Ben opened his eyes, still cold and wet but thankfully on the floor of the next rest area, Greed already working on healing him as he laid there. He worried about how long he’d been out but cast a look to the area of the wall he knew the countdown would be and saw it was only a few hours.

“So how’s it look Greed, am I losing any limbs to frostbite?”

“A couple of your toes were looking bad so I worked on them first, you should keep everything. I’m more surprised your fingers look fine.”

“I modified the scooter on the fly when I realized what was happening. What about the rest of me? What’s the damage?”

He was afraid to move and look at himself. Like each other time he’d finished a section, the pain was intense, making him wonder if he’d ever get so lucky as to gain the pain resistance skill. His biggest concern was how they’d gotten out though. By having Greed forcefully rip the mana from the nesting spatial bags he’d set up, he’d more or less created a bomb right against his body, he didn’t think it would be pretty, even if the fact that he could still feel his limbs was a good sign.

Shockingly though, his companion actually had some good news for him. “Looks like your fancy jacket you packed away saved you from most of the damage, at least that’s my best guess. I’ll tell you legs, you really live a little too on the edge.”

“Ha, we’re alive, aren’t we? Just let me know when I’m good enough to stand, I want to add my enchantment and then figure out what sort of hell we’re dealing with next.”

“You can probably move now, though I doubt you’ll like it much. Do what you need to and I’ll finish up after.”

He’d actually hoped he would have been made to lie down longer, but with his healer's consent given he forced himself up and applied the enchantment to the trial again.

He felt the size of his minds increase and breathed a happy sigh as he did. The enchantment was still difficult for him, he needed to keep the entire thing in his thoughts at once before placing it, so the added wiggle room to his mind felt like a blessing as he moved to the pile of items that had been left there.

He hadn’t given any thought to what would happen to the entire pool he’d created, but it had been brought to the next rest area, water and all. He didn’t need it now that the water section was done with, but it had a light and death enchantment on it to keep the water from growing stagnant and an earth one to keep it from rusting so he could always make use of it later if he wanted.

At worst I can just break it down and use it for parts.

He moved on to look at the rest of what was there. It seemed that everything that hadn’t gone into making the pool was still there, though the items from the last two trials had been tossed together into a single pile, with a newer, much smaller one present for this area.

As each pile they saw shrank, it stood as a marker for just how many people actually survived, but as depressing as it was he’d need to go through it later. For the time being, he grabbed some old clothing left in the first pile to dry himself off with before grabbing a couple broken chunks of metal to practice his magics with as he waited for Greed to finish treating him before he wandered over to the doorway of the next section, doing his best to contain a scream as he did.

“So we’re probably in a fair amount of trouble because the next section is going to be fire!” He yelled out to the waiting crab, who only seemed defeated by the news, even if he tried to be optimistic.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad?”

“I’d say the past three are evidence to the contrary,” Ben told him dryly, already thinking on how he might prepare.

“Well, what’s the worst-case scenario?”

“We’re tossed into the heart of a star, or at least the closest thing the god who made this place can replicate.”

“...What’s the second worst scenario then?”

“I don’t know Greed, I wasn’t expecting this guy to try to freeze an entire fucking ocean with us in it. Who knows what sort of crap this maniac is going to do next. At this point, I feel fairly sure that the guy who made this was actually an evil god who thought it would be funny to mess with a world already in peril. We also need something to call him other than ‘that guy’ or ‘the god’.”

Greed looked thoughtful for a moment, trying to find the perfect name to sum up his feelings for what they’d had to go through. “I vote assface.”

“Assface works for me.”

The notification rang out in his head as he was practicing his magic while having his mana heavily buffed. If he had to be stuck there with anyone, Greed was the best option. Even if being buffed kept him from raising the attributes under the buff’s effect as he practiced, having all that extra mana and regen was doing great things for training his actual skills themselves. With a mana pool already larger than he ever could have hoped for without a couple years of sleeping with his cursed ring, the increase that awakened blessing magic could temporarily provide still felt substantial.

If I’m in here long enough, maybe I’ll even catch up to Thera’s magic level. He thought with a laugh as he imagined how annoyed she might be, even if she was happy for him in the end. As that bit of amusement ended though it was replaced with sorrow and worry. Would he ever see her again? Would he see any of the people he’d grown to care about in the world? When he’d first gotten there he’d felt so alone as he’d been the only one left unwanted, but slowly he’d built his life, finding people to care about and making his place in the world. The thought he might not get to see any of them again was horrifying.

Don’t think about it.

Stressing wouldn’t help him, not when there was so much else to do. He needed to try and anticipate whatever the trial was going to throw at him next and figure out how to create countermeasures for it on top of improving his skills as much as he could. He didn’t have a forge he could rely on for making things, meaning he needed to master his new magics to get them to the point that he could make anything he might need to keep them alive.

It was with that frame of mind that he walked over to the newest pile of goods, eager to see what there might be. While the first pile had been huge with hundreds of things and the one that had come after was still more than half its size, this one had shrunk considerably. He wasn’t so optimistic as to assume that it was because more people were making it through so there were less items to be had though. It was likely the opposite, that too many people had died early on, meaning that he’d already seen most of what there was to be pilfered.

On the more positive side of things though, the items he was seeing now were much better. Sure, there were still the bloodied clothes and broken bits of armour and weapons, but he was now seeing items in the mid-rare range of the ranking spectrum, though still lacking any useful enchantments for him to try copying. More important than that though was what he immediately recognised as two spatial bags, both extremely high quality and one having a time enchantment bound to it.

Neither were as good as what he could currently make after awakening his enchanting and the time enchantment wasn’t of a level high enough to freeze the time within it, but that didn’t change his excitement about what might be inside.

Without any care he ripped them both open, feeling his eyes gleam as he did. Both were in a bad state. He was sure that they had each contained food that had been there so long it had rotten away to dirt, covering everything inside, but he couldn’t care less about that. They weren’t so old that the enchantments on them had become useless, and more importantly, they were receiving power, meaning they were made with mythril.

He dumped their contents and sorted them with everything else he’d seen, tossing them all to the side as he did. The first bag was useless to him except for the small bit of the precious metal it was made from, but the second was far more exciting. It contained plenty of things that he would have no personal use for, a magic lighter, a canteen that could refill itself, and rotted away rations to name a few, but most important by far was a small shield with an earth and barrier enchantment applied to it, with a small white mana crystal built into it.

“Oh thank god,” He said as he sighed contently. “So now we have two mana crystals and some mythril, so whatever I make I won’t have to spend as much of my own mana on. No, that’s not right, I’ll just have more mana to spend overall and might be able to make some things without needing to worry about juggling my output for multiple items at once. This is good, this is real good.”

Even if things were still tight for his magic materials, at the very least he wasn’t low on other resources. All that was left was figuring out what he needed to make.