Lord of the Myriad Worlds

Chapter 202: Digging a Well

Dawn was barely a suggestion in the sky.

George rolled upright and bolted to the rooftop, working the dew collector with quick hands.

Not a breath of wind — and the temperature swing between night and day was at its widest just before sunrise, which made this the prime window for collection. Wait even a little while, let the sun rise and the breeze pick up, and there would be nothing left to collect.

Not bad — nearly six hundred milliliters today. The air's moisture content was climbing. Rain in the next few days, perhaps?

The thought crossed his mind, and he divided the water into thirds: his share went straight down his throat. He was parched. Last night's roasted rat meat had been too salty.

He brought the rest down to the fourth floor. Li Yue accepted her portion and used it to rinse her mouth. Liang Yuzhi put hers in a small bottle but made no move to drink it — she had plenty of cleaner One-Star drinking water in her own supplies, and had no reason to suffer unnecessarily. Besides, she'd wait to see whether George showed any signs of stomach trouble first.

No one cooked breakfast again that morning.

Liang Yuzhi's night watch ended and she went to the fourth floor to sleep. George and Li Yue each paid her 5 Contribution.

Then Li Yue headed out on her own, resuming the task of hauling concrete blocks — apparently planning to build a perimeter wall around the building. She probably also had her eye on continue farming mutant rats, as long as she stayed away from the town center and kept alert to anything from underground, that should be manageable enough.

Last evening's thunderous hammering had barely stirred the Four-Star Rat King. That gave Li Yue ideas.She didn't have many other options, honestly.

George's Contribution was climbing fast. Without taking some unconventional approach, how was she supposed to close the gap? Claiming Head of Household at month's end was her only path to a future in this mission — and she needed to want it enough to work for it.

Besides, from the looks of George, he was planning to build a brick kiln and fire pottery — useful, but slow. That gave her the opening to push ahead.

Eight hundred Contribution cap was already reached. Even if she earned too much and it overflowed — that was George's problem to solve, not hers.

'This little sister is also a schemer.'

George could read Li Yue's thinking at a glance. He didn't mind. He went about his own work in the steady, methodical order he'd decided on.

The clay from yesterday's digging had spent the night drying out on the surface, though it was still workable in the interior. George carried it up to the fifth floor, found a flat and out-of-the-way corner, and started shaping it by hand — thick-walled water jars, roughly two centimeters in each wall, ugly but functional. When the clay needed moisture, he used a small amount of drinking water to keep it workable.

He produced five jars and set them aside for slow air-drying. Based on experience from the Rookie Mission, this type of thick-walled storage vessel needed at least twenty days of gradual air-drying before it was ready for the kiln. Better to start them early and get on with other things.

With that done, he headed back out, this time toward the highway rift he'd visited yesterday. Today wasn't just about clay — he needed water.

He'd noticed yesterday that the soil at the bottom of the rift was thoroughly saturated. Dig deeper, and there would be groundwater.

As it turned out, he only had to go down a little under three meters — roughly eight meters below street level — before murky groundwater began seeping through.

But that wasn't enough yet. He needed to go deeper.

Proper safety precautions first.

He climbed out, gathered stones from the surrounding area, dropped them down in a ring around the wet soil to form a low retaining wall, acting as protection against cave-in. Then, working a section at a time, he dug downward and kicked the stone ring deeper using the soft mud as anchor, pressing it down and packing it. He kept adding new stones to the ring and repeating the cycle.

At points, he had no choice but to strip off his boots and jacket and use his shovel to fling the saturated mud upward out of the hole.

Throughout all of this, he kept his ears alert to every sound around him, with his dagger clenched between his teeth — so that if something went wrong while he was inside the well shaft, he'd at least have a fighting chance.

Beyond that, he forced himself to stop and rest every so often, climb out, and scan his surroundings before going back in.

Progress slow — safety first.

From mid-morning to dusk, George finally had a well shaft approximately twelve meters deep. The rift had provided a head start of six or seven meters, without which throwing the mud out as he dug would have been physically impossible.

Now it was a matter of waiting for the silt to settle and the water to clear.

He sat on the roadside edge and carefully wiped his feet with his jacket, then spent a small amount of clean water flushing the grit from between his toes.

Not vanity. His face could stay filthy. But hands and feet stayed clean.

In close combat, those were the least predictable variables. He'd learned that the hard way.

By the time he was done, his already-dirty clothes were indistinguishable from a mud sculpture — but his hands and feet were clean and dry.

He pulled on the cowhide boots again and let out a long, satisfied sigh he hadn't been able to stop.

He'd thought those boots were a somewhat mediocre reward when he first got them.

