Labour was good for the mind. Others had tried to convince Charlie that the main point of it was to soothe the physical body, but he knew the truth. Receptive motions did close to nothing for the flesh, when not regulated in a meaningful manner. The best thing that would happen from his current work, looking at it from a physical standpoint, would be that he got a new reason for having pain in his back.

Not that the pain would have a reason to appear yet. Charlie had not yet gotten to the harder parts of his current task. And that task was to get some freshwater by the river. He had meant to get some new reserves the night before, but circumstances had forced him to forego such planning.

Normally, it wouldn't even have been him meant to do the current task. That was what Troy had stood for, and he had been doing it every day for the last three weeks. The kid was adamant that his task was this, that he needed to be the one during it. Charlie had had nothing against such a statement.

He had been able to stay behind with Mara, before, able to make sure that she was stable in her condition, and that no emergencies would transpire without his knowledge. It was a comforting thing, and there had been few moments where he had willingly let it go. Though… that had happened more as of late.

Troy had fallen down to a shade of his regular shade, forced to have constant deep breathing. The man wasn't traditionally sick. It was more akin to the body having strained itself to a point where it could do nothing but try and recuperate its losses. There was no real chance of movement.

Asking the kid to grab water in the morning had therefore been given to Charlie, the only one of the trio currently able to take more than ten steps out of their lodge. It was not a hard choice to make, really.

Charlie needed the water desperately. Wounds need to be cleaned, water needed to be taken into the body, and bodies needed to be wiped off. If not for their daily scouring for liquids, the disease would be upon them within days. If there was one thing the man would not allow, it would be that Mara succumbed to rats and maggots. Everything would be as clean as an operating room, even if the tree around them looked nothing like it.

Trees were actually also under them. They were everywhere in the forest. One could hardly look anywhere without seeing them. In the wind, they would even obscure the sky from view, with how tall some of them were. Those close to the city might have been able to be broken, but it would take some rather heavy equipment to break century-old trees seen deeper inside.

Though… there might have been a lesser desire for the broken ones to be cleaned up. Nothing lasts forever, and even trees succumb to the passage of time. If only they could still remain to stand, instead of falling to the few places where the dirt was available to be seen. Charlie was constantly forced to walk around and on top of fallen pieces of wood. The footing was uneven, slippery, and more than a little dangerous to tread upon.

And he knew it would be harder on his return. The fragile places to stand, bending slightly under his weight, would more than likely collapse once the buckets were filled with water. Charlie had more than once listened to Troy’s struggles with the travel back, but he had always looked on it as nothing more than a need for words to come out of the kid’s mouth. While still not having experienced it himself, there was a mild empathy beginning to bloom. Somehow, Charlie began to guess that the future had nothing positive in store for him.

Nothing good came from the physical world. He knew his hands would feel the sharpness of the handholds, that his legs would shake once he came back to the hand, and the understanding of his own weariness was felt in more ways than one. Charlie had not slept for over a full day now, and his body was letting him know with every step.

Perhaps… it would not have been so hard to get through if he had medication for it. There were many forms of supplements able to have a man standing for days in a row, designed to make them feel refreshed at any point in the day and night. Charlie had never personally tried them, but he knew of them, and he knew that he wanted them.

But, nobody fully got what they wanted. Instead of professional medication, Charlie received the natural medication of putting his hands into ice-cold water and filling his first bucket with as much as it could hold. The way back became more of a game of balance with each inch closer to the edge of the bucket, but every drop was so desperately needed. The more was brought back, the less of a need there would be for the journey to be made again.

The journey could not be taken too many times in a small time frame. Charlie knew he wouldn't be able to withstand the pressure on his body. Maybe if he was allowed to sleep, it would be different, but such a tale would not be told. Instead, he would be the one to always stand by, always on his two feet.

And maybe that wasn't so bad. Yes, his body felt terrible. Yes, a hard push would be the only thing needed to make him fall. And, yes, there were restrictions to what he could. But… at least he was sure about somebody watching over the other two. With Troy out of the game for a while, he needed to pick up the slack. Charlie could not rest while Mara was in danger of choking on her own blood while sleeping. She would not notice it. There needed to be somebody by her to make sure she would wake up the next day, and that somebody was Charlie. Troy needed rest to get back to health, and there was no way that the large man would allow him to not have it.

That was why the journey was worth it. There was no physical gain by it, yes, but the mental evaluation that automatically started up the moment he went out of the door was worth more than that by a long mile. Charlie was able to gather his thoughts, able to figure out why he failed with his weaknesses. He learned so much about himself through sheer will.

