After the string of ominous messages, no more notifications came. From what Eli could see, he hadn’t broken Guide with his experiments, but he resolved to stop screwing with the mana or the magic in his body for now. There’d be plenty of time to run through his theories once they made it somewhere safe, maybe with a few stout walls to protect him if and when he knocked himself out again.

The doctors had warned him about possible side effects before his surgery. After all, Guide was a small piece of technology surgically implanted inside his skull. There were all sorts of potential disasters like an aneurysm, hemorrhage, stroke, and so much more. It was a laundry list of warnings about disability, pain, or death. Since he couldn’t do anything about it, he pushed that worry down the road.

Damn it all, I have a potentially broken piece of technology in my head, and I can’t risk screwing around with it too much.

Eli finished the rest of the Mana Candy and ate a Healthy Refreshment too. Sadly, he didn’t have any pain meds, so he tried to make do with the green brick of food with its health regeneration. It was too bad that it tasted like cheap tea and grass clippings that some sicko had mixed in a blender.

Since he wasn’t about to screw around with his body any further for the night, he moved on to some hopefully safe and innocuous improvements to his user interface.

The first one, to change the question marks for the new biological scan ability, would be an easy way to test Guide’s functionality after the recent unpleasantness. Like when Eli set up the toggle functions for his powers, he simply instructed Guide on what name he wanted and then confirmed the command. A moment later, the “???” was replaced with Lifesight. Encouraged by the success, he changed Mana Scan to Manasight, as the name made more sense. For now, he wanted to try for consistency with these abilities, so if a power involved something visual, he’d have ‘sight’ in the name.

The edits also included how Guide showed the modifier buffs to make them more aligned with a few of his favorite games back home. The idea was to make everything as quick and efficient as possible so he could understand the details at a glance without learning a new way of interpreting the data. He had no idea if other people had to deal with a status screen, but he’d begun to think that it was only him - Dara had given him the same “you’re crazy” look when he asked her about it.

He paused in thought, wondering if he really was the only one with this status screen. Could it mean that this was all in his head after all? Was he drugged up in a hospital bed back on Earth right now? Once he added a few game mechanics on top of everything else, it made a weird sense that this could all be in his imagination. It seemed more likely that his brain was making this all up than him being in another world with superpowers and magic.

He shelved the thought, as it didn’t matter at the moment. Why or how he was here could wait until he had more data. Still, he might as well bring everything in line with how he was used to seeing things in games. Quick comprehension was critical.

Name: Eli Tal

Species: Human

Race: Restricted (Anomaly)

Level: 7

Evolution: High Mundane

Abilities: Tracking, Identify, Manasight, Healing, Flamethrower, Lifesight

Modifiers: Well Fed, +Mana Regen, +Health Regen

He couldn’t quantify any of these buffs or numbers yet, only that eating the blue and green rations made the lights inside him grow brighter, multiplying with their numbers. Each also seemed to work about half a day, at least as far as he’d been able to estimate with the limited sample size. He looked forward to finding other buffs and wondered if there were local dishes he’d get to try soon – a hot and fresh meal sounded divine after days of mostly jerky and magic rations.

He left the rest of his status screen alone, though there was obviously something happening under the hood, as these levels and everything else was being cataloged and tracked by Guide. He had tried to get this information, but any which way he worded his questions, he’d just get one of two responses from Guide:

Command Unknown

Or…

Please restate the question

He never woke Dara for her watch since the food buffs from earlier kept him feeling pretty wired. Plus, he still had a lot to think about while she could use the rest. He did get some food ready for her as he gently tapped her bundle where her feet should be.

***

Hours later, Dara and Eli walked faster down the trail, eager to escape the forest. Dara wasn’t sure, but she guessed it would take at least another day or two to reach the closest town of Herria and then only a day further to get her home. He had provided a new buff to speed them on their way. The new food block in the yellow wax wrapper, Tasty Treat, gave them a significant stamina boost, letting them move faster for longer and without as many rest stops. It had a sort of fruit flavor, somewhere between a kiwi and mango, which was pretty good.

