Paul explored the cave network every day after he woke and committed his findings to his mental map. His [Pathfinding] skill had ranked up to five, and holding twists and turns of the tunnel network in his head was nearly effortless now.

Geology was never a subject that he paid much attention to, but Paul was struck by how diverse the cave system was. Igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock were all present, sometimes only separated by a few hundred meters. The sedimentary layers were jumbled, sometimes horizontal and sometimes folded or bent into vertical stripes. It was like someone had put together a jigsaw puzzle of a planet’s crust by dumping out the pieces from the box and pouring a bottle of glue on the pile.

Paul marked notable features on his mental map as he explored. A coal seam. A vein of copper. An outcropping of obsidian.

He avoided the rats for the most part, using his tracking skill to stay clear of their territory when he could. He didn’t shy away from them either though, and several times his exploration ended early with Paul carrying a rat carcass back to his cavern. Occasionally he would actively hunt for the rats, honing his [Tracking] and [Move Silently] skills, as well as picking up a new talent, [Hide in Shadows].

He didn’t find another family of rats again, and the single rats represented less and less of a threat for Paul as time went on.

Occasionally there were signs of other predators. He found a rib-cage in one of the caverns that he could walk through. Webs were everywhere in the caves, woven by tiny, translucent spiders, but on one of his trips, he stumbled through a curtain of webs to find cocooned death rats lining the walls. He backed down that tunnel, mentally noted it on his map, and did not return.

There were giant snakes, too. Nothing like the small garter-snake sized serpents that lived in the cavern, these ranged from the width of Paul's thigh to the width of his torso. The smaller ones left Paul alone, but the larger snakes were more aggressive. Paul had learned, painfully, to hold his hands high when they approached, so his arms wouldn’t be pinned beside him when they tried to wrap around his body. He had to die twice before learning the lesson.

Those deaths were stark reminders to Paul that despite his progress, he still had a long way to go before he could travel the caves safely.

The second time he woke up after a snake crushed him to death, Paul didn't move. He didn't know if he wanted to.

He lay on the cold stone a long while, letting the chill seep into him. It was dark, and Paul didn’t bother to create light with his mind.

Why am I even trying?

Paul wasn’t a crier. Or he had never considered himself to be. He supposed that before his first death, he had never had much reason to cry, so maybe his life hadn’t been the best test. Since he arrived in the caves, Paul had spilled more tears than he cared to think about.

This time was different than his past breakdowns, though. He wasn't in pain; he wasn't panicked, he wasn't even particularly scared. He just didn't know what the point was anymore.

Why am I going through all this shit if I'm just going to die anyway?

He didn’t sob this time, but his eyes were red with tears all the same.

What am I supposed to do? Just fucking die, over and over?

Paul wondered what would happen if he just lay here.

Will I die of hypothermia first, or thirst?

He decided the answer was probably hypothermia.

How long are you going to feel sorry for yourself this time, Paul?

It took every ounce of willpower that Paul had to stand.

He walked from his resurrection point to his cavern, but didn’t stop to eat his stashed meat or drink at the pool. Paul summoned his light, stood in front of the tunnel that led to the caves where he died most recently, and took a deep breath.

You can do this Paul.

Two hours later, he returned to his cavern, bloody and panting, dragging the body of a fifteen-meter snake.

Paul found herbivores and plant-life in the caves as well. Cave bison roamed the tunnels in herds, moving from watering hole to watering hole, devouring groves of mushroom and moss as they traveled. Because they traveled in groups, they were easy to track but challenging to hunt. He learned to bring them down by trailing the herd until they came to a constricted tunnel where they could only travel nose to tail. Paul would fall on the last one in the narrow passage with a war club, dropping it to the cave floor quickly and silently.

Sometimes he managed to kill the cave muskox silently enough that the second-to-last in line didn’t even notice that their follower was missing. Other times Paul would have to run, sprinting down the tunnels with an angry herd at his heels.

The Cave Muskox tasted gamey, but after days of rat, it was a delicacy.

Focusing his intent on the light became more natural the more he practiced. Sometimes the improvements were heralded by skill advancements, but sometimes they weren’t. His other talents seemed to follow a similar pattern. The skills imparted a blueprint of muscle-memory and ingrained knowledge for Paul to develop, but they were just plans, not a finished product.

