Cole lay in the freezing water, panting hysterically, his chest heaving.
He looked down at his right leg in the dim light of his sputtering wax candle. It was a mangled, bloody, horrific mess. The bone was broken cleanly beneath the skin, the unnatural angle of his shin sending waves of blinding nausea through his brain. But the skin was not fully pierced. He could still drag himself.
He had solved the very first problem in the simulation. He had moved the immovable rock.
He looked over at the dark cavity exposed by the fallen slate. He could see the faint, undeniable glitter of the raw gold vein in the candlelight.
Now, he needed to solve the second problem. He needed to extract the gold without the heavy iron pickaxe, which was currently buried permanently beneath the center of the massive slate slab.
Cole wiped the freezing mud from his face and dragged his body across the flooded floor of the shaft.
He reached the exposed rock face. The gold vein was thick, embedded deeply within a matrix of dark, hardened quartz.
He picked up the splintered, two-foot-long oak rung he had just used as a lever. It was sturdy, but it was just wood. It would never break solid quartz.
He frantically sifted through the collapsed debris around him, his bleeding fingers searching for a tool. He found a long, jagged wedge of slate that had broken off during the ceiling collapse. It possessed a sharp, triangular edge, resembling a crude, primitive chisel.
He positioned the sharp edge of the slate wedge against the quartz matrix, right beside the glittering gold vein.
He gripped the heavy oak rung in his right hand, raising it like a hammer.
He struck the flat back of the slate wedge with the oak wood.
A sharp crack echoed in the small chamber. The slate bit into the quartz, sending a tiny spray of stone dust into the air, but the rock did not yield.
Cole struck it again. And again. And again.
He fell into a brutal, agonizing rhythm. He was using primitive, broken tools to mine solid bedrock, working entirely on adrenaline and the desperate knowledge that he was currently residing inside a temporal projection.
In the simulation, he could afford to exhaust his muscles completely. He could afford to bleed. He could afford to make mistakes.
Hours bled away in the dark.
The blue timer in the upper right corner of his vision ticked down relentlessly.
20 hours remaining.
18 hours remaining.
His hands were completely ruined. The slate chisel had cut deeply into the palm of his left hand, mixing his own blood with the gray stone dust. The oak rung was splintered and fraying, threatening to break apart in his grip.
But he had mapped the rock.
Through thousands of agonizing strikes, Cole had learned the exact structural weaknesses of the quartz matrix surrounding the gold. He memorized the precise angles required to fracture the stone without blunting his crude slate chisel.
He learned that striking three inches to the left of the main vein caused a massive fissure to open along the natural fault line of the bedrock.
With a final, desperate swing of the oak wood, the quartz cracked loudly.
A heavy, fist-sized chunk of rock broke free from the wall and fell into the freezing mud with a soft splash.
Cole dropped his tools and scrambled forward, plunging his bleeding hands into the dirty water.
He pulled the chunk out. It was incredibly heavy for its size. The dark quartz was laced thickly with pure, glittering yellow gold.
He had successfully extracted the motherlode.
Cole sat back against the cold dirt wall, clutching the raw wealth to his chest. He was completely physically exhausted, his breathing shallow and ragged.
But the simulation was not over. He still had to climb out of the hole and deal with Elias.
He looked down at his ruined right leg. The broken bone throbbed with a sickening, hot agony. He could not put any weight on it whatsoever.
Climbing a sixty-foot vertical wooden ladder with one functional leg and entirely depleted arm muscles was a mathematical impossibility without a structural aid.
He needed a splint.
Cole unbuckled the thick, worn leather belt from his waist. He tore several long strips of fabric from the bottom of his ruined, muddy cotton shirt.
He retrieved the splintered oak rung he had used as a hammer. He positioned the sturdy piece of wood flat against the outside of his broken right calf.
He wrapped the torn cotton strips tightly around his leg, binding the bone as straight as he could manage. He used his leather belt to secure the wooden splint firmly just below his knee, pulling the buckle incredibly tight to create a crude tourniquet.
The pain of forcefully straightening his broken bone caused him to black out for several seconds.
When he opened his eyes, the blue timer read 15 hours remaining.
He dragged himself across the mud to the base of the vertical wooden ladder. He tucked the heavy gold chunk securely into his shirt, tying the fabric in a knot above his stomach so it would not fall out.
He reached up, grabbing the first intact rung with his bleeding hands.
He pulled his entire body weight upward using only his lats and biceps. His left foot found the bottom rung. His splinted right leg simply dragged uselessly against the rough wooden side rail of the ladder.
It was a grueling, agonizingly slow process.