The two of them also shared a Healthy Refreshment. The buff wasn’t as good being split, but more than good enough for the aches and pains accumulated over their journey. He still felt pretty good outside the persistent headaches, but Dara’s feet had started to form blisters when they’d stopped last night. Happily, the sores had largely disappeared when she’d checked them during their midday break a bit ago.

In this way, they came around a bend, and the whole world seemed to open up from where they stood, not too far from a steep drop-off. The trail in front of them angled slightly downwards and then turned out of sight, but then further down, it appeared again as it zigzagged in its descent to the land hundreds of meters below.

“Wow!” Eli said, his eyes drawn to gigantic white mountains on the left. The vast white rocky behemoths looked made of marble that shifted with elevation to an almost bluish snowpack before disappearing behind thick white clouds. Far below, a blanket of green and brown plant life spread around the base of the mountains. There were tiny dark dots below the snowline, stark against the natural colors that might be little towns, but they were too far away to tell. A few of the closest crags were shorter and didn’t have the same snow cover and clouds, revealing more of the same white stone as their siblings, while scattered hills dotted the land among the trees at their bases.

He hadn’t realized their elevation until now since he’d always associated high altitude with thin air and problems with breathing, but he hadn’t noticed any issues. Plus, the thick forest had done a thorough job of hiding their situation by blocking off anything other than the view of the narrow trail that slowly snaked through innumerable plants and trees. With Eld Forest’s ever-present thick canopy, he hadn’t even seen the sky since that first night at the Blood Boulders, and that had only been tiny glimpses of the pitch-black heavens between heavy rainclouds.

Far down the trail, where the ground leveled out, was a large grassy clearing with a few trees and a small winding blue rivulet at the furthest edge. Beyond, in the distance, were still more forests and what might have been more hills, but the clouds made it hard to see clearly. The greens below also looked like a brighter color than much of the ones Eli had seen in Eld Forest, making him wonder if the ones up here preferred the altitude.

“This is Eld Forest’s boundary,” Dara said, pointing down at the meandering trail. “It ends there, where the colors shift, and the trees no longer smother the ground. Once we make it down there, we should be safe from Boruta, even if we leave the trail.” She looked behind her, then at the same trees that had surrounded them for days as if to pierce their darker shadows.

He nodded even as something caught his eye in the distance, far off to their right, just at the horizon. He turned on Tracking just to see what he could see, and the world lit up with arrows, lines, and bits of information. The tree closest to them had a white ring around the trunk, with a line coming off the ring that ended with a big fat “Unknown” in red letters. He hadn’t used the ability much since he’d first been flung here by Lugh since it had become nearly useless.

It’s a tree, Guide.

Eli sighed, a little of his wonder in the view tempered by a familiar frustration. Back home on Earth, he had used Tracking quite a bit, but then Guide had access to an extensive database with additional backup cloud support for challenging or esoteric particulars. He’d enjoyed the heck out of the program where he could go for a walk in the park, and the world would fill up with details about the names of the trees, bushes, landmarks, and all sorts of things. Here though, Guide was a bit messed up, and it seemed to be missing its database of information - most of the items he could see returned either unknowns or errors.

Tracking’s secondary Record feature also appeared to be offline. Normally, there’d be an icon in the top right of his HUD with a white square and red circle in the middle. The icon was supposed to warn the User that Guide was recording visual inputs, but he hadn’t seen any sign of it since he’d woken up in Lugh’s place.

He didn’t really miss it since the Record feature was not something he’d messed around with much anyway. There were a big bunch of liability and medical releases he’d signed when he had entered the Beta. He’d even had a Sahara lawyer personally explain the documents to him, though her paralegal really had done most of the talking. The gist of their presentation was that Record should only be used in specific circumstances where all parties had given written consent, but he had a hard time believing other Beta testers had stuck to the rules. He’d decided early on not to use the thing since he didn’t want to open himself up to getting sued – everyone was so damned litigious these days. Still, he wasn’t sure when or how Record went offline, assuming it had ever worked on this world and had simply added it to his growing list of unknowns.

