The silence in the trash pit weighed heavier than the smell.
Ren sat on a rusted metal plate, scraping the wolf's blood off his arms with a piece of flat slate. The blood was sticky, cooling rapidly in the chill wind, turning into a black, tar-like substance that refused to let go of his skin.
He didn't vomit. He wanted to, his stomach clamped tight with hunger and shock, but he forced the bile back down. Vomiting wasted calories. And right now, he had zero to spare.
His gaze fell on the carcass.
[Entity: Scavenger Wolf (Deceased)]
[Lootable Data: High]
A mess of fur and gore, the wooden stick still protruding from its spine. A normal person would see a monster. Ren saw a resource node.
He reached out. His hand hovered over the open wound. Disgust should have hit him. It didn't. Instead, a strange, buzzing vibration hummed in his fingertips. It was the same magnetic pull you felt when holding a rare earth magnet near a spinning hard drive.
"Data," Ren whispered. The word tasted metallic on his tongue.
He focused on the wolf's fur. Matted. Dirty. But underneath the grime, the undercoat was thick. Designed for this hellish weather.
Ren looked down at his own clothes. Burlap sacks stitched with rot. Thin. Useless against the biting wind that was already turning his fingernails blue.
He needed that fur. But he had no knife to skin it. The glass shard he had used earlier was just a tool for the property, not a proper blade.
I don't need a knife, he thought. I just need the code.
He blinked, activating his vision. The world desaturated into gray. The wireframes returned, overlaying reality.
He locked onto the wolf's pelt.
[Property Detected: Thermal Insulation (Tier 0)]
[Source: Organic Material]
[Extract?]
"Yes."
The headache hit him instantly.
It was not a migraine. It was a glitch. A high-pitched whine screamed in his right ear, and black dots danced across his vision like dead pixels on a dying monitor. Ren gritted his teeth, clutching his skull with one hand while keeping the other extended toward the corpse.
[Extracting...]
[Warning: Organic Data is complex. Corruption increasing.]
The wolf's corpse didn't vanish. It did not dissolve into light particles. Instead, the fur simply... withered. It turned gray, then brittle, then dusted away like ash in the wind, leaving behind raw, red muscle exposed to the freezing air.
Ren felt a weight settle in his mind. A "file" sat in his mental clipboard, heavy and waiting.
He grabbed the hem of his burlap shirt.
"Paste."
[Imbuing Target: Burlap Rags...]
[Success.]
The change was not flashy. The burlap didn't turn into fur. It didn't change color. But as the data settled into the fabric, the weave tightened. The gaps between the coarse threads seemed to fill with invisible density.
Ren gasped. The biting cold that had been gnawing at his ribs vanished. The shirt was still scratchy and smelled of rot, but it trapped his body heat perfectly. It felt like wearing a high-end thermal parka.
He slumped back against the metal pile, exhaling a cloud of white steam.
"Magic," he scoffed, closing his eyes. "Thermodynamics."
He rested for a moment, forcing his heart rate to slow. The high-pitched whine in his ear faded to a dull, throbbing hum.
That was the catch.
He had suspected it. Nothing in the universe was free. Energy could not be created or destroyed, only transferred. If he was "editing" reality, the stress had to go somewhere.
"System," Ren croaked. "Status."
He didn't know if that was the command. He just guessed.
A large, semi-transparent blue window expanded in front of him. It didn't look like the stylized RPG screens from the fantasy novels. It looked like a debugger console. Cold. Clinical.
[User: Ren]
[Class: None]
[Level: N/A (Admin Access Only)]
[Physical Stats]
Strength: 0.6 (Malnourished)
Agility: 0.8
Endurance: 0.5
Computing Power: 12.0 (High)
Ren scanned the list. His physical stats were pathetic. An average adult male should be a 1.0. He was barely half a man.
But his eyes drifted to the bottom of the window, where a bar pulsated with an ominous red light.
[Corruption: 3.2%]
[Threshold: 100%]
[System Note: Corruption accumulates when editing reality. High levels result in physiological breakdown, hallucinations, and eventual deletion.]
Ren stared at the number. 3.2%.
He had done two edits.
One: Moving [Sharpness] to the stick.
Two: Moving [Insulation] to his shirt.
Roughly 1.6% per edit.
"Fifty edits," Ren calculated, his voice cold. "If I reach fifty edits without finding a way to reduce this number, I die."
He touched his left eye, the one that had bled during the dragon event. It felt tender, bruised like a peach left out in the sun.
The power was not a gift. It was a radiation leak. He was handling uranium with his bare hands.
He swiped the window away. Dwelling on it would not help. He was alive. He was warm. Now, he needed fuel.
He looked back at the wolf. The fur was gone, leaving the meat exposed.
He didn't have fire. He didn't have a pot.
Ren looked at the glass shard still clutched in his hand. The [Sharpness] was gone, moved to the stick. Now it was just a dull piece of green glass.
He scanned the trash around him. A jagged strip of rusted iron stuck out of the mud nearby.
[Item: Rusted Iron Strip]
[Property: Tetanus Risk (High)]
Ren ignored the disease risk. He focused on the edge. It was jagged, serrated.
"Copy [Serrated Edge]."
[Corruption: 4.5%]
The headache spiked again, sharper this time, like a needle driven behind his eye. He ignored it.
He touched the glass shard.
"Paste."
The glass shifted. The smooth edge fractured, forming microscopic teeth. It was now a serrated glass knife.
Ren dragged himself to the wolf. He carved a strip of meat from the flank. The glass cut smoothly, parting the muscle like butter.
He held the raw meat up. Dark. Stringy. Dripping.
He couldn't edit the bacteria out of it. Not yet. He could not see them. They were too small, Layer 1 (Material) was his limit. Bacteria were likely deeper in the code.
"Eat or die," he said to the empty air.
He shoved the meat into his mouth.
It was cold, slimy, and tasted of old pennies. He chewed mechanically, forcing his jaw to work, forcing his throat to swallow the lump.
One bite. Two.
He ate until the cramps in his stomach turned from hunger pains to a heavy, leaden fullness.
Then, he stood up.
The wind howled across the trash mountains, carrying the sound of distant screeches, metal grinding on metal, or perhaps beasts fighting for territory.
Ren grabbed his "Sharpened Stick" and tucked the glass knife into his belt of rope.
He was not going to stay here. This was a spawn point for scavengers. The smell of the dead wolf would attract things bigger than the wolf.
He looked at the horizon, where the purple clouds met a jagged skyline of what looked like ruined towers.
"Phase one complete," Ren said, stepping over the wolf's carcass.
He didn't look back.