There was no part of me that could feel sick, but my mind was doing plenty fine without organs or a brain.

Vomit.

I had to vomit.

Somewhere, anywhere, I had to get the queasiness in my mind out.

Unfortunately, knowledge is much harder to expel than spoiled food.

To dispel these feelings of dread, I had to counter them with logic and faith.

If I established the ground to stand on, then there was nothing I couldn’t conquer. With my feet planted firmly on the earth, only the heavens could stand above me.

Yes, that was the way. If I knew the biggest and smallest challenges ahead, then the rest would fall into place. My capability for reason was always going to be my greatest weapon, so before I could deal with my problems, I needed to make sure that my judgement was still intact.

I wanted to break down and hide my head once more after seeing those faces, but the logical part of my mind didn’t allow that. The longer I waited, the more my enemies would grow. The longer I pitied myself, the harder things would get.

All I could do was embrace what I had and move forward accordingly. Even if this windborne song came that damned woman, accepting it in full was for the sake of my freedom and continued survival.

Combined with my eternal whistling melody, this rhetoric calmed my nerves.

It was only a tiger that knew advanced Ether manipulation guarding a door to this realm’s heart, and unspeakable cannibalistic abominations who sensed me through walls. What was there really to be afraid of?

Hm. A little fear may be acceptable in extraordinary circumstances like these. Plus, the primordial fear of death by exsanguination had pushed me to find a new innovation. In a way, I was still growing, even as I was crying and panicking. How’s that for grasping at silver linings?

As much as I wanted to turn a blind eye and hope things would work out, I had run my supply of blessings dry. If I truly made an effort to know my enemy, then there would be nothing to fear.

The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown. The more I learn, the less I have to fear. If I could quickly evaluate an opponent, assuming mastery of self, knowing when and how to attack would be as simple as opening my eyes. Battles, conflicts, and duels would be a matter of timing.

Well, complete mastery of self was a tall order — it could wait until I was in better shape.

Now that I was calm, I could look around and investigate what I formerly couldn’t.

I poked at some of the buttons on the beacon, but they didn’t do anything. It was probably saving power, so I decided to leave it be. I could pry at Samson’s final secrets when I was free of this damned place.

Seriously, I had a breakdown at a date. Not at anything that came before me, or the grave robbing I was currently committing, but a complete freak out at asking a corpse for the time. What kind of idiot would do that?

Haha. Ha.

I really needed to get better control over my emotions. Let’s put that on the to-do list, alongside busting out of here.

After all these years, all that was left of Samson were some glass vials, a pair of binoculars, a metal flashlight (that, somehow, was still functional), and his shirt. After digging a bit more, I got what I really wanted — that gun-like instrument I once glimpsed.

Unfortunately, the years had been even less kind to his equipment than there were to me.

His gun, if you could still call it one, had a bad fungal infection. With no fingers for fine movements, scraping the thing clean with Tintin’s edge was the best I could do. As for actually operating the thing, the internals were completely clogged with Ether absorbing shrooms that I had no way of cleaning out and the frame was almost entirely gone.

I also had a slight feeling that Al Paradies Manufacturing wouldn’t be available for warranty evaluation.

Despite being non-functional, I got a general idea of how it worked. It was a weapon that accepted Ether from the user’s palm and channeled it upwards into the barrel, where it flowed through three metallic cylinders and was probably ejected out the business end.

Tech that utilized Ether was around way back when, huh? Interesting.

It seemed to be made out of the same stuff as the doors that locked me in here, but I brought down Galahad to see how tough it was.

Yep. Damn thing was near indestructible, just like the doors.

After realizing I couldn’t really use anything here, I slid over to the pod Samson crash landed in. I hoped to see a beautiful tunnel that would lead me straight to the surface, but all I got was a solid wall of glowing mushrooms.

I poked my head inside. After witnessing the wires dangling from the roof, the burnt everything, the cracked screens, and the straight hole which corresponded with the wound I first saw in Samson, I decided it was better to leave. I had a better chance with retrofitting a simple weapon than an entire teleporting escape pod that was busted beyond repair.

Cursing my lack of thumbs and fingers once more, I attempted to puzzle out a way to utilize the technology within.

There were circuits inside, but how could I use them? They were engraved into unknown metal, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t break apart the gun to get to them. Simply replicating the circuits with Ether in thin air did nothing — I assumed the technology required the active flow of Ether to activate.

