Chapter 25 (UPDATED)

“What,” Tyler breathed, eyes wide as Caleb helped him unsteadily to his feet, “happened?”

“The System said terraforming, remember?” Chloe said, shaking her head softly. “I guess this is the result.”

Tyler swallowed heavily, looking around as though his brain refused to compute what his eyes saw. “But what about… everything? It looks like we’re still in the middle of the wilderness. Where are the cities? The roads? My apartment?”

“Gone.” Caleb solemnly shook his head. Best to come to terms with it quickly. After falling into a deadly Dungeon, not much was still capable of shaking him. Evidently, that wasn’t the case for Tyler.

Just seconds after stumbling to his feet, the boy’s legs gave out from under him and Caleb had to catch him. He gently lowered him to the ground. Tyler sat there for some time, mumbling to himself, hands repeatedly going to his mouth, wiping salty tears from his eyes. Just give him time. The boy would adjust eventually as he’d been starting to near the end of their time in the Dungeon.

Caleb turned to Chloe and jerked his head to the side. The two walked several paces away, giving Tyler some space.

“So,” Caleb started. “What do you think?”

She paused for a moment, thinking, then spoke. “I think first things first, we need to get food, water, and shelter. I know that you don’t necessarily need to eat because, well, everything about you is special it seems. But I do and especially Tyler. He’s been trying to be strong, but we both know he’s still not doing well.”

Caleb nodded along. “I’ll need food eventually. I think. During the Dungeon, I was sustaining myself on the aether that I absorbed from the monsters I killed in place of food. The both of you could do it, too. You just need a consistent source of aether. At least, I think. I haven’t really put that theory to the test yet, but it lines up with everything I’ve experienced.”

“Okay, so we need food for all three of us, then.”

Caleb’s eyes widened with an idea. “Maybe there’s a way we can get it from the System.” He looked back at the two chests he’d brought with him through the portal, sitting in the grass next to Tyler. “The Aether Credits. There’s got to be something we can buy with them, right?”

Chloe’s brows knit over her dark eyes. “Perhaps,” she said slowly. “But how? There isn’t exactly a store anywhere around here. There isn’t anything.”

Or was there? Caleb was beginning to get an idea of how the System worked. It liked logical progression. So far, nothing had been given to him that wasn’t almost immediately beneficial. Level up? Get a class. Level up more? Upgrade your class. Kill a boss? Get titles and gemstones that told you where the next boss was. And lastly, create a Faction? Get Aether Credits.

He opened up the Faction screen and started navigating through its various subscreens until he found what he was looking for.

“Here,” he said, pointing.

The words Aether Shop were written in large font at the top of the screen. Chloe’s eyes widened as she read it, then looked at him.

“How did you know?”

Caleb shrugged. “Intuition.”

The shop had all sorts of items available for purchase. There were raw materials like stone, wood, concrete, steel, as well as ones he’d never heard of and sounded vaguely magical. Other sections listed tools, weapons, and armor, all with their own descriptions, prices, grades, and some having special abilities. One such item caught his eye during his scrolling – they were called Bracers of Presence and would allow him to channel his Presence into his attacks to more easily break through his enemies defenses. Unfortunately, the bracers came in at a whopping nine million Aether Credits, so he wasn’t going to get those anytime soon.

More interesting than even the items, was a section where you could purchase buildings. They had exorbitant prices, even the cheapest of them being double digit millions of Aether Credits, but the implications of what the different buildings could mean was staggering.

One was called a Faction Hub, another a System Bank, an entire subcategory of Automated Defense Systems, Planetary Teleportation and Interplanetary Teleportation.

Caleb started to feel like an ant that had just had quantum physics explained to it. It hurt his brain. Interplanetary? What the shit? Am I going to have to sucker punch some martians?

“You seeing this?” he asked Chloe.

“Yeah.” She swallowed hard. “The universe just got a whole lot bigger.”

However, there wasn’t any food readily available in the shop. Just the tools to help them grow their own. Thirteen thousand Aether Credits would get them a nice little start, but it wasn’t a large sum of money in the grand scheme of things.

“What do you think?” Chloe asked. “Some basic tools and weapons, supplies to make shelter, and seeds to get started on a farm? We’ll have to hunt for food in the meantime, but–”

Caleb cut her off with a grin. “I’ve got the shelter covered.”

He kneeled down and pressed his hands into the soft dirt, reaching out and feeling for stone. There wasn’t nearly as much as there was in the mountains of the Mistveil Peaks Dungeon, which was to be expected, but he could feel layers of it deep underground. He reached out to it, calling for it. The ground shook, softly at first, but then more violently as the stone responded to him, climbing up to the surface.

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In less than a minute, he’d created three square buildings made of limestone all facing each other in a loose ring. Nothing fancy. Just four walls, a door-sized opening, and a roof for each. But they were sturdy, and better yet, cost zero Aether Credits.

Caleb clapped his hands together. Manipulating stone when it wasn’t as abundantly available used up more energy than he had expected. “What do you think?”

Chloe shot him a look from the corner of her eye. “I think you’re a show-off,” she said, then smiled at him. “But a useful one, so you get a pass.”

***

A few hours later, Caleb was sitting atop one of his newly built stone houses, staring out over the vast rolling hills. The sun was setting over the western horizon, turning everything orange and gold. In just a few minutes it would be night.

Down below, Chloe was crouched in the ploughed furrows of soil Caleb had carved out earlier in the day, planting seeds they’d bought from the Aether Shop. If everything went right, they’d have fresh, home-grown potatoes and tomatoes within a few months. So long as they survived until then.

Tyler was nowhere in sight, which meant he was either passed out in the building they’d decided would serve as the bedroom, or wrist-deep in the pile of components he’d bought from the shop. He’d spent nearly a thousand Aether Credits on metal scraps, coils, strange wiring, and a dozen other gadgets Caleb couldn’t even name. Apparently, Tyler had been a mechanical engineer before all of this, which explained why he handled the parts with something approaching reverence.