After what felt like hours, my son stopped screaming. The chittering of singing birds struck me like an apple to Newton's skull. I looked up for the singing bird and found it. It looked… much fatter than I would have expected for a bird hailing from this sort of biome.

I focused towards it and sent a lance of the slightly corporeal Purge Life spell at it, nothing more than a directed heat-haze practically invisible in the dim darkness. It bounced against the fat bird's plumage and fizzled inches after the rebound. The bird noticed and lazily began to beat its wings, taking off through the canopy, leaving me once more to hunger.

No food, but I would have to feed my son again, or at least attempt to. While I forced breastmilk out like pressing stones for water, my son suckling eagerly, heartbreakingly, to stave of death, I obsessed at my failure.

It should have worked, but not only did it not, it also reflected off the bird. Was it the feathers? Did nonliving matter obstruct the spell appreciably, even if it was organic? That made no sense. Nothing in the schematics of the spell indicated such things. The spell could travel through nonliving organic matter in order to hit the intended target. The matter didn't even have to be organic.

Seemingly, it could even penetrate through clothes or armor, as long as it hit…

…I furrowed my eyebrows at the mental image conjured. The target wasn't an amalgam of flesh and blood and bone, it was something else, more ethereal. I was imagining a target's outline more than a living being, and going into the why of that specific image finally netted me some answers from my subconscious mind, the part of me that still remembered my waltz with demons in the starscape’s hidden dimension.

My magic targeted an aura. The spell hit that aura, and rejected it. Why? More intuitive knowledge came, this time on the fundamentals of magic. All animals had magic signatures. In this case, the signature differential was too substantial. How did I go on about solving this issue?

After a few mouthfuls, my breasts refused to cooperate. That was it for today. I direly needed food and water and I didn't know where to start on my current predicament.

I swallowed my pride and returned to the starscape, clutching my newly earned Spell Point preciously. The starscape shifted into an entirely different region, far away from the category I would likely have called biomagic, towards the nexus of stars, an area more self-referential. The magic about magic. Metamagic.

And as it happened, Shift Signature was a foundational spell, right next to Ritualism and Magic Manipulation, the only spells in that cluster altogether, unlocked or no. Though my interest was piqued at the latter, I stayed focused enough to take what I needed and go.

Shift Signature slotted itself into my mind like a long-forgotten verse in the scriptures coming to light in perfect clarity. Perhaps that didn't really apply to me anymore, as I found myself able to recall the scriptures with preternatural clarity, even after over a decade of not opening one book. The boosts to my intelligence were paying impressive dividends, though I didn't dwell very long on the dubious benefits that religion and prayer would bring to my… otherworldy situation. If God was real, he wasn't with me.

Shift Signature came with a rather impressive side effect. Once activated, I received the intimate knowledge of not only every animal's magical signature in my surroundings from at least twenty meters, but their locations as well.

The shifting occurred within a two-dimensional spectrum of values that were akin to, but not exactly the same as numbers, a range that seemed almost infinite in complexity. Then again, all limited number lines had an infinite amount of values.

That said, a new dimension could be formulated. Not a new spell, simply a novel application of it. I found… four axes, and with them, four distinct "values" for every animal near me. None of them meant anything to me, but for a rather self-evident one.

Tiers of purity. Again, numbers almost weren't applicable as each tier went through great flux and would shift seemingly at random. Only one tier remained static, unchanging as the stars in the real night sky. Ultimate purity.

I could tap into this signature and affect all things the same, pierce through all innate magical barriers with trifling ease. I would also likely be consumed by it and then destroyed, if not physically then mentally.

I put a pin on it.

I located a substantially slimmer bird for a lack of better options, shifted to its signature as closely as I could, and sent the magic sailing.

My boy’s incessant howls had it take off far before the spell could land.

I grit my teeth and looked at the little boy, wishing he would listen, wishing I was a better human, someone more able to soothe their only child.

I didn’t waste any words on him. I knew that was a slippery slope, and I didn’t want to set our nascent relationship off to a bad start, one where I’d shout and scream and demand the world from such a powerless little being and have him disappoint me at every step, breeding such a profound resentment that he wouldn’t care whether I lived or died.

I didn’t want that for him because I regretted that it happened to me. It was a selfish motivation but I was a selfish person, so it would do for now.

I hushed into the baby’s ear. He swung his head away and continued crying. “Please,” I whispered, tearfully.

The crying halted a little, before continuing.

“You need to be quiet,” I said patiently. “You need to be quiet so we can eat.” The boy finally stopped crying, but just as I sighed in relief, he began to launch into the groaning beginnings of another bout of wailing. “Hush, little one. We need to be quiet.”

I continued like so, walking closely to the sounds of chittering while I cooed into my boy’s ear. When I found another bird, I had to stop talking so I could charge up the spell and shift my signature at the same time.

The baby began to cry and the bird flew away again.

“We are going to die,” I whispered tearfully. “Please be quiet. Please.”

I picked myself up from the failure and tried again, staying strong for the boy in my arms.

The next time I found a bird, I aimed above it, so just as it took off, the spell still struck true.

