I was still alive when I woke up. I suppose that had been true every other time I’d woken up too, but that was no excuse to take it for granted. Even my quarter-assed camouflage appeared sufficient to last a night.

Or day? It was still light out. In? Fuck it, I slept so it was night, and it was pretty open so it was outside, actual time and place notwithstanding. Semantics wasn’t something I had time for right now, or ever.

I reached into the food pouch and withdrew a handful of jerky. I jammed my entire hand into my mouth, bringing the food from pouch to mouth too fast for the smell of meat to escape.

On the other hand, I now had a hand stuck in my mouth like an idiot. It occured to me as I dry swallowed unchewed jerky from the inside of my hand that maybe I could be too paranoid for my own good sometimes. Then I remembered the invisible owl attack and I went right back to swallowing.

Once I’d thoroughly cleaned off every last scrap of sustenance I withdrew my hand and double-checked the food pouch, ensuring it was sealed off. I was safe from even the keenest nose, unless it could sniff out extra-dimensional spaces.

Aaaaaand now I was sure to run into one of those. Oh well, at least I’d seen it coming.

I spent the next few minutes working on my camouflage. Hiding beneath a pile of sticks and leaves was well and good when you weren’t moving, much as mere clothing was more than enough in the pitch blackness of the tunnels, but neither would suffice for moving about in this visually complex jungle environment.

I’d left the branches mostly intact before, but now I broke them up into bits and bobs no longer than perhaps six inches tops. I wasn’t up to retying anything with one hand, but my current garb of torn and bound cloth left plenty of edges to tuck things under already, so I was able to add enough greenery to not only break up my silhouette, but turn me into a virtual walking bush.

Hopefully the herbivores here weren’t as aggressive as the predators.

I clambered up the tree, moving slowly as I worked my claws into the bark. Garrett’s boots might have been tempting back in the hard stone of the crypts, but out here I was glad to have left them behind. The extra purchase of my claws helped compensate for working with one less limb, and stars knew I could use all the help I could get.

It was a long climb, longer than I would like, but eventually I reached enough of a break in the canopy to get my bearings. The owl had forced me in exactly the wrong direction, and I’d have to circle the step pyramid just to get back to where I’d been, let alone hope to reach the titanic trees that stretched up into the sky.

But a start was a start, and it was high time to get moving. Regrettably, that started by moving back down. A canopy thin enough to see through was too thin to jump between, unless you were a particularly adept breed of monkey.

I reluctantly made my way all the way back to the ground, were I could walk without unduly stressing my injury. The constant jerking about of leaping from tree to tree would be faster, not to mention less boring, but I knew that trying to ignore an injury would just insure the thing would stick around ten times longer. I might not have the incredible knowledge of body and medicine that my mother had, but some of it had rubbed off.

Still, I made sure to keep a healing potion on the top of a pouch. There was avoiding waste, and there was dying a dumb death. If it looked like a quick heal could save my life, I’d down that potion in a heartbeat.

It wasn’t long until I’d made it to the edge of the pyramid, and from there I circled the base and got around to other side. I made my way through the jungle slowly, gradually adding more leaves and twigs to my ensemble as I went. It took me a solid half an hour just to reach the base of the step-pyramid again, and circling around the edge would take at least as long.

The trek all the way to the pillar tree was looking worse every minute. I’d hoped to get out of this place quickly, but the odds of a rush job just weren’t looking good enough to meet even my rapidly declining standards and that meant I was going to have to take some time to prepare.

Like finally making up my damn mind about what to do with those two levels I still had lying around. At the very least I could just throw them into stats and get something out of them instead of the grand fuck all I was getting now.

I started to walk, hugging the side of the pyramid and looking out for a nook or cranny big enough for me to squeeze into, but, critically, not big enough that anything bigger could get in after me.

Not a hard task in most jungles, but this one just had to be fucking special, didn’t it? There was a swath of ground adjacent to the the pyramid where nothing grew, leaving a convenient pathway for walking, but far less convenient for finding hiding places. I debated on whether I should wander off into the woods and risk getting lost or stay in the barran strip and hope that whatever mojo warded off plants worked on animals too before eventually splitting the difference and nestling up in the roots of a tree straddling the edge.

I took a deep breath. Okay. What kind of Skills might be useful?

