The cave was dark, but not pitch-black. A faint, ethereal glow emanated from somewhere deeper within, casting dancing leaf shadows on the walls. Williams didn't notice. His eyes were fixed on a bush. A heaven sent gift.
It grew near the entrance, its leaves a deep emerald green, laden with plump, crimson fruits that seemed to pulse with an inner light. They looked like raspberries, if raspberries were the size of his fist and glowed like embers.
He didn't hesitate for even an instant. He didn't care.
He lunged at the bush, tearing the fruits from their stems with desperate, shaking hands. He crammed them into his mouth, two at a time, juice running down his chin, mixing with the dried blood and mud on his skin.
The taste was indescribable to him.Sweet but also electric. It fizzed on his tongue and slid down his throat like warm honey, spreading a tingling sensation through his chest.
Poison? He doesn't on't care. Could it not be better than dying on an empty stomach?
He ate until his stomach protested, until the frantic knot of hunger loosened its vice grip.
Then he ate three more for good measure. The bush was still heavy with fruit, a small fortune he couldn't comprehend in his current state.
His body, pushed beyond its limits, made the decision for him. The adrenaline that had carried him through the chase, the battle, the sheer terror of the last hour, finally crashed.
His eyelids drooped. His legs buckled. He slumped against the cave wall, then slid sideways onto the cool stone floor, unconscious before his head touched the ground.
---
Time passed. Minutes? Hours? Williams couldn't tell. The cave remained still, save for the soft, persistent glow from the depths and the slow, rhythmic breathing of the sleeping man.
But inside his body, war had begun.
The fruits he had devoured were no ordinary berries. They were spirit fruits, nourished by something the Earth's natural energy over the course of it's evolution. One has to know, that apart from intelligent beings who were taken to a separate dimension for the first culling process, beasts and plants were part of this evolution. And who knows how long it took. Especially looking at how the traces of human civilization were gone and the huge change in terrain.
And Williams's body, born and raised on pre- evolution Earth, had never encountered such concentrated spiritual energy.
It flooded his meridians like a river breaching a dam, except Williams had no meridians. Not really. His pathways were clogged, narrow, utterly unprepared for the torrent now rushing through them.
The tingling he'd felt while eating intensified. It became heat. The heat became burning. And the burning became something far worse.
His body began to swell.
It started rather violently, his fingers feeling thick and his lips numbing visibly.
But as the spiritual energy continued to circulate, seeking pathways that didn't exist, it pooled in his tissues. His hands bloated. His feet swelled against the cave floor. His face puffed up like a grotesque mask, eyes sinking into puffy slits, lips cracking as they stretched.
****
Williams woke due to pressure of his own skin.
Immense, unbearable pressure, as if his skin had become a too-tight suit, two sizes too small. He tried to open his eyes and found he could only manage narrow slits. He tried to move his fingers and barely felt them through the numbness of swelling.
What the..
Panic clawed at him as he looked down at his body. Or rather, at the body that used to be his.
His torso was bloated, his arms were thick as logs, his legs unrecognizable columns of puffy flesh. He looked like a corpse left too long in water, except he was very much alive and very much in agony.
The fruits. It had to be the fruits.
His mind, sharp even through the fog of pain, began analyzing. The tingling he'd felt. The warmth. The way his hunger had vanished so completely.
There was only one conclusion. " Am I really suffering Am allergic reaction?"
"Those certainly weren't normal fruits.. Fuck! What a way to die, what a way to die!"
So his body, utterly untrained in spiritual matters, was rejecting the energy. No—not rejecting. It was drowning in it.
He remembered fragments from the information that had flooded his mind after the first culling. About spiritual energy. About the divine aperture. About how natural beings must locate and open it through circulation.
He hadn't circulated anything. He'd just... eaten. And now the energy was building with nowhere to go, pressure mounting like steam in a sealed vessel.
He was going to pop. Like a balloon stretched too thin. Implode or explode, the result was the same ;a messy, undignified death in a cave, surrounded by the very fruits that had doomed him.
No!
The word was a spike in his mind. He hadn't survived wolves and bears and cliffs and starvation just to die because he ate the wrong berries.
His father's training echoed in his memory. Not the memories of physical conditioning, but the mental discipline. When cornered, don't panic. Assess your situation based on rationale. Act based on analysis.
He assessed.
"The energy was inside me isn't poison; My body isn't rejecting it out of malice, but out of inability. The spiritual energy wants to flow, to circulate, and to find its shelter. But my pathways are blocked, my divine aperture,if i even have one is sealed, hidden and undiscovered. What to do, what to do.."
The best solution would undoubtedly to find the relative toxin get rid of the allergen that is spirit energy. That means that the toxin should have the absorption affinity and storage capabilities but, where on earth would he get such toxins?
The next best solution would be to try and circulate the energy in his body until he finds the location of his divine aperture, however this will also aggrivate his situation and bring his end sooner.
But compared to the last option,which is to wait and let his body get accustomed to spirit energy long enough for his immune system to kick in,this option was too dangerous. Mostly because it was too dependent on fate,where he needs to keep wishful thinking that his body won't give in and explode before getting used to spirit energy.
Williams wasn't the kind of person to let things up to chance or fate. And since the first option wasn't viable,the only solution was to give his body what it