Chapter 6. The First Rules

I had been walking since the pale dawn, and I walked for a long time.

Gradually, the trees thinned. The black trunks drew apart, and patches of tawny ground began to show through the unbroken moss beneath my feet. I noticed that I was not tiring the way the old me would have. My legs carried me steadily, my breathing remained even, and the foreign strength still hummed throughout my body.

I was no longer afraid of it.

I was beginning to learn its balance, the way you adjust to an unfamiliar tool: heavy, strange, but apparently functional. If I intended to survive, I needed to understand exactly what this body could do.

The process felt familiar. In truth, it was almost a rescue—a return to the thing I had always done best: observe, test, derive rules. At home, when something broke, I did not panic. I sat down and separated the failure into its parts.

Here, there was nothing left to break. Everything had been broken from the beginning, starting with the fact that I was here at all. But the habit remained. I clung to it like a man in deep water clinging to a log, because it was the only thing keeping me afloat.

The grief had not gone anywhere. It traveled with me as a steady, cold weight at the bottom of my mind, the same weight that had hardened into rage during the night. Now, at least, it had work to do. Every step was a step toward them, even though I had no idea which direction toward them might be.

For the moment, that was enough to keep me moving.

First, I learned how to summon the lines of light.

I had already realized they did not appear entirely on their own. The first time, above the scavenger, fear had called them forth. I had fixed my whole attention on the enemy and needed desperately to understand what it was.

Now I tried to recreate that need deliberately. I focused on an object and reached toward it with my attention, holding the same silent question in my mind.

What are you?

Symbols appeared above the object.

I directed the question at a bush with dark berries beside the path.

Shadowberry · Harmless · Bitter

Then at another bush that looked identical to me.

Dazeberry · Poisonous (fruit and leaves)

I stood looking at two shrubs I could not tell apart, one of which would have poisoned me while the other merely tasted bitter. For the first time since the silent white light, I almost laughed. It was a short, dry sound without any amusement in it.

I had been thrown into a world where I could be eaten, poisoned, or crushed—and handed a cheat sheet at the entrance.

I had no idea whether anyone else possessed the same advantage. But the world itself had labeled me an Anomaly and my class Undetermined. Something told me the cheat sheet might have been issued to me alone.

Following another ingrained habit, I began giving it a title, a field, a line in the imaginary table inside my head.

Analysis.

The moment I thought the word clearly, the System seemed to nod. A quick spark flashed at the edge of my vision in confirmation.

Yes. That was its name.

I caught myself maintaining a spreadsheet for the afterlife and understood that this was probably not the healthiest response to insanity. But it worked.

I held on to anything that worked.

Rule One, I told myself: look before you touch. Always.

As I walked, I tested the rule on everything. The water in a stream—the System said it was clean, and I drank, not entirely trusting it but having no alternative. Mushrooms. Heavy insects the size of my fist. A bird with membranous wings that took flight when I approached.

Line by line, the world obediently opened itself to me. From those lines, I assembled my first rough map: what was alive, what was dead, what I could eat, and what wanted to eat me.

Then I grew overconfident.

I found a broad clearing where everything rested beneath the even light at once—grass, insects, quick little burrowing animals, two birds, a tree with a nest.

What if I do all of it at once? I wondered. What if I spread my attention across the entire clearing and ask everything what it is?

So I did.

It felt as though something struck me from behind my eyes.

Lines poured into my vision all at once, dozens and then hundreds, crossing and layering over one another until there was no room left. Cold light flooded everything in a solid, cutting veil. Pain flashed through my temples. I squeezed my eyes shut and dropped to one knee.

Something warm touched my upper lip. I wiped it away and found a small streak of my own red blood. For several seconds, I remained on my hands and knees, waiting for the pressure to recede and muttering curses under my breath.

Strangely, part of me was almost pleased. This pain was comprehensible and human, the fair consequence of doing something foolish.

Rule Two: one thing at a time. This gift was a needle, not a net. It struck a single point. If I tried to gather the entire world at once, it would strike me instead.

I made certain I would remember.

By the middle of the day, I was truly hungry, with a sharp, animal hunger I had never experienced in my former life. When a four-legged, horned creature about the size of a deer emerged from the undergrowth ahead, I did not wait for it to decide which of us was prey.

I directed Analysis at it, calmly now, with a single touch of attention. The creature opened before my perception, and I understood where it was vulnerable.

Then I moved.

It was not like the fight with the scavenger. Back then, my body had led while I clung to it in horror from somewhere inside. This time, I led. I measured my strength, using exactly what was needed and nothing more, and brought the animal down quickly.

There was no thrill in it, but no disgust or sickness either. It was work. The animal grew still, and a courteous notification appeared above it.

Experience Awarded

The System's bookkeeping no longer made me ill. I recorded the fact and moved on. This was how the world worked: defeat something, grow a little stronger. Those were the rules.

And I intended to use every last one of them.

Making camp proved the hardest part. I struggled for an embarrassingly long time before I finally managed a small fire. The meat was tough and tasted faintly of stagnant water. I ate beneath two rising moons in the foreign twilight and remembered how recently Mira and I had shared a single cup of coffee every morning, passing it from hand to hand.

I did not push the thought away. I set it beside the cold weight at the bottom of me, where I kept everything for whose sake I was willing to become anything at all.

On the third day—I was counting the days now; that, too, had become a rule, a small human thing worth holding on to so I would not lose track of myself—the path brought me to the top of a long, gentle hill.

There I learned whether I was capable of caution.

Far below, in a hollow, something moved.

Something large.

I could not make it out clearly, only a shadow between the trunks and the shudder that passed through the treetops with each of its steps. Out of habit, I directed Analysis toward it.

For the first time, the System, always so helpful, refused me.

No name appeared above the shadow. No level. Only three cold symbols that sent a chill across my shoulders.

???

Very quietly, I withdrew behind the crest of the hill. Then I took the other route in a wide arc and kept walking until the hollow lay far behind me.

Rule Three, and perhaps the most important: when the cheat sheet had nothing to say, run. Anything I could not read might read me perfectly well.

Later, while changing the bandage during a rest, I noticed something I had overlooked in my haste. The three claw marks on my forearm, still raw the day before, had closed. They had not merely dried; new pink skin covered them, the way an ordinary wound might heal in a week rather than three days.

I studied the marks without knowing whether to be pleased. The body I had been given repaired itself quickly and without complaint, just as it seemed to handle every other demand placed upon it.

Another line in the table.

Another way in which I was not like other people.

Half a day later, from the top of another rise, I finally saw it.

At first, it was only a thin gray thread rising above the distant forest and dissolving into the pearlescent sky.

Smoke.

Not the wild smoke of a forest fire. A steady, domestic ribbon from a chimney.

I walked farther. The trees parted, and beneath the smoke appeared rooftops, a palisade, and dark patches of cultivated fields.

People.

I stood on the slope and watched that gray thread longer than I should have, just as I had watched Mira sleeping on my last morning. Somewhere below were living, speaking people, people like the man I had once been. There would be answers. At the very least, there would be a beginning to the long road that ended at home.

I started down the hill toward the smoke.