Kaelen was almost frozen as he sat on the piece of board.
'What is happening?'
He had never heard of something like this. Never was it mentioned in the book. How come the trial had not ended despite accomplishing the objective of the trial unless...
"The trial has not ended."
He fell back on the raft and groaned.
"...From earth to sea"
The feeling of the flowing sea was an uncomfortable shift from the flat ground he at least had to walk on. He had been on boats before, so the seasickness was not as bad as it could have been, but the fact that the only thing separating him from the depths was a piece of wood.
The sky here was the same as the one in the Earth region. It had a source of light somewhere out there acting like a sun, and he felt that it would have the lightless night too.
And unfortunately for him, he again had no food, no weapon, but at least there was water everywhere. If it was even drinkable.
But there was something else too...
"Let's focus on the good things..."
He felt his skin that now had the texture of stone and the hardness of one. Not only that, but his wounds had repaired, and his bones felt heavy too, as if they were made from stone too.
'This must be the effect of absorbing that brown mist..."
At least his body was in good condition, and then there was a light bulb that went off.
"I got my first memory!"
He quickly summoned the runes, hoping for something cool, a weapon? armor? But what he found was almost underwhelming. Almost
Memory: [Hunter's Mark]
Memory Rank: Awakened
Memory Tier: II
Memory Type: Charm
"...A charm!" Kaelen was ecstatic; charms were often more useful than weapons in many cases, and maybe this one would help him survive this trial too...
Memory Description: [When it came and took the king, it cursed us as his subjects... He watched his soldiers descend into madness. He could not bear it, and so he killed them. He killed as many as he could before succumbing himself; his accuracy ended their pain, and his fast...]
'That's a long-ass description...'
He had a general idea of its enchantments even though he could not see it. The name and the word 'accuracy' in the description made it clear enough.
He summoned the charm, and instead of appearing in his opened hand, it was on his forehead. A beautiful stone that had various shades of brown. Not that he could see that.
The only problem was the moment he equipped the charm, he became aware of something.
He stared into the blue water and braced himself as the thing slammed into the boat's edge.
It wasn't a wave. It was a physical strike from below.
There was an almost brown dot that appeared in his mind that was showing him the location.
He peered into the water and saw it once it got close to the surface.
Kaelen's eyes snapped open, his fingers digging into the wood.
Something is here.
A silver flash cut through It was fast—impossibly fast.
"Is that an eel?"
It was nearly 2 meters long, its body a whip of corded muscle and metallic scales that shimmered like polished mercury. It didn't have eyes; it had a row of heat-sensing pits along its snout and a jaw that unhinged to reveal volleys of needle-thin, inward-curving teeth.
The eel circled the board, its dorsal fin cutting the surface like a razor. Then, it struck again.
CRACK.
The creature slammed its heavy head into the side of the board. The wood splintered, a jagged chunk of the corner breaking off and drifting away. Kaelen nearly slid into the water, his heart leaping into his throat.
'You're weaker than the last thing I killed.'
The eel dived down, preparing to jump back, preparing for a breach, and to bring him into the water.
The eel started to swim up with an impossible speed compared to the creatures of earth, preparing for a breach that would snap the board in half.
"Come on then," he smiled.
As the shadow below surged upward, Kaelen lunged towards the end that he saw the brown dot approaching.
Crash!
His weight pressed down on the board, which prevented it from flipping over and caused the eel to break through the wood, and in that moment, Kaelen outstretched his hand.
He gripped the body of the eel and slammed it on the raft's floorboard.
It thrashed trying to get into the water, but Kaelen had already found his meal. He grabbed the top half of its jaw and then the bottom half and pulled.
'Let's hope you aren't toxic.'
[You have slain a Dormant Monster: Sliver-Back Eel.]
He just sat there for a few seconds soaking in the new reality. The cold was definitely more present than the earth region even in the night, but he could take it. The lack of shelter, though, would be a problem...
But there was a light. The fact that he was just attacked by a dormant creature meant that there was nothing in here above the awakened rank. Just like the other place
Still, that didn't help his mood improve because the question kept popping into his mind.
"How many trials am I going to complete before this nightmare ends..."
He had a number in his mind, but he hoped he was wrong.
He laid back down and thought about what to do. more precisely what he could do, and soon enough half a day had passed since he came here.
He had tested his body's capabilities by now, and he was quite fond of the new developments. The addition of stone to his composition had increased his strength by a large margin as well as his durability.
He sat up and looked at the corpse.
He hoped one of 2 things was going to happen. Either the meat of the eel was not toxic, or whatever had happened to his body changed his stomach to
He looked at the eel. He had no fire, no knife, and his basalt spear was a memory at the bottom of a different world.
