The Overdream, a moment between the martial arts study.

Where could Henry's retired feet now roam unsaddled by that weight of old?

Down The Three Rivers and towards the soft-sand coast where their mouths salivated into the ocean? That was a home for aquatic life in abundance. Drop a line, and you’d never know what strange creature might tug to give its greetings. It reminded him of the limitless mystique of Earth’s waters in the tales before their mapping. You’d go diving in an inlet where some leviathan once slumbered and left her imprint in the coastal bed and dug-out minerals that fed a school of scaly eels. Then that fishing up The Three Rivers, each with waters unique, changing with the seasons and the outbursts of the volcanoes in-land.

Or how about to the western woods of Boiling Mud Lakes and another hunt of the Sun-Beam Meerkat colonies? They were always a delightful foe, and their prey did not begrudge their thinning numbers. They were smart, coordinated, as aggressive as man in his expansion out of Africa, with tactics ingenious in their adaptation and cruelty.

Or maybe across the Bamboo Jungle of the Elementosaurs? That old blockade to his pursuit of the Flying Crab migration during the Floating Leaf scouting—yes, that would be his direction for today, the completion of a small adventure with his own intrigue as the sole impetus and the stakes divinely inconsequential.

Only another decade was needed to finish cultivating a Nature Energy Grass with the potency to fuel the treacherous journey. He had climbed to the highest branches of Forest Farming where the trees and the vines and the flowers began to talk, and they had whispered to him the secrets of their verdant souls. Somewhere in their mad chatter had been a grain of useful advice.

He waited for an autumn during his study of the art after Adaptive Wound Cycling, for the Flying Crabs that’d repopulated his island home to moult and spread their broader wings for the migration south. Henry setting off with them filled his inventory with his fuel seeds and a couple tools and sketchbooks for documenting new discoveries. The Bamboo Jungle ahead had killed him innumerable times when he’d last attacked it decades earlier, but he was confident he’d cross it in his first attempt and he did not pack excessive supplies. During the silent episode of Monster-Self Veneration living alongside the beasts, they’d taught him how even this land’s worst moods might be endured by an honest pair of arms and legs.

Across the adjacent marshes, he and the flocks travelled, through the scattered fields of his expanded farms and beyond. He would leave his estate unattended for his travels, but the wildlife wouldn’t bother reclaiming them yet. Autumn marked a truce. Everyone was too busy with winter preparations and they wouldn’t risk trying for more than what they owned already. Spring was the season for proving your bravado in the acquisition of territory. Wasting insulating fat or knicking your fur in a spat would hurt sorely when the winter chill blew through.

The terrain transitioned to dry woodland, where the aggressive packs of Lobster-Wolves reigned. One day a group scented his trail and pursued him, Henry spotting them from a hilltop. He shapeshifted into a 12-legged insect whose haemolymph stank of decaying lemon peels. The packs soon desisted the chase. They sniffed confusedly at the changed odour and their nostrils drove them in the direction of less off-putting meat. Vile, nauseating, none of the promised sweetness of the former smell.

Henry’s legs shifted through several forms, escaped some monsters, and skirted around the lairs of others. The migrating herds passed him on the plains on their over-land route to the south, ignoring and dodging him. Bogs where he’d drowned, prairies, cloistered vales, dunes of metallic sand, and towering gorges – he recognised the myriad faces of the land from whence they fled, the land he’d seen them in and the land seen in them.

Further along was The Three Rivers region and then the turn south into those foothills. The giant Pelican Griffons attacked. They divided the swarming crabs like leaf-blowers through a carpet of deadfall. The greediest made extinct populations from regions neighbouring his home and distant. The flocks fought to survive the gluttons’ assault, splitting and converging, lifting and lowering, speeding and slowing, spinning in distracting formations. Their sick and elderly volunteered as sacrifices, forming clusters to lure Pelican Griffon swoops and trying to clog their devourers' throats – with mixed success.

