Reborn to be a Hermit

Chapter 7: The River of Desert Death

The ascent had been a silent, desperate prayer, each knot in the Elephant Rope a shield against the inevitable. Rina now clung to the sheer, desolate rock face high above the Forest of Whispers, the meager shelter she was carving into the stone face her only sanctuary. Below, the sprawling, miserable tapestry of the valley floor lay exposed, and with it, the terrifying, methodical advance of her enemies.

She was not running from her past; she was preparing for a future she knew, inch by bloody inch. She knew the sequence of the Kingdom of Bohemia’s retribution: first came the surveillance, a lazy, arrogant sweep by the local nobility, the Bright family, confident that a few unguided village children could never truly escape their gravitational pull. She could already sense their presence—not with magic, for she was careful to keep her Void Core silent, but with the subtle, unnatural sounds of metal on stone, the distant, clumsy shouts of low-level guards establishing their perimeter in the lower foothills. They were closing the net, ticking the box: Ensure the failures remain on the property.

But that was merely the prelude. The true horror, the one that chilled her blood, was the arrival of the hunter mages. Sent unofficially by the Royal Academy, these highly trained assassins would arrive within the week. Their mission would be to eliminate any child who took a Zero-Level Skill, a final, ruthless measure to destroy all evidence of the school’s fraud and prevent the power of an SSS-Rank skill from falling into uncontrolled hands. The system could tolerate a failed experiment, but not a hostile anomaly.

I have four days, maybe five, Rina calculated, her hands moving with frantic precision as she hammered one of her climbing spikes into a crevice. The fate of her second life depended on two things: making herself absolutely untraceable and ensuring Edam’s survival on his deadly errand.

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The River of Thirst

Her mind was a constant, agonizing loop of worry for the demonkin. She had sent him to the most dangerous place in the district, a dried-up riverbed known only to the desperate and the dead, a place now choked with the beautiful, lethal flora she sought: the Desert Death mushrooms.

She remembered the area from her previous life—a cracked, sun-baked chasm in the earth where the river used to flow. It was a hellscape perfectly suited to the mushrooms’ horrific biological purpose. These spores were an evolutionary masterpiece, a demonic-continent fungus that thrived on drought and extreme heat. The greater the dryness, the more violently and perfectly hydroscopic their spores became. They were nature’s ultimate hoarders, sucking every molecule of moisture from the air, the soil, and, fatally, any living thing that touched them. The slightest brush with their velvety caps would unleash a cloud of spores that could drain a man of his entire bodily fluid—flesh, blood, and marrow—in minutes, leaving behind only a brittle, desiccated corpse.

The entire riverbed is a weapon, she thought, the sheer scale of the danger making her breath catch.

Yet, this garden of ultimate thirst was the only hope for her water independence. If the mushrooms were mature—a process hastened by the punishing drought—they would have naturally generated a Water Source Bead within their body. This bead, a flawless, fist-sized crystal, possessed the capacity to purify and generate an endless supply of clean water. It was a treasure that guaranteed survival against both the arid climate and the coming flood.

She had given Edam the instructions: Pluck only with a long stick. Immediately place into a sealed clay pot. Retreat at the smallest hint of thirst. It was a surgical protocol for a task that demanded utter, uncompromising focus, and he was taking along Ria, the naive classmate who was prone to distraction. The fear was a cold stone in her gut, but the prize was non-negotiable.

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The Coming Deluge

The threat of the mushroom’s spores was immediate and localized, but there was a far greater, world-shaking danger that only Rina knew was rushing toward them: The Catastrophic Flood.

It had happened ten years ago in her past life, a tragedy of biblical proportions dismissed by the capital as a regional weather anomaly. A sudden, weeks-long downpour had overflowed the rudimentary dikes and dams, flooding the entire Bright region and crippling vast swathes of Bohemia. She remembered the chaos, the mass drownings, the bodies floating down the swollen current.

And she knew that the drought, which had driven the Desert Death to such terrifying maturity, was the precursor to the deluge. Nature was balancing its own cruel accounts.

I need the mushrooms for the flood, she realized, the second, strategic use of the fungus becoming clear.

If the mushrooms were the perfect water absorber, they could be turned into a tool against the water. She could harvest a vast, controlled quantity and bury them at key points on the mountain and around Edam's low-lying home. When the storm broke, these hydroscopic sponges would drink the floodwaters, slowing the inevitable torrent, reducing the devastation, and perhaps saving the few people she was determined to keep alive.

It was a staggering, two-part gamble: Edam had to survive the dehydration to get the Water Source Bead, and the mushrooms, in bulk, had to be harvested to combat the coming drowning.

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The Void and the Blade’s Growth

The sun crested the mountain, beating down on her hideout, and Rina forced herself to concentrate on the only thing she could control: her power.

She had to make the [Inch Blade] grow. It was still at a pathetic 1.9 inches—a scalpel, not a sword. Against the magic-wielding hunters who would be seeking her out, the blade would be useless unless she could make it longer, stronger, and faster.

She took a massive block of lime rock she had cleaved from the quarry face and, with the tiny, shimmering edge of her blade, began a meticulous process. She wasn't just cutting the stone; she was using the edge to carve runic arrays—not for magic, but for structural integrity. She was cutting the stone into perfectly interlocked blocks, preparing for the construction of a small, hidden cistern for the water bead.

Mana transfer is slow, Rina lamented internally, feeling the near-imperceptible pull of ambient mana into her Void Core with each slice. The rock was not a strong source. She needed to cut denser, more difficult material.

She looked at her newly woven Elephant Rope. It was strong, but cutting it with the Inch Blade felt like a monumental effort, the demonic fibers resisting the clean slice.

She positioned the blade against a fiber, pushed her will into the Void, and cut.

The resulting sound was a high-pitched, almost musical ping. The fiber severed instantly, but the Void Core registered a massive, instantaneous influx of mana—a shocking amount of power released by the complete severance of the magically resilient material. The Inch Blade shimmered, jumping in length from 1.9 to 2.2 inches—a growth rate she hadn’t seen since the initial burst of the Awakening.

Elephant Rope is my grindstone, she realized, a fierce, cold smile crossing her face. The very resource Edam had created was the key to unlocking her own ultimate weapon. She could sacrifice a small amount of the rope, using it not for construction, but as a catalyst for her blade's growth. The more resistant the material she annihilated, the faster her power grew.

She began to meticulously slice the rope fibers into dust, one tiny piece at a time, each cut a deliberate act of magical larceny, feeding her Void Core. She was transforming Edam's production into her own ultimate protection.

The distant sounds of the Bright family’s search party were now closer, the faint echo of a command spell carried on the wind. The hunters were coming, the flood was looming, and Edam was currently engaged in a silent war of nerves against a thousand dehydrated deaths. Rina’s war was one of preparation, and she had just found the secret to her survival. The fate of the entire region rested on the survival of a magically null demonkin and the growth of her two-inch blade.