Morning came not with sunlight, but with a pale, sulfuric mist that drifted across the jungle floor like ghostly fingers.
Rey emerged from his shelter, eyes bloodshot, body tense. Sleep had visited him in short, fractured breaths. The shadowy man's voice still echoed in his ears:
> "They will."
He didn't know who they were, but he wasn't going to wait around to find out.
For the last year, he had survived by studying. Observing monsters like a biologist would animals. And now, with danger circling close, he doubled down.
He headed north again, deeper into unfamiliar terrain.
But this time, he wasn't just moving to survive.
He was watching.
---
He spotted his first pack of monsters near a dried riverbed—small lizard-like creatures with rock-like scales and fire-tipped tails. He watched from a distance, hidden beneath a clump of thorned vines. They hissed and bickered constantly, never straying more than a few meters from each other.
Weak. But together, they were territorial and vicious.
Then, an hour later, he came across the opposite.
A large, feline-like monster—jet-black, with glowing yellow eyes and thick bone plates covering its limbs—drank alone at a foul-smelling pool.
Strong. But solitary.
The pattern held.
Rey pulled out a piece of bark he used as a notepad. Symbols, sketches, theories—he recorded everything.
> "Weak ones group. Strong ones roam. There's a balance here… a law."
He remembered how a pack of weak creatures once took down a stronger beast by ambushing it in a narrow canyon. Monsters weren't mindless. They adapted. They evolved.
And now… so would he.
---
For days, he repeated the pattern:
Scout. Study. Record.
He didn't build new shelters every day. Instead, he made temporary safe zones using tree branches and pits. The real shelter he built was in his mind—the knowledge he gathered.
He made traps using a mix of bone hooks, vine ropes, and acid sap. He fashioned crude armor by hardening spider silk and layering it with bark and stone.
His movements became ghost-like. Footprints erased. Scent masked with wet soil and crushed herbs.
He stayed in each zone no longer than two moons before vanishing north again.
The jungle grew colder. The monsters grew faster. Smarter.
But so did Rey.
---
Two years passed like this.
Each close call taught him more.
Like the day he was caught in the giant spider's web—its strands invisible in the dim fog, sticky and silent. Struggling only made it worse. But he remembered seeing birds escape by twisting instead of pulling.
He did the same, cutting the threads at an angle with his bone-blade, then rolling, letting his weight tear the web in two. He escaped bloodied but alive—and now, he used that same web technique to craft rope and stitch crude clothing.
Another time, a pair of horned beasts caught his scent. He ran for hours, hiding in a hollow tree as they circled like wolves. Only by throwing his own blood on a distant branch did he finally mislead them long enough to flee.
These incidents scarred him, but they sharpened him.
He was no longer the confused boy dropped into the Abyss.
He was becoming something else.
---
One evening, as he sat atop a stone ledge, watching the distant shimmer of monster eyes in the mist, Rey held a torn strip of his old shirt.
It smelled faintly of his home.
Of safety. Of the people he may never see again.
He clutched it gently, pressing it to his forehead.
> "I miss you… Mom. Dad. Sis."
His whisper was lost to the wind.
But the weight of it remained in his chest.
He was no longer just surviving.
He was living… with purpose.
In a world that wanted to devour him whole.
---