Ruins

From the small ledge she had just found herself upon, Alice stared slack-jawed at the scenery that lay in front of her still-blurry eyes, the low-light receptors contained within her retinas slowly turning off while the ones that worked best with a high level of brightness started activating, bright colors soon flooding her starved brain.

Despite the small twinges of pain that the excessive lighting was causing to her nerves, the young woman didn’t even entertain the idea of closing her eyelids, too entranced with the landscape that extended below her feet, drinking in the constant stream of new details that her gradually sharpening eyes started sending to her hungering brain as she unconsciously stepped forward and gripped the weak and rusted railing in front of her, ignoring its groan as she lightly pushed against it.

The glowing pool, the deep tunnels, the nest of the Spear Spiders, and the fungal forest had all been wondrous views for the young woman, sceneries she would never have seen or even imagined hadn’t she been transported to that new world, but all of them paled in comparison to the ruins that filled the massive space beneath the crystal dome.

The enormous wall of strange stone that supported the translucent roof was covered by a confusing blend of staircases with twisted railings, windowed openings, broken, dripping pipes, and ancient buildings that had been built one over the other, sometimes almost reaching the line of demarcation between glass and stone, many hundreds of meters up in the air.

The ever-grasping tendrils of many different kinds of climbing plants coiled around pillars and metal poles, using them as supports and stepping stones in their constant crawl towards the light, always trying to find the best spot in that multilayered, vertical environment.

Where the climbing plants didn’t reach, Alice’s enhanced eyes could see patches of forest green moss blanketing the more obscured niches, growing in the moist shade of broken walls and ancient porticoes while, just a few meters above or below, small fields of tall and gently swaying grasses took to the flat terraces that were the numerous intact roofs of those buildings.

On the ground, between broken and half-buried walls, small rounded hills, and the rare intact building, the young woman finally laid her eyes upon the first actual trees she had seen ever since reaching that realm.

Gradually growing denser in the center of the ruins and around a smooth, grassy mound on the left side of the area, the plants didn’t seem much different from the ones she would be able to see in her old world.

Most of them on the short side; they resembled willows, birches, and maples, their contorted trunks clinging to the boulders surrounding them as old men clung to their walking sticks, their gnarly roots plunging into the cracks between the stones, surely searching for the water underneath the soft soil.

Growing just beside the large and round hill and towering over the smaller vegetation, Alice instantly spotted a single, bifurcated oak; its two main branches, probably reaching over twenty-five meters in height, were filled with gnarled knots and smaller, broken boughs that still sprouted tiny, emerald green buds from their wounded ends, barely visible even to her incredibly powerful eyes.

As she was dazedly staring at the gently swaying of leaves, Alice started finally noticing an unpleasant gleam in the corner of her eye that constantly forced her to squint.

As her stupor started fading and her attention moved away from the flora, the young woman finally noticed one of the jagged crystalline protrusions that, from all over the ruins, reflected and refracted the rays of sunlight that shined upon everything under the perfect cupola.

Embedded into the soft soil of the large hill surrounded by trees, growing between the stones of the ruins or poking from the tall grasses on the buildings’ terraces, the transparent minerals, not unlike those that peppered the tunnel she had just traversed, seemed to grow both in size and number the farther they were from the side of the expanse she was in until, on the opposite margin of the cave, numerous large formations fused together, covering a fraction of the wall in a multifaceted mess of crystal that resembled a shimmering, frozen waterfall splashing its way down to the ground, its refracted light yet another reason for her blurry eyes.

Alice felt like her head was spinning, her body so weak that she fell on her knees, her hands still gripping on the slightly creaking balustrade while she placed her forehead on one of the thin banisters, feeling the warmth it had acquired from the sun slowly seep into her skin.

She elected to remain there for a few minutes.

“What the absolute fudge. Where the heck did I end up?” Alice muttered to herself as she climbed down the steep and somewhat degraded stone staircase that had allowed her to at least start a very slow and careful descent to the ground level.

In the end, Alice had spent just shy of half an hour on the small terrace near the tunnel, her mind still reeling at the change of environment and at the realization that she still wasn’t out of the caves.

“Or, at the very least, I’m not outside.” She told herself with a frown as she skipped another weak-looking step, her bare feet landing on the slightly sandy stone and doing their best to find some traction on it; she was glad she had taken her time to remove her chitin shoes and place them in her rucksack, they would have probably been much more slippery on the worn surface of the stairways and she couldn’t allow herself to make any mistake. Falling down would likely spell her death.

