The sun itself struggled to pierce the heavy atmosphere. Its rays didn’t dance across the forest floor—they dragged, sluggish, laden with unstable Ether dust.
They weren’t straight lines—they fractured, scattered into fractal patterns, as if the air itself were a flawed prism.
I blinked, tried to focus on the task. Build a shelter. Simple. Logical.
Returning to the repaired fissure, I noticed something.
A thin green moss had grown along the seam—not the sickly gray moss of the rest of the cave, but a vibrant moss, almost luminous.
And most importantly, the Ether around it flowed better. Less chaotic. More… channeled.
— I didn’t just patch a hole.
I repaired a circuit.
I crouched near the cave entrance, forcing my mind to ignore the extra layer of reality buzzing behind my eyelids. Focus. Wood. Stones. Shelter.
Wood first.
I stood, scanning the surroundings. The forest wasn’t a forest. Not really. It was a silent hospital. Every tree bore its scars: flaking bark, dead branches that refused to fall, leaves with charred edges that had never burned. And between them, the Ether flowed like infected blood—in spurts, pooling into luminous abscesses at the trees’ nodes.
I reached for a dead branch on the ground. It was relatively dry, still heavy. Perfect.
But when my fingers brushed the bark, I saw something else: the cellulose fibers stretching, warping under invisible pressure. The Ether spiraling through them, as if repairing something. Or as if waiting for me to make the first move.
— OK. Breathe.
I placed both hands on the branch, closed my eyes. Not the eyes. The other vision. The one that showed me atoms as trembling nebulae, bound by unstable golden threads. I focused on a single point—a crack in the wood, where the structure was weakest. The Ether rushed into it, like water into a fissure.
What if…
I pushed.
Not with my muscles. With something else. An intention. A will.
The crack sealed.
I reopened my eyes—the real ones. The branch was intact. Smooth. Like new. I weighed it in my hands, incredulous. Lighter, too. As if I’d removed something. Or added it.
— Cool.
A warm pulse traveled up my spine, like a sip of lukewarm water after hours of walking. Not a fire. No. More of a presence. As if something inside me was realigning, grain by grain. My lungs relaxed. My heart slowed. Even the noise of the atoms—that constant hum drilling into my temples since I’d opened my eyes in this damn mine—faded for a second.
Just one.
Then everything returned: the golden filaments between the leaves, the vibrations in the air, the world in double vision—reality and its hidden framework overlaid like two misaligned film strips.
But now… I understood a little better where to step.
Not because I’d learned anything logical or measurable. No. It was simpler than that. More primal. As if my brain had just installed a new driver for quantum perception—beta version, unstable, but functional.
I tapped my chest with my fingertips, ironic.
— Welcome aboard the rolling dumpster fire that is my life for the past forty-eight hours.
[LEVEL REACHED: 2]
Unlocked Skill: ATOMIC REPAIR (Lv. 1)
You can stabilize simple atomic structures through direct contact.
Range: hands | Efficiency: low | Fatigue: high
A shiver ran down my shoulder blades as the words floated before my eyes—not projected into the air like some ridiculous hologram, no. They were there, inscribed somewhere in perception itself. As if the universe had just sent me a brain-email with the subject line: “You’re making progress.”
I gave a dry smile.
— Thanks, Captain Obvious.
And damn… was I already thinking in XP?
A nervous laugh escaped me. I’d just repaired a half-rotten piece of wood by touching it. No tools. No glue. Just by… willing it to be so. And I was still gaining XP and levels.
— Great. Now I’m a quantum carpenter.
I shook my head, tried to rationalize. Nanoparticles. Something like that. Except I didn’t have nanoparticles. Just my hands, the Ether, and a branch that should’ve been firewood but was now as solid as a new stake.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
I gathered three more branches, repeated the process. Each time, the same tingle in my fingers, the same resistance yielding to mental pressure. As if the Ether were modeling clay, and I’d just learned how to knead it.
OK. So I can stabilize wood. And then?
The stones.
I turned to the rocky outcrops near the cave. Granite blocks, eroded by time, dotted with lichen. Perfect for walls. Except, once again, they weren’t just stones. Their crystals vibrated faintly, their atomic bonds flickered like faulty neon. And between them, the Ether swirled in tiny cyclones, as if searching for an exit.
I kept scanning the rocks around me. Some glowed faintly—not like quartz, but enough to reveal their crystalline networks. Like veins of light beneath the surface.
That one.
A grayish block, streaked with thin golden lines. I knelt, placed my hands on it.
I felt the stone. A puzzle. The pieces refused to fit properly. The Ether circulated in tight loops, as if hitting an obstacle.
I closed my eyes—the other vision—and pulled.
Not physically. Mentally.
A crackle.
The stone split cleanly along the golden lines. Two perfect pieces, as if laser-cut.
— Holy shit…
I touched the sharp edge. Smooth. Too smooth. Like polished glass.
— OK. So I can cut stone too…
I picked up both pieces, weighed them. Perfect for bracing beams. Or making a doorstep.
Progress.
I spent the next two hours gathering "repaired" wood and "cut" stones, trying not to overthink what I was doing. Each time my fingers brushed a material, I saw its flaws—microscopic cracks, impurities, areas where the Ether stagnated like water in a swamp. And each time, I fixed them. Not always successfully. One branch exploded into dust when I tried to "stabilize" it too quickly. A stone shattered into razor-sharp shards when I pushed too hard on its flaws.