Every time he pulled himself up to the next rung, his muscles screamed, and the splinted bone in his leg ground together with a sickening friction.
He climbed ten feet. Then twenty feet.
The air grew slightly colder. He could hear the faint sound of rain hitting the muddy ground far above him on the surface.
He reached thirty feet. His forearms were cramping violently, his fingers locking into claws around the wet wood. The rain was leaking down the shaft, making the rungs incredibly slick and treacherous.
He reached forty feet.
Cole reached his right hand up to grab the forty-second rung of the ladder.
He wrapped his fingers around the wood and pulled his weight upward.
The wood felt distinctly soft under his grip. It was spongy and completely rotten from years of absorbing the damp, acidic mine water.
Before his conscious mind could register the danger, the forty-second rung simply dissolved into wet splinters under his weight.
Cole's right hand violently slipped into empty air.
His entire body weight suddenly shifted to his exhausted left arm. His left fingers, slick with rain and his own blood, could not maintain their grip on the lower rung.
He peeled off the ladder.
Time seemed to slow down entirely as he fell backward into the pitch-black abyss of the shaft.
He felt the terrifying, absolute weightlessness of the drop.
He did not even have time to scream.
He plummeted forty feet straight down, his back slamming with catastrophic, bone-shattering force into the massive slate slab that rested at the bottom of the mine.
His spine snapped instantly. His skull fractured against the unforgiving stone.
His vision flashed brilliant red, and then instantly faded to absolute black.
[Simulation terminated. Host vital signs depleted.]
The cold, mechanical voice echoed in the absolute darkness.
[Cause of death: Massive blunt force trauma. Catastrophic spinal cord severance.]
[Resetting temporal coordinates.]
Cole gasped violently, his eyes snapping wide open.
He was completely submerged in pitch-black darkness.
He was lying flat on his back in the freezing, muddy water at the very bottom of the mine shaft.
The massive, hundreds of pounds of solid slate was currently resting heavily and agonizingly across his right leg.
The blinding, white-hot pain of his freshly crushed tibia tore through his nervous system, forcing a raw, wet scream from his dry throat.
He was back in reality.
He had spent over nine projected hours in the simulation, struggling, fighting, and ultimately falling to a horrific death. But in the physical real world, only a single, fleeting second had passed since he sacrificed his grandfather's brass compass.
The system was an absolutely flawless, completely unforgiving teacher.
It had just shown him exactly how he was going to die on the ladder, and exactly how long it would take to extract the gold using primitive tools.
But most importantly, he now possessed the perfect, flawless blueprint for survival.
Cole did not panic. The cold, calculating logic of the simulation had completely overwritten his teenage fear. His physical body was trapped and broken, but his mind had already lived through this exact moment.
He knew exactly what to do.
He reached out blindly in the freezing water, his fingers frantically searching the muddy ground.
He found the loose stone. He found the sturdy oak rung on the bottom of the ladder.
He repeated the exact physical actions he had perfected in the simulation, but this time, the pain was not a projected variable. It was absolute, undeniable reality.
He smashed the loose stone against the ladder, breaking the oak rung free from the iron nails. He wedged the sturdy wood underneath the heavy edge of the slate slab. He placed the pivot stone beneath it.
He lay back in the mud, gripped the wooden lever, and pushed down with a terrifying, primal roar.
His real muscles tore. The real bone in his leg shifted agonizingly under the immense, crushing pressure.
But the rock tilted.
It balanced on the quartz fulcrum for a fraction of a second, and then slid completely off his ruined leg, crashing heavily into the mud beside him.
Cole lay in the freezing water, vomiting purely from the shock of the physical pain.
He was free.
He did not rest. He knew he had to move fast. Elias would eventually notice the lack of noise from the shaft and pull the bucket up, or assume Cole was dead and leave him to rot.
He fumbled in the dark, finding his wax candle on the ledge. He struck a dry sulfur match from his pocket and lit the wick.
The small, flickering light illuminated the newly exposed dark cavity, and the glittering, beautiful raw gold vein within it.
Cole immediately stripped off his leather belt and tore the bottom of his ruined shirt. He bound his broken right leg exactly as he had done in the simulation, using a broken piece of ladder wood as a rigid splint.
The real-world application of the tourniquet made him black out for two full seconds, but he bit entirely through his lower lip to force himself back to consciousness.
He grabbed the sharp slate wedge and his oak hammer.
He crawled to the exposed rock face.
He did not need to spend six hours mapping the structural integrity of the quartz. He already possessed the perfect memory of the fault lines.
He positioned the slate wedge precisely three inches to the left of the main gold vein.
