogue found. Mapping to Thrive skill set.
Compliance reference: Oversight Queue §44.7.
Result: New Skill Enabled — Inspect (Interface Only).
Restriction: Accessible only within Thrive-enabled regions.
[ASSESSMENT LOG — SUBJECT REGISTRY]
License: Thrive System [Provisional] (Ref: LIC-TH/PRV).
Name: Rembrandt de Vries.
Race: Human (Enhanced).
Level: 1.
Class: Error — No class found (Ref: SYS-ERR/CL-404).
[ASSESSMENT LOG — STATISTICAL INDEX]
Strength: 8
Agility: 8
Vitality: 7
Intelligence: 12
Perception: 12
Essence Control: 9
[ASSESSMENT LOG — SKILL REGISTER]
Class Skills:
Error — No class found (Ref: SYS-ERR/CL-405).
General Skills:
Inspect — Present system-registered item details (Ref: SK-INS/001). Interface only. Accessible only within Thrive-enabled regions.
[ASSESSMENT LOG — EXPERIENCE]
Current XP: 0
XP to next level: 100
[ASSESSMENT LOG — ANCILLARY DATA]
Challenge Passes Remaining: 0
Clear Record: None
Compliance reference: Oversight Queue §8.2.
“That.. wasn’t expecting anything,” he muttered. The words fogged faintly in the damp. He looked down at his boots and thought .
[INSPECTION REPORT]
Item: Leather Boots (Level 1).
Grade: Common (Ref: IT-GRD/COM).
Durability: Good (Ref: IT-DUR/STD).
Traits: None recorded.
Compliance reference: Item Registry §12.4.
He tugged out his notebook. The cover was softened by use, corners splayed. Charcoal scraped, leaving the smell of dust and carbon. Entry 1: Boots. Common. Durability: good. Baseline confirmed. He paused, tapping the page with the side of the charcoal, black crescents forming along the margin. His handwriting cramped on his uneven thigh, letters like little fences. Smudges smeared what had come before, but this—this felt like the first proper line in a map. Not a doodle. A record. Evidence that the strange could be measured if you asked it clear questions.
He set off. Gravel bucked underfoot. The brook gurgled and hush-hushed like it knew secrets but was polite enough to whisper them. Motion tugged at the edge of his vision. A slime slumped along a stretch of stone, translucent green, inner bubbles sliding. Another pooled against the wall like spilled jelly. A third drifted across open ground. He counted without moving his lips. One, two, three until seven. None rushed him. Their presence made his shoulders itch.
Exit first. Numbers second. Experiments last. The plan. Trust the plan.
At the far end the glyphs glowed. He slid down the wall until the damp cold pressed the bones of his back. Stone bled chill through his shirt. He flexed his right hand. Blue brightened above his fingertip, a square the size of a six-sided die, humming the way wires hum when a building breathes. He let go. It hung for a breath, then dissolved like sugar. He tried not to smile and failed.
Curiosity got him. He bent, picked a pebble from the scree, and dropped it into the glow the next time he called it. The stone slowed. Drifted. Stopped. There, hanging in the square as if the tiny world had different rules. A short laugh slipped out of him. The system had not said a word about this. Of course it hadn’t.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
And at the size it was it didn’t matter - but the ability to freeze in place items in your merge field, that was a fairly large oversight by the Star Corps machine. He watched in wonder as the pebble floated inside his little square.
Certainty struck like a clean chord. Hardness. Not a sentence. Not even a word, really. A quality pressed into his mind the way heat tells you it is heat. Resistance. Refusal to be dented. Along with it came the scrape of absence in his chest, subtle but definite, as if a sip of himself poured away through a crack he couldn’t see.
He braced the notebook on his knee and wrote quickly: e He dotted the question hard enough to punch a fleck through the paper.
Then he played. Tossed the pebble up, snapped the square mid-arc, caught it in the glow. Grin he couldn’t unmake. Tried again, late. The pebble pinged off the stones and skittered away. He hissed through his teeth and fetched it, muttering about timing like it could hear.
The next span—he guessed half an hour by the slow creep of light across the opposite wall—he tested. He wasn’t elegant. He was method. Moss clung to damp stone. Identify: absorbency. A fallen leaf, its veins like a fine net. Identify: fragility. Brook water cupped in his palm. Identify: carrier, to move other things along. Each revelation cost only a sip. He could feel the subtraction. Manageable, provided he respected it.
For merge
Waiting.
The thought came unbidden: Not a word spoken, not a command, but a certainty—if he willed it, they would fold.
He did.
