Dan walked over to retrieve the corpse of the Rootlurk Viper he killed and thought about Minor Aether Bolt. Five bolts were more than enough to kill a small monstrous snake. One was enough to kill a bug or blast a small plant. The bolts seemed to move in straight lines with no apparent drop due to gravity or deceleration with distance. They were invisible and very fast, but did not instantaneously teleport to their target. His best guess is that they were somewhere between an arrow and a bullet in speed, but it was tough to tell without a gun or a bow and arrow to test against. When they hit, the damage they dealt was, as with so much else recently, weird. It appeared to have a kinetic component, something like a less powerful shotgun slug. On the other hand, it seemed much more damaging to living targets than inert matter such as dirt, rocks, or fallen trees. Did it attack some sort of life force? It seemed to have an explosive component, but it was localized to the target rather than effecting the surrounding area.

Most mysteriously, to a certain extent the bolts seemed to do what he wanted them to do, which was just really, really weird. When he wanted one to hit the head of a fish three feet below the surface of water without damaging the rest of its body, the bolt did. When he wanted them to utterly destroy a tiny viper, they did. When he wanted one to hit a tree like an arrow, with concentrated, penetrating force, it did. It was just... weird. He wished he had taken a shot or two at the lizard, dinosaur, deer thing.

On the other hand, it wasn't as if he could use more than a small portion of its meat, if any, even if he could kill it. His family were hunters, and had taught him a strong ethic of killing only what he would eat. The dinosaur deer thing was a complete unknown as well. It could be sentient, even sapient. For all he knew, it was more intelligent, more emotionally, socially and ethically complex than he was. Though his compass had not tugged him toward it. But that may just mean he was prejudiced against its form, and so would not recognize it as a person. After all, those were the terms he had set when using the ability. On the other other hand, System Identify hadn't given him any information on the dino-deer, any more than it did on various bugs or fish, which might indicate it was just an animal. Or not.

If it could give him valuable data, did his ethical qualms even matter? He had the weight of a world resting on his shoulders if Sam had spoken truth. If he failed the nebulous command to gain power, it was not only his future at risk, but that of Earth and all mankind. Dan was apparently one of those best equipped to succeed in passing these insane tests after all. So was it his responsibility to do everything possible to gain power, regardless of who or what he had to hurt in the process? Was it all a giant, confusing version of the philosophical trolley problem?

He turned that bit of intellectual navel gazing over in his mind. There's a trolley heading down the tracks, rumbling towards ten innocent people. They can't get out of the way and it will kill them unless he stops it. They only way he can stop it is by diverting it down another track. But there is one innocent person down that track who will die if he does. Is it better to actively kill one person or passively allow ten to die? There were variations. What if it were ten against nine instead of ten against one? What if it were one hundred or one thousand against one? One million? What if he knew the one, if it was a friend or family member? Dan had never bothered to decide what right was on that question. It seemed like an absurd scenario. But with the dinosaur deer, in hindsight, he'd faced a bizarre variant of it, one that would likely repeat itself again and again over the next seven years, should he be fortunate enough to live that long. He could choose to harm another living being, and by so doing gain an unknown amount of power, which would improve his chances of meeting the unknown criteria of the System's test by an unknown amount. Passing that test would improve humanity's chances of winning a System connection by an unknown amount. That would improve humanity's chances of long term survival by yet another unknown amount. It was all so speculative and nebulous that it would be easy to throw his metaphorical hands up and ignore it, but that was the lazy, cowardly way out of this moral dilemma. Dan had to choose.

Alright then. Pretend the dino-deer was the moral equivalent of a person. Accept as given that killing it would give him a measure of power. He was no philosopher, had little interest or familiarity with the subject. But from what he remembered, Kantian thought would say not to kill the deer, even if it meant he died, even if mankind died with him. That felt wrong to him. Utilitarian ethics said kill it. That twisted his guts in an ugly knot, but analytically seemed more correct.

Yet it was still wrong.

For one thing, there was no way he'd make that choice if it was not an alien reptilian deer but a little human girl playing in the woods. So his analysis was badly tainted by his own prejudice. But that wasn't the biggest problem.