For that exact reason, she stopped for a few seconds to carefully inspect the next section of the staircase, searching for weak points and missing steps while also conserving her energies for the next part of the journey.

The railing had disappeared after the tenth step, ending in a twisted and rusted piece of rebar that would give you tetanus just by looking at it.

Not that I’d need to worry about it even if I didn’t have Bioresilience, I’m definitely more likely to die by slipping and falling down into the abyss below. She reminded herself, shivering at the memory of just a few minutes before when she had made the rookie mistake of leaning to the side and taking a tiny look at what lay beneath the stairs.

Upon seeing the broken roofs of the houses more than forty meters below, a sudden sense of vertigo had taken over her body, turning her muscles into jelly and making her head spin; she had felt so woozy and weak that she had almost lost her balance and dropped down to her death, barely managing to stumble back at the last second, dropping on her butt on one of the steps and laying her drenched back against the cool wall.

After that short break, she had decided to keep as close as possible to the barrier, her shoulder constantly brushing against it for support and safety while her mace, held in her right hand, made a weak plinking noise every time it hit the cream-toned material.

“At least there is no wind.” She told herself with a relieved tone. “If I also had to take into consideration a gust tossing me down… Well, I’m happy I don’t.”

Even if she was so high up, she was indeed barely feeling a weak breeze shaking her hair and the edge of her silken dress, the enclosed nature of the dome apparently preventing harsh winds from forming.

Nonetheless, the descent was still quite harrowing and she was thusly extremely relieved when the stairway finally ended and she found herself in a very tiny square, hidden between a handful of ruined buildings that, while not particularly tall, prevented her from seeing most of the expanse below.

She had to admit it, it didn’t feel bad at all to forget for a second about being hundreds of meters up in the air, supported only by the strange crumbling stone that seemed to be used for most, if not all the suspended structures of that city.

When her feet left the last step of the staircase and landed on the ground, Alice found herself walking barefoot on a thin layer of somewhat dry moss interspersed by thin blades of grass that softly crackled under her weight; less than a couple centimeters underneath that softer layer, the young woman could feel the cold and ungiving texture of the stone, this one slightly ridged, probably to prevent the long-gone inhabitants from accidentally slipping on it.

She stopped moving after only a couple of steps and a tense silence returned in the small space between ruined homes.

Alice stared silently at the buildings around her, her eyes flitting from dark entrance to dark entrance while she strained all of her senses to catch any sign of danger, she couldn’t allow herself to get sloppy here, she didn’t know what would be trying to eat her next.

When, after a few tense minutes of scanning, nothing seemed to emerge from the shadows, the girl’s attention was instead grabbed by the buildings themselves.

The five constructions that surrounded the square were both similar and different at the same time; made of the same identical material, they were somewhat tall, two-story buildings with wide square windows with rounded edges, and a single entrance in the center that appeared just a smidge taller and thinner than what she felt was usual.

One of them, a bit larger than the others, must have once sported a tiny portico on its front, now just a pile of mossy rubble blocking the access, with only a single thin column still standing upright, supporting only the weight of a forgotten memory.

Draped over each of the fronts, a natural blanket of vines, offshoots, roots, and leaves attempted to hide the other details of the buildings, covering and sheltering them, as if to say that they didn’t mean anything anymore, for they now were just the rocks upon which that confusing conglomerate of vegetation would grow and thrive. Nothing more, nothing less.

From the square, partially hidden by those same climbing plants, Alice could see a couple of narrow streets proceeding outward on a slight slope, surely leading to the lower levels which she decided to ignore for the moment.

She had just finished a very exhausting climb that had made her sweat far too much and which had only managed to land her in another place she needed to get out of, she wasn’t in a hurry to get herself in more dangerous adventures just yet, those could wait until tomorrow.

“Before moving again, I’ll need to get information and a good hideout. Until I find it though, one of these buildings here will do.” She whispered to herself, her right hand once again gripping the mace while the other slowly extracted the knife from its sheath.

Picking the building that was closest to the edge, Alice moved away the small curtain of pointed leaves and proceeded to cautiously enter it.

At a first glance, the inside of the building was actually less interesting than the outside.

It was a bare room filled with a thick layer of mosses, fungi, colorful molds, and in a particularly humid corner, a little bit of slimy algae in a puddle.

A waist-high slab of stone—which could have been a cooking surface, an altar of sacrifices, or both— stood near the wall to her right while a thin shelf ran all along the inner walls, protruding from them without a clear line where one ended and the other started, its surface empty of everything but a build-up of mosses and detritus.

Small and large mounds in the same moss indicated where some of the furniture had once stood, their shape and uses long-forgotten while, right in front of her, a simple staircase led to the upper floor, its steps uncomfortably tall when she started climbing it, her thighs and calves lamenting the new strain after all the exercise she had subjected them to.

Nonetheless, a careful set of stairs after, Alice found herself into a small hallway with two more entrances leading to small, identical rooms, each with two nooks carved into the walls and a single wide window overlooking the expanse.

In the first one, the girl dropped the almost empty silken rucksack she had carried all the way there, eyeing the defensible entrance and the somewhat comfortable-looking sleeping spots with a good amount of appreciation.

Definitely better than a cave floor. She thought to herself as she carefully stepped out of the first room and into the second one where, to her surprise, the tired biomancer had her first encounter with the local fauna.

The moment she popped her head into the room, in fact, Alice noticed an incredibly fluffy, baseball-sized bird that was sitting upon a good dozen of small, azure speckled eggs in the middle of a very large nest made of dried, purplish flowers, bits of fluff and dry, flexible twigs.

Despite being so small, the soft-looking creature seemed perfectly able to cover each one of its eggs with its beautiful golden plumage while it also groomed itself at the same time.

The moment it noticed her, the bird opened its beak, puffed up the feathers on its neck, and started producing a quite loud and very annoying chirping that started immediately hurting her ears; apart from that, however, the yellow sparrow didn’t seem interested in moving away from its eggs and a quite surprised Alice was quick to retreat, the sound ceasing soon after she had disappeared.

When the surprise of having a roommate faded, the young woman was incredibly happy that had been the case, for the tiny bird would probably be an absolutely perfect alarm if anything decided to invade its territory and, if she really felt hungry, there were always its eggs.

“Even if I’d rather keep the relationship as it is,” she murmured as she entered her room.

Despite that additional safety measure, Alice also took her time to extend her trusted silken cord over the open doorway, sure that it could at least somewhat help against the bigger intruders.

Afterwards, she took her time to use her Lumen to clean herself and the nook she had chosen as her personal resting spot, smiling in satisfaction when, a few minutes later, she laid her back against the dry slab of smooth stone.

“It’s actually somewhat comfortable, even if it’s freaking hard, I think I’d forgotten what it means to be sleeping somewhere actually dry… the last time was with Maath after all, and I still had my futon back there,” She muttered with sadness in her voice, her eyes moving to the almost-empty rucksack she had been carrying around, an idea coalescing in her mind, “but what if I could get something similar?”

With that thought in mind, she proceeded to quickly empty the sack of her belongings, placing them in a small pile on the ground before starting to fill the silken bag with a large amount of dried moss, soon obtaining a pillow for when she decided to sleep.

When that was done, however, she didn’t feel too tired yet and, instead, she started casually inspecting the things she had collected over time, ignoring the handful of tadpole bones she still had to chew through for their precious calcium and instead focusing on the more interesting objects, her eyes moving past a small, magnetic metal cube and the toad’s purple core to instead focus on a small ball of compacted moss she didn’t remember making or carrying around.

“I wonder when I placed it here,” she wondered aloud as she carefully opened the ball, her eyes widening when she saw the vibrant yellow flesh of two small and partially shriveled Happy Cap specimens.

“These one were tasty as heck!” she exclaimed, picking one of them up and holding it between her thumb and index finger, closely inspecting the tiny mushroom, “Did I collect some before meeting the water bug? Why?”

She really couldn’t remember.

Trying to connect with the toadstool proved to be a difficult process but, after many attempts, Alice finally confirmed that, while the mushrooms themselves were dead and already slowly decomposing after having been removed from their complex system of roots, they had still managed to produce and shed a good amount of golden spores which now laid into the ball of dry moss, waiting for the right moment to hatch and start growing while lying dormant in the meanwhile.

“I could try to grow them back after all, I hope they will keep up for a bit… at least until I find somewhere nice and safe to live or until I get back home. They are too good not to try.” She promised herself as she popped the two mushrooms in her mouth and munched on their flesh, ignoring the toxins she was ingesting and instead focusing on their peachy taste, only marred by the slightly off-putting aftertaste caused by the rot.

“Definitely worth it,” she whispered to herself.

A few minutes later, after leaving her culinary future aside, Alice finally laid back on her makeshift bed, her mace by her side and her head propped up by her new pillow.

“Not as soft as my futon but it will do in a pinch,” she said as she gently played with the purplish core and the small magnetic metal cube she had found during her trip to the Nest and had carried all the way there.

She felt with her digits at the sharp edges of the metal objects while also carefully inspecting the smooth crystal sphere, feeling the poisonous magic contained within as it prodded her back, her mind soon started wandering about.

Her skeletal system had finally been upgraded; beneath her skin and flesh, her bones felt incredibly sturdy, capable of sustaining even the hardest of impacts without much issue.

The rest of her body, however, was still far behind.

She frowned while thinking of the dislocated shoulder she had experienced in the fungal forest; while the memory was still fuzzy, she was sure it had been because of the poor balance between enhanced and unenhanced organs. She could not allow herself such a mistake one more time.

That, however, meant improving on the muscles and sinew in the entirety of her body, possibly even at the same time. Which, on top of a clear idea of the structural changes she wanted to make, meant having at her disposal a large amount of nutrients, time, and safety.

Let us start with the design process. She told herself as she forcefully slowed her breaths and fell into a light trance, feeling the way her muscles rippled and her ligaments tensed throughout her body, comparing their movements to the ones she had experienced in the many creatures whose system she had explored.

She thought of the rippling mass of muscles that were the Rocktopus tentacle, the complex system of ligaments and smaller muscled controlling the limbs of the mole rats, the powerful back muscles of the evolved screechling, and the coiled threads in Maath’s legs.

Everything could be useful. Everything would be useful.

She didn’t know how much time had passed since she had started designing her new project but it was almost dark when a sudden shrill call echoed throughout the small house, immediately causing her to jolt awake and almost slam her head against the ceiling of the nook.

With a tight grip on both of her weapons, Alice slowly moved out of the room and headed towards the one occupied by the bird, her well of power already preparing an empowered adrenaline Aestus.

Over the shrill chirping, her ears could perceive the beating of wings and, for an instant, the muffled sound of broken eggshells.

When she finally reached the room and glanced into it, Alice found herself staring at a very agitated bird as it tried to fend off a furry, bipedal creature resembling a monkey, its long, three-fingered hands with strangely wide fingertips quickly grasping at the small eggs and bringing them to its hidden face.

She attempted to close in, slowly raising her mace to club the thief on the head, when the slight rustle of her dress caused the small ears of the creature to twitch. An instant later, the monkey creature had used its long and powerful legs to jump onto the ledge of the open window, one of the eggs still in its hand while, behind it, the scream of the bird had reached such a crescendo that she was forced to grit her teeth to ignore the pain.

The creature suddenly turned and she had just the time to see its strange face with large eyes and unsettling, plump lips as if constantly puckered for a grandma kiss, their blue hue incredibly visible against the dark fur that covered its toddler-sized but strangely muscular body.

Without giving her time to react properly, the creature suddenly flung the final egg in her direction at incredible speed, impacting her body with a wet crack of broken eggshells and jumping out of the opening, falling down on the street below and disappearing from view, a strange hooting sound the only noise it made in the process.

An incredibly powerful smell forced its way into her nose, filling her nostrils and coming from the yolk splattered all over her chest and, before she could realize what the heck had happened, the young woman found herself being assaulted by the fluffy bird, its shrill and enraged chirping going on and on while its sharp talons and hard beak tried to peck at any and all soft parts of the body of the perceived thief.

As she frantically retreated out of the room and started going down the stairs, the human girl started suddenly hearing an echo in the incredibly loud sounds of the sparrow.

She, however, didn’t have time to dwell on what she had seen as the furious sparrow kept pecking and slamming against her with its wings, its incredibly shrill and loud cry hurting her ears so much that she resolved to simply run out of the house until it had calmed down. She felt bad about the thief but if it decided to keep attacking her she would nonetheless end it for good.

It’s just one bird after all.

When she reached the lower floor, however, she quickly discovered how much she had been mistaken.

That is not one bird. she thought to herself before a small flock of the fluffy creatures, which had been flying all around the mossy lower floor, suddenly landed on her in a whirling maelstrom of very soft feathers and very sharp talons, most of them ineffectually scratching at the resilient silk and chitin of her garments but a small numbers reaching her soft skin and tearing her hair.

Now thoroughly scratched and annoyed, Alice started swaying her weapons around herself, still trying to avoid killing the birds but not too bothered if that actually happened. When she found herself in a lull between the attacks, the human girl immediately rushed out of the house, glad to be away from the screaming creatures.

Only for the screaming to suddenly grow louder.

With a sense of despair slowly flooding her stomach, Alice looked upwards, her expression growing blank as the large cloud of fluffy birds that had been hovering above the house suddenly plunged in unison towards her.

“Oh shi—"

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by Alice L.! Thank you for your support!