Ethan Reyes woke with dirt in his mouth. The grit stuck to his tongue like ash, clinging to his gums as he coughed and spat. He rolled onto his side, lungs seizing as he choked down the alien air. Every ragged pull burned, sharp and unfamiliar, carrying a metallic bite that made his chest convulse. For one horrifying moment, terror spiked—what if it wasn't breathable after all?—but the panic ebbed only when oxygen finally reached his blood.
He gagged, wiping at his lips with a trembling hand, smearing mud across his cheek. His throat ached as if he had swallowed smoke. The taste refused to leave, bitter and cloying, coating his tongue until it felt like his mouth was lined with soot.
Shivering, he forced himself up onto his hands and knees. The ground beneath him was wrong. His palms scraped across jagged stone and brittle grass slick with dew, the blades cutting at his skin like thin glass. A faint chill clung to the surface of the earth, seeping into his bones, as if the land hadn't yet decided whether it was alive or dead.
He coughed again, sharp and wet, his chest rattling as he fought to steady his breathing. Each inhale brought with it the alien tang—metallic, sharp, almost copper-like—that stung the back of his throat. The air felt heavier than it should, pressing down on his ribs, unwilling to let him breathe freely. He pressed a hand to his sternum, forcing air in, forcing it out, until the rhythm returned.
Only then did he dare to lift his head.
A lavender sky stretched overhead, dimming at the edges where the horizon seemed to bend. Two suns hung near the rim of the world—one pale gold, the other a sickly white. Their twin lights bled shadows into each other, smearing depth and making distances feel wrong.
For a heartbeat, there was only stillness.
Then the planet woke.
From every direction came a rolling surge of sound—as if an unseen hand had lifted a lid off the world. Thunderous bellows overlapped with chittering clicks; flute-thin trills tangled with wet, guttering croaks. Predators and prey, small things and large, all startled into existence at the same instant and crying out in the same raw confusion. The first wave of noise rose, broke, and scattered through the trees until it thinned into a jittering hush that left his bones buzzing.
This isn't Earth, he whispered, his voice trembling as the overwhelming chorus of creatures howling and roaring all around him made every word tremble on his lips. Hearing his own voice amidst the chaos, he steadied himself a fraction; he breathed more slowly. Observe. Assess. Survive. He repeated the cadence, trying to block out the cacophony, until the shake in his hands eased.
A faint shimmer flowered in front of him—a translucent pane of light, words hovering like frost on glass, waiting for his attention.
{[EXISTENCE ALLOCATION FRAMEWORK – INITIALIZED]
Name: Ethan Reyes
Species: Homo sapien
World Designation: 55-Earth
Civilization Code: 100% (Survivors: 8,004,871,229)
Status Panel: Online
Map Panel: Half-Unlocked — Cartography skill required for full access; temporary reveals decay after 1 day. Skills: Cartography (Locked)
Inventory: Empty
Trading Tab: Unlocked
Chat Tab: Active (silent until viewed)}
Amidst the chaos, there is structure. A framework exists, guided by rules, or at least the illusion of them. He dismissed the panel and allowed the forest to envelop him.
The trees grew in crooked angles, bark peeling in gray flakes that drifted like ash when he brushed them. The undergrowth was sparse but strange—blotchy ferns with frayed edges, red vines braided tight around trunks and puckered into the bark like old scars. The air had no scent—too clean, too flat—until the wind finally remembered itself and pushed a cold thread through the clearing.
He needed information. And, if the framework was honest, information was only a decision away.
He opened the chat by choice, not because anything demanded it, but because ignorance felt louder than the forest.
[GLOBAL CHAT: UPLINK STABLE – REGION 55]
{CrimsonFox: DO NOT drink the green water streams! I'm blind in one eye now!
KitsuneDreamer: 誰かいますか?助けて!
Sturmjäger: Wo bin ich?! Hilfe! Bitte!
StoneKing: Where am I? Is anyone nearby?!
IronFist23: Keep moving. Don't stay near spawn points. If you don't have a weapon yet, make one now.}
Static profile pictures hovered to the side of each line—faces at odd angles, blurry shoulders, a neutral expression, or a startled one—but honest. Not avatars. People. The messages came in a stuttering scroll, then fell quiet again, as if the system itself refused to shout over billions of voices.
He closed the chat, jaw clenched. Different languages, frantic warnings, the word spawn thrown out as if it's just a simple fact. If there were rules here, they were strict.
He summoned the Technology Tree.
Lines unfurled into a branching web. Almost all the nodes were dim gray—there, but untouchable—while a handful at the very bottom glowed with a tired, tentative gold. Small percentages pulsed beside a few entries, fluctuating minutely, like a heartbeat shared across continents.