The bird squawked and batted its wings, trying to escape its attacker. It flew a few more feet and dove towards the ground.

When I reached it, I used Purge Poison and Purge Disease on it. Afterwards, I plucked its feathers by the handful and bit into it, raw and everything. I had the tools to survive the experience, but not the expertise to start a fire, so the choice was obvious.

The taste and smell was inconsequential. I avoided the less savory innards by consuming the limbs to the best of my ability, then moving on to the breasts.

I knew that blood was too salty to hydrate me properly. The berries were helpful, but I needed a clean source of water before anything else.

Or a more intense version of Purge Poison that could remove or destroy impurities from a liquid with a water base. I could use that alone to kill animals, "transmuting" their lifeblood into water.

I decided to do my best. I had the relevant glyphs and the know-how to create a spell like that, but there was something I doubted about it, a prerequisite that I probably did not fulfill.

Was it my attributes? With a tentative command to this… system, I called up my sheet.

Name: Reza Talib

Class: None

Title: None

Level: 3 (68%)

Attributes

Power 1

Endurance 2

Coordination 2

Intelligence 7

Wisdom 5

Charm 3

Unspent points: 2

Common sense dictated that I invest in Power or Endurance. Whatever they did, they could help me survive. Endurance, especially, appealed to me on account of the ceaseless trekking I had put myself through in the past few days.

I would be a fool, however, to not trust in the power of magic after how far it had taken me. If magic could cure and heal me at will, it was all I needed. I just had to make my own way.

Intelligence was important. It helped me keep the glyphs in mind and their transformations while I evoked. It was invaluable, and without it, or my preternatural ability to focus on extreme mental tasks, I would be dead by now.

Wisdom was also important because I was awarded a point for it in the process of spellmaking, and my Wisdom value counted when the system awarded me a Spell Point the first time. It was likely to be the hidden factor as such. I added the two unspent points into it, making both mental attributes equal. Immediately, I felt a difference. The humming of the seed of madness remnant of my immersion into otherness became less pronounced. Rationality replaced it, subduing it even further. Wisdom cured insanity. An important discovery.

The task ahead of me seemed less daunting. I went through the now-familiar motion of teetering on the edge of oblivion's oblivion and flirted dangerously with the boundaries of my mind's capacity for thought. What became more and more abundantly clear as I did this, was that magic was not created for human minds, nor the synthesized minds of human creation. It was otherness incarnate, and as I lost and found myself in the throes of spellmaking, I wondered whether the insanity was a byproduct of my becoming more acclimated to magic or my mind being worn down by it. The former was too dire a thought to dwell on, so I decided instead to focus on the task at hand and come out the other end unscathed.

If anything, a boost in Wisdom would deliver me if things ever got messy. I vowed to keep unspent points for exactly such a situation.

The spell came to a conclusion along with the Intelligence boost and as I shifted signatures and aimed my spell at another bird, I finally dared to believe that we would survive this.

I used Purge Poison and Disease on the bird and, like a vampire, I bit into a random part of it and sucked. What met my lips was pure water. It was slightly marred by the taste of blood, but after a while, that stopped mattering entirely. I was finally drinking water.

I had planned to drag the bird around like a waterskin, but I managed to drink so much from it that the effort wasn't worth the meager remainders. I moved onwards and waited desperately for my breasts to get to work and do their damned jobs for once. I was fully sated and quenched, yet I couldn't help but loathe myself for feeling this way while my son was losing weight day by day.

The smartest thing to do would be to rest up for the night. I sat against a log and periodically cast Shift Signature to gauge my surroundings. It was good to be off my feet, and though the food was nothing to write home about, the feeling of a full stomach was appreciated.

I hadn't had that luxury for months, and the demands of my pregnancy hadn't made my time any easier.

I closed my eyes to rest them for a moment, and a shock of awareness ran through me as I realized I was about to doze off. I cast Shift Signature again and sighed in relief. Nothing had come near me.

I stood up slowly as tiredness washed over me, commanding me to lay down and sleep and restore my aching muscles. I was just one huge spot of soreness.

I looked at the spot I had just stood up from, and looked around at the forest. Nothing would come for me. Nothing had come for me, and even if something did, it was unlikely to seriously hurt me. Most predators were averse to humans, especially their wild counterparts. The only question was: should I count on that being the same in this new world? Would I stake my life on that gamble?

My son began to cry. I wagged him gently and tried to breastfeed him. There was milk, finally, and my son suckled hungrily, his noises dying down.

I sat down and smiled at my fortune. I had bought us another day, but without sleep, it would all be for naught.

Steeling my heart, I came to a decision, and for the first time since my 'emancipation', I prayed to anyone that would listen to keep us safe, even knowing that it was a futile gesture.

I closed my eyes, and let myself get swept into dreamland.

000

I woke up to the rustling of branches and the inhuman wails of my son. A swift cast of 'Shift Signature' told me that it was only some kind of tree-dwelling critter, the six-legged type. Nevertheless, I moved away from that spot and stared up at the sky. The moon was low and dawn would only be a few hours away. That meant that I had slept for at least three hours. It was enough.