But until you'd walked all day through rough terrain, or put in a long day of heavy labor, you couldn't really appreciate what it meant for a piece of footwear to be genuinely comfortable.

There were no words for it. You just knew.

Right — boots didn't owe you good looks, high defense ratings, or special traits. Comfortable, sturdy, and durable. That was enough.

'Deerhide gloves someday might be nice,' he thought, glancing at Li Yue's pair with mild envy.

He rested a bit longer, ate something, drank some water, waited for his Stamina to recover to 180 — and then rose and began the walk back under the last light of evening. Unhurried, breath controlled and even. At this pace, Stamina didn't drain — it gradually recharged.

The night wind came up, bringing with it the calls of unseen birds. At some point during the walk back, three dark shapes had appeared on the road behind him — a hundred meters or so back.

In the fading light, they moved in low predatory bursts — crouching, then springing, making almost no sound at all.

As nightfall thickened and normal eyes would have started failing beyond thirty meters, they spread out and began closing in on George from three sides.

George walked on as if he noticed nothing. He even started humming — badly off-key. All right, yes, he was a little on edge. Self-reassurance. Singing out of tune wasn't a crime.

A gust of wind, and the shadows struck — left, right, and a flanker from behind. Tactical, actually.

George burst forward without warning, covering ten meters in one sprint — leaving the two flankers nearly colliding with each other.

He didn't counterattack. He stopped and turned, looking back.

People.

Three of them.

Or rather — Ability Users. The two who had come from his left and right had long, sharp bone blades growing from their hands; flesh-pads on their palms and feet — like a cat's — which was how they'd moved without any sound. Estimated Agility around 15, possibly as high as 18.

Combined with the bone blades, that made them genuinely lethal hunters against a normal human target.

"Friend," George said, with a look of sincere openness. "Before you do anything — can we talk?"

He hadn't quite finished the sentence when the third figure at the back let out a low, guttural sound. The lower half of its body ballooned outward, skin hardening into dense chitinous plates, a single horn erupting from its forehead — and then it charged, exactly like an enraged bull.

At the same moment, the two Bone-Claw types came at him again, left and right.

George's response was to turn around and run.

He kept running for two or three hundred meters before stopping. The Bull-type Ability User was already heaving on the ground, hyperventilating, foaming at the mouth, convulsing like a punctured balloon — the cost of an incompletely integrated power backlashing through its own host body.

The two Bone-Claws hadn't shifted. But they also didn't dare press forward. When George walked toward them, they both stepped back.

"Friends, we have no hostile intent."

One of the Bone-Claw types finally spoke — in a gurgling, layered language that George's system translated in real time.

'No intent?' After launching an ambush, that's what you call 'no intent'?'

He believed nothing of it — but he kept that to himself, keeping his expression pleasant. "In that case, I think there may be a misunderstanding between us. Why don't you tell me what this is about?"

The Bone-Claw regarded him for a moment and then pointed one bladed hand toward the ruined town a few hundred meters away. "You have occupied our hunting grounds. We have always come here to hunt mutant rats. Since you arrived, you've enraged the Rat God and broken the balance. You outsiders!"

George nearly asked the translation system to run the line again. 'Rat God. Broken the balance. Outsiders.' He needed a moment to process that combination of words.

Then his eyes went to the Bone-Claws again. Something clicked.

Without making any fuss about it, he reached into his pack and pulled out the leftover rat jerky from last night, and tossed it across.

The Bone-Claw caught it in a movement so fast that George watched the pupils dilate and track — extraordinary dynamic vision.

But instead of eating it, the Bone-Claw crossed to the convulsing Bull-type and forced the jerky into its mouth.

'Ah.' Extreme hunger triggering power backlash — and maintaining the powers demanded enormous caloric intake.

That rang familiar.

George immediately took out the rest of his rat jerky and threw it over too. The two Bone-Claw types still didn't eat — they continued feeding it all to the Bull-type.

Just as he'd suspected: with enough food to settle the immediate deficit, the Bull-type stopped convulsing and gradually came back to itself.

But then all three went quiet again and seemed to be reconsidering a second round.

These weren't great thinkers.

George immediately put both hands up: "We can cooperate. We can trade. I can supply this kind of dried meat to you — on the condition that you—"

"That is our hunting ground!" The first Bone-Claw cut him off with surging anger, a rumbling growl starting in its throat.

The second Bone-Claw moved quickly, rubbing a palm across the first one's back to calm it down.

"Friend, I understand what you're saying. But we have nothing to offer in return. That hunting ground is the only one we have — it was a territory arrangement we had with the Rat God. So I'm sorry, but: either you leave, or we take the hunting ground back by force. Choose."