1.4

In the first moments following his bold declaration, when reality began to settle in, Harold moved to take stock of the situation. Okay, the main problem is a lack of supplies, and the only thing we have are these new abilities that we can use to fight-

“Oh!” Amber exclaimed, “if you’ve read about this kind of ability before, is there anything consistent in all the stories you’ve read that we might be able to use?”

Harold made a noncommittal noise. Was there something that we could use? He was really regretting dropping a lot of those litRPGs right about now. However, there was almost always one thing that those stories had in common.

“STATUS!” He practically bellowed the word out. In response, a small screen appeared before him, likely only for his eyes, just like the notifications had been.

#####

[Harold Sturm]

Age: 24

Race: Human

Class: [Gem Soldier, Level 3]

Constitution: Human

Achievements:

Titles:

#####

“Huh, there’s no stats here, that’s kinda weird...” Harold looked up to see Amber looking at him.

“So say status, and it’ll give you an overview of your abilities.”

She nodded, softly repeating the word, "status", and began staring off into space. Suddenly, Harold saw a small blink, and her screen was at once also visible to him.

“How’d you do that?” Harold asked. It didn’t seem as though she had said anything special, or anything at all. Maybe it was a willpower thing? He willed for his own page to be visible to her.

Amber did a little jump as his page became visible. “Hey! How come I'm level 2, but you’re 3 already?” She frowned, crossing her arms.

“Maybe melee combatants get more experience? Or maybe it’s just cause I landed killing blows on all three spiders.” Harold shrugged, if there was anything he had learned from those litRPG novels, it was that any system granting levels was at best, inconsistent, and at worst, actively trying to kill someone.

In the meantime, he took a closer look at Amber’s page.

#####

[Amber Liddle]

Age: 24

Race: Human

Class: [Elemental Mage, Level 2]

Constitution: Human

Achievements:

Titles:

#####

So it’s basically a carbon copy of my page, he thought. With the exception of the abilities and her class, it looked as though neither of them were especially talented humans. It was equally strange for this system to record all the things a ‘normal’ system in a litRPG would, but omit any mention of their stats.

Maybe it was just trying to be vague until they levelled up? Or perhaps it was a sort of barrier to entry, like ‘you’re not allowed to increase your stats unless you get to this level by yourself’. Strange, but he’d take any help he could get right about now.

“Okay, we have to explore now, right?” He sighed. “It’s not as if we have much of a choice, right? It’s either go out there to the death spiders, or stay here and starve to death.”

Amber looked as if she was about to waver, but ultimately nodded. We would move forward.

#####

As they once again stepped into the corridor, this time with much more caution, Harold once more took the lead. Grasped in his hand was his green hammer, emitting a warm green glow. Being the frontliner, he was best suited to face the threat of any spiders head on. The hammer seemed to be here indefinitely, and perhaps it would stay until it was completely destroyed. Harold hadn’t noticed before, but the hammer had taken a good chunk of what felt like his soul upon creation, but made no effort to continue draining him. He theorized that this loss he was feeling was mana usage, of energy leaving his body and forming the weapon. At least, he hoped, it wasn’t a chunk of his health that was being taken away.

Amber brought up the rear, walking several steps behind Harold, poised to blast any spiders that came into view with a mana bolt. Even with mana sight, in Harold’s opinion the bolts were highly inefficient. He could see just how much they had taken out of Amber the last time she had cast them. Perhaps two shots would knock her out completely, not exactly the most inspiring of abilities. Again Harold hoped that these powers were draining something akin to mana, rather than their vitality.

This time around, the pair slowly edged forward, feeling at the walls, careful not to make any loud noises or sudden moves, lest they be swarmed again.

They had been moving for several minutes when Harold paused, whispering. “Left, it feels like there’s a passageway that diverges from the main path”. He turned long enough to see Amber nod in the dimly lit hall.

Nervously, he turned left, and despite his fears, he did not come face to face with spiders, or any other beast for that matter. What he saw was a bright dot at the end of the very long branching corridor. ‘No wonder we missed this the first time,’ he thought, ‘It’s hard to find even when we’re looking for other ways out.’ He motioned for Amber to get closer to him, farther away from the spiders that were further down the main tunnel.

Once more they edged forwards, ever so slowly. But feeling no side passages, and being close enough to the light source to see their surroundings clearly once more, Harold resumed a regular walk as they approached the source.

As the light came into view, Harold noted that the walls were repeating the same phenomenon he had seen while leaving the large cavern, the crystals began appearing, very sparse at the outset, becoming more frequent and much larger as the two impromptu adventurers made their way towards the light.

It was another cavern, one with a small river, that looked like it was fed by a small tributary from above. However, the most striking feature of the area was the marble altar, atop it sat a green stone, and at the base of the altar were a series of medium-sized stones. As he approached, the green gem shimmered, but failed to capture his attention. For some reason his eye was drawn to one of the stones on the ground.

He moved to pick it up, his geologist intuition had never failed to guide him before, not in grad school, and not in the practical examinations that his professors insisted the students take. He recalled an ability that he now had, his [Analyze Mineral] was by far his least useful skill in terms of combat, and he wondered how to use it.

