Lying there without access to his status pages, Daniel found himself getting struck by that expression. His “status pages.” It felt weird using the term. Who would have imagined something this crazy could have occurred?

Crazy—that word did not describe it. The blood, the gore, the killing, his near death. It all hit him. He wanted to embrace the wave, to break down, submit to the emotions that had been on the verge of forcing their way out since he had discovered Ivey under his bed. That had been this morning. Less than a day ago and so much had happened. He forced his eyes open. He would not indulge; he would not give into despair. There was a problem to solve, and he was going to bloody crack it. What exactly did he need to be doing?

Sleep? The thought ran through his head, but the moment he considered it, he knew it was hours away at best. His mind was too active. Too much had happened, and his thoughts were spinning in a thousand different directions. What he really needed to do was to work out how to save everyone.

Hero complex much? The errant thought surprised him a little. He was not taking the world on. All he wanted to do was to keep the kids safe! That was it. He owed them because their father died because of his mistake.

How to save them? Not everyone, just them, maybe Trudy, as they would be upset to lose their mum, and he would definitely save Ivey. Tamara was nice as well. He laughed inside as he was back to almost everyone.

But he was distracting himself. His aim meant he needed to grow stronger. To truly protect them, he either had to vanquish all the nearby monsters or act as an escort as they retreated to some mythical safe haven. A place that might not even exist and probably did not, after all. If it was advertised, then he was sure Ivey would have been raising it with him.

Lying there, having just built cocoons to save the lives of the nine of them, Daniel understood how mammoth that simple ambition to save the kids might actually end up being. The world was brutal. One floor, nine confirmed survivors and they had kept skirting death. It was not how he wanted this to go. If he continued risking his life in every skirmish, then a zombie was eventually going to take it. There had to be a better way. This existing on the edge of obliteration bullshit was a crazy method to guarantee the kids’ survival because if he died, then so would they.

His mind played out the fights.

Better traps were required, and superior fallback positions. With time, he could build that, but what he really lacked was intelligence. The sort of stuff surveillance equipment could once have generated. If he had known that big brute was coming out, then he could have had a weapon prepared to kill it. Ivey thought they would get smarter, and he trusted her, which meant that they needed to adapt and improve even quicker than the monsters.

Lying on him, she was sort of snoring. That made him smile, not that he would ever tell that to her face. Girls did not snore. It was a simple fact. What he was hearing was just deep breathing.

Focus! Daniel thought furiously to himself. He might not be able to sleep, but there was stuff he could do. With his hand covered in blankets to hide the light, he touched the cocoon and let his mind delve into the wood. He had created this shell, so it was still alive and was easy for him to send his senses through. Right near the floor, magic flowed into a section and in a moment, the growth consistent with a week of sun and rain occurred and an explorative tendril grew out of the cocoon.

Under his direction, it ran along the wall. It climbed over to the second bed in the room and connected to the cocoon that Jayden and Tamara slept in. That secondary structure appeared in his awareness. Magic kept flowing, never enough to deplete his reserves, but the tendrils spread anyway, so he did not lose track of time as he did when he infused his consciousness into the wood. He kept his eyes open. At first it was disconcerting, the overlay of top of the shell he had created highlighted by the only partially suppressed glow of his magic and the impressions from the objects that he was monitoring, but his brain adjusted quickly.

Three minutes later, he was in touch with all four cocoons and both doors. It was not much and the tendrils would not conduct his magic very well, but at least he would know instantly if anything went wrong. Thinking of the tendrils as a pipe to conduct magic was interesting and something to explore further. But he would consider it later. It did not really matter now. He had real time information via what he had built and, in a pinch, the capacity to remotely alter everything he was in contact with.

That was great.

His mind kept focusing on the need for intelligence. There had to be a way to understand the threats that they were going to face. Flexing his consciousness further via the door, he tried to sense what he could about what was in the corridor. He knew he could feel things happening to the wood and sort of what was on the surface, but could he make it sensitive enough to use?

There was a vision of sorts, and it took Daniel a moment to interpret the weird information. Vibrations, both sound and the tremors transmitted via solid objects such as the floor were available. It was surprising just how much he could perceive with the strange sense. There was a light tread in the corridor. He tensed, expecting the worst, but it kept going. With a tiny fraction of his mind left to focus on the space beyond their doors, Daniel considered where he was at. It was a little distracting, as he continued to flick his attention back to the door to glimpse more information about the potential threat. There was something out there, and he wanted to understand what it was.

This was what he had been searching for. A method to tell what was out there. It would need to be developed further, but with enough time, he could get these tendrils everywhere and who knew what else he could do. Maybe he could remotely create and trigger traps, destroy everything in this building without leaving this room. But he did not have unlimited time. It was easy enough to imagine what was happening on other floors. For one, it would take him half the night just to spread them over his current floor. That meant at best he could do two floors a day, and he doubted that the other survivors scattered through the hotel would survive that long unless they had a similar utility ability to his own . . . and from what Ivey had said, that was unlikely.

The other drawback was that even stupid animals might notice the tendrils when he sent them around. He was terrified of accidentally alerting an enemy to their presence and inadvertently bringing their doom down upon them.

What was his best option?

Take the risk. Expansion was the answer. It was always the answer. Expand to get intelligence, expand to get resources, expand to save people. Life was a risk. He might poke the metaphorical yeti, so to speak, but if he went fast but carefully, the potential rewards exceeded the risks. Saving humans was not a zero-sum game, Tamara showed that. More survivors meant a greater capacity to meet future threats.

Their floor was done and there was no time like the present to break into the lower floors. Quietly out of the bottom of his bed, a root extended. Forget about laying defences over his level. All the major threats would have broken out before now. The remaining rooms could be safely searched using the playpen method, with adjustments to avoid another Anthony situation. Finding out what they faced below them was more important.

The carpet shredded instantly, but then he hit the hard floor underneath. It was heavy concrete. Daniel’s brain worked overtime in absolute silence as he tried different combinations to breach the material. It was not as simple, which was what he had expected. After all, wood was not the hardest of resources. Then he remembered the concrete slabs near the shearer’s house and how whenever he went down there, he was amazed by how nature had broken up that manmade construction and that in a few years’ time, it would complete the job. Small seeds getting into cracks and then growing and making them larger and larger, till the slabs themselves split in two.

That was what he needed to go for. Find the weaknesses in the floor below. Daniel began sending tiny roots into those miniature gaps and then expanded the roots till the material around cracked. Rinse and repeat, exploiting the new flaws the process created, keep going, shift out the dust generated. Under his conscious direction, he wore away at the concrete under the bed, forming a new—albeit—shallow hole.

It was extraordinarily slow progress. After ten minutes and having only penetrated a centimetre, his attention turned to other matters. He did not know how thick the floor would end up, but by making a few changes, his brain kept the “drill” going while he switched his consideration to other things. The growth power came from his core; that was his alone, but there was also the interface components that Ivey had shoved into him to save his life and her own because Daniel knew precisely what would have happened if Ivey had been trapped in the room with him once he had mutated into one of mindless zombies.

The drill beneath him kept going as he considered what the parts of the interface could do. What power could they grant him? While working, he wondered exactly what Ivey had given up in order to give him that broken interface. He would have to ask. Hopefully, it was not too much, but as far as he was concerned, even though he could not direct his skill, she had saved him by pushing the bits she had into his mouth. First, they let him keep his sanity, but they also gave him an attribute point per level and those three skills.

Everyone else got to choose their path, but no choice was better than dying. Plus, he had the option to consume the zombie cores, and that might be superior in the long run. From those cores, he could now move like Neo in The Matrix. There was also the enhanced strength there that he might or might not already been using, and of course, there was his druidic magic. Not to mention what other powers the zombies could end up granting him. All in all, it was exciting.

His focus was on survival, so he could not use his power in how he had originally envisaged it during those fever dreams. Back then, it had not been a weapon; it had been for crafting. Growing fields of plants and potentially constructing a house that others could marvel at. The abilities he possessed exceeded what he had wanted. His capacity dwarfed his flights of fancy pre-event. He could build a home that would exceed anything he had ever imagined when reading about wood elves and their soaring tree houses. In a day, he knew he could construct a larger dwelling than a typical house.