With less emotion than in the past, Henry watched the feeding. Who was he to tamper with Nature’s delicate balance? He sketched the hunt and captured the nobility of the grotesque pelicans. He’d slain some while Starhunting, and he’d examined the storage spaces in their distended bellies, used to feed next year’s hatchlings. Animals ate many smaller things, and were in turn eaten in their many by bigger things – such was life’s trophic cycle. Henry wouldn’t admonish them for it. As a humanist, he knew the impossibility of just getting a species to stop cannibalising itself, and the necessity to prioritise one’s battles in a world of finite time, attention, and care. He kept his distance from these feeding creatures he’d come to understand a bit more, and they, understanding him back, kept theirs from him.

He and the thinned-out crab-flocks left the foothills and continued on to that tropical place, down to that Bamboo Jungle of those Elemental pests. A leisurely pace had come to be his preference amongst nature, but it was a death sentence here with the cheetah-quick packs of raptors and their hyperspeed senses. Henry into one of their kind and grazed upon a ration of seeds of Nature Energy Gathering Grass. The seeds had been infused with the potent century of cultivation and mineralogical exploration and Alchemical tinkering, and their taste attested of his war with his planet and the treaties they’d conceded.

Into the jungle dark, he raced with his hastened speed and senses and the alerted wind-raptors chasing him like a company of white blood cells attacking a foreign pathogen. He fled from his pursuers and the tens of thousands of others dropping from branches and emerging from ponds and thickets, Henry following routes mapped by previous failures and slipping the quickest packs by dipping into the territories of larger, slower rivals, who lumbered after him in turn.

Two to three days of sprinting at over 110 kilometres per hour without a break, jungle-winding through two thousand kilometres as the crab flies. One stumble and the forerunners snipping at his heels would latch his limbs before their comrades inundated him. However, Starhunting had conditioned him for weeks continuous against tougher foes. Tested the endurance of his body and tuned his mind to the rationing of vigilance. Finally through and past the jungle’s perimeter to the interior where the Cloud-Piercers towered and fed and controlled the Elementosaurs, over whom they lorded like queen bees sending out the colony to bring her tributes of pollen. With no method to defeat these imperious plants, he hugged the strips between their intersecting territories to avoid drawing too near to any and triggering their inner vine-defences that squeezed and crushed.

The steady plunge into the hostility of the jungle, deeper and deeper. The abrupt bombardment of the aerial Lightning-Pterosaurs who hawk-dove from the sky and blasted craters of molten rock.

Beyond his furthest success of the past. It exhilarated to brave the unknown and unforgiving. Here were the first difficulties of his crossing, one pack strategising to mislead him as they coordinated with their host Cloud-Piercer’s senses, another pack consisting of a single super-predator that telekinetically controlled the trees and shrubs and weeds to try snag him. Henry struggled to create breaks and replenish his form with his seed rations. There was no assurance a weed might not sense the subtle shift of relaxation and seize his ankle. His rations ran out. On, on, on after those ugly crabs flapping their wings through the frictionless air, he soldiered on with his mortal senses through this realm where he didn't belong, with the hyperspeed packs swarming him thick as tangles of choking kelp. He waded onwards in spurts. When he had Stamina, he wove through them in Cheetah form. When he didn’t, he fought with his Thousand Tools, by whacking the monsters off him with shields and spears and logs, by using the defences of the land, by manipulating terrain, by weaponising the foliage and the cliffs and the caves, by shedding his hands and his feet and his bones and his guts, by directing monster against monster in accordance with the spatial limitations of their dissected anatomy, by drawing upon the experience of thousands of such moments immersed to his eyeballs in the blood. In the gaps of sky glimpsed between the jungle canopy, between the dense blanket of beasts swaddling his limbs fighting with the desperation of an infant being suffocated by its mother, there it emerged, a glimpse of the blue heavens unbroken by those bastard trees that punctured the clouds. He had reached the perimeter on the jungle’s other side.

An eight-ton ankylosaur joined his pursuers and spat boulders at him as he jogged for the last few hours. Persisting through the thinning jungle, Henry was slowly able to move with less impediment, the packs dropping their chase when they were satisfied the intruder was leaving their home. They’d simply wanted to be free of the strange creature and his misshapen branches tipped with steel.

Endless sun now. Its rays unbroken by the leaves above as Henry made his exit, tussling with the final packs, breaking away from them, sprinting into the open as the last pursuer turned back.

Finally, he’d crossed, reaching the light on the jungle’s other side, a century after first setting off.