1.5

This world loved its rain and that's not a bad thing. For some though, the rain might come as a nuisance. It dampens the mood for a lot of people. However, with Aesa, it was different. He welcomes the rain. Especially now that the deluge was helping him cover up his tracks as he tried his hardest to drag his petit bony ass away from trouble. He estimated that with the way the down pour was going, it should significantly slow down his pursuers from potentially catching up to him. The freezing temperature along with the muddy track should be pesky enough to discourage Godrick's lackeys from tailing him further into the forest.

An hour has passed since and Aesa found himself hauled up again inside the confines of the shallow cave. He pretended to study the rain while he cocooned himself over a new sheet of warm blanket. The last improvised cloak that he had worn probably got lost in the forest while he was fleeing for his life earlier on. He didn’t even notice that it had slipped through his frame because back then, his sole focus was to preserve his life rather than worry about losing a rickety blanket.

During the skirmish, Aesa has suffered a great deal of damage. He had lost his entire left arm in that fight. It would have been okay to receive a damage like that if this was an ordinary game. Unfortunately, this game was not normal. Grum's Labyrinth doesn’t exactly follow the cliched MMORPG cookie cutter mold. If this was the generic kind of MMO, he would have not panicked the way that he did back then. He'd simply check his HP (Health Points) bar and he'd know immediately whether it would be okay for him to engage further into the fight or withdraw entirely right then. That was normally his usual play style with other MMO's. But around here, Aesa just learned that when a player gets hurt, they wouldn't know exactly how much HP they had lost once the damage has been applied. There are zero notifications such as ' You've received damaged for XXXX'. All the normal convenient information which were freely provided from other games are sorely absent here in Grum's Labyrinth. It was exactly the fear of the unknown that forced Aesa to flee from the fight against Godrick and his gang. Not knowing what was what made him disengage. Plus, there were too many variables to consider. Three versus one wasn't exactly his usual cup of tea and Aesa didn’t want to risk dying the second time. He might not return forever and that would be truly unfortunate.

Grum's Labyrinth was different in a sense that it practically relied more on the players intuition rather than rely on transparent blue screens and floating green bars. In the real world, you just know that you're hungry, sickly or sleepy simply because your body tells you that you were. Cirrus Games copied that same principle and it was seriously messing people up just like Aesa.

The down pour outside seemed to go on forever and the heavy rain was unrelenting. The mood got Aesa re-evaluating his motivation--- why was he here in the first place again? And why was winning so important?

There were a number of reasons why Aesa chose this game and why he wanted to win badly. A big portion of that reason was because he wanted to escape and start over. Whether to escape reality or to escape Mars itself, only Aesa had the answer to that question. Registering and logging inside the game was the easiest part. The challenge now for him was how he'd plan on winning when the odds weren't exactly in his favor? He was somewhat of a UWD or an undead with a disability. So, how was he going to secure a seat amongst the top one hundred if he was severely handicapped like this?

Aesa was worried. Normally with other games, his arm would have regrown by now. But in here, that wasn't the case. Would there still be a way to fix his shattered arm? Or should he carry on like this all throughout the game walking around like an amputee? A disabled skelly huh?

Aesa wanted to laugh at himself not because it was funny being a 'cripple'. He was laughing because the reality of failure was not too far away for him. It was highly likely that he'd lag behind the other competitors due to his disadvantage and his chances of reaching the top 100 would just be a pipe dream. 'And just when I sacrificed everything just to be here. What a failure this endeavor turned out ot be.' He nagged at himself while curling up into a ball.

With nothing better to do, Aesa's eyes wandered around the cave. He'd been in this cave many times before and yet this was the first time that he was able to examine the cave extensively. He has not noticed this previously, but above him, there were constellations painted on the rough rocky ceiling. Scorpio, Aquarius, Sagitarius et al. They were all beautifully hand painted with some sort of magic weaved into them. Aesa assumed it was magic since somehow they moved, like waves swaying in the vastness of the ocean.

Against the bleakness of the cave, there were series of red glowing strings that connected the dots of each stars that formed the constellation. Aesa would have continued to just lay on his back and just watch the mural in silence, however, something caught his eyes. Almost all of the constellations were stringed correctly and perfectly on the ceiling. The only two that were plotted erroneously were the Fornax and the Sculptor's constellations. He could have ignored the minor mistake and just allow it to simply slide, but he knew those stars like the back of his band. It didn't help that he has OCD and his knowledge of astronomy wouldn’t allow him to sleep. The science boy in him would not allow this type of atrocity against the stars to endure any further. It ends here and now. He vowed.

Right then, Aesa stacked the bed, the small dining table and the chair on top of each other. It formed a sort of a mini furniture pyramid which created enough height for Aesa to reach the ceiling. It was low already to begin with hence the stack was good enough for hm to literally touch the 'constellations'. With his bare hand, he carefully unraveled the strings tied to what was supposed to be the Fornax. Aesa after which transferred the red string to the correct stars where it should have been. He did the same exact process with the Sculptors constellation and finished it without delay. "The stars are now aligned." Aesa declared with contentment in his eyes. His OCD died down finally knowing that the arrangements has been rectified.

And just when he was finally coming down the stack, the constellations suddenly started moving. All the red strings that were there on the mural systematically grouped up and transformed into a long slender looking serpent. It appeared to be swimming inside the painting, fetching every single available red string on the map there was, absorbing each one into its main body as it went. And when all of the strings were finally banded together, the serpent opened up a small porthole through the middle of ceiling. Beams of red light flashed before Aesa's eyes and he couldn't help but be stupefied at the sight. 'A magic circle? What in the--- ' Suddenly, a box made of thick silver dropped from the ceiling where the red magic circle was. And with a heavy thud, the box fell flat on Aesa's face. "Argh-ssole!" he groaned.

Although the drop jarred his skull, Aesa chose to ignore it. He instead poured his curiousity into knowing what kind of content the box would unveil. At that point, Aesa carelessly opened the package. It would have been a huge mistake on his part opening the box the way that he did since he could have triggered a trap. It was a relief though that there was zero trap implanted within the box when Aesa finally unboxed it.

'What is this?' Aesa asked himself as the content was finally unraveled. He had this expectation in his mind that the box might have contained a great fortune of some sort. Perhaps a number of gold coins or a couple of precious gems sealed within it. But to his disappointment, what he saw there was no treasure. Instead, what he pulled out of it was--- 'a map?!'