Paul found that he could sometimes refine, and sometimes elaborate on these blueprints, adding efficiencies or flourishes of his own. When Paul used his blunt weapons skill to help guide his clubs, he could tell that the swings were technically sound. Some blows, however, seemed to be intended for a weapon with a longer reach than a jawbone club, and he noticed that others left him open for a rat to leap at him.

What he came to realize that many skills weren't a manual to be followed, but were more like a collection of tools. What you built with them was up to you.

With that in mind, Paul experimented with the light as he explored.

Moving the light was his first challenge. Since he first pushed the glow into existence, it had remained stubbornly floating in front of him where Paul had held the lightshroom. This was inconvenient because as the light illuminated the room, it also shone directly into his eyes. Manipulating its position was like trying to move a limb that he didn’t know he had. He could feel the light, feel his intent pouring into it, but shifting it was beyond him.

He let the light go out, then tried to will it back into being in a different location, but all that created for him was a headache. He gave up for the day.

The next day, he tried a different technique. He harvested a lightshroom, held it in his hand, and focused his intent on the fungus like he had the first time he created the light. Keeping his focus on the lightshroom, he slowly moved his hand back and forth and up and down. The light followed.

Two days later, Paul was able to remove the lightshroom, and just focused on the light hovering above his hand. Three days after that, Paul could move his hand away altogether and still shift the light around him. The most challenging step for Paul was moving the light above his head or behind him, outside of his field of vision. He had to meditate on the connection he felt in his mind, the stream of intent that flowed from him to power the brilliant glow.

Eventually, he settled on keeping the light above and slightly behind his head, illuminating the caves without shining in his eyes.

He felt that with practice he could move the light faster and farther. Sometimes he had to stop himself when his mental exertion turned into a headache.

He tried other experiments.

When he tried to touch the light, he expected his finger to pass right through it, and was surprised to find he could feel it with his finger - a strange tingle of hot and cold - like it had physical substance. He poked at it with his finger, and the light bobbed a few inches away, then settled back to its original location as if he had just pushed a ball up a hill then let it roll down again. He didn’t know what the implications were of his discovery that his intent was somehow not just manifesting light but a physical object that reacted like it had mass, but he filed the information away for future use.

On Paul’s return trips, he would stop using the light when he returned to familiar, well traveled tunnels, using those hours spent without it to gain additional ranks in night vision. Each level of the skill added lighter shades of grey to Paul’s palette, making it easier for him to navigate the caverns without light.

During his daily expeditions, he came across several caverns that were even larger than his own. The feeling was almost agoraphobic when a tunnel broadened into an enormous chamber, and Paul would suddenly feel vulnerable without walls close on either side.

One of the caverns was so bright with the bioluminescent fungus that Paul first thought that he had found the surface. The chamber's beauty lessened his disappointment when he realized that he was still underground; bioluminescent fungus covered rust and coral colored columns of rock that reached from floor to ceiling. Azure pools dotted the cavern floor and drained into a slow-moving stream that meandered through the cavern before disappearing underground. The most beautiful sight of all for Paul though was all the green. For the first time since his death, Paul saw trees.

They were tiny, spindly things, poking up above groves of giant mushrooms. Paul wondered how they received enough light in the caves to photosynthesize, but there were parts of the cave ceiling that were so dense with glowing fungus that the brightness left after-images on his eyes when he looked away.

There were other green plants in the cave as well. Fern analogs, small bushes with suspiciously edible-looking berries, and a rough, sharp grass that grew among the lichen and moss. Paul collected samples of each. Cutting two trees down was easy once Paul scavenged a rock with a good edge from the cavern, and his enhanced strength allowed him to make short work of the trunks. He stripped the slim trees of their branches, then made his way back to his cavern.

Upon his return, he carefully set the small tree trunks aside to dry. He considered moving to the new cavern, with its bright light and new resources but decided against it. His cavern had its advantages, and re-creating the crude infrastructure he had built in a new cavern would set him back weeks.

When Paul would return from exploring or hunting each day, the real work began.

After butchering any animal that he brought back, Paul would start his least favorite, and by far his smelliest job of the day: Tanning. His crude tannery was set up in the stalagmite forest across the cavern, far away from the pool and Paul’s sleeping place, which proved to be a fortunate bit of foresight. He turned the area into an assembly line of mushroom cap bowls full of foul-smelling liquid, hides in various stages of preparation, and leather stretched between stalagmites.