Basic Fire Creation — Locked
Stone Weapon — Knife — Available (Manual Unlock)
Shelter Design I — 3% Learned
Water Filtration (Primitive) — 0.2%
Signal Fire Construction — 0.5%
He hovered over Stone Weapon — Knife. A minimal description ghosted into view: primitive bladed tool; unlockable through manual creation; knowledge merges into Stone Tool Crafting once variations are complete or parent tech is unlocked. He didn't need points or permission to start. If he could make it, the system would acknowledge it. The thought steadied him. Doing was an answer. Doing would count.
He closed the tree and rose.
The first steps were deliberate, each foot placed as if the ground might rearrange itself at any moment. The roars that had thundered at waking now echoed in pockets—far bellows, closer chuffs, the brittle percussion of something moving through brush. He let the trees break his outline, moved with the slope as it gave way to a shallow gully. Cracked stone lined the bed; weeds clung to seams where moisture once burrowed through.
He paused at every snap and creak, letting the world speak first. The wind returned as a thin ribbon, dragging a mineral chill down the gully. Twice, he saw the red vines pulse, almost imperceptibly, as if remembering they were alive.
The gully should have been empty. It wasn't.
Movement tugged at the corner of his vision. Hunched and narrow as a starved dog, the creature stood no higher than his hip. Its skin was a pale, fungus-gray stretched too tight across joints, every motion a stagger at the edge of control. Amber eyes reflected the bruised light. It gripped a stone in each bony hand and struck them together—click, click, crack—progress measured in frustrated squeals and flinches.
Ethan's body chose stillness for him. Breath slowed, shoulders softened, eyes cut for exits. The thing kept working, oblivious. He sank lower and eased a foot back. Then another. Then another. A careful retreat stitched of small movements and the promise not to run.
Brush swallowed the creature. The clicks faded into the trees. Only when the gully curved and the view broke did he let his lungs burn and empty.
Not ready for that. Not yet.
He needed a weapon before curiosity got the better of him.
He picked a spot where stone lay in generous flakes near a split boulder and knelt. He'd done this once, years ago, at a summer camp he'd hated: knap the edge, shape a handle notch, lash everything tight. Back then, there was a teacher, bandages, and lunch afterward. Here, there was only the shape of his hands and the memory of the steps.
He chose a flat shard with a promising ridge, then a smaller wedge to strike with. The first tap sent a useless chip skipping. The second found a seam. The third raised a slice as thin as a thumbnail. He worked the ridge into an edge—too steep and it would crumble, too shallow and it would tear more than cut. Bark peeled from a nearby sapling in long, thin fibers; he twisted them into a cord until they bit into his palms. A straight length of branch became a handle.
Time blurred into repetition: strike, test, adjust. The framework didn't guide him, but it watched.
[Stone Weapon — Knife: Manual Creation Initiated] Progress: 18% … 41% … 73% …
He wrapped the blade's base to cushion it, set the notch against the handle, lashed hard, then harder, until the fibers creaked and settled. The edge kissed his thumb and drew a bright line of pain—sharp enough.
[Stone Weapon — Knife: Complete] Inventory Updated: +1 Stone Knife Technology Tree Updated: Partial Knowledge Gained for Stone Tool Crafting
He exhaled. The knife was heavy, ugly, and real. He shaved a curl from a twig; it peeled away clean. Not much of a margin, but a margin all the same.
Thirst pressed in now that adrenaline had someplace to sit. The dry gully, which had promised water at some point, might still remember where it had pooled. He followed the slope as it eased, scanning for darker soil, for the shine caught between stones, for the smell of wet that didn't exist in the sterile air.
The suns had inched apart by the time he saw it—a shy glimmer at the base of a black-veined slab. He crouched. A shallow basin had collected a hand's depth of water, its surface dotted with tiny bubbles. He dipped his hand and tested the liquid. It didn't burn or stink. With a trembling sip, he brought it to his lips. It was flat and metallic, but still drinkable. He cupped his hands and drank. Despite being flat and metallic, it slid down smoothly and felt like his own throat again.
[New Location Marked: Freshwater Source — Temporary]
So the system learned too.
Ethan knelt back on his heels and watched the twin suns smear across the little pool. The terror that had woken with him hadn't vanished; it had calcified into something useful. Focus. Resolve—a willingness to move in small, specific steps.
He pulled up his Status Panel. The Civilization Code number flickered, then settled below where it had started. Some of those eight billion faces had already gone dark—dropped into the wrong patch of world, too near a thing with amber eyes, too far from water, too dependent on a machine that wasn't here.
"Step one: water. Step two: shelter. Step three: survive," he said softly, and the words didn't echo so much as settle.
The forest answered with distant voices—roars, clicks, trills—the soundscape of an entire biosphere trying to understand itself. He slid the knife into his waistband, rose, and chose a direction with shade and stone enough to think.
The war for existence had begun, and every choice would count.