But gradually, a pile of usable materials accumulated near the cave entrance.
Now, I need to stabilize my connection with the quartz.
The piece of quartz I’d snatched from the mine still glowed faintly, like a sleeping firefly. The moment I increased my contact with it, the hum in my skull lessened—the filter. Without it, the world was too cacophonous. With it, I could almost pretend everything was normal.
But I couldn’t hold a pebble in my hand forever.
I needed something to fix it against my skin.
I looked around. No rope. No wire. Just vines hanging from low branches.
— Why not?
I cut a vine with a sharp stone shard (thanks, Ether), then turned to the quartz. It was too big for a necklace. I needed to reduce it.
I placed the crystal on a flat rock, pressed my palm against it.
Cut.
The Ether reacted before I even pushed—it coiled around my fingers, as if it knew what I wanted to do. A golden line appeared on the quartz’s surface, following a precise angle.
I pushed.
The crystal split cleanly.
Not like glass. Like… like someone had drawn a line with a pencil, then folded the paper in half. Perfectly.
I repeated the process until I had a flat shard the size of a two-euro coin. Then, with trembling fingers, I imagined the stone becoming porous at one precise spot and poked a hole near the edge.
It worked better than expected.
The vine slid through without resistance.
I tied it around my neck, tucked the quartz pendant under my shirt so it rested against my chest.
The relief was immediate.
The world stopped vibrating like a broken TV. The atoms became blurry dots at the edges of my vision. The Ether receded to a distant murmur.
A shiver—not cold, not heat.
A resolution.
As if two blurry images had finally aligned.
And the universe responded.
Characters floated in the air, cold and sharp:
[CRAFTING: STABILIZING PENDANT]
[First Time / High Innovation / Ether Use]
+45 XP
Progress: 158/250 toward Level 3
The plants around my shelter were starting to change.
The translucent patches on the leaves were fading. The nearby trees seemed straighter, less twisted.
As if my mere presence, stabilized by the quartz, was soothing something.
— Am I… am I healing the area just by being here?
I raised my hand.
Brushed a twig at my feet.
Nothing. No migraine, no tearing sensation. Just a sharp click in my skull, like a switch flipping.
The twig lost its flexibility. Under my fingers, it became hard, dense—as if I’d compressed a century of growth into a second.
— Interesting.
A laugh bubbled up, a little nervous. I wasn’t just a guy lost in the noise of atoms anymore.
I was becoming more than a passive observer, a lab rat of the universe.
I had hands. And now, those hands did things.
Maybe I wasn’t just a lab accident after all.
Maybe I was finally going to build something that made sense in this world.
I took a deep breath.
— Damn.
For the first time in… I didn’t even know how long, I felt stable. Not normal. But stable.
Now, let’s build.
I turned back to my pile of materials, grabbed two "repaired" branches and a flat stone slab. The idea was simple: create an awning in front of the cave entrance, sturdy enough to withstand wind and rain.
I propped the branches into an A-frame, then balanced the stone on top.
Too unstable.
I closed my eyes—the other vision—and saw where the weight concentrated. The pressure points glowed like embers beneath the stone.
I placed my hands on the whole structure.
Push.
The Ether obeyed.
The branches bent slightly, like red-hot metal, then locked into position—perfectly adapted to support the stone. The wood fibers had reconfigured, reinforcing the contact points.
[CRAFTING: SHELTER CREATION]
+45 XP
Progress: 203/250 toward Level 3
I stepped back.
The awning held.
Not pretty. Not perfect. But functional.
— One step at a time.
I wiped my hands on my pants, looked at the rudimentary shelter taking shape before me. The walls would be stacked stones, cemented by… well, by me, apparently. The roof would be a mix of woven branches and slate slabs I’d "cut" earlier.
And the windows?
I picked up a transparent quartz shard—a fragment I’d kept "just in case." If I could modify wood and stone…
I placed the shard on a flat rock, closed my eyes.
Stretch.
The Ether stirred around my fingers. The quartz’s structure floated in my mind—a network of atoms bound by oxygen bridges. I pulled on those bridges, stretched them like taffy.
When I opened my eyes, the shard had flattened into a thin rectangular pane. Transparent. Almost like glass.
[MEDIUM MATERIAL MODIFICATION: STRUCTURAL REINFORCEMENT]
+45 XP
Progress: 248/250 toward Level 3
— Not bad.
I wedged the quartz pane between two stone blocks like an improvised window.
My first opening to the world.
Rustic. Rough.
But mine.
I slumped onto a rock, palms flat on my knees, and surveyed the whole thing.
Four hours had vanished.
A lopsided roof, a half-built wall, and this quartz pendant serving as my lifeline. The shelter was still a rough draft—it’d take at least two more hours to plug the gaps and make it livable—but it was a start.
And for the first time since I’d landed here…
I’d built something.
Not a theory.
Not a schematic.
A shelter.
With makeshift means, laws I didn’t yet grasp.
And yet, it held.
For the first time, matter had bent.
Not to equations.
To me.
A laugh escaped me, rough, a little strained.
I straightened up, dusted off my hands.
Twilight was setting in.
The work wasn’t done.
But this time…
This time, I didn’t feel like I was sinking.
Just struggling to keep my head above water.
One movement at a time.
Bond after bond.
Only two measly XP left.