He raised the oak rung and struck the slate with absolute, focused precision.
Crack.
He struck it a second time.
Crack.
He struck it a third time, aiming the wedge at a slightly downward forty-five-degree angle.
The entire quartz matrix shattered instantly.
A massive, heavy chunk of dark stone and pure, glittering yellow gold fell directly into his waiting, bloody hands.
It had taken him nine hours to extract it in the simulation. It took him exactly forty-five seconds in reality.
Cole held the heavy, fist-sized nugget in his trembling palms. It was cold, jagged, and infinitely beautiful.
He needed to confirm its absolute value. He needed to know if the system could process it.
"System," Cole whispered, his voice hoarse and raw. "Appraise the asset."
[Item detected: Raw Gold Vein Fragment.]
[Condition is unrefined. Quartz matrix attached. Purity of contained metal is exceptional.]
[Estimated Market Value is 350 Silver Eagles.]
Cole stared at the glowing blue text. It was real. The wealth was physically in his hands.
But carrying a heavy, jagged rock inside his shirt while climbing a slick, dangerous ladder with a broken leg was an unnecessary physical risk. If he dropped it in the dark, he might never find it again in the deep mud.
And he needed an overwhelming amount of system currency to guarantee his absolute survival on the surface.
"System," Cole commanded, his voice hardening with cold, absolute resolve. "Sacrifice the gold fragment."
[Asset value is exceptionally high. Do you wish to proceed with the sacrifice and convert the physical asset into systemic balance?]
"Take it," Cole ordered.
The heavy, fist-sized chunk of pure wealth vanished completely from his bloody palms.
[Asset accepted.]
[System balance updated. Current balance is 351.6 Silver Eagles.]
Cole let out a long, shuddering breath.
He was currently sitting in a collapsed, freezing mud hole with a shattered leg and a ruined body, but he was secretly the wealthiest man in the entire mining camp.
He possessed three hundred and fifty-one days of purchasable future.
He had an infinite arsenal of time.
Cole extinguished the wax candle and tucked it into his pocket. He dragged himself through the freezing water to the base of the vertical wooden ladder.
He began the climb.
It was absolute, unadulterated torture. The real rain was leaking heavily down the shaft, making the wooden rungs incredibly slick, exactly as the simulation had predicted.
His arms burned with a fiery lactic acid buildup. His splinted leg scraped agonizingly against the rough stone wall of the shaft.
He climbed ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty feet.
He reached forty feet.
Cole stopped entirely. He hung suspended in the pitch-black darkness, his left arm wrapped tightly around the forty-first rung.
He looked up at the forty-second rung. It looked perfectly identical to the others in the darkness.
But he remembered the absolute terror of falling. He remembered the sickening sound of his own spine snapping against the slate.
He reached his right hand up, completely bypassing the rotten forty-second rung, and grabbed firmly onto the solid forty-third rung.
He pulled his exhausted body upward, skipping the deadly trap entirely.
He continued to climb, his breathing loud and ragged in the echoing shaft.
Finally, his bloody hands breached the edge of the wooden platform at the surface.
He pulled his broken body over the lip of the hole and collapsed onto the muddy ground of the mining camp.
It was nighttime. The sky was entirely obscured by heavy, dark clouds. A cold, miserable rain was falling steadily across the chaotic sprawl of canvas tents and wooden shacks.
Cole lay on his stomach in the deep mud, completely hidden in the shadows of the wooden mining crane.
He looked across the muddy thoroughfare.
Fifty yards away, sitting comfortably under the canvas awning of his large tent, was Elias.
The massive, brutal man was sitting in a wooden folding chair, illuminated by the warm, flickering glow of an oil lantern hanging from the tent pole.
He was drinking heavily from a glass bottle of whiskey, looking incredibly bored and entirely unconcerned with the fact that his sixteen-year-old worker had been down in a highly unstable shaft for fifteen hours.
Resting casually on the small wooden crate next to Elias's chair was a heavy, loaded, military-issue revolver.
Cole stared at the man through the cold rain.
He knew exactly what would happen if he simply crawled out of the shadows and asked for help. The first simulation had proven Elias's absolute, casual cruelty. The man would beat him to death for breaking the pickaxe and coming up empty-handed.
Cole could not physically fight a man three times his size, especially not with a crushed right leg and completely exhausted arm muscles.
He needed a weapon. He needed the revolver.
But sneaking fifty yards across open mud, stealing a loaded gun from a light sleeper, and shooting a massive man before he could react was a highly volatile, statistically improbable plan.
If Cole made a single mistake, if his splint scraped loudly against the mud, if the hammer of the revolver clicked too loudly in the rain, Elias would wake up and snap his neck like a dry twig.
