Jude put the last of the materials down on the ground. He had finished moving thirty sacks of mortar, the barrel and the other building materials to the cave. After the first few loads, he had thought he was going to die, but at some point his body seemed to adapt, and the hard work became easier.
The first thing to do was the floor. He played the video on how to lay a mortar floor on the laptop sitting on the chair, and after watching it to the end, he decided to simply do it.
According to the video, he would need water, a lot of it. So that he would not have to carry it in the barrel, he went home, took a hose from the ground floor and connected it to the bathroom on the second floor before returning to the cave.
He poured water into a large basin, cut a sack of mortar open, poured it in and mixed it with a shovel. It was surprisingly hard and slow. When he stopped to check again and looked into the cave, his face hardened. The cave that had felt so cramped a few minutes ago had somehow grown bigger in his eyes.
Clenching his teeth, he focused on the work. He fixed a piece of string to a nail hammered into the wall near the ground and stretched it, so that he only had to spread the mortar to the height of the string. However, the inside of the cave was jagged here and there, and it did not work as he intended, so he gave up on making it perfectly flat and settled for making it as level as he could.
The inside of the cave was warm, and as he kept working, his body was soaked with sweat. Slowly, hunger came to him. He could go home and eat, but for some reason, he wanted to eat here today. Jude took a portable burner from his backpack and set a yellow aluminum pot of water on it, then cooked instant noodles with a whole tin of canned meat. It felt like camping, though not the peaceful kind, but a dangerous trip into hills full of predators and monsters. He only hoped that monsters like the Archaic Bear or the bloodthirsty wolves would not come out.
Even a bone crawler would be dangerous. If anyone who had been in the beta was asked which monster was the most powerful, many of them would answer a Mountain Beast. But if they were asked to pick the scariest, ninety out of a hundred would surely pick a bone crawler.
A bone crawler was a monster born from the bones of a dead monster. In other words, it was a skeleton. It crawled silently toward its enemy and then detonated itself, and the explosion was powerful enough to kill a man instantly if he was caught in it properly. Because of that, many veterans had been sent back to the beginning in a single blow. It was also one of the reasons he had buried the old imp, because for some reason, a monster corpse buried under the ground never turned into a bone crawler.
As he was finishing his noodles, darkness fell over the hills. Since there was no light anywhere, it felt like late at night rather than evening. The unknown birds stopped calling, and an orchestra of sinister insects began to play.
Should he just go home? He shook his head. Jude needed to finish the mortar floor tonight, because the sooner it dried, the sooner he could start storing his supplies there. The entrance was well covered, and if something really happened, he could escape with Random Teleportation at once.
He washed the dishes and went back to work. Having become quite skilled at it, he worked faster and more easily than before, and with nothing in his way, the work went quickly. When he finally saw the cave floor covered with smooth mortar, joy filled his heart. His hideout was truly well made, though it would be even nicer if he had a door to cover the entrance.
Then, as he felt that something was about to burst in his lower body, he ran outside. When he reached a nearby tree and was about to pull his trousers down, a strange sensation struck his back. Slowly turning around, he saw a horrific skeleton walking toward him in the pitch-black darkness.
Without even finishing his curse, Jude ran toward the cave as fast as he could, covering his head and stomach with his arms. It was something he had learned after dying countless times in the beta.
The explosion shoved his body and turned the sky upside down. He rolled over a few times before he crashed into something and stopped, and at that moment, a severe pain struck his whole body.
Jude could barely move, but he forced himself to. He was truly relieved to find that there was still strength in his body. Even though everything ached as if someone had beaten him to a pulp, he was grateful, because at least he was not dead.
A bone crawler had spotted him. Thankfully, it had not come close enough, and that was how he had survived. When he looked at his body, pieces of bone were stuck in his arms. Since they had struck far from the arteries, he decided to pull them out, and he cursed as a sharp pain struck him again.
He half crawled to his backpack and took out the Serene Grass powder and the vegetable oil he had taken from the old imp. It was not an ointment yet, but if he applied it to his wounds, it would heal them to some extent. He tightened his grip on another piece of bone, and he was truly glad that he had covered his head with his arm, or the bones would surely have struck his temple. Tears welled up in his eyes as he pulled out the last fragment.
As he spread more of the powder and the oil over his wounds, the pain slowly faded. After lying down for a while, he sat up and looked at his status window. A bleeding debuff had been added to his active buff, but his health was not decreasing, which meant he would soon recover. With the bone crawler's death, he had also risen to level two, and his points had become twenty-eight.
For now, he would go home.