I moved again.
My foot tightened, released, and carried me forward a few millimetres.
It hurt.
Behind me, the arthropod tore through another mouthful of moss.
Crunch
Still there.
I kept going.
The thin film beneath my body had almost disappeared. Each contraction dragged more than the one before it, and the irritated part of my foot caught against the stone.
I reached the edge of a crack and stopped.
From where I was, it looked less like a crack and more like a trench cut through the world. The bottom vanished into darkness. A root crossed part of it, but the root was narrow, dry, and curved.
I raised the front of my body toward it.
My shell shifted.
No.
There was moss along the left side of the trench. Damp moss. It curved away from the marker before returning toward the ruins farther ahead.
Safer, but longer.
I checked the System.
[Location: Moss-Covered Ruins]
[Distance: 2.96 meters]
Three centimetres.
I had made three centimetres since the last check and already wanted a different body.
I turned left.
The damp moss was easier to grip, though every change in direction made the shell pull against my balance. I moved until the trench was no longer directly beside me, then checked again.
[Distance: 2.97 meters]
I stared at the number.
I had moved forward.
No.
That was not accurate.
I had moved along the route. The route itself had carried me slightly farther from the ruins.
I turned toward the marker, crawled another short distance, and checked again.
[Distance: 2.95 meters]
The number measured position, not effort.
It did not care that one path crossed open stone and another avoided a fall large enough to end the experiment permanently.
So the System knew where the ruins were.
It was not giving me directions.
'Useful.'
The moss ended beneath a hanging fungus.
A clear droplet bulged from the edge of its cap. It was smaller than the one I had avoided earlier, but smaller had become a flexible word. The drop was still wider than my head.
The cap bent lower as the weight increased.
I could wait for it to fall and take whatever water remained.
The stone beneath it sloped toward the crack.
A shallow groove ran across the slope, carrying a thin line of water into a patch of moss near a root. The flow was weak enough that it did not move the moss.
Weak enough for moss.
I had no idea what qualified as weak enough for me.
The arthropod crunched behind me again.
I moved toward the groove.
The fungus bent.
I reached the lower edge just as the droplet fell.
Splash
Water struck the stone above me and rushed into the groove.
The first wave hit my side.
My foot lost contact.
The world turned blue, black, then blue again. My shell rolled over me, dragging my body sideways toward the crack. I pressed down.
Nothing caught.
A root fibre swept beneath the front of my body.
I spread my foot over it.
The fibre bent.
My shell kept pulling me sideways.
'No.'
I flattened everything I could flatten. The edge of my foot caught against a ridge in the stone. The shell pulled once more, then stopped with most of my body tilted into the flow.
Water ran over my head and beneath the front of my foot.
For a moment, I could not tell whether I was drinking it, absorbing it, or simply being drowned slowly.
Then the rush weakened.
I stayed wrapped over the root fibre until the groove carried only a thin film again.
My body felt heavier.
Wetter.
The burning under my foot remained, but mucus began forming more easily along the uninjured sections. Whether I had swallowed the water or absorbed some of it through my body, the result was obvious.
The first attempt had nearly swept me into a crack.
It had also worked.
I shifted behind the root before the next droplet could form.
The second time, I positioned myself uphill, pressed the edge of my shell against the root, and waited until the strongest part of the flow passed.
Only the thinning end reached me.
No rolling.
No trench.
Better.
I remained there until the fungus began bending again, then moved.
The damp route followed cracks and low places in the stone. It rarely pointed directly toward the marker. Sometimes the distance fell. Sometimes it remained unchanged after enough effort to make my foot tremble.
Once it increased by four centimetres because the only wet path curved around a patch of bare stone.
I stopped taking the number personally.
Mostly.
[Distance: 2.41 meters]
I moved.
I rested beneath a root.
I moved again.
Another fungus filled.
Bent.
Released its water.
By the third cycle, the muscles along my foot had begun trembling even while I stayed still.