…

Nothing. Fucking infinite possibilities and all I could do was draw a blank on all of them. I was gonna be climbing up, what was useful climbing? Rope? I could just make rope. I could create some kinda camouflage skill, except I already had one, so what would be the point? Combat? That’d only be useful if I actually had to fight, and I wanted to avoid that.

How had that been working out for me so far?

So, yeah, I was making a combat Skill. Something protective, to back up my mediocre Toughness. I could do that by just investing Stats into Toughness though…

I shook my head. No, no, no, that wasn’t the way to go about it. The only Skill I had to go on was based off of something I’d done before, taking advantage of people’s natural tendency to ignore shit.

Well, technically I’d also seen a Skill that shot venom into the eyes of poor innocent goblins, but that was Garrett’s, and stars knew emulating him was a terrible idea.

So I’d probably be best off basing it on experience. Luckily for me, I’d had all kinds of, shall we say, interesting experiences. I wasn’t sure how having my soul attacked or being forcibly teleported actually converted into a useful Skill of my own. I could try to learn soul attacks or teleporting, but I had the feeling that anything that complicated would take longer to learn than a few minutes, or even hours, of meditation.

I took a deep breath and focused on the last time my life had been in mortal danger, when the owl had snatched me up into the sky. What had saved me then? My multiple layers of rags had absorbed most of the force before the talons could reach my flesh and redirected the crushing force behind those points enough for me to wriggle free.

I brushed one finger tip over the canvas wrapped around my arm and felt my soul quiver as the level began to activate.

“[Rag Armor].” I spoke the words experimentally and found they fit. Not perfectly, but well enough, like a shirt that hung past your kneecaps. I put my power behind them, watching the energies of my soul swirl ever inwards on themselves. It was the same transformation the level responsible for [Beggar’s Disregard] had gone through, yet it was utterly unique. The soul-stuff began to move with the current, following along with the spiraling motion of the soul energy and spinning itself from amorphous mass into a distinct thread, glowing and pristine.

And then it stopped. Hovering, unconnected, as more transforming spiritual matter spooled out behind it. A single thread was a strange form for a Skill to take, but the first twitches of an agonizing pain as the thread began to fray made it clear that I had yet to reach a stable conclusion.

I seized hold of the thread, but it simply continued to unwind within my mental grasp, no better than sand slipping between my fingers. The pain picked up in a steady tempo. It wasn’t yet as bad as the soul attack, or even my initial failure to properly use the elixir, but I had a dread certainty that it would be.

I stopped struggling, merely watching as my own soul degraded before me. How did you secure a thread?

You tied it. I snatched up the thread once more and twisted it over on itself, binding it together in a simple knot. My heart pounded in my chest as the fraying approached the knot, but the pressure exerted by its own length proved capable of holding it together even when my direct attention failed. The decay was stopped.

Well, I say stopped. It was still sort of trying to pull itself apart, but the thread itself was actually capable of exerting enough force to hold itself together, where willpower alone could not. It would going to break apart, but I’d bought myself some time to think.

I needed a more permanent solution. I needed to complete the Skill if I wanted to reach a truly stable state. Until then the half formed Skill would just keep working through all the soul stuff of this level, spinning it into useless thread and the more that happened, the more painful it grew.

Wonderful. Not only did unravelling the thread hurt, pulling up the pre-existing soul stuff to make it hurt just as bad. What kind of bullshit was my soul pulling on me?

I needed to secure the Skill to something, and the most stable thing I had, the only thing I had really, was the divine energy binding my soul together. I stretched out the thread and stuck it to the side of the level, and anchored it there.

I stretched the line out to the other side of the level, sticking it to the wall of the divine energy on the other side of the level. It still hurt, but I was beginning to get a feel for the pain. It was a hollow, empty sort of sensation. Its vacuum exerted a pressure on everything around it, it threatened the entire structure of my soul with collapse.

I needed to fill the void. I ran the thread of soul matter through the void again and again, stringing it about and around itself in a complex self-supporting spiderweb of shared connections. As the Skill continued to spin out more of my soul stuff into thread and destabilize the areas that had once relied on them for stability I refilled it with the network of bound threads, holding the level together despite the drastic changes it was undergoing.

I frantically kept up the pace as the more and more of my soul energy was transformed, and I steadily filled the void with a dense network of incredibly fine threads, each relying and supporting one another.

Just like a bolt of woven cloth. I drew back my view as the last piece slid into place, the final end of the thread coming into place at the very beginning, the place where the thread was still bound up in a knot on itself. I gently teased the knot open and bound the two ends both together and to the wall of divine energy, completing the circle and definitively anchoring the level in a stable balance once more.

I opened my real eyes, returning my perception to my body as I spoke the words to activate my new Skill for the first time. “[Rag Armor].”

Every stitch of fabric across my body quivered, like a lute string at the touch of a hand. I felt the power flowing out my soul to extend into the cloth, but how strong the effects might be I could only guess at.

I muttered the activation of [Soul Sense] and glanced at my soul. The energy flowing through my [Rag Armor] Skill were steadily depleting. Looks like [Beggar’s Disregard] wasn’t a fluke, most Skills couldn’t be maintained indefinitely, especially at first. Hopefully [Rag Armor] would follow suite and increase its staying power in time the way [Beggar’s Disregard] had.

For now I deactivated the Skill. Like a field, letting it lay fallow would increase the harvest.

I popped my neck and indulged myself with a nice little stretch. Small pleasures, but I deserved them. It wasn’t every day a goblin crafted a new Skill!

I cocked my head. Or was it. How long had it been since I’d gotten the Soul System anyway? It might not have been that long, but I’d been some manner of knocked out or underground for a good chunk of it, so it was difficult to tell. Shrugging, I set the matter aside. Days weren’t a very gobliny manner of time measurement anyway. I’d been forced to memorize the calendar, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

I certainly hadn’t been out for more than a few hours this time though, I wasn’t nearly sore enough for that. I wasn’t even all that hungry. I mean, I was hungry, but more peckish than starving.

I rifled through the pouches and threw back a few handfuls of nuts I found in a side pocket off of the main food bag. A nice snack, and the scent of nuts probably wouldn’t attract predators. Probably.

While I was going through the bags anyway I decided to nick one of Garrett’s spare jackets for a little bit of experimentation. I found a good one, nice canvas, and stabbed straight through it with a dagger. Ripping the blade out the side from there proved near-effortless, with the razor edge leaving a cut smoother than a human’s infuriatingly delicate skin.

“[Rag Armor].” I focused as I activated the Skill, pushing it into the jacket I held rather than any of the cut up garments I was wearing. I aimed at a different spot and stabbed the cloth again. Or rather I tried to. The blade wasn’t turned by the cloth, but the loose cloth did bend and brush over it rather than getting cut.

I held the cloth up to the tree trunk where it had no escape, then stabbed it again. This time the point slid through with no appreciable resistance, at least none that wasn’t due to hitting wood.

I yanked the dagger out and tried to cut through the reinforced material. The blade jerked across the splitting canvas in halting stops and starts, leaving a jagged trail behind it. I frowned and deactivated the skill. Not perfect, but perhaps it was good enough. It wasn’t as strong as steel plate, but it didn’t have to be. Just strong enough to save my hide.

I started walking again, armed and ready with my new panic button. Just because I couldn’t have it active constantly didn’t mean that [Rag Armor] wasn’t useful. It only took a breath to blurt out the Skill after all, even half a second’s warning would let me deal with a threat, whether by fight or flight, with the full benefits of my new Skill. It would be convenient once I could keep it running continually like my [Beggar’s Disregard], bu—

Why wasn’t I using [Beggar’s Disregard] right now? I put my back against the pyramid wall and muttered a quick “[Soul Sense].” under my breath. Sure enough, the level responsible for [Beggar’s Disregard] was dark and still.

Well, it was resplendent and beautiful in a way that defied not merely explanation, but comprehension by mortal minds. But it was resplendent and beautiful in a way that indicated it was not, in fact, on.

I stopped myself from audibly hissing in frustration only by biting down on what remained of my tongue. Stars above be damned, was I really that dumb? My first reaction to a little bit of stress was to very nearly reveal myself to anything that cared to listen?

I began beating myself about the head, a pathetic rain of fists that probably couldn’t even hurt a soft-skinned human child. Stupid, idiotic, fucking goblin! Perhaps my greatest Skill, and I just forgot about it!? What kind of utterly moronic fool would…

No.