With a grunt of pain, he leaned forward and used his fingernails—now hard—to peel back the scales and skin. The flesh beneath was white and pale, smelling of salt and something sharply metallic.
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He tore a strip of the raw, cold meat away with his teeth.
It was tough and rubbery, sending a jolt of ice through his gums. It tasted like pure brine and raw electricity.
He ate until his jaw ached and the nausea was a physical weight in his throat. Then, he reached into the creature's open wound, his fingers brushing against the cold, hard lump of its soul. He pulled out the shards.
"Nice," Kaelen choked, trying to keep the 'food' down.
He crushed one and kept the other.
Afterwards he took the spine of the fish—'Weapon acquired.'
Now he just needed to test the waters, literally.
He looked over the edge of the board. The water of the Hollow Sea was there, blue, and looked more like it had held more than a few more Nightmare Creatures than anything that wanted to help him.
On Earth, drinking seawater was a death sentence. But Kaelen wasn't on Earth, and he wasn't entirely human anymore either.
He cupped his hands, scooping up the water.
"If this kills me," he whispered to the empty horizon, "at least I'll die hydrated."
He brought the water to his lips and drank.
'Ahh, actual water!'
Thankfully it was not as disgusting as the water sacs, nor was it salty.
He lay back on the board, his eyes staring up at the featureless blue sky.
As the flowing water carried him and the plank forward, he woke up as he felt the [Hunters Mark] sense multiple figures, all marked as brown spots.
His eyes widened as they landed on the sight in front of him. There were numerous planks and even small boats that were all crashed together and floated on the water. There was an eerie white fog that was touching the planks and wood.
But through the fog he saw figures.
They looked like humans, but only in the way a corpse looks like a human.
Their skin was the color of drowned parchment, stretched tight over ribs that threatened to puncture through. Their eyes were wide, milky spheres devoid of reason, and their teeth had been filed down to jagged points by gnawing on bone and wood.
'Could these be the ones who failed the trial...?'
No, it wasn't. He felt that they weren't
It was an intuition paired with some physical clues too. If they were a part of the trial, they would have needed to kill the [Broken Behemoth], and they would most likely get the stone composition that he did, but their flesh was rotting.
He moved in close and hopped onto the plank while taking his plank on top of the rest and started to walk over to the creatures.
They looked like zombies, honestly, and not the dangerous kind; these ones were slow and almost...pitiful.
They moved towards him, and he wielded the thin spike of spine as they approached.
'Yeah... no.' He picked up one of the wooden boards from the ground and broke it.
He held the now broken plank looking like a floorboard.
The first madman reached the board, his fingers—nails long and black with rot—digging into the wood. Kaelen didn't hesitate. He drove the oak stake through the man's throat. There was no red blood, only a spray of black, seawater-like ichor.
[You have slain a Dormant Beast: Forsaken.]
But there was no time to breathe. Three more were on him. One grabbed his wounded leg, his teeth sinking into the calf. Kaelen stomped his other leg down and crushed the thing's skull again and again until there was only a wet sludge beneath his feet.
[You have slain a Dormant Beast: Forsaken.]
He swung the board again.
As he struck down another Forsaken, he felt a surge of cold strength. It was an odd sense of joy, not the destruction of the nightmare creature but a harvest.
He fought for hours in that wreckage. He had picked up another broken board as a shield and kept his plank. He was covered in the black, rotten blood of the madmen; his shirt was torn now too, and not just his hoodie that he left back in his cave.
There was no life there anymore aside from himself.
34 more of the forsaken were killed, and he sat down on the wood now.
Kaelen sat in the center of the carnage, his chest heaving, the oak stake dripping with black fluid.
'I need to harvest the shards.'
He looked at his hands. They were trembling, but not from fear. They were trembling with a dark, cold hunger. He looked at the bodies of the humans he had just killed. He knew he needed to eat. He knew the eel meat was finished.
The survival instinct of his was turning out to be a bit of a menace.
Kaelen stared at the remains of the Forsaken.
"No," he hissed, the word catching in his throat. "I won't eat human."
He woke—"But your shards are something I will take.
He moved and harvested all the shards and crushed them all, keeping only one for light.
Kaelen found a relatively stable section of an old deck—a platform of thick wooden planks wedged between two upright masts. It was far above the water in the case of any waves. He dragged his tired body onto the wood, his fingers bleeding as he gripped the barnacle-encrusted surface.
The "evening" brought no color, only a deepening of an oppressive gray. The fog thickened until he couldn't see the water around him; only the ghostly masts of the ships remained, reaching up like the fingers of drowning men.
He lay on his back, his head resting on some wood.
The hunger would not consume him for a few days, but that was it.
Kaelen went to sleep. Tomorrow's problem will wait till tomorrow.