I sat there, staring at the wall of Ether rocks around me, wondering what to do.

Then, with growing dread, I realized there was something I could do.

During my tiger escapades, I managed to sever part of myself via a combination of blunt force and willpower. Recalling the memory, I saw that my core retained the shape that I had concentrated on, even when it wasn’t attached.

Experimentally, I pressed myself against a stalagmite and forced the boundaries of my Ether limit beyond the scope of my body, infusing a small section with plant-like roots.

So my core could contain as much Ether as it wanted, but the moment I allowed anything other than my vessel to store Ether, it took physical form.

Because of this, my plan was possible. I didn’t want to do it, but it was definitely possible.

Before I went ahead and executed the terrible plan I had concocted on a whim, I moved to the Ether clumps around. Improvising the world’s worst pickaxe, consisting of a Galahad-Gun-Tintin sandwich.

The whole ensemble collapsed after the strike, a single firm knock with the gun was enough to break off a huge chunk of Etherite.

Etherite. That was a good name, actually. Beats having to keep calling them Ether rocks over and over.

I hobbled over, attempting to stretch my roots into the crystal. As it turns out, Etherite had an extraordinarily rigid structure — one would have to grind it to dust, or at least, very tiny pebbles to properly consume the Ether within. I also tried stretching my roots into Galahad, but that didn’t work either.

Until I acquired an industrial hydraulic press, Etherite was useless to me. I couldn’t rewrite the structure of this particular mineral.

There goes my last hope.

Humans are resourceful creatures that could do the best with the resources allocated to them. That’s why I had to use the only method I had of recreating the cylinders within that gun, because I had no other choice.

It would only hurt a little, I told myself.

For just a moment of pain, you’d gain so much more.

You’ve already done much worse to survive, right? So this should be a walk in the park. A cakewalk!

These were the comforting lies I told myself as I marched up to a stalactite and began to replicate the first cylinder with a section of my limiter. Above me, I held the world’s worst gun-rock pickaxe.

I could recall the pattern perfectly. The most important was the small gate formed at the end of the cylinder, the rest was meant to guide the Ether into it. That’s all I had to replicate.

It was going to be like getting a vaccine, or getting the tip of your pinky chopped off. It wouldn’t hurt that much, I kept telling myself.

A necessary, very tiny amputation, for the sake of survival and innovation. Building my resolve, I held out the very tip of my pinky—

—My arm.

It wasn’t a painless, quick amputation.

Though I physically only chipped off a corner, I saw everything that really happened.

Red.

Everything beyond the point of my imaginary shoulder was reduced to a red smear.

Crushing. Piercing. Stabbing. Slicing. Bleeding. In a few seconds, I experienced every possible type of pain.

I dropped everything to the ground and screamed.

This wasn’t ordinary pain. Without the kind cushion of survival to rely upon, I had to face the fact that I was forcibly severing part of my very existence.

It hurt.

The fool lay on the ground, writhing and wailing, now forced to face the consequences of their actions.

It hurt.

Wallowing in a growing puddle of urine and blood, the fool succumbed to the white-hot pain that tore through their mind.

It—hurt—

I lay on the ground, riding out the slow burn till it reached a dull throb. When the dull throb eventually faded, I was filled with a sensation of emptiness, like part of me was missing.

Hold on, of course it felt like that. Don’t be stupid, me, you cut your core up. You’re playing arts and crafts with your existence. You bumbling buffoon, you shoved your hand into a guillotine and wondered what would happen when you dropped the blade. What did you expect?

Hey, wait a second. Shouldn’t one of the benefits of being inanimate be complete immunity to pain like this? Why did I have to see all my suffering compressed into a human body?

Stop asking rhetorical questions nobody will answer, I told myself.

Shaking my head clear of my self-arguments, I got up and looked at my handiwork.

My Ether was already leaking out of the section, but my roots were taking physical form. What was left behind was a thin, crystalline network of conductive lines in the exact pattern that I had imitated.

With this method, I managed to form the first gate.

Dejectedly, I looked back at the stalagmite. There was plenty of untouched rock for me to keep doing this, and I doubted the first gate alone would do anything useful.

It occurred to me now that I was no better than a maniac who cut off their arm to form a sword, though in my case, I was cutting off my arm to just form a fragment of a weapon that may or may not work.

