The inventory list turned out to be a waste of time to read. Pages upon pages of numbered items that could be found in any supermarket on Earth rolled by on the screen. There were some exceptional items such as “Spirit Amplifiers”, “Cleaning Stones”, or “Consumable Cutlery.” Despite their novelty factor, they were generally mundane items. During their day of rest, they also opened up the 7 boxes they had found. The first 3 held nothing but lined paper, the next 3 held nothing but toilet paper, and the last was entirely empty.

Kain sighed. “Damn, I thought there’d be something good. Oh well. Anyway, what do you want to look at now?” he asked Luna.

“I dunno,” she replied before going wide-eyed and jumping up. “Oh! I know! That Ether book, uh… Emergency Survival Imbuements. That one! There’s got to be something interesting in that!” she concluded enthusiastically.

He laughed and pulled the book out from the amulet. “So, which one do you want to look at first?” he asked, tilting the book in her direction for her to look at.

She pulled the book closer to get a better look. “Hmm… emergency rationing… wayfinding… terraforming… volatile terraforming… healing and recovery… wait, corpse utilization? What’s that?” she asked.

“Hmm…” he mumbled. “It looks like necromancy to me.”

“Necromancy? Like, using corpses for something other than eating, burning, or crafting? That’s necromancy?” she asked wondrously.

Flipping to the section, he scanned over the few he found. “Hmm… it seems like it’s pretty much like you said. This thing outlines how to make a corpse explode, make a corpse decompose quickly to nurture plants, make a corpse melt and make a smell that drives off predators, and… how to make a corpse into a robot,” he listed. “I was wondering if they did that, especially after using so many robots, so I guess it makes sense.”

“Wait, why use robots when they can just do that?” Luna asked. “Wouldn't it be easier to just string up a horde of corpses and send them into the direction of their enemies? I mean, they were fighting wars and whatnot, so it can’t be impossible to do.”

“It was probably a moral dilemma. We’re mostly numb to things like that, you for your time spent in cruel nature and me for my childhood of hunting trips, but they may have not been like us. Maybe they thought of sending legions of corpses at their enemies as religiously disrespectful, or just saw it as morally wrong. I didn’t read the warning at the top of the page, but it says to ‘only use this imbuement in dire circumstances.’ That’s also not even addressing the practicalities of avoiding this… screw it, I’m calling it a spell. Corpses rot and robots don’t. Corpses stink, and robots don’t. That, and the fact that this spell is lengthy, labor intensive, and gory. The gist of it is that you need to carve an imbuement network into the corpse’s brain to hijack the muscles of the corpse. Even then they’re slow, shambling, and weak. Not to mention the tonnes of work needed after that to preserve it. It’s just not worth it,” he concluded. “Though, I have never thought of carving an imbuement network into a material, nor taking advantage of a muscle’s natural properties to make it move. The spell could be a terrifying tool if developed, but we have things to do.”

“Hmm… you’re right, but when we have a few days to burn, we do that. Kay?” she asked.

“Sure, sure. Anyway, anything else in the book you want to look at?”

“How about…”

They spent a few more hours looking through the book, trying to find inspiration, but it was all for nothing. The book contained a multitude of things whose effects were either exactly the same or worse versions of what they could do. Instead, they decided to begin creating some ‘wellness tablets’ out of the paper they found. During this time, Luna discovered that she was getting closer to being able to sense finer details of Ether in items. Despite that, however, she said she felt herself hitting a wall. It was not insurmountable, but it felt like she needed something to click, and she was stuck without the frame of mind needed. While she lamented, Kain calmed her down and got her to help him make more wellness tablets. By the end, they had over 100. While they were good for the body, it was only effective enough to help to heal a bruise, stomach ache, or head ache.

*=====*

Luna was feeling fine the next day, so after waking up and eating breakfast, the two left their small church-like building in the odd forest. Their first order of business was to find a map or other direction to the ‘Nexus.’ Their first idea was to float upwards and find some sort of landmark, but they were almost immediately set upon by a horde of small birds. Once they landed in the forest, which was more similar to a public park than anything else, the birds immediately retreated.