Cole needed an absolutely flawless, mathematically perfect murder plan.
He looked at the glowing blue text resting passively in the upper corner of his vision.
[Current balance: 351.6 Silver Eagles.]
He did not need to guess. He did not need to rely on luck, stealth, or divine intervention.
He could afford to fail a hundred times in the safety of the void.
"System," Cole whispered into the cold mud, his eyes locked dead onto the silhouette of the man who had tortured him for years.
"Deduct one Silver Eagle."
"Initiate simulation."
[Balance updated. Current balance is 350.6 Silver Eagles.]
[Simulation starting in 3, 2, 1.]
The cold rain, the flickering oil lantern, and the muddy camp instantly dissolved in a blinding flash of white light.
Cole opened his eyes. He was lying in the mud exactly where he had been a second ago, hidden in the shadows of the mining crane.
The blue timer appeared in his vision, counting down from 24 hours.
[Simulation active.]
He was in the projected future.
Cole immediately began to drag himself through the deep mud, his eyes fixed purely on the heavy revolver resting on the wooden crate next to the sleeping giant.
He crawled for ten agonizing minutes, closing the distance to thirty yards. Then twenty yards.
The rain masked the sound of his body sliding through the wet earth.
He reached the edge of the canvas awning. Elias was snoring loudly, his thick bearded chin resting heavily on his chest. The half-empty whiskey bottle had slipped from his hand and rolled onto the muddy floor.
Cole slowly, agonizingly pulled himself up onto his good left knee.
He reached his trembling, bloody right hand out toward the small wooden crate. His fingertips brushed the cold, heavy steel barrel of the military revolver.
He wrapped his hand around the textured wooden grip.
He carefully lifted the heavy weapon from the crate. It was incredibly heavy, completely unbalanced in his weak, malnourished grip.
Cole aimed the barrel directly at the center of Elias's broad chest. He placed his thumb on the heavy steel hammer, pulling it back to cock the weapon.
Click.
The mechanical sound of the hammer locking into place was incredibly sharp, cutting cleanly through the ambient noise of the falling rain.
Elias's eyes snapped open instantly.
The massive man did not hesitate. He did not ask questions. The survival instincts that had kept him alive in the Western Fever reacted with terrifying, explosive speed.
Before Cole could even pull the heavy trigger, Elias lunged forward from the wooden chair like a massive, enraged bear.
Elias's huge, calloused left hand clamped violently over the cylinder of the revolver, completely blocking the firing mechanism and crushing Cole's fingers against the steel.
His right hand shot forward, grabbing Cole entirely by the throat.
Elias lifted the sixteen-year-old boy completely off the ground with a single, brutal motion.
Cole kicked wildly with his good left leg, gasping for air as his windpipe was instantly and completely crushed.
"You stealing little rat," Elias growled, his breath reeking of cheap alcohol and chewing tobacco.
Elias squeezed his right hand.
The horrific sound of Cole's own trachea collapsing echoed loudly in his ears.
His vision exploded into a shower of white sparks, instantly followed by an expanding, absolute darkness.
[Simulation terminated. Host vital signs depleted.]
[Cause of death: Asphyxiation and catastrophic damage to the cervical vertebrae.]
[Resetting temporal coordinates.]
Cole gasped, his eyes snapping open.
He was back in reality.
He was lying flat in the cold mud, perfectly hidden in the shadows of the mining crane.
Elias was fifty yards away, still sitting in his wooden chair, still drinking from the glass bottle, completely unaware that he had just brutally murdered the boy in a projected timeline.
Cole swallowed hard, his throat throbbing with phantom pain.
The system had proven it again. A direct, physical confrontation, even an armed ambush at point-blank range, was a guaranteed death sentence against a veteran prospector.
He could not use the gun. The sound of the hammer cocking was a fatal flaw.
Cole narrowed his eyes, wiping the freezing rain from his face.
He needed to kill Elias without getting within arms reach of the man. He needed to use the environment.
He looked carefully around the simulated camp, calculating variables.
Behind Elias's large canvas tent was a steep, forty-foot embankment that dropped directly down into a fast-flowing, rocky river. The river was currently swollen and raging from the heavy seasonal rains.
Above Elias's head, hanging from the main wooden support pole of the tent, was the glass oil lantern. It was burning brightly, filled to the brim with highly flammable kerosene.
Cole looked at his balance. 350.6 Silver Eagles.
He had 350 more tries to orchestrate the perfect execution.
"System," Cole whispered softly into the dark.
"Deduct another Silver Eagle. Initiate simulation."