“This should get us to Herria eventually,” Dara said, pointing directly in front of them down the trail. “I think we might reach it tomorrow, but I haven’t come this way, so maybe the day after. From Herria, we’d be able to get to my home in less than a day. Off to the west,” she pointed right, “you’d eventually get to the Firmore, the great ocean that lies off the coast of Freesan.”

Dara pointed to the left at the colossal white mountains that had impressed him. “Those are the Great Teeth.”

“Wow,” Eli breathed out, unconsciously repeating his earlier exclamation. The big white jagged mountains did kind of look like some gigantic predator’s teeth, though it would have to be the size of a small moon to fit the proportions. He had never seen some of the famous mountains back home for comparison. Well, he’d seen them in pictures and movies, but not in person. Still, he had difficulty imagining Everest or the rest of the Himilayas were as big as these mountains, where they dominated the entire distant horizon.

He hadn’t spent much time exploring the incredible natural beauty except for a few nearby resorts back home. When he was little, he vaguely remembered visiting some of the old national parks with his family, but the details were fuzzy. There were small snapshots of scenes like a giant wall of rock in Yosemite or the massive trees growing as tall as buildings in some mountains coming to mind, yet he wondered at these frozen moments in his memories, curious how much was real and what was imagined. He’d always told himself he’d see the world and do all his traveling once he retired, planning his itineraries, budgets, and timelines with priority sights to see. In the end, though, he’d only visited a few countries outside North America for work trips, and few included anything remotely as breathtaking as the scene before his eyes.

A fat lot of good all the saving and planning does me now. Talay.

“What are those words?” Dara suddenly asked, pulling him out of his darkening thoughts. “I’ve heard you mention ‘tall lay’ before.”

He chuckled in surprise. “I didn’t know I’d said that out loud,” he said around a growing smile. “It’s probably silly, but ‘Talay’ is just a word I use to remind myself to calm down – it’s an acronym in my language for ‘turn around and look at yourself.’ When I feel my emotions spinning out of control, I remind myself to take a mental step back and look at myself, my thoughts, and my actions more objectively. It’s just something I use to help find my center. I’m happy to tell you more when we camp later, but you were telling me about those mountains?”

Dara smiled as she let him steer the conversation back towards the geography, and she pointed towards the mountains again. “Beyond the Great Teeth is Droch, a large barren land full of deadly tribes, blood cultists, sand, and poisonous beasts. The only water is in protected or hidden settlements or fortresses, and the whole region is hazardous and a quick way to die.”

“The cultists that had you? Those guys? They live out there?” He gestured vaguely towards the mountains.

“Well, they can live anywhere, but some of them invaded those lands back in my grandfather’s time, but I have no idea why. I’ve just been told to stay away from Droch, though that’s where my mother was born.” At the end, Dara’s voice took on an almost wistful note, her eyes lingering on the eastern horizon.

“Well, it’s hard to say what the future will bring. Maybe we’ll take a trip there someday? This is all new to me, so one place sounds as interesting as the next, and I’ve had a little experience in dry climates,” he said, thinking of a few trips he’d taken with his friends. He had no idea what kinds of survival gear they had here, but he wasn’t against a bit of exploring as long as they took adequate precautions. Of course, if the danger was more of the psycho variety, that was another story entirely.

Shaking away the notion for now, he gazed at the horizon, trying to create a mental map based on her descriptions. “Okay, so there’s a big ocean on the right, and your home is down this trail past Herria. On the left are these big imposing mountains, with a dry, dangerous place beyond them. But once we’re down the trail, we’ll be safe from the demon?”

“Yes.” She pointed down towards the large clearing they’d first seen earlier. “Once we get down to the lower trails below, we should be safe from Boruta.”

“So maybe we make our goal that clearing way down there for tonight? Think that gets us into striking distance of reaching Herria tomorrow?”

“Striking dis…,” she snorted a laugh and shook her head. “Such colorful words, but yes, I think we’ll reach it tomorrow. If the mountains and trees didn’t block our view, we would see the town from here. It should be out in that direction,” Dara said, pointing down and slightly to the right.

“Great! So, down the trail we go? Maybe tell me more about Herria?”