Paul groaned as he struggled to sit up. He slid himself off the spongy shelf-fungus and stumbled over to the stream, splashing his face with water and rubbing rheum from his eyes.

Yesterday sucked.

He grimaced and took an inventory of his injuries. Claw wounds, bites and bruises covered his body.

I feel like I fell down a staircase then walked back to the top and did it a few more times for fun.

And yet Paul was surprised how quickly many of his wounds had healed during the night. His cracked ribs continued to ache with every breath, but he could now fully inhale without a stab of agony.The multitude of tears and bites he sustained were still sharp with pain, but the open lacerations had closed, and shallower cuts had already begun to scab. Not for the first time, Paul wondered what was happening to him.

He walked to the center of his cavern, turning in a circle as he took in each piece. The salt-lick on the far wall. The grove of giant mushrooms. The old rat-den. The close-packed stalagmites near a tunnel entrance. He wasn’t sure when he began thinking of the cavern as his, but it felt right. He stood and pondered his next steps, what actions he needed to take to survive. Each step started right here. His plans took shape as he surveyed his domain.

Survival first. Existential questions later. Time to get to work.

The giant mushrooms were first. Paul toppled five of them, then separated their caps from their stems. Sweat trickled down his chest. The stems were tough and fibrous, and he had to strain to saw through them with his knife. He placed the caps gill-side up and used a rock to scrape the gills out, creating large shallow bowls.

He drug one of the bowls to the salt lick at the edge of the cavern, where the surrounding limestone crumbled away to reveal a thick layer of pink salt. Paul chipped away the soft limestone with his rock, freeing chunks of the pink salt and piling them in his improvised bucket. His arms burned and joints ached from the repeated impacts.

Dragging the full mushroom cap back across the cavern was back-breaking, and Paul wished he had a rope that he could use to pull the heavy load across the cave floor. Instead, he had to bend nearly double to grab the edge of the cap and slide it slowly to the old death-rat den, legs straining.

He used a smooth slab of rock as a work surface, crushing hunks of pink salt with a flat stone and scraping the coarse grains into an empty mushroom cap until the chunks of salt were gone.

He stood, stretched his back, and chewed a piece of rat, frowning. He had made good progress so far, but a thought gnawed at him.

I should be more tired than this.

He knew it was true. It just wasn’t possible that he could do any of these things after the punishment his body took the previous day. What’s more, while his muscles ached, Paul knew they were far from spent. He felt the change in his movements, in the tightness of his grip, in the way he breathed.

The changes scared him, in the same way the messages that flitted through his consciousness did, the same way he didn’t stay dead did.

Just like the fact that I created a light by thinking real fucking hard.

These things scared him because they shouldn’t be possible, and each time they happened, Paul wondered if he was losing grip on his sanity. He shivered and realized that he hadn’t moved for minutes. He rubbed his arms to warm them.

Get yourself together Paul.

Remember the plan.

Survival first. Questions later.

Paul moved to his next task.

Paul grunted as he set the last stone in place under the stream. He almost lost his footing on the slippery rocks but caught himself before falling back into the pond.

He stepped back from the stream to examine his handiwork. A large, flat stone interrupted the flow as it tumbled down the cave wall. The water splashed and ran over the rock before it reached the pool, adding another, waist-high waterfall to its descent. The stone sat on supports of carefully placed rocks, forming a small hollow underneath it.

Paul checked to ensure that water didn’t leak into the cubby, stood back, and sighed. It was time for him to recover the rest of the corpses. He retrieved his shiv and war club, pried a fresh piece of bioluminescent fungus from the cavern wall, and stepped back into the dark, light-source held high.

The journey to the rat nest took a fraction the time that it had previously. Paul’s lightshroom was fresh, and he moved through the well-illuminated tunnels quickly and confidently. Wrinkling his nose from the smell of rat shit, Paul entered the cavern where he had battled the rats. The bodies were stiff, and Paul knew that if he didn’t butcher them soon that most of their carcasses would be useless.

He sighed, heaved one of the corpses over his shoulder, and turned to leave. He took a step, then stopped himself, thinking.

Paul had avoided overthinking the light he had created on his harrowing trip back to the cavern. There was so much he didn’t know about the blue-white glow: what it was, and how he had created it. Paul began to question whether the light was real or if he had hallucinated the entire experience while delirious from pain and blood loss.

