Ed stretched his legs behind the gate. Behind him, people stood around nervously.

“Be careful, Ed.” Ranga said, giving voice to their thoughts.

Ed refrained the desire to sigh. The camp had nearly had their first riot when Ed had proposed he go alone to scout around the camp.

It had made sense. Combined with the Dao of True Sight, Lightfeet would allow him to move about more safely in the quickly changing landscape of the city than anybody else.

“I will. I’ll be alright, guys. Just going to see if I can go and ‘catch’ any goblins. Noel missed quite a few, and there should still be some around here if they’ve survived. And we all know the goblins can be a bit hard to kill.”

Some of the survivors chuckled, but only a few of them. Noel, on the other hand, had been pouting the whole time.

“I still can’t believe you’re going alone.” she said.

“I won’t be. Wutang will be with me. And we both agreed that one of us should stay behind to protect the camp.” Ed replied, adjusting his back-pack.

It held some water-bottles, candy-bars, and some smoked fish. A very balanced meal. He had noticed he could subsist off of less and less food as his Body became stronger, but he was a firm believer in feeding his body good and nutritious food. This was the best he would get. Oh, he felt like he would kill for a bowl of rice, some good bean-stew like his dad used to make, and kimchi.

Wutang chittered on Ed’s shoulder, gnawing on a nut he had found somewhere. No one was completely sure if he understood exactly what was being said, but Ed had assured them it was relatively safe to assume so.

“I shouldn’t be long. I might be back in a couple hours, or I might be back in a couple days. But I will be back. Good luck with the duties that we discussed.”

The last drew solemn nods from the builders and Ranga, as well as excited nods by the hunters. The builders, led by Ranga, had completed two large wooden cabins, one for men and one for women. They would be working on a special compound for the hunters, who’d be led by Noel, to store the game they hunted around the camp.

“And Ranga, I’ll try and find you some tools and ingredients if I can.”

Ranga nodded.

“I’ll do what I can in the meantime.” He rumbled out.

Ranga had confided in Ed, saying he’d need special materials, or at the very least, more sophisticated tools to actually make use of his Blessing.

The Will of The Sea

Infuses pieces of art, wooden carvings, and tattoos produced by the Blessed with the ability to channel manna. The power of the pieces depend on complexity, beauty, and the connection between the artist and the piece.

Ranga had tinkered with the bones of some kind of canine beast that had been lying around in the camp, and it looked like a vicious tool. Ranga lovingly called it a bone-spur comb.

Despite his generally calm demeanor and trustworthiness, no one had wanted to be the first one Ranga practiced on. Besides, it had turned out that the ink had to be made out of something special, as Ranga had proclaimed regular soot as 'dead ink'.

As a result, Ranga had also been practicing carving pieces of wood in his free time instead of chasing down people to tattoo. But while Ranga was a sensitive man, he was not a very skilled artist. A rather clumsy one, actually. It was obvious that it would be a while before he was creating pieces that were 'complex', or 'beautiful'. His daughter thought they were pretty, at least, and could be found trying to convince Wutang to play tea with her.

Ed had promised to look for things like special trees and certain berries that he thought might help Ranga improve his craft. He would have looked for metal tools, but according to Wukong, the metals of Earth would absorb the ambient manna and regain their properties a lot slower than the animals or plants would.

It seemed they would be stuck with wooden or stone tools for now.

“Ok. Wish me luck.”

Ed set out before anyone else could stop him, Wutang chittering on his shoulder.

The camp all watched as he waved and disappeared from view.

----

Ed admired the sight of the city beginning to burst into life even as he kept his guard up. He activated the Dao of True Sight intermittently to conserve his energy, but even brief glances of True Sight revealed an entirely new ecosystem beginning to form.

Insects of all kinds flitted about through the grass, and buds of strange flowers seemed to be ready to bloom. A rat the size of Wutang skittered into sight, noticed Ed, and quickly disappeared into one of the ruined houses.

A few birds chirped here and there, though none of them seemed to be birds of prey. They were large though, pigeons and sparrows that had ballooned to the size of the human torso. Some of them sported vibrant colors.