But now that I was here, I had to keep going. I wasn’t going to let all this be for nothing.

Taking a deep mental breath, I prepared myself.

Two more to go.

I took three days off to recover from the mental strain of that stunt. As it turns out, chopping up your soul is a pain that you can never get used to.

The moment I had the will to move again, I popped out of my hidey-hole with my new toys in tow.

The cost of these toys took another chunk out of my Ether limiter, but I had enough left over to perform my easy harvest technique. I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover from the mental damage, but hey, add that trauma to the pile. I was well on my way to turning my heart into a pile of scar tissue, so why not see how bad it could get?

If presented with a new toy, the only reasonable move is to play with it. This was the path of the true scientific spirit!

The first gate accelerated any Ether that passed through, creating a beam of sorts.

The second gate applied spin to the beam, like the rifling of a proper gun.

The third gate, in a miraculous defiance of anything close to science, caused Ether to turn into gas and accelerate forth at blinding speeds. On the gun itself, this would be the very tip of the barrel — where the projectile comes from.

The first burst I successfully lined up melted a basketball-sized hole in the cavern wall.

Oh man. Oh man, oh man, oh man.

I didn’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. All of a sudden, all my pain and suffering seemed entirely justified.

I couldn’t contain myself any longer — I cackled in glee, hugging the gates I had blatantly plagiarized.

In my hands was the receiver of an Ether-powered plasma pistol.

Take that, proprietary technology. Licensing agreements? Patents? Copyright laws? Like I cared about any of that. What were they going to do, sue me? Try taking a rock to court, and you’ll get laughed right out.

Realistically speaking, it was going to be near impossible to line up a perfect shot with all three gates aligned. My wind was nowhere near strong enough to pick these roughly hewn gate stones up, and they were carved into simple rocks — they’d break if I accidentally flung them.

But that was the same as any real weapon. Can’t expect a bow to put up with the same neglect as a sword, nor a crossbow to be as resilient as a shield. Instead of tinkering or trying to think my way through this problem, I’d have to adapt. I could indulge my desires to engineer when I actually had a workstation and arms; right now, I needed to utilize what I had.

Hard work was what I needed, as well as a side of hard work, hard work, and hard work. Those were the four ingredients I required to break free from this place.

And before I forgot, I remembered to give Samson a small bow. I was sure I’d figure out what his business was when I got his beacon to the surface, but I had to thank him once more for the offering. I wasn’t sure if I could live up to a fancy-sounding name like Spirit of the Black Cavern, but I would try to live up to his expectations.

This was also an apology, because I was going to use his invincible shirt as a bindle. Tuck in Tintin as a walking stick and whatever stuff I wanted to carry, and I was complete.

Behold me, The Great Homeless Rock of the Black Cavern!

Thus, following my acquisition of my new title, I immediately got into street fights with the local inhabitants.

Objectively, I was sabotaging my growth with my overreliance on wind implosions.

It took me this long to realize that I was only relying on ambush attacks. It was great for building up my Ether reserves, but I didn’t learn anything new.

My vow to keep my feet planted firmly on the earth wasn’t for show, y’know? And thus, I made another vow as I dropped back into the jungle valley: I’d learn how to fight.

For some reason, I had an unreasonable amount of general martial arts knowledge — most of which was not applicable to my current form.

Actually, most people instinctively know about martial arts. Martial arts is simply the application and refinement of technique, right? The only thing separating martial arts and painting is the liberal application of fists to create strokes.

Stance? Oh yeah, I had this one down pat. I had the steadiest stance possible. There was a zero percent chance that I’d ever lose my balance.

Actually, mark that down as another long term goal. I’d open up my own school of martial arts and teach how to have a stance like this one.

Just be a rock, dummy. It’s that easy.

I couldn’t perform any strikes, as I didn’t have a human body. The closest thing to mystic arts I had were my gates, and those weren’t very mystic at all. Sure, I could pretend I pilfered them from an ancient scroll or received them as a gift from a venerable mentor, but I plagiarized them from a dead man’s gun, which was created in turn by a manufacturing company.

Strip away the mysticism of a fight and you’ll find that it all comes down to timing and techniques.

The right time to strike, the right time to dodge, the right time to run away. Easy concepts to grasp, but I needed to find these intuitively.

This is where the street fights came in.