He had tried to create the light twice during today’s trip back to this nest, but he stopped himself each time, scoffing. Paul told himself that he quit because it was so patently not possible that it had happened in the first place.

Of course I can’t create floating light with my mind. It's fucking insane, Paul.

He knew that wasn’t the reason that stopped him, however. Part of him hoped that the light had been real, that he had created something so remarkable and so impossible. He stopped himself from trying because he was afraid that when he tried he would only find that it had never been real, like a pleasant dream that evaporates in the morning.

Now, turning and looking back at the corpses, he had a decision to make. Paul knew that he could carry a second young rat on his other shoulder if he dropped his lightshroom, making only two trips for their corpses instead of four.

Pull the bandage off Paul.

Paul closed his eyes, banishing his disbelief and uncertainty for a moment, and pushed.

When he opened them again, the light was back.

He had a million questions but shoved them away for now. Time was against him, and he had two more trips to make.

Paul set the rat mother’s corpse next to that of her young in his cavern. She out-massed her pups by quite a bit, and his legs burned from carrying her carcass through the tunnels.

Despite his new-found stamina, he was incredibly tired. His muscles protested from the abuse that he had put them through, but Paul sat and began his work.

Paul examined his connection with the light while he butchered the rats. He understood why it had gone out yesterday. He pushed with his thoughts and could feel that he expended some unidentifiable resource as he did. It wrapped in and around his focus and concentration like a ribbon braided through hair. He had thought that creating the light was like pushing on a wall, but it was more like blowing on a paper sailboat. As he used it, this resource would run out just like lungs would run out of air.

The realization allowed Paul to experiment. He varied how he pressed his thoughts, visualizing them first as a diffuse wind, then as a narrow stream, like blowing through a straw. He found that he could use less of his concentration by using this method, draining himself more slowly while keeping the light's intensity constant.

*Channeling has reached level 3*

*New Skill Gained - Intent Focusing Level 1*

Paul lost focus on both his butchery and the light. The light vanished, while the claw-knife slipped and punctured an anal gland on the rat he was skinning. He swore loudly, causing a small lizard that had crept near to skitter away in fright, then vomited from the stench.

Oh fuck, it’s all over me! Oh my god, it smells like death. No, worse. It smells like death took a shit. It’s like weaponized hate.

Paul vomited again. He sprinted under the stream while still gagging and furiously scrubbed at his skin.

Serves me right for not paying attention while holding a knife in my hand.

The messages Paul received were fascinating to him. He wasn’t sure what channeling meant, but he thought it must have been one of the skills he gained last night. Intent focusing was new, and it gave Paul a word for the intangible resource that he spent to power the light: Intent.

He wanted to experiment with the light more, but Paul was already physically tired, and maintaining the blue-white glow taxed him mentally as well. He knew he needed to finish the day's work.

Paul continued breaking down the rats. He rinsed the small intestines and stomachs in a mushroom-cap bowl, changing the water several times. The stench was putrid, but after the anal gland incident, Paul didn't know if a smell could ever phase him again. Once the water ran clear, he added generous handfuls of salt to the water and set the bowl aside.

He scraped the hides clean with a knife, removing the fat and membrane from the skin, then placed them in a mushroom cap filled with salt water like he had the guts.

The meat he cut into strips, rolling them in the pink salt until covered, then carried them to the improvised fridge he had created beneath the stream earlier that day. He tucked the salted meat in the space beneath the stone slab and rolled a large rock in front of its entrance to keep scavengers away.

Paul stashed the bowls with the hide and guts as well as most of the other parts that he wanted to keep in the old rat den, then fed the fish with the scraps and organs he couldn’t use. He wondered much deeper underground the pool extended. He knew the lake had to exit somewhere, otherwise the rushing stream that fed it would cause it to overflow its banks.

That’s a mystery for another time, Paul, you’ve got your own shit to figure out.

He rinsed the grime and ichor off his body, ate, then climbed to his shelf-fungus perch, far above the pool below.

He gazed up at the cavern ceiling. Light reflected from the pool beneath danced along the rock formations. Paul felt like shit, and he smelled worse, but he smiled when he closed his eyes.

Eat your heart out, Robinson Crusoe.