By the fifth, hunger had settled into my body as a dull pull. I scraped at a soft patch of moss, swallowed what little I could remove, and learned almost nothing except that eating with a radula was slow.
I moved.
The blue fungi dimmed when drops struck near their bases. Green threads brightened inside the moss where water spread, then faded as the surface absorbed it. Tiny shapes shifted inside the growth and vanished whenever I approached.
I could not tell whether they were feeding, hiding, or both.
[Distance: 1.78 meters]
The arthropod's crunching became quieter.
Either I was gaining distance or it had changed direction.
Turning back would cost time and balance.
I kept going.
There was no reliable way to measure how long I travelled. The fungi did not brighten or dim together. The darkness never changed. My body gave me hunger, pain, moisture, and exhaustion, but none of them worked as clocks.
I began measuring the journey by resting places instead.
A split root.
A hollow beneath a fungus.
A stone ridge sharp enough to press against my shell.
Another root.
At some point, the arthropod disappeared from my hearing.
Later, I caught myself wishing it would return because its feeding had been the only familiar sound in this place.
The thought disturbed me more than the silence.
Then the stone shook.
Not the small vibration of mandibles tearing moss.
A deep impact travelled through the broad flattened trail ahead.
The blue fungi along it went dark in a wave.
One after another.
Something was moving beyond the roots.
I could not see a body. Only blurred darkness passing between darker shapes and moss pressing down farther along the trail.
Another impact struck.
The root above me jumped.
I pulled into my shell before I decided to.
The opening tightened around my body. I remained still inside it, listening through the stone.
Impact.
Pause.
Impact.
The vibrations moved across the trail rather than toward me.
Good.
Probably.
They faded.
I waited.
Then I waited longer because one Health Point did not leave room for optimism.
When I emerged, part of the broad trail had changed. Moss lay flattened where it had stood before. A fungus leaned at an angle, its light slowly returning.
Something had crossed there.
Larger than the arthropod, probably.
I still had not seen enough to identify anything except the damage.
I continued.
[Distance: 0.83 meters]
The ruins stopped looking distant.
They became a wall of broken stone rising beneath moss and roots. Flat surfaces met at angles too regular to be natural, though time and growth had buried most of the shape.
Water gathered in old grooves. Thin fungal threads crossed shallow markings I could not understand from this height—or with these eyes.
The marker waited above a narrow ledge.
Between me and it was a strip of dry stone.
Of course.
The damp route ended at the base of a raised slab. The climb was perhaps twice the height of my shell, but the surface leaned outward. There was no moss. No root. Only small pits in the stone and a pale seam running across it.
I touched the seam with one lower tentacle.
Dry.
Not burning.
Not moving.
That counted as good news.
I began climbing.
My foot adhered to the first rough patch. I stretched upward, contracted, and pulled the shell after me.
Its weight shifted away from the stone.
I pressed closer.
Another contraction.
The injured part of my foot slipped.
My shell swung sideways.
For one second, most of my body hung from a patch of mucus smaller than my head.
I stopped moving.
The shell did not.
A shallow pit waited above and to my right. I extended toward it until the front of my foot reached the edge, then spread as much of my body into it as possible.
The pressure eased.
I pulled.
My foot burned.
I pulled again.
The shell scraped the edge of the slab. The vibration passed through my whole body.
Then I was over.
I lay on the ledge without moving.
My foot trembled. My shell felt heavier than it had at the beginning of the journey. Even my tentacles were slow to extend.
A thin line of moisture had collected beneath the moss ahead.
I crawled into it and flattened my body.
The marker hovered directly above the stone.
'Distance.'
[Location: Moss-Covered Ruins]
[Distance: 0 meters]
The number remained for a moment.
Then the blue text vanished.
[Sign-In Successful.]
[Location: Moss-Covered Ruins]
[Please select one reward.]
(A) Passive Ability: Hardened Shell
(B) Passive Ability: Acid Slimy Trail
(C) Passive Ability: Heightened Sense of Smell
(D) Passive Ability: Omnivore
I read the list twice.
'Of course I only get one.'