The first few hours were relatively easy. You know, if you consider wallowing in filth and existential dread easy.
The options were clear: faceplant into the mud and hope for the sweet release of death, or drag myself through this mess and try not to die horribly.
The real problem began when thirst made its stellar appearance.
At first, I thought I'd die of dehydration, but after examining the cave, I found a curious little pool tucked in the cave wall, oozing something that looked like water if water had joined a synthwave band.
It was yellow. Neon yellow.
I mean, I don't understand how I didn't notice it before, since the glow it gave off was quite noticeable. Maybe it was fatigue.
Anyway, I approached the puddle and examined it in more detail
The amber liquid had glowing veins, as if some kind of cosmic energy was traversing it. The smell was actually quite nice, compared to the stench of the ground around me.
A crazy, unthinkable thought surged in my little head. A voice I didn't know was there, telling me what you must've guessed by now: to drink the liquid.
Hell no. I wasn't going to drink some weird, probably poisonous beverage that flowed from that shithole.
Nope. No way. Not in a thousand years.
…I thought, as I reached out and scooped up a handful like a man possessed.
It tasted like honey, citrus, and the sweet relief of not dying. I wanted more. Needed more.
I soon found myself burying my face in the puddle, trying to drink every last bit of it.
So naturally, the universe decided to punish me.
My body betrayed me. Muscles tensed and snapped like cables under pressure. I hit the floor, twitching, screaming, and deeply regretting every life decision since birth.
The pain dragged on for hours, wave after wave of muscle-ripping hell, until it finally faded.
By the time night fell, I could almost pretend I hadn’t nearly died.
Damn.
I thought I was going to die, but as the memory of the pain faded, I felt more and more energized. It felt like I’d chugged a hundred Red Bulls, wrestled a god, and somehow lived to flex about it. Pain aside, not bad.
Good. It was time to do something about my miserable situation.
Slowly, I dragged my feet across the wet cave floor, and before leaving, I looked back at the small pool. The neon piss-puddle of life had refilled itself. Sweet. At least my toxic hydration problem was solved. Sure, I should pace myself next time… but hey, if it didn’t kill me the first time, it probably won’t the second. Right?
…Right?
Anyway, little by little, I clawed my way out of that personal pit of hell. The night greeted me with six gigantic moons and a slap of wind so cold it nearly scalped me.
There was no middle ground there. Either the suns roasted you alive, or the moons freeze-dried your soul. Or well, maybe not paralyzing enough to stop my little, delirious brain, as I slowly made my way out of there until I was outside. Lucky me, that afternoon playing video games, which seemed incredibly far away, was cold, so I had put on my cozy, fluffy Pikachu pajamas. So yes, I was now a half-dead teen in Pikachu pajamas, covered in cosmic mud, under six moons.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Try putting that in your system tutorial.
Be it delirium, mental fatigue or the absolute lack of will to live, I tried to breathe deeply and fill my lungs as I closed my eyes. By then, the stench rising from the floor had become part of me. Like trauma. Or a second skin, as it did not make me want to throw up. Instead, something strange happened.
I opened my eyes... and the world had changed.
Tiny lights. Thousands, maybe millions, floated all around me, drifting through the air like weightless fireflies on cosmic drugs.
Shit.
My heart skipped a beat. Was I in the presence of an alien parasite that entered my system through my respiratory tract, so it could incubate a xenomorph that would open my belly from side to side when it hatched? Or maybe a virus that would slowly eat away at my brain?
Shit shit shit shit.
I had to return to the cave and drown myself in the yellow elixir. Maybe it would kill the parasyte?
But as I moved, those tiny lights moved towards me and started going through my body.
I let out the highest-pitched scream my lungs could manage and flailed at them with my bony little arms, like a feral noodle trying to fight stardust.
…but contrary to what I expected, it felt good.
And I don’t mean “a little tingle” good.
I mean “weirdly euphoric full-body cosmic spa treatment” good.
Like if serotonin were a mist... and that mist was aggressively hugging my nervous system.
Or like being gently electrocuted by the universe’s kindest jellyfish.
At some point, I might’ve moaned. I will neither confirm nor deny this.
I fell to my knees, overwhelmed and sparkly.
They just kept coming. Little pinpricks of bliss sliding through my skin, flowing into me like I was some kind of half-dead USB port for space particles.
I should’ve been terrified.
Instead, I just sat there, twitching slightly, trying to decide if this counted as my first alien kiss. I can only hope it did not.
The yellow elixir from before? The effects of it were paled compared to this. I could literally sense the energy flowing in and out of my body, like a river branching out infinitely, reaching every corner of my very existence.
But soon I began to feel overwhelmed. Euphoria turned to dread faster than a free trial turns into a monthly subscription. I had to do something or I'd explode into gory bits.
Clearly, I was becoming an energy bomb. So naturally, I turned to ancient wisdom: webnovels.
As far as I knew, I wasn't in a Murim or Xianxia world, but it was worth getting a little delirious and trying, so I focused on myself and the flow of that invigorating energy.
I tried everything I’d ever read in a cultivation novel: stared into my soul, opened my third eye (still blind), merged with the cosmos… nothing worked. I was a walking energy piñata with no stick.
I could feel the pressure building in my body to the point where my eyes were about to take off toward one of the moons in the sky, until something worked: I managed to mobilize the energy by doing basic exercises.
A squat, a push-up, a short jog.
As I did so, I felt every muscle fiber in my body destroying and regenerating at an abnormal rate, causing a strange mix of pain and pleasure. It was the kind of pain that would make a masochist cry tears of joy. And me? Cry tears of regret.
As the energy settled, I felt stronger. More powerful. All the fatigue that had plagued my small, fragile body was gone, so I tried what any idiot would try in my situation.
I fixed my eyes on my first victim, a rock the size of my head a few feet in front of me.
I approached, making sure it could see and fear me, and stood in front of it. I took a deep breath, raised my arm, and brought it down, like an anime protagonist delivering a righteous friendship punch to the final boss...
BOOM!
It exploded into a thousand pieces.
...That’s what I thought would happen.
Instead, my fingers snapped and broke like soggy wooden chopsticks.
Once again, I unleashed a high-pitched scream so shrill it probably got picked up on interdimensional emergency channels.
Clutching my hand, I dropped to the floor and regretted being so stupid.
What did surprise me was how fast my hand started to heal.
I watched, half horrified, half fascinated, as my fingers snapped back into place, realigned like reverse spaghetti, and the scrapes vanished one by one.
Within a minute, it looked like I’d never even tried to punch that poor rock.
Maybe that little bit of training didn’t give me super strength…
But regeneration? That was definitely a thing now.
Was it the yellow cave juice? The glowing space glitter? The trauma?
I had no fucking idea.
But hey, looked like I’d just found something to pass the time with.
It was training arc time.
Now all I needed was a grumpy old man with a cane and unresolved trauma.
I’d find one eventually.