With Paul’s leatherworking skill had come some exceedingly unpleasant knowledge of how to best tan the hides that he found, which is how Paul came to piss in a hollowed out mushroom cap every night instead of his latrine.

The ammonia in his urine was a crucial component in softening the hides, and if he left the pelts submerged long enough, he could scrape the hair off of them as well. He gagged every time he had to remove one of the hides from the urine bath.

At this point, the pelts that Paul kept the fur on were stretched by laying them on a flat piece of ground and placing heavy stones at the edges. It wasn’t perfect, but it did result in two rat pelts that Paul was able to use for a blanket at night and a crude poncho that he wore until he could craft something better.

The pelts that Paul removed the hair from took a lot more work, and some of it equally unpleasant. While mashing up rat brains to use as a tanning agent, Paul would sometimes reflect on how precisely a middle-aged city slicker from the 24th century came to be pulping brain for a tanning solution but pushed those thoughts aside.

Stop being a mopey asshole.

Finally, he would rub the hide with rendered fat and stretch it. To create more pliant leather, Paul worked the hides for hours, pulling and softening them.

It was a long, time-consuming process, but it was one that Paul felt he had to undertake. He still didn’t have a good way to determine the time in the caves, but he hadn’t found an exit after walking for an estimated half-day through any of the cave systems so far, and he wasn’t ready to spend nights away from his cavern yet. Partly because of the warmth and light the bioluminescent fungus offered, but mostly because of his inability to carry supplies with him.

Exploring further into the cavern would mean a rucksack and waterskin, and Paul wanted more protection than his increasingly smelly kilt could provide.

After he finished the daily tasks he set for himself at his tannery, Paul would sit next to his crude approximation of a stove and sew. He pulled thread made of dried, braided gut through leather with a bone needle, and over the weeks, clothing and equipment took shape. A rucksack with carved bone. Two waterskins made of Cave Muskox stomachs and hide. Moccasins. A sueded Kuspuk.

He still struggled with making pants.

The stove was built from Paul’s most abundant resource, rocks, and featured a large flat stone that sat over the fire and a large round chimney that doubled as a kiln. Clay that Paul harvested in the streambed of the tree cavern filled the gaps between the uneven rocks as a crude mortar.

He experimented with pottery making, but most of his pots were brittle and cracked when he fired them. Eventually, he discovered that by peeling away fibrous strips from the giant mushroom stalks and mixing them with the clay he could produce pottery that wouldn’t shatter before he removed them from the kiln.

They were beyond crude, despite the skill of [Pottery] that he earned, but the simple earthenware pieces that Paul created improved his quality of life dramatically. A cup. A washbasin. A (leaky) jug. They felt like luxuries to Paul.

It was the stove and pottery that had allowed Paul to render the oils he needed in his leatherworking. More importantly, it was the key to making the first item that Paul allowed himself that was purely self-indulgent: soap.

Paul usually fueled the stove with coal from a seam of anthracite only a short walk into the tunnel system from his cavern. For soap, however, he used the precious trees he found in the bright cavern as fuel for the furnace, burning them down to ash. He then boiled the ash, skimming off the lye, which he then boiled again with the rendered fat. He poured the final, mushy mixture into a square mold he sculpted out of soft clay, and let it harden overnight.

The next day, before he climbed to his fungus sleeping perch, Paul heated water over his stove, poured it into his washbasin, and lathered up a piece of sueded hide.

Paul wasn’t a religious man, but feeling the warm water on his skin, and watching the accumulated grime disappear from his skin was the closest to a religious experience he ever had. He never realized how much he had missed being clean.

It was more than just being clean for Paul though. It was all the work all the sacrifices, all the pain to get to this point. Killing rats for fat, gathering and carrying wood, learning how to start a fire from scratch, creating a kiln, learning how to make a pot, all of it had led up this moment. And it was worth it.

As he let a month of accumulated dirt and grime rinse away from his body, he realized something.

For once, he didn’t even feel sorry for himself.

You can do this Paul.

He had told himself this same thing hundreds, if not thousands of times since arriving in the caves. For the first time, he believed it.