2026-09-13 23:10:14After finishing his meal and letting himself rest a while, Nathan stood in front of his tool collection, weighing his options.
The chainsaw and the electric handsaw were both dead, and there was nowhere out here to charge either one. He hadn't stumbled across any other useful gear yet, so it looked like he was going old-school.
He grabbed a sturdy camping hatchet and a long-handled splitting axe while he was at it, the extra leverage would save some energy.
"Hope this actually gets me somewhere."
His right hand, wrapped in the green wristguard, tightened around the axe handle. That familiar rush of strength surged through his arm again.
Back at the tree line, Nathan found a decent trunk and swung. The blade bit in, and he noticed the difference immediately. Way less resistance than before.
Thunk.
Wood chips flew.
Not as satisfying as the raw power of the chainsaw, but with the wristguard's Lumberjack's Proficiency kicking in, every swing landed with solid, efficient force. He was making real progress.
He kept at it until the light started fading and the wind began to pick up. Only then did he drag his haul back to camp.
Seven trees total.
Not exactly record-breaking, but for pure manual labor, not bad at all.
Nathan pulled the logs into the Core's radius and, out of habit, selected Recycle.
"Equipment Effect Triggered: Resource Yield Increased! Obtained: Common Wood x42"
"Wait, what?"
Nathan blinked at the number that popped up.
Seven trees. Forty-two units.
That meant each tree was worth six wood now. Before, it had been five.
"So the wristguard's efficiency bonus doesn't just help me cut faster, it also bumps the recycle yield by twenty percent?"
A bonus he hadn't even considered.
It meant that for the same amount of work, he was pulling in a fifth more than anyone else out here. In a world this stingy, that kind of edge was the difference between scraping by and actually getting ahead.
"Okay, yeah. This thing's a keeper."
Nathan grinned and patted the wristguard fondly. Forget legendary gear, this uncommon piece was already pulling its weight.
"If a basic item does this much," he muttered, "what would a full set do? Or something rarer?"
The thought alone was enough to keep him motivated.
Night rolled in fast, swallowing the flats whole.
The sky overhead wasn't completely dark, though. Faint hairline cracks of pale light drifted across it, the same color as the Core's glow, weaving slowly through clusters of stars like veins under skin. It was strangely beautiful, in a way that felt wrong to admit.
If it weren't for the heat that could still kill a person in hours after dark, this might have passed for prime camping scenery.
Nathan sat at his new wooden table, firelight flickering beside him and stretching his shadow long across the packed earth.
Dinner tonight was going to be a feast.
In front of him sat the still-steaming Beef Stew MRE. On the grill rack over the Core, a slab of raw meat he'd traded for yesterday sizzled and spat.
Sszzz.
Fat dripped onto the glowing stone, sending up little puffs of smoke that smelled like heaven.
Nathan carefully tore open the sauce packet from the MRE and squeezed a bit of the gravy over the roasting meat.
No salt. No seasoning. That little packet was all he had.
A few minutes later, the rich smell of cooked meat filled the small camp.
He took a bite. Crisp on the outside, tender inside, flavor blooming across his tongue.
"Not bad," he mumbled around the mouthful.
The meat was firm but not tough, probably some kind of desert herbivore. None of that flat, grain-fed taste he remembered from back home.
A spoonful of rice, a bite of roasted meat, washed down with half a canteen of water.
Nathan allowed himself a small, satisfied smile. If he posted about this meal in the global channel, he'd probably get roasted by everyone still choking down hardtack and lukewarm water.
Full and content, he checked his inventory.
After accounting for what he'd eaten and adding today's haul, he still had over ninety units of wood.
Enough for a little splurging.
"Alright. Outhouse. Non-negotiable. Done living like an animal."
Nathan walked back to the Core, pulled up the building menu, and selected the Outhouse he'd been eyeing all day.
"Confirm Construction? Cost: Wood x30, Stone x20, Iron Scrap x5"
"Confirm."
The resources vanished from his inventory. A soft white glow flickered at the edge of camp.
A few seconds later, a neat little wooden structure rose up out of the ground.
Smaller than his main shelter, but the craftsmanship was noticeably better. There was even a small frosted window set into one wall.
Nathan practically jogged over and pushed the door open.
"Whoa."
Even with some expectations, he was genuinely caught off guard.
The floor wasn't packed dirt, it was smooth gray stone tile, laid clean and even. In the corner sat what looked like a proper ceramic toilet. A little old-fashioned, sure, but honestly not far off from the real thing.
What really got him, though, was the other side of the room. A glass-walled shower stall. Inside, a simple steel showerhead. Next to it, a small sink with a mirror.
Nathan hurried over and twisted the faucet.
One second. Two seconds.
Nothing.
Not a single drop. Let alone hot water.
"System Notice: No Water Source Detected. Construct and connect a Camp Water Storage and Heating System first. Materials Required: Iron Scrap x5, Sealant (or Resin x10) Daily Operation Cost: Wood x1 per day (prevents tank freeze and provides hot water)"
The smile slid right off his face.
