I opened my eyes and stared at the stone ceiling above me for a few fleeting moments before I forced myself to sit up and look around. I was back in the same room after my cosmic road trip. Just a moment ago, I had a text box saying I had died from an infection.

I felt around the top part of my right foot and found that it was like It had never been impaled. Looking down at my arm and touching my back showed the same results. What had the text box meant? How could I have died, If I’m sitting here?”

It took me a moment to realize I was in the same shotty clothing I had been in yesterday but without the tears and rips. A ‘click’ removed me from my pondering, and I hopped off the table and went to look at the counter of runes at the head of the table. I watched as it slowly clicked down, then sprang back up to the default runes.

Did I die and somehow get resurrected back on this altar? Was this counter showing me how many lives they had? My mind was breaking. I staggered backward, and when my back hit the wall, my legs gave out as if my strings had been cut, and I fell onto my ass. I sat there and stared at the metallic pipes and colorful gems below the altar’s stone slab.

After god knows how long, I stood up and took a lap around the room to see if I missed anything the last time I was here. Not seeing anything of interest, I went over to the door and opened it. Without letting go, I stuck my head out and looked both ways, same damn stone halls with the mysterious blue fireballs lighting the way.

Backing out of the door, I let it close and kept my eye on it. It remained a part of the wall. I opened it back up and looked inside to see the same stone slab altar and closed it back up. Still there. As I heard a ‘clank’ in the distance, I looked towards the offending sound. Not seeing the skeleton yet, I looked back to the now stone brick wall.

“That is just the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” I whispered to myself.

I began to wander the halls trying to avoid the genuine undead problems stalking the area. I couldn’t find the chairs I had laid out but did find the prison cells pretty quickly. It took me quite some time after that to find one of the barracks. Using one of the smaller pillowcases, I removed some skins and bags of jerky from the room's storage. I was happy to find this barracks also had one of the leather maps on its wall. Before I left, I broke one of the chairs, grabbing the two legs with the longest reach.

I wandered the halls for what seemed like days. I even walked straight past sixteen halls. I’m pretty sure I had somehow walked in a circle, but anything I left on the ground to mark my start seemed to vanish. Maybe something was cleaning up behind me?

After I slept in one of the random barracks for a second time, I came across an odd room. It looked like any of the other barracks I came across but had two mirrors on one wall. In the mirror on the left, I could see my reflection. I looked almost exactly like I had before I stepped into the shower back on the F.N. Xistrith so long ago. My hair was down to my shoulders and was the color of freshly fallen snow. My skin was its usual darker blueish-white. The same color I vaguely remembered my mother having. The changes to my body I noticed right away were my eyes and ears.

My eyes seemed to glow the most radiant lavender I had ever seen. The glowing was strange, but the fact my eyes had been grey was what shocked me the most. Then there were my ears which seemed to have gotten pointier and more prolonged, almost like the ears of a Drow, only without the dark coloring.

However, what made this room an oddity was the second mirror in the room. While the left one showed my reflection, the right one did not. It showed a dark room with a few visible doors. It was almost like the mirror was a doorway into another room, and the glass on the mirror was missing. I tossed one of the broken chair legs at the mirror to test a hypothesis that came to mind.

The moment the wooden leg hit the mirror, a ripple ran out from the point of contact and went out to the edges of the mirror, like it had been a small rock tossed into a pond. The moment the ripples stopped, I could see the chair’s leg lying on the floor of the other room. My hypothesis was correct, and this was some type of portal or wormhole from one location to another.

Figuring the worst that could happen was I’d end up back in the altar room, I jumped through the mirror. I had a tiny glimpse of what I would have said was the same rainbow tunnel I had traveled within to this universe, and then the next moment, I was falling flat on my face.

Picking myself up, I looked around the circular room. Behind me, I could see four mirrors looking into four different barracks. Around the rest of the room were doors and more doors. Above each door were two runes. After studying them for a while, I believe they represented some type of grid system. I also noted the same style of runes above the mirrors.

Getting up, I made my way over to the first door to the right of the mirrors and opened it. I immediately slammed it shut as I found myself staring at three skeletons in a tiny room. The next door, I found myself looking at the bottom of a dark shaft. The next couple of entries were the same, and I began to wonder if this was how they cleaned out the traps I had fallen into. After a few more scares with skeletons, I came to a brighter shaft and found to my horror, my dead body, which was already decayed, nothing but my pants and bones.