That power.

On the bed, he frowned. There was so much potential for beauty in what he could do and instead, he was fighting for his survival.

Fair, not fair—it was all a moot point.

He had his mutated human skills and the free stuff from Ivey’s meddling. And free stuff was always a bonus; plus, the whole not being turned into a bloodthirsty zombie was nice. His life was a gift and he would pay it back ten times over by the time that was through. He promised himself that.

From the broken interface so far, he had only benefited from the attribute allocation. His strength and speed. What about the three skills from his beast whisperer class? They had seemed pretty simple. At a very basic level, it was: find animal, tame the creature, then learn stuff from it.

The real question was how could he use the knowledge, but even as he thought about Animal Sense, he understood how the process was supposed to work. It was just a matter of triggering the interface.

Daniel used the spell.

He could immediately sense the humans nearby and a rat in the ceiling above eating some pre-event insect remains that had not survived the transition because of a lack of real estate when its body grew. There was also the feel of distant movement, which was the zombie right at the edge of his range, till it vanished as it kept moving on its mindless looping.

Daniel’s eyes snapped open. He involuntarily grabbed his skull where under the skin, it felt like it was burning. Ivey startled at his abrupt movement, a small sound escaping her lips. He hugged her, pulling her in tight so she would feel protected and would not wake up screaming.

“It is all okay. Sleep,” he whispered as the heat started fading away.

Daniel stroked her hair, trying to comfort her. She needed her sleep; she had been awake before him, terrified she was going to be torn apart when he woke up. In many ways, her day had been worse than his. After all, he had been busy and distracting himself the whole time while she had been forced to wait and dwell on her thoughts.

The burning sensation finally faded, and it was just like what he had felt when scanning to determine the innate senses, so he was not that worried. However, that was not what was supposed to happen when he used the Animal Sense skill.

He had deliberately ignored it, but he noted down the way the innate scan worked had changed between the two uses. The first had been more painful but shorter, and the second one, while more comfortable, had taken considerably longer.

Sort of like a computer overheating when you asked it to do too much.

It was an effect of his broken interface. The lack of mass or the number of pieces was causing the problem he was experiencing. Because of Ivey sharing her interface, he lacked the number of grains of everyone else and so his spells failed as the interface could not manage the calculations that were needed to support the “magic.” The fragments he had were overcooking, so to speak, and heating too much.

From the spell knowledge, the level one Animal Sense spell was supposed to have a range of up to a hundred meters, at least in the forest. His spell had barely extended for ten meters. The walls in the way should definitely have reduced the distance, but not by as much as he had.

It had been a failure. It was that simple. Plus, with fourteen levels, he doubted Animal Sense was still at level one, even if he could not check explicitly. Skills, according to what he had been gathered, updated themselves regularly as people levelled, or at least that is what Anthony had claimed regarding his sword ability.

Daniel quickly suppressed the wave of impotent grief that went with thinking about the older man. He did not have time for grief.

The Animal Sense spell was broken like his interface.

Were the others? He knew the answer, but not gathering the facts was never a sensible choice.

Entangled animal bonding. The moment he thought about the spell, he found memories floating in his brain where a striking older woman had taught him about it. He had never seen that woman before, but sure enough, she was there in his memories. Like Ivey had explained, the ability was like the druid spell, but it was not identical. It was synergised to be used in conjunction with Animal Sense.

Its strength was in the partnership side of the spell. By achieving mutual buy-in, the connection could be deeper faster. The nameless woman had even shown him the technique by having him practice on a series of rocks that, from the spell perspective, behaved similarly to an animal. Teaching how to negotiate a contract. In the wild, the beast whisperer would follow the creature that he wanted to bond for days using low-level entanglement multiple times before committing in order to get the most out of the bond. Each attempt would align the beast whisperer’s needs and desires to the target and bring them together. Even minor changes in disposition of the target towards the whisperer resulted in a significant strengthening of the union.

According to these recollections, the class was powerful, allowing the entanglement of animals up to twenty levels higher than the whisperer, and those memories were not talking about a level fourteen, either. These were users in the high thirties taming level sixty animals, and a level sixty monster could probably clear the entire hotel in a day they were that strong.

While the skill was technically there, it was also clearly broken. Daniel knew instinctively it would be dangerous to even attempt to use unless he held the animal in his hands.

It was an excellent class, but the abilities did not function. At least the bonus attributes had been free. He should dwell on the positive and not get overwhelmed by the negatives. There was going to be enough of that out there. Human nature being what it was and all.

Daniel checked the drill.

It had penetrated three centimetres. He watched the drills automatically progress, trying to see if there was anything obvious he could do to improve efficiency.

There was not.

The existing method of exploiting the small holes in the concrete was the best he could think of.

Wondering what to do, he sent out a pulse of energy to watch the doors and cocoons, double checking that nothing had gone wrong. No changes. In some ways, the pulse demonstrated the ineffectiveness of his existing network of awareness. That rat above them was invisible, and it would remain that way unless it moved and created vibrations that were large enough to be sensed by the cocoons below it. He doubted his wood vision—for lack of a better description—would pick it up unless it literally ran across the wood he controlled. It was not sufficiently sensitive to notice something that light at a distance.

Then his focus switched back to his beast whisperer class. The skill was so good, but he needed to get it working. But when he used the power, it failed because of how the fragments of the interface heated.

Thinking through the Animal Sense in more detail, Daniel started it up just enough so that he could feel Ivey with the spell and no one else. As it worked, he traced the flows of energy.

After a minute of using it at this absolutely lowest level, his brain was warming up too much, so he dropped the ability. A distant roar reached him from outside. Something huge challenging something just as large. He shivered. Ivey clung to him tighter. Daniel bit his lips he could not afford to be distracted he needed to master his class skills.

Once more his examination went internal. From the hot spots, there were six fragments of Ivey’s interface in him and now he knew what he was looking for, he could sense them within him. It was a new ability that allowed it, some sort of body sensing technique that let him trace both his physical state and energy flow. Six pieces. He wondered how many she had.

With his hand still over her shoulders, he tried to use his new technique to count inside Ivey’s body, but it felt like pushing on a steel wall. Ivey stirred, and he ceased all efforts wondering if it was just random sleep movement or if his efforts had disturbed her.

The roar outside descended into squealing, as something fought for its life. It was not loud, but then it was coming from a long away. Something deadly eating a different man killer. That reminded him of his situation and almost instinctively, he used his growth ability to check on the doors worried that the zombie was hanging around. It was not.

However, that expansion of energy had been effortless and nothing like what happened when he used the interface.

What did it look like?

Curiosity, as they say, killed the cat, but to survive, he needed to take risks and this felt safer than fighting a zombie.

Once more, he expanded his senses while focusing inwards. It let him sense what was happening inside him. The alien pieces of the interface were now visible, and then he saw his own core. It, like in the feral mutated humans, was set next to the heart in the protected area of his chest.

It was massive. Larger than even the brute’s core, and he was surprised that he could not feel it when he breathed and moved. The shape differed as well from the ones he had cut out. Those, while never perfectly spherical, had been like river rocks, somewhere between a cube and a sphere. His, however, was flat and spread out, though in the centre it was thick.

He pushed on the centre of his chest to see if he could physically feel it, but the ribcage protected it nicely. It hugged his sternum and rib bones, presumably both protecting and reinforcing them, and was wider than his hands. If power was correlated to volume, then his potential felt limitless. That solid blob of matter was so large Daniel imagined it had to be squishing his internal organs, but they were not causing discomfort.

Daniel could imagine what doctors would have said if they had seen this on a scan just yesterday. He would have been dragged into surgery; of that, he had no doubt.

The previous world no longer mattered. It was clearly past history and most of the lessons learnt from it were wrong. Everyone’s instincts were off. The only thing that was relevant was now and surviving the next hour, the next day, and if he wanted to stargaze, then the coming month. The core was there and there was no reason he could not eventually use it to mimic the interface powers. Ivey might have a hundred fragments, but his core would have more volume. There was no comparison. He had way more raw potential.

If he could get his core to do the work instead of the interface, then his Animal Sense problems would be circumvented.

The question was how?