"You have got to be kidding me."
To be continued.
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Chapter 25 The Long Walk Back
Nathan stayed at Priya's camp only one night, long enough to trade what supplies he could spare and agree on a way to reach each other that didn't run through the public channel at all, a private code they worked out together by firelight, nothing written down anywhere the interface could read or record.He left at first light, the cart lighter now, pulling toward home instead of away from it, the wheels somehow feeling less like a burden on the way back.The walk felt different than the walk out had. Not shorter. Not easier, exactly. But less lonely, somehow, even with nobody actually walking beside him, the simple knowledge that Priya's Core was still burning somewhere behind him enough to change how the silence around him felt on the long stretches between landmarks.The cart handled better empty than it had loaded, the wheels catching less against the loose stone near the hills, and Nathan found himself thinking, somewhere in the second day of walking, that he'd need to build a se
Chapter 24 Two Architects
The survivor's name was Priya, though she didn't offer it right away, and her camp was smaller than Nathan's, a single reinforced tent rather than a cabin, no workshop, no water system, just a Core burning steady at what looked like Level 1 by the size of its glow.She kept the hatchet in her hand the whole time they talked, resting across her knees where she could grab it fast, and Nathan didn't blame her for it, not after everything he'd already been through himself."You said a symbol," she said, once he'd explained enough about the walk out to earn a seat by her small fire. "Circle, three lines through it.""You've seen it."She didn't answer directly at first. Instead she reached into a bag by her feet and pulled out a small carved token, worn smooth like she'd been turning it over in her hands for days without meaning to. The same mark was etched into its surface, catching the firelight when she held it up between them."Found it in a crate two weeks ago," she said. "Thought it
Chapter 23 The Light That Wasn't His
The cart made the difference. Two days later, moving slower but steadier than his first failed attempt, Nathan reached the first mark on the map with water to spare and legs that still worked properly underneath him, sore but reliable.What he found there wasn't a camp. It was the memory of one.A ring of scorched earth, wide and deliberate, marked where a Core had once stood. No structure remained. No fence, no cabin, not even the scattered debris a raid usually left behind according to everything he'd read in the channel about attacks on other survivors. Just a circle of ground darker than everything around it, like something had burned there once and never quite recovered its color.Nathan stood at the edge of it for a long time, unwilling to step inside, the cart's wheels quiet now that he'd finally stopped pulling it.He didn't need the interface to tell him what this was. He already knew, in the same cold, certain way he'd known when he read RUSTLINE's blank status for the first
Chapter 22 What the Workshop Couldn't Fix
The first mark on the map sat a day and a half out, according to Nathan's rough math, further than he'd ever pushed himself since arriving in the Shattered Flats.He made it four hours before the heat forced him to stop and rethink everything, sitting hunched in whatever thin shade a cluster of dead rock could offer, sweat already soaking through his collar despite the thermal layer's supposed resistance.It wasn't the walking itself. His body had adjusted to that weeks ago, the ache in his legs now familiar rather than crippling. It was the water. He'd packed enough for a day trip in his head, not a proper two day crossing, and the math didn't work no matter how many times he ran it, checking his inventory count against the distance still left on the map.He turned back before he'd covered a third of the distance, frustration sitting heavy in his chest the whole way home, every step back feeling like a small defeat layered on top of the larger one he hadn't figured out how to solve y
Chapter 21 Eleven
Nathan didn't sleep after the Warden left. He sat by the Core until the sky turned from black to the same tired gray it always did, turning the choice over in his head without landing anywhere solid.Wait, and hope his own light didn't go out next. Or move, and risk everything he'd built to find people he'd never met, who might not even want to be found.He thought about Priya's map fragment, still folded in his inventory, and about the ruins he'd walked away from without ever finding out what happened to whoever left that second set of handwriting behind. J.M.R. had stood in that room once. Maybe they still stood somewhere, waiting for someone to come looking.He pulled the fragment out and laid it flat on the table next to the journal, smoothing the creases with the side of his hand. Most of the marks on it still meant nothing to him, scattered points with no obvious pattern. But two of them sat close enough together that they could plausibly be the same day's walk, maybe a day and
Chapter 20 The Gatekeeper
Three days after the vision, Nathan barely slept at all, running through the journal's hidden layers night after night, hunting for anything he might have possibly missed the first dozen times through its pages.He found nothing new no matter how carefully he searched. Whatever had shown him that map clearly wasn't in a hurry to explain itself any further than it already had.On the fourth night, something finally changed.Nathan was checking the pagar's northern section, the same routine he'd kept up religiously every single evening since the Dome failure, when a figure appeared at the boundary line, not shadow this time, but solid, wrapped in a long gray cloak that seemed to drink in the last of the fading daylight around it entirely.It didn't attack. It didn't move at all, in fact. It simply stood there, waiting patiently, as though it had known exactly when he would come to check that particular stretch of fence tonight."Structure detected: Boundary Warden. Not classified as hos
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