The body just opened up mentally when it couldn't focus on it. When Charlie was forced to do nothing but make sure he didn't fall and break his neck, the underlying machinations of his mind would begin to unravel. It was close to knots being untied, build-ups of thoughts being allowed to even distribute, and an overall tension of time being made into nothingness. Everything bad would be scrutinized in the way that only his subconsciousness could do, and it would all be spat out into a format that Charlie could understand for himself.

He loved that part of himself. When having talked about it with others, it had been called something along the lines of a runner’s high. That did make sense, in some way. It helped him gather his thoughts, allowed his emotional instability to stabilize, and made him a more calm person overall. Looking away from the need for enhancements, weight training had been started up so intensively because of the mental benefits it had had on him.

Anger, sadness, and stress would fade away. They never left, of course. They were always there. But… through the look through it all, things became just a bit more bearable for the man. He could understand what made him tense up, what he could change to avoid it, and what could be done in the future to make sure he increased his own experience emotionally, be that through physical activities or through social connections.

Mara wanted him to talk more. That was understandable now. Humans were a social bunch, and there was no reason for Charlie to reject that nature. Fortune came with the help of others, and ignoring that fact was akin to throwing any chances away. It was not a good thing to do.

What else could he do? Maybe begin training again, try and get back to his former health, if not just stabilise the state he was in now. Weight was being lost, and there was no reason for allowing that to happen now, was there?

The first two buckets had been filled now. Charlie could hardly feel his fingers, their constant contact with the water making them feel numb. He stuffed them into his jacket for a few minutes, not wanting to chance to let the buckets fall when he needed to move them. If failure occurred through his own considerations, then he needed to blame himself for it. Accidents were acceptable, but events that had been predicted were not.

Looking up at the sky, Charlie could see the sun was beginning to rise up to a better level. The light had been aplenty for an hour now, but the clouds were finally thin enough to allow the light indirectly. If sunglasses had been worn, it would not have been too bad to watch it. But, there was not such an instrument near, as the man had never thought about grabbing such a pair.

Why hasn't he exactly? Such an instrument would have allowed an extra line of camouflage, should the need call for it. While not able to fool any form of modern recognition programs, Charlie felt that he could get away with it on the human side. The mind focused too much on the eyes, and without them, the memory was always ready to fail.

It was exploitation, and Charlie fully understood that. He had always understood that. His entire job had been surrounded with requests to exploit some feature of the body, to make it better or to make it worse. Some had wanted him to increase their vision, while others had wanted to make a gas able to blind the enemies.

It was always about gain through self-improvement or through worsening others. As long as one gets one step above the average, everything would be fine. The idea of it had always sick and Charlie. Some people would readily accept going back a century if it meant they would be a decade ahead of the others. Free research had been dead for a long time, but it had worsened so much over the years. Every project had needed a project, some excuse on how the government would benefit by a lot and how fast it would be.

His fingers felt warm again. Getting them out of his jacket, the friction of fabric came to his brain in waves. Every sensation had returned to full levels, and some parts had increased by even more than that. They had gotten sensitive. That might have been good at other points, but Charlie knew he would hate the experience of it. The iron would feel like a knife soon enough.

The third of the four buckets were filled quickly enough. There was an attempt to hold his fingers up above the water, but it became a requirement soon enough. The container needed to be fully filled, lest the man would have to come back that same day and do it all again.

It was surprising how quickly his fingers came back to their cold feeling. Maybe the blood needed extra time to settle back into place? Maybe. Charlie had no real idea, never having studied that function too much. He understood how to stop it, how to make it happen, but never how it occurred with multiple exposures.

Charlie wondered about that, as he did his best to fill up the final bucket. He had done so much work on that mechanism of the body. When the flesh felt cold, the heat would be brought into the core to preserve it, the body doing its best to survive. That was logical. When it was hot, it would do the opposite, doing its best to send all the extra heat out.

There had been many ways to weaponize it, over the years. While only having been an advisor, he could still remember the projects focused on making people die by the inner stake. Attempts had been made to make the body feel the heat, to make it do its best to fight an illusion of fire, draining it of the essential warmth that was needed to function.

Death by a thousand matches. One of the more terrible things Charlie had done through his career. Even now, he could still remember watching over the initial test trials. The usual researchers never saw much of it, due to mental health requirements, but advisors had never been included in that list. At this point in time, Charlie still wondered why he had never thought of who exactly the product was being tested on. And maybe, just maybe, it had been designed that way, nobody really wanting to know, lest they would fall to their knees in fear and anguish.

All buckets were full, and Charlie felt ready to move back to the house. His mind had strayed away from mental health, beginning to go back to how it used to be. While such lines of thoughts had the ability to be positive, he knew that the current one would end up in unneeded pain.

Just as he was about to leave the riverside, however, a voice behind him stopped him in his tracks.

"You certainly don't look like a dead animal."

The only real thing Charlie noticed, during those first moments of visual confirmation, was the bright, golden badge on the chest.