I resumed the trek in the same direction I started in, the same direction I had maintained since I was brought to this world. I didn't know where I was going, so the least I could do was maintain commitment and increase the likelihood of coming across something that would help me survive.

An hour later, my walk finally led me to a large clearing, the ground covered in tall grass instead of mulched leaves. I saw something large, propped up against a singular tree in the clearing, and headed towards it to examine what it could be.

It was a boar, judging by the tusk and snout. No, not a boar. Boars had four limbs, not six. This one didn't seem to have any hair either, as its smooth hide shined darkly, reflecting the meager moonlight. Whatever it was, it was enormous. Had it stood, its shoulders would easily have reached my stomach. Judging by the tear through its stomach, illuminated by moonlight from a brief clearing in the canopy, it was decidedly dead, too. Possibly wounded in an altercation and fell unconscious by the tree before it bled to death.

I reached near it and…

The ground was dry.

I activated Shift Signature and my heart almost leaped up my throat. I stood up quickly and narrowly dodged a spear hurtling through the air. I didn't even look back as I ran, keeping their locations in mind using Shift Signature. I always tried to keep a tree between them and me, but they were canny hunters and stood at a semi-circle behind me, almost covering their bases completely.

I didn't manage to dodge a spear in time, though it only grazed me. My left arm went numb. This had to stop.

I looked back. Humanoid figures, adorned in feathers and… paint. I couldn't make out their skin color considering the darkness, but their faces told me enough already. They were not human. Wide mouths and sharp teeth jutting out from them as well as eyeshine and digitigrade legs disabused me of that notion entirely.

I never realized how long it took for me to cast a spell. With Shift Signature activated, it took almost five seconds to evoke and cast Purge Life.

Bokora slain

150 experience awarded

One managed to die, but this wasn't the sort of pursuit where I could run for minutes and lose them as I took them out one by one.

One managed to grab me, spear in its other hand. The spell activated just then.

I saw seven or eight of them closing in on me, too fast for my spell.

I bit my lower lip almost to the point of bleeding. Last resort.

I shifted my signature to ultimate purity and released a dome-shaped blast of Purge Life, beginning several feet away from me, and terminating who knows how many hundreds of meters away.

First came the instability. Then my perception altered dramatically. It couldn't be trusted. Nothing could, when my windows to the world had been vandalized, written over by the paint of insanity.

Hands entered my mind, making a mess of things. Up became down, independent concepts became dependent. The ocean was deep because the newborn child of a mother was loved! And it was only love. Love remained. I clinged to love. Love for my son. All else could collapse but that single concept.

My son.

The magic travelled for hundreds of meters before terminating. The monsters, Bokora according to the system, were slain. Not just the men hunting me right now, or the others hunting different prey in the night. Their tribe of a hundred was eradicated, children included, too, and with each kill, my rewards diminished almost to nothing. It was the same with the birds, beasts and insects that roamed this particular patch of forest.

All things… dead.

"Nothing beside remains beyond the decay," I observed quietly. "Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare," closing my eyes, I could almost believe I was back in the wasteland of my home rather than in this forest. The two were equally lifeless after all. "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

It was banal, but felt fitting. I was treading on unsteady ground, unfamiliar to my worn and abused feet, but the poems kept me grounded, told me that I was still me, albeit damaged beyond belief.

I was a harbinger of death, now. The Bokora tried to hunt me, and I killed them all, even the uninvolved ones, as well as droves of innocent animals.

Was it worth it?

Level up!

Level up! 1+ Spell Point awarded.

Level up!

Level up!

What was ‘worth’?

What did I care if things I’d never seen before died?

Right. The rewards.

Yes, yes, they were appreciated. High time the system understood my divine potential.

High time indeed.

The wretched cub in my arms, held fast by hands unwilling to obey their master, yawned and started crying. Wouldn’t it be wiser to leave it to its own devices? Better yet, could I transmute it into food?

Why did I need food? What a laughable limitation. I didn’t have to eat. I could create energy.

No, no, no, too simplistic, too… unwise.

My attention fell back to my attributes, to my laughably low wisdom count. Obviously, I was wiser than a mere seven wisdom.

More likely, the detestable machine was withholding it from me, limiting me from the get-go in order to fit an inane narrative of linear growth.

What should any of that mean to me?

Everything, for I was weaker than it, and it was the strong that made the rules.

“Very well, stupid machine. I will acquiesce to your theatrics this last time, if only to gather the requisite wit required to do the smart thing.”

I punched in all my pent-up points into wisdom.

Ethereal fingers reached into my head and shaped my mind, straightening the bent, bending the straight, lifting me up from the dark pits of cold calculation and megalomania, allowing me once more to cling to that inefficient, illogical, irrational and incredibly powerful thing that was sentimentality.

I looked down at my crying nuisance and hugged him closer, realizing now where we stood. It was not just a ‘me and him’ situation, but ‘us’.

That was what I was, and what he was. Us.

“Us,” I whispered. “Us.”

I walked on ahead and continued whispering that sacred word so I would never forget.