The two stones rippled, sparks twitching between them briefly before they folded together with an energetic snap that echoed off the walls. It was done in a second leaving only a single hovering pebble. Then the drain hit, if his identifymerge
He tugged out his notebook. Charcoal scratched fast, hand smudging lines:
Merging was expensive. He learned that quickly. Pebble with moss yielded a porous stone that drank water like a thirsty mouth. Pebble with leaf gave a shard brittle enough that breath almost broke it. Pebble with water formed a bead the size of a thumbnail, liquid that bent light and pressed back against touch as if it had decided inertia was a hobby. The last took him down. He folded to sit without intending to, spine scraping stone on the way. Hollow rang through him, a scraped-out gourd sound where strength should live. Hands shook. Thought staggered. He counted breaths, which steadied nothing but at least marked the seconds. He took two careful sips from his canteen. Cold threaded his throat and gave him back the edges of things.
He wrote with a hand that wanted to wobble: The words smeared under the heel of his hand. He underlined drain twice until the paper almost gave.
Enough theory.
He took up the hammer. The haft felt rough and honest. The weight settled him. He set on the closest slime, a sagging green lump hugging the wall. He raised the head and swung hard. Impact came wet and wrong and loud. Shock bit through his wrists. The slime split, peeled, tried to recollect itself and failed. A core, a small green marble with a faint inner light, rolled out and tapped his boot.
Relief slid into him. Not a flood of muscle, more like coolness poured into cracks. Something refilled. He couldn’t name the reservoir, only the sense of it existing. He wrote without looking away from the ground: Entry 12: Killing slime restores… something. The ellipsis felt honest.
[COMBAT LOG]
? Target Eliminated: Level 1 Slime.
? Reward: 5 XP.
Compliance reference: Combat Resolution §9.1.
He pulled the green marble slime core up and summoned his domain around it, barely encapsulating it. Identify revealed the core’s primary quality: duplication.
that might come in handy.
He pulled out his notebook and jotted it down. Already his mind spun with possibilities.
He got back to work. It was not pretty. Sweat stung his eyes and made the world shine. The hammer sang against stone when he missed. Slimes split and doubled and refused to die because refusal was apparently the word of the day. Twice the hammer skidded in his grasp and the rough wood took skin from his palms - through his gloves. He almost smashed his own toes once when the head rebounded. Breath rasped. He remembered Tomas' advice. Leverage. Don't try to brute force it. His mother: ration his strength. Saskia, ever cheerful, implied a few bruises would be his best instructor. The memory of them kept him going.
Time ran like the brook, quick when he watched the hammer head, slow when he was collecting himself against the wall, quicker again when a slime finally collapsed into a tired smear. When the last of the group stilled, he had four faintly luminous cores in his satchel. His arms trembled with their own weight. His shirt stuck to him. Every breath carried grit.
[COMBAT LOG]
? Targets Eliminated: Level 1 Slime x3.
? Reward: 15 XP.
Compliance reference: Combat Resolution §9.1.
He slid down the wall again and let the stone hold him up for a while. This exhaustion was different from the hollow of merge. This was earned. Sweat, slips, bruises, the old curriculum. Honest fatigue. It felt bad and clean at once.
When his breath stopped sounding like it had thorns, he pinched a smear of residue from the rock, bringing it up to his eyes to inspect. Analyzing it closely he could smell the acrid scent, see the glimmering green mass, and there inside the mass suspending is smaller tiny specs something more. He isolated the clear substance and summoned his blue square around it.
Identify.
The answer arrived with simple clarity. Carrier. The same result as when it identified water earlier. He blinked, his thoughts leaping to the next logical question. Do slimes absorb water? How much could they carry? How quickly did they trade water with the world? The notebook came back out. The question mark sat big. He liked it. Questions kept things alive.
He paged back through what he had. Hardness. Absorbency. Fragility. Carrier. Porous stone. Brittle shard. Unstable bead. A grammar of qualities, simple nouns that made compound truths when paired. Objects confessing under pressure, but only in single words. Combinations that worked for a breath and then fell apart, like the world allowed novelty in small bites. Rules. If there were rules, there was a way to learn them, and he had a pencil.
He summoned his status pane and snorted. XP: still zero. He felt the tug to be annoyed and let it pass. Maybe leveling was a story for later. Maybe the point now was cartography. Map the strange first. Tally the triumphs after.
He closed the notebook with a thumb lingering on the softened edge of the cover. The hammer felt heavier now that he had time to notice it. His chest ached in a way that promised tomorrow, not collapse. Resolve had weight too, and he could carry it. He pushed up the wall and stood until balance returned.
The far glyphs waited, pale and patient.
Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I will break the challenge.