I took a deep breath, centering myself. Would this particular instance of self-abuse put food in my belly, or aid my survival in any other way? No. In fact, in my little tantrum I hadn’t even bothered to correct the mistake that had sparked it.

“[Beggar’s Disregard].”

I took another deep breath, taking all the frustration and hate and shoving it deep down inside. All my failings, every minor error and major catastrophe that was my fault, bound away where no one could ever find it.

Not until it burst out again.

I started walking. Sometimes that was all you could do. The warm burn of muscles working was something to distract from all the bullshit running loose in my head at least.

I made good time through the cleared zone. It only extended a meter or so past the pyramid walls, but it was a meter or so without underbrush to hack through, so it still made a huge difference. Still, all good things must eventually come to an end, and so to did I eventually reach the point where hugging the pyramid would do me no more good, and I’d have to strike out through the jungle if I wanted to reach the pillar-tree.

So I took one last heading, measuring the angle I’d be moving compared to the only source of light down here, rechecked the buckle on my oversized bandolier, tucked in some of the more loose bits of my camouflage, and realized I was stalling.

Well, no matter. All that preparation shit was helpful, after all. But there still came a point where you just had to suck it up and dive in. I reminded myself that it was technically still my goal to get topside before I ran out of food.

And then I stepped forward, into the green.

Moving through the jungle wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it wasn’t what I would call ideal. My narrow frame was small enough that I could mostly weave in and around the dense flora rather than take the effort and risk of bulling through it, which would have been a nightmare, but that didn’t erase the effects of my injuries. I considered the option of just downing a second healing potion and being done with it only to cast the notion aside. I’d gone this far for the sake of saving on alchemical supplies, I’d be damned if I was about to quit because of some stupid trees.

I had a handful of close calls with unknown predators stalking through the jungle, but nothing capable of piercing my combined camouflage. I took stock of the various beasts as best I could, but most never got close enough for a good look. In this thick jungle it was neither sight nor sound that warned of danger, but silence.

The constant cacophony of screeching birds and howling monkeys was the natural state of this place and if any of the prey animals actually got scared enough to finally shut the fuck up you had better follow suit, assuming you wanted to live. Whenever the clamor died down I would simply crouch down in the underbrush and wait until the brief quiet passed and some semblance of safety returned.

In between hiding I would make some progress, moving directly away from the light behind me. The canopy made telling the light’s direction a tad difficult, but I certainly couldn’t see far enough to aim for the pillar-tree directly, so every so often I would check behind me and ensure I was still walking directly away from the brightest spot.

It might seem paranoid to double check your heading when all you had to do was walk in a straight line, but I’d long since learned not to trust the surface world. It lacked the mercy of the tunnels, where one path lead to one destination. In the ever growing expanse of the surface you could wander off in the wrong direction entirely and never know it until you starved to death.

Or were eaten. Or murdered. Starvation really wasn’t the greatest threat around down here, but it wasn’t like getting lost would help my odds against ravenous monsters either.

I distracted myself by building up my camouflage as I moved. There were only so many plants you could add to yourself without getting caught on something and falling over, but that didn’t mean there weren’t improvements to be made. I started with dirt, just a light layer of mud stains over the top of my clothing. It was nice to have an appropriate level of grime again. Garrett’s fashion sense hadn’t been into garish colors, so my scavenged cloth had had least been muted even before staining, but it was a far cry from the unmistakable texture of true dirt.

Unfortunately I ran into the limits of camouflage based entertainment not long after that. I’d seen some truly impressive setups, but any more layers and I just might have to start hacking through this jungle rather than slipping between vines and branches. Needless to say, that was unacceptable. Not so much that I’d die before doing it, but if I did I’d probably die soon after, which was hardly better.

Eventually I grew tired. I’d call it after a day, but who the fuck knew done here? I simply decided that it was night time and started looking for a place to hole up. The lack of a thick loam layer to the soil frustrated me, as that would be nice and easy to pile over myself, but one made good with what one got. I dug out a roughly goblin sized circle in the forest floor with the broadest bladed of Garrett’s knives and curled up inside. A swing of an arm was enough to drape a dirty cloak over me and I drifted off to sleep safe and secure as I’d ever been, just another lump on the jungle ground.