He looked at Amber, “any ideas about how to activate an analysis skill?”

She shrugged, “how’d you use your craft skill to make a hammer? Maybe that’d work?”

Harold pursed his lips, he honestly didn’t even know how he had used his first skill. It had been necessity, rather than any understanding of the system that had driven him to build his hammer.

“[Analyze Mineral].” He said with as much confidence as he could muster. Before him appeared a status screen, rather than a notification

#####

[Rock]

Age: ???

Race: Rock

Class: ???

Constitution: Rock

Abilities: ???

Achievements: ???

Titles: ???

Relative threat level: ???

#####

That… that was slightly disconcerting. He analyzed the rock that had been laying next to the stone that he was holding.

[Analyze Mineral: Rock - Highest concentration - Iron]

He turned his attention to the altar, which could dubiously be construed as a mineral or rock.

[Analyze Mineral: Altar - Highest concentration - Marble]

Huh, it seemed like even refined minerals could be considered minerals by his analysis. But more than that, Harold now knew that the rock he was holding represented an even more mysterious question. ‘If my identification only works on minerals, then why did it give me a person’s status page as a result? And if this thing is alive, why would my analysis work?’

He put the rock down on the altar, and picked up the green gem, which had so far been untouched. Using [Analyze Mineral] once more,

[Analyze Mineral: Of Hearth and Home - Highest concentration - Emerald]

[Additional Information: Of Hearth and Home was crafted by a ??? of ??? by the name of ???]

Now that he thought about it, the marble altar itself was surprisingly pristine, as if it had just been moved there a short while ago.

It made sense, he supposed. If there was anyone in this tunnel system, they would have taken the gem just for the visual glamour of it.

Looking around, outside of the ever present green crystals that were scattered around every surface of the cavern, were a group of protruding roots. Relatively small, with two clusters of roots on either side of the altar, it seemed as though their parent tree was fairly young.

Harold kept hold of the gem, moving to walk back into the corridor with it. There were no other openings in the cavern, no other way but back through the hallway, and towards the spider’s nest.

As they moved towards the opening once more, the cave seemed to shake with the force of a mountain, cracking into the side of whatever rock face they were close to. Small particles of dirt and grim fell from the ceiling, and cracks began to form on either side of the cave. The roots that he had seen before began to slither and move, gradually shifting towards the ground, snaking their way towards Harold.

[Lvl 4 Guard Oak]

“GET BEHIND ME!”

The cave exploded in sudden movement. Harold’s war hammer flew forward, missing a nearby tendril by a hair, which sprang up, nicking him in his forearm.

“Any ideas?” He shouted in between dodging jabs from the various roots brought up to attack him. He brought a hammer down on one, and another curled around his left leg. Shaking it off, he was brought face to face with a writhing mass, continuously revealing more and more of the spines as they protruded from the walls.

“I don’t know! Maybe try to return the gem? They didn’t attack us before?!” Amber shouted over the constant grinding of wood on stone.

The chamber continued to shake as one tendril shot at Harold’s head. As he moved to parry the blow with his hammer, he felt something constrict around the handle of the hammer. Then as one, the roots all pulled back, forming one orb in the center of the room, squeezing in on the hammer at the center of it all.

In this small reprieve, Harold sprinted for the altar, shoving the emerald onto the marble pad, leaving the gem slightly ajar, leaning against the mysterious stone he hadn’t had the wherewithal to move back to the ground. Then at once, the shaking chamber stopped.

‘I guess the mechanism is set to trigger when someone expresses the intent of removing the gem?’ He had no other answer, and for the moment, wanted none other. He and Amber stood in their respective places, panting, recovering from the arduous task of consistently fighting for several minutes.

“It… was level four, wasn’t it?” Harold said between breaths. “So why the HELL was it that powerful?”

Amber could only shrug in response, the roots had been the same level as one of the spiderlings that they had fought earlier that...

“Wait, earlier? Has it been a day? A couple hours?” She asked. “It feels like something is warping what we’re feeling, right? How come neither of us have felt hungry or thirsty since we got here?”

“Oh shoot, yeah. We should go take a drink of water!” Harold made his way to the small pool of water nearest to the entrance. He paused. ‘There’s no fire to make sure it’s safe.’

As they sought their reprieve, tending to their basic needs, the strange stone and the gem slowly began to glow. As Amber shouted a warning, Harold turned back to the pedestal to see the stone had somehow melded with the green gem. In its center, the brilliantly shining emerald had been embedded, like the core of some important mechanism.

His assumptions were to prove more true than he could imagine, for as he walked foward and picked the stone up from its marble cradle, something truly… original, came to be.

In his arms, the little rock thought. It thought for the first time, and became truly novel. The first rock to ever form a coherent thought. And as its mind whirred and moaned, to form this original, never before seen phenomenon, only one thing came to its admittedly unsophisticated mind, taking the form of random noises that no doubt made no sense to anyone but the rock itself.

[Achievement Get: First Light - First member of your kind to gain sentience]

[Original action achieved: Form your species first original thought! (+ ERROR) to Intelligence]