The premise was wrong, the thought exercise too simple, flawed from the start. There was no such thing as a decision he could make in isolation. Each choice would change him. If he ruthlessly sought power, no matter the moral cost, then even if he succeeded and made it back to earth, he'd be a heartless, powerful, self righteous jerk convinced that the ends justified the means. Was that an acceptable outcome, or even useful to mankind? Maybe - after all, Stalin and Churchill were not exactly kind people, but had won the war. But there were other ways to power. Collaboration, cooperation, working together with others. They might be slower, more fragile at the start, but in the long term Dan believed they were more sustainable. Sam had warned him to treat the locals with respect. Also, from what Dan could gather, this whole strange thing was a species wide try-out to join a multi-verse spanning community of intelligent beings. Acting like a power obsessed, selfish, anti-social parasite seemed quite unwise when viewed through that lens. He would seek power. No doubt that would at times require difficult moral choices, but there was also power in ethics, in morality, that he was not willing to throw away.

Dan had arrived at the base of the small tree where the viper's corpse lay still several seconds prior. He examined what was left. It had been pretty while alive and it was small. That had made it seem harmless, even when it quite clearly had not been. Now it was very dead and rather mangled, and truly was harmless, barring something dumb like intentional self envenomation. Somehow the small, dead monster moved Dan and opened a gate he'd managed to keep closed until then. He mourned. He mourned for the snake, even though it had been a presumably vicious monster who would have happily killed him. He mourned for the old, old goblin shaman, for the young goblin he killed as it hid in a bush. He mourned for himself, for the life he'd left behind, his friendships, the family he might never see again. His mother's warm smile and slightly greater than rational concern for his health. His dad's distracted enthusiasm for his latest brilliant idea, or grandpa's deeply felt history lessons. His favorite chair and a cup of lemonade while his choice of thousands of songs played softly in his headphones after a good day's work.

Theoretically, all of that was only seven years away. Realistically? It was already gone. Even if he succeeded and was returned to Earth, it would be with seven years of bizarre and completely inexplicable life experience along with a not just sound but superhuman body, on top of other superhuman abilities. Everything would change. It would not be the type of thing that could be hidden or explained away. And that was the best case scenario. Dan's heart, lungs, and legs were stronger now than they had ever been, and he knew that he could run for hours. But a deeper part of him was so very tired.

He shook it off as best he could and kept moving as Universal Compass directed. If his arrival had been in morning and this sun rose in the east, then its march across the sky had taken it west to late afternoon. Detect Monster's eight hour and forty minute duration could be used as a clock to measure the length of a day if he started it exactly at sundown and kept track of how often he needed to re-use it and how much time it had left before the sun set again. The number of hours in a day just seemed like a useful thing to know. A more useful bit of knowledge would be how cold it got at night. He had warm clothes, a fur, and a blanket, but it would be good to know how elaborate of a shelter he needed to go along with them. He decided to jog for another couple of hours, then get to building.

An hour and forty minutes later he came across a fallen titan of a tree laying broken in the forest. A number of small animals already had made homes in its carcass, but a careful examination using Dan's wide array of senses showed none of them to be dangerous. He knew that in building a shelter, the bed is the most important element. Fortunately for him, his Agility gave him options normal earthlings would not have had. He climbed a nearby pine that was, while still large in its own right, much smaller than its giant elder cousins. After clambering out on a sturdy bough thirty feet up, he simply broke off smaller branches heavy with pine needles and dropped them to the forest floor below, then repeated the process on other boughs until he had enough both for a comfortable bed and to lean against the fallen tree to make a triangular shelter. He climbed back down and carefully arranged them until the roof looked stable and the bed looked comfy. Finally, he climbed a stout trunked tree a short distance from his shelter and tied his rope around a thick branch about thirty-seven feet up. If something Dan couldn't fight or outrun came in the night, he wanted somewhere to escape up to.

His work done, Dan sat in his shelter and ate dried rations from an envelope of alien plant fiber and drank water from a bag of alien animal skin. He separated two of the branches of the roof and watched the sun set, careful to mark the time with Detect Monster. Then he closed them, got out his blanket, lay down, and set himself to the task of sleep.