Their next plan was to search for some sort of travelers center to find a map, so they wandered aimlessly around the city. They looped back to the hotel they first found themselves in, which had become a veritable battleground between scavengers fighting over the scraps of meat left by the chitin-covered monkeys battling with the moss and a few deaths from the pigs. There were plenty of variations of scavengers, from short dog-like creatures that stood on two legs and had 4 arms to large vulture-like birds that walked on 8 legs, had metallic wings, and had a cawing that could rupture eardrums with its volume. There were even the birds that had attacked Kain and Luna around the bird, picking at the bits of gore that the vulture couldn’t reach between the cracks in the pavement. Now that they got a better look at them, they noticed the details of the swarm of birds. They were small, only about as large as a grapefruit. Their wings had a metallic shine to them, similar to the vulture, and they walked on 8 legs. That was when they realized that the vulture-like bird was simply the adult version of the other swarming birds. Apart from the birds, there were also some small bundles of moss that slid around the area, absorbing every stray drop of blood and scrap of meat they could find.

The two ignored the scavenging party and left down a random street. They traveled for an hour, being slow and careful so as to not catch the attention of any other groups of animals. On their journey, they found even more interesting creatures. There were large cow-like creatures that travelled in herds and had a sort of exoskeleton made of the blue metal-like material that made up the outer shell of the computer they found. They guessed that they could take a part of the shell and use it like metal, but when Kain tried to grab a piece, it was so tightly attached to the carapace of the creature that it almost made the herd attack him. They decided to put a pin on the idea.

They also found a creature they could have been considered an apex predator. It was a medium sized reptile walking on 2 hind legs and with a mace-like structure attached to the tail. It was a lone hunter, but also ate the various plants that grew further into the city, from the grass between the cracks in the cobbled road to the ever-present moss that still grew in some of the more destroyed buildings. However, the mace-like appendage was not the only weapon at the creature’s disposal: it also had the limited ability to use Ether. From what they saw, the reptile-like creature would use fire to herd its prey into back alleys and finish them with its mace-like tail. It was a simple hunting strategy, but it worked. They also chose to avoid the creature; they knew how effective it could be when herding its prey, but didn’t want to test the limits of its fire Ether.

Despite the previous two’s uniqueness, the most interesting creature they found was something akin to a giant tortoise with plants growing out of its back. They found the creature lying in a destroyed building, sleeping. On its back grew various plants, from flowers to tomatoes. There was also a pack of chitin monkeys lounging around the tortoise. No matter where they sat, hit, or slammed during their ‘social activities,’ if monkeys brawling with each other could be called that, the tortoise did not wake up. Kain took a vine of grapes from the back of the creature, but caught the attention of the monkeys. They were about to fight, but the monkeys suddenly ran away. Luna and Kain, ready to fight whatever drove them off, stood around on high alert, but nothing came. They suspected that the smell of monkey that came from them was a dead give-away to their monkey-killing prowess and moved on.

Eventually, they reached a large, 200 foot plaza near the center of the city. They had noticed that, as they continued forward through the city, that more and more buildings were ruined shells of their former selves. There was nowhere in the city that made such a pattern more apparent than the center plaza. There was not a single building properly standing in the entire plaza. Every building was flattened. Every stall was crushed. Every lamp post was demolished. They had no idea why that was until they looked at the center of the plaza where there was a giant crack in the ground.

The crack spread nearly 100 feet long, but was only about 20 feet wide. As they inched their way to the gap, wary of any attacks, there was nothing but silence. Eventually, they were able to peer over the edge and see what lay below. From their vantage point, they gazed at the giant, square room that stretched 150 feet across and 50 feet down. The centerpiece of the room was a large, glass cone spanning 100 feet at its base, and inside the pyramid was another pyramid. It spanned only 80 feet across, but was densely packed with machinery and cubic slots. The things they presumed to be the occupants were all lying scattered across the room. They all had wiring sparking with two colors: red and blue.

*=====*

‘Nother short one, but I wanted to leave off with a cliffhanger for this one. Anyway, I am going to be getting the second rewrite done on Saturday, so it should be out for your Sunday enjoyment. If you live in the US anyway. Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed.