The Pragmatist trait wasn't a feeling. It was an absence of one. A firewall had been erected in his mind, and on the other side of it, the useless emotions of guilt and revulsion whimpered unheard. Elias looked at the bloody mess before him, not as a tragedy, but as a problem to be solved.
He needed to process the carcass. With the primitive obsidian knife, he began the grisly task. It was a messy, anatomical puzzle. He had never seen the inside of a living creature before, save for diagrams in biology textbooks. The viscera steamed in the frigid air, a smell that was both coppery and foul. He worked slowly, methodically, his actions guided by a cold, newfound instinct. He knew, without knowing how he knew, to preserve the hide, to separate the meat from the organs, to keep the long bones for potential tools. It was a disgusting, clumsy effort, leaving him slicked with blood that quickly grew cold and tacky on his skin.
The revulsion was a distant echo, a ghost of a sensation from a former life. The dominant thought was: This is insufficient. I need fire to cook this. I need shelter to survive the night.
He bundled the pathetic scraps of meat in the small hide and secured it with a vine. Now, for shelter.
He rose, his makeshift bark shoes crunching on the frozen ground, and scanned his surroundings with a strategist's eye. The forest was monolithic, oppressive. Building a shelter from scratch would take too much time, too many calories. He needed to find something that already existed. A cave, a hollow log, an overhang.
He started walking, moving deeper into the woods, his direction chosen by a simple, logical principle: downward. Cold air sinks. A low point might offer some protection from the wind. The howl from before had faded, but the silence that replaced it was no less menacing. Every snap of a twig under his feet felt like a broadcast of his location to unseen listeners.
The forest floor sloped gently downwards for what felt like miles. The trees grew thicker here, their roots twisting over the ground like petrified serpents. And then he saw it.
It wasn't a natural formation. Set into a slight rise in the earth was a low, crumbling wall of stacked stones, barely visible under a thick blanket of moss and grave-lichen. At its center was a darker patch of earth, a shallow depression. It looked ancient, forgotten. A cairn. A barrow. A grave.
The Elias of two days ago would have regarded it with intellectual curiosity, perhaps a sense of historical reverence. He would have respected its purpose and left it undisturbed.
The Elias of now saw only its utility.
It was a pre-dug hole. The stone wall, though low, would serve as an excellent windbreak. It was the most logical choice for a shelter. The most efficient expenditure of energy.
He approached the grave. A single, flat stone, larger than the others, lay tilted at one end, like a headstone worn smooth by centuries of rain and ice. There were no markings on it. He knelt, his blood-smeared hands touching the frozen stone. He felt nothing. No spookiness. No sense of sacrilege. Only the texture of the rock and the biting cold.
He began to dig with his bare hands. The topsoil was frozen solid. He fetched his obsidian knife and used it to hack and pry at the icy earth, deepening the depression. It was exhausting work. Shivers wracked his body uncontrollably, but he didn't stop. He was a machine executing a task. [Task: Improve Shelter. Condition: Critical.]
After an hour of frantic labor, he had carved out a space large enough to lie down in, shielded on one side by the ancient stones. As his fingers scraped against something hard and smooth in the dirt, he paused. He brushed away the soil and unearthed a collection of what he immediately recognized as bones. They were old, brittle, and stained the color of the earth. A human ribcage. A femur. Part of a skull.
This was the former occupant.
Elias paused, looking at the bones. He wasn't desecrating a grave. He was occupying an abandoned structure. The previous owner had no more use for it. He did. The logic was sound. He needed to survive. The dead did not.
With a strange, detached care, he gathered the bones and placed them respectfully just outside the stone wall. He was not a monster; he was simply practical. He arranged them neatly, a small pile against the headstone. It was a concession to a morality he no longer felt but intellectually understood. An inefficient but negligible gesture.
He settled into the shallow grave, pulling his knees to his chest. The wind howled over the top of the low wall, but down here, in the hollow of the earth, it was still. The biting edge of the cold lessened slightly. He was still freezing, still starving, but he was shielded.
[Minor Milestone Achieved: Improvised Shelter Established.]
[Reward: 1 Skill Point.]
He didn't hesitate. System. Open Proficiency Menu. Allocate Skill Point to Survivalist.
[Survivalist Proficiency LVL 2 Unlocked.]
[New Sub-Proficiency Unlocked: Basic Fire Starting.]
[A small packet of information has been downloaded directly to your cerebral cortex.]
Again, the tingle at the base of his skull. And with it, knowledge. The properties of friction. The exact angle to hold a spindle. The types of wood that worked best. How to build a tinder bundle from dry Grave-Lichen and shredded bark fiber. The knowledge was there, waiting to be used. He had the theory, but he lacked the materials and the energy. Not now. Soon.
The system pinged again, this time with a summary.
[Status Update]
[Host: Elias Thorne]
[Condition: Severe]
[Core Temperature: 33.8°C (Stabilized)]
[Primary Objective: Survive the First Cycle (16 Hours Remaining)]
He huddled in the dark, in the scooped-out grave of a long-forgotten person, clutching the bloody, frozen hide full of raw meat to his chest. The man who had sought purity and recoiled from base instincts was now coated in viscera and nesting in a tomb. The irony was a phantom, a concept his mind registered but did not process.
From the outside, to any observer, the scene would be one of pure malevolence. A blood-soaked man, clawing open an ancient grave, casting aside the bones of the dead to make a lair for himself. It was an act of profound evil.
But for Elias, huddled in the life-saving dark, it was his first act of true, unadulterated hope. It was the logic of survival. It was a start.