He could see things more clearly every day, and recently had begun being able to see what he assumed was manna. It swirled inside of every living thing, and he thought it did so with personality.

He could see strands of manna that moved about more aggressively as well as smaller cores of manna that more calm within the animals. It looked like they were beginning to fuse, and the more energetic strands of manna seemed to be provoking the calmer cores of manna to grow and move about more energetically as well.

According to Wukong, the explosion of humans, decline in biodiversity and pollution had gradually been dwindling the source of Earth’s manna. In some ways, humanity had brought on the apocalypse unto itself.

Ed enjoyed being in nature in solitude, and even though he had enjoyed the company of people after nearly a month of solitude, it felt good to be alone again.

Almost alone. Wutang was grooming his head, rooting around and occasionally miming eating something. Ed hoped it was symbolic.

---

Ed breathed in the morning air as he did his morning stretches.

It was a mixture of things that he’d picked up over the years training in different sports. He’d found that it helped him assess his Body, Mind, and Spirit, and that the routine even seemed to improve them minutely every day.

He’d tried to teach the young hunters back in the camp, but with no backgrounds in martial arts, they were improving very slowly. And Noel had not had the patience to sit still for very long.

Ed was also getting better at meditating, reaching deeper and deeper into his inner self as he observed the ebb and flow of his thoughts and emotions. He felt like he was beginning to understand what his father had been talking about when he droned on about the benefits of meditating.

After he had shaken the sleep out of his body, he took out his breakfast chewed on the smoked fish he’d taken out from his pack, watching Wutang eat some sort of large insect that he’d apparently hunted and killed. Even alone, Wutang would probably do just fine in this changing land-scape, even by himself. He was a true-clone of the Monkey King, after all.

Ed chewed the dry meat as he considered the events of yesterday and his goals for this outing.

One, he was going to try and capture a goblin and bring it back alive to the camp.

Joe would hopefully be able to gain more information about the denizens of Heloth. Specifically, he wanted to know more about this High Mother of the goblins.

Two, he would scout the area for other survivors to see if they wanted to join them at the camp.

He didn’t know what a Village Designation or a Spirit Tower was, but 15 Spirit Crystals for each person upon having 50 people in the camp would be an enormous boost in their ability to defend themselves and build a booming outpost of a town.

Three, He would map the territory for any other groups of goblins or demons nearby.

Since a large group of humans had formed a camp, it would be easier to defend from smaller threats but harder to abandon or move if a larger group of demons found out about the camp and decided to attack.

Ed had made a lot of headway in two of these goals.

He had mapped nearly a 5 mile radius yesterday, using beast-hides that the goblin had kept using the soot from Ranga’s failed experiments as ink. It seemed all of the goblin stragglers had fled the area after Noel and Ed had essentially destroyed their tribe.

Ed had actually ran into survivors as well, beginning to come out of their hiding places now that the goblins were gone.

It seemed that Blessed weren’t that common, as none of them had any idea about what the title meant when he’d asked them. Ed had pointed them in the direction of the camp and offered them shelter and a larger group of humans to band with. Ranga and Noel would set them straight if they caused any trouble, but mostly Ed thought they would be glad to be around other humans for a change.

One of the survivors had mentioned that the rift that had spewed out goblins had appeared near downtown, so that’d be the way he headed today.

Despite it all, he felt rather hopeful. In a way, he was really grateful to the System for not only the chance to grow stronger in every way imaginable, but also having trusted him with the Quest to rescue fellow humans.

----

Ed had been walking for about an hour through the ruined streets.

A cough caught his attention, and Wutang raised his hackles in a hiss.

It was a grey orc surrounded by the corpses of a dozen goblins.

Its eyes met Ed’s, which lit up with a yellow light as he dropped into a combat stance and brought up his dagger.

But then he saw why he hadn’t even detected any strong manna fluctuations in his routine checks with True Sight.

The orc sat with its back leaning against the fallen wall of a house, blood pooling slowly on the ground from the numerous wounds on its body. The orcs manna was weak and seemed to be on the verge of flickering out.