Vomiting my breakfast of juice and dried meat, I looked over my body once again and could see the infection in my foot had turned my leg’s bones into a darker shade than the rest. Not wanting to stick around, I grabbed the silken pillowcase and sword from behind my corpse and closed the door. A pungent smell came from the bag, and I soon found the jerky and juice had grown moldy. I tossed the bags and skins into the corner of the room.

Searching the reminder of the doors, I found little else but skeletons and the bones of the long dead. I stepped through one of the mirrors, this time managing to keep myself from face planting again. Barricading the door, I sat in one of the beds and began to go through the books I had in the silken pillowcase. After skimming through them, I looked over at the brown book with the white gem embedded into its cover.

Knowing what would happen, I laid down and opened the book again. Immediately, I was bombarded with images, runes, and symbols that seemed to leap off the pages and enter my mind. Before I could even think about closing the book to stop the pain, the sensory overload stopped, and the book slammed shut on its own before falling onto the bed. A moment later, the ever silent box of text flashed before my eyes.

[ System Notification ]

Cartographer Trait Learned

I suddenly knew I had a personal map. I knew if I thought about the map, it would display. With a curious mental push of will, an almost see-through-orange map appeared hovering before me, showing all of the halls I had been wandering around for what seemed like forever. I was happy to see a green dot that I hoped meant “You are here.” I got up from the bed and found I could walk around the floating map as if it lay on a table.

Removing the leather map, I could see where I was on it now, and I guessed my map only showed the locations of where I had been so far. I could see the straight hallway I walked through probably a few times. If the leather map was correct, there were over two hundred and fifty-six blocks. I had traveled between maybe a third of them according to my map.

I tried to push the images of the leather map onto my magic one, but no matter what I tried to command, it wouldn’t change anything. What good was my map if I had to travel everywhere before it showed up? It wouldn’t be a significant advantage if I couldn’t import others’ knowledge. Frustrated, I slammed the rolled-up leather map onto the projection, and it vanished into a poof of smoke and ash.

Startled, I watched as the rest of the hallways and rooms began to be drawn onto the magic map in shades of grey, where the locations I had been, stayed in their shades of orange. Then the symbols started to populate, and then finally, a legend materialized on the right side of the map!

Looking over the symbol provided the answer to what each meant. The jail cells were holding rooms. The upside-down outline of a head were traps, with the right side up said, Spawn. The barracks were called Guard Stations. Everything else was your standard rooms and facilities.

But what really caught my attention was the symbol saying Outer Courtyard. I planned to head there after I grabbed some sleep to see if it was the exit or not. I picked the brown Cartographer book back up and tried to open it but found it locked shut. Shrugging at the craziness of a book giving me what I figured was a trait or an ability and closing its cover to me. I tossed it back into the sack. I then began depositing the larger books until I caught a rune I understood on one of them.

The book’s cover had a handful of runes, but I could clearly understand one rune translated to a word that meant locations. Flipping through the book again, I found it was the one with plants drawn inside. Some of the runes were now translating to words for me. Most of them seem to be the name of a place or type of environment. Still, there wasn’t enough translated for me to understand what was written, so I closed the book and placed it in the sack with the others. I would figure that out later.

Waking up for the first time without the urgency of a life-threatening event, I found myself in a somewhat good mood. Grabbing my bronze sword and refilling my pillowcase with food and water, I headed out into the hallway and towards the courtyard symbol. It didn’t take long to run into a few skeletons. Taking on one at a time was becoming simple. Each would dissolve into one of those tiny white gems, and I even picked up another torn piece of paper.

When I arrived at the door to the courtyard, I was surprised to find the door leading out into a lifeless dirt-covered valley. Turning around, I found myself outside a circular small stone brick tower that had seen better days. Checking my surroundings, I could see the remains of dead trees and the bones of what looked like birds. Walking around the tower, I found another carcass of some animal I had never seen or heard of before. The bones looked like a rodent of sorts but were much larger than they should have been.

“What in the hell would this thing eat?” I asked no one in particular.

Seeing a tall hill nearby, I began to walk towards and up it. I immediately caught the scents of salty air, and when I crested the top of the hill, I could see nothing but water in every direction. I would have to check the other side, but it looked like I was stranded on a damn island. I watched the ocean crash into the rocks in the distance for a few moments before heading off to the other side of what I really hoped wasn’t an island.