What I needed to do to learn was to get animals really mad at me, and then try to survive their attacks. If I could learn to dodge those with my wind alone, then I’d be set for life.

So here’s a joke I told myself to pass the time.

A rock and the entire animal kingdom walk into a bar. The bartender plucks a shotgun from under the counter and starts blasting.

Not very funny? I know, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing the whole time.

I smashed a glass against a tiger’s head. He came at me with a broken bottle, swiping at my throat. I waited until he was exhausted, then drove an ice pick through his head.

Monkeys threw darts at me. I walked up to them, followed them until they were desperate enough to take swings with whatever they could find. They were fast, I’ll grant them that, but they couldn’t break me with sticks. To show them how it was done, I picked them up and broke their backs.

A tortoise swung at me with his tail as he ran out the bar’s door. I picked up a nearby piece of concrete, followed him for four blocks, then turned his face into mushy pink-pea paste.

I fed off these animals' desperation as an emotional parasite. Animals don’t fight at their full strength unless their lives are threatened, so I had to become that very threat to grow.

It was funny, wasn’t it?

This was what I was becoming. A bad joke played out ad nauseum before me, and I was the punchline.

As much as I wanted to stop myself, I couldn’t.

That tiger and those monsters above existed in completely different worlds. Just as an insect can never glimpse the intricacies of human society or the magnificence of the cosmos high above, I couldn’t reach them as I was.

I was not a blessed creature, and there was no further help coming.

My existence rode on two miracles, and lightning wouldn’t strike a third time — especially not in a cursed place like this, which was doomed to an eternal cycle of life and death.

If this was the path ahead, then so be it.

These animals didn’t have a choice in how they existed. They existed only to kill and be killed, to mate and slaughter in a cramped maze in which there was no escape. I did, but I ran out of options.

Was this self-defense? If it was for the sake of my future, was killing justified? I didn’t know anymore, but I couldn’t let myself stagnate any further.

Better to ask for forgiveness than pray for salvation.

Clutching my weapons close, I built the mountain that would let me brush against the heavens.

I killed without rest. I killed without thinking. I killed everything I came across, collecting the strength required to face those above me.

Mere animals could no longer stand against me. I just had to kill until it was over.

So please — let it be over soon.

A month passed. I rebuilt my Ether back to what it was, but there was still so much more to do.

I didn’t want to do this anymore, but this was the path and price of freedom.

Was I missing something? They were still fighting back against me. Why were they fighting? Even if they beat me, they’d have to face another season of bloodshed.

This place would soon end. There weren’t many of them left.

I was almost free.

By the time the next Ether cycle came, it was quiet in the jungle.

I wandered through the eternal dusk, searching for my next harvest. But all that remained were withering plants and wilting flowers.

Without animals to create carbon dioxide, the plants couldn’t breathe. Even Ether couldn’t completely replace the need for vital nutrients; something must’ve allowed these plants to live without sunlight.

Ignoring that final factor, I did it. I conquered this branch of this underground jungle.

No matter where I looked, there was nobody left to oppose me.

I had reached 3 EX a month ago and factored that growth into my training. The wind at my side could now rip entire vines from their roots, fling small animals like toys, and easily knock over most creatures.

Not bad for a freebie.

As I wandered the empty halls, I learned that the Ether circulating in the empty halls wasn’t for me. No wonder I had trouble absorbing it in the first place — it was on a completely different wavelength. Much like how Ether changed form when I ran them through the three gates, this was specially tuned for living creatures to absorb. In the end, I had merely wasted my time.

In the end, I had decayed beyond recognition.

My wind was no longer a beautiful song that carried the seasons, but a tuneless scream held no regard for its listener.

Most would have come to a revelation at how far they had fallen and repent at what they’d done, but here, with nobody to witness my disgrace, I was happy. Even if I had forsaken myself, the wind was always by my side.

This was the end of this path: a view of falling Ether over a barren wasteland. I had no choice but to see what would become of it.

The unused Ether drained into the arteries that led back to the heart of these caverns, completing the circuit for the first time in this section. Soon, the consequence of my actions revealed himself.

I wasn’t a virtuous soul that could forgive and forget, nor was I wise enough to figure out another solution. From the moment he became one of my traumas, there was no other way this could end.

A lone white tiger emerged from the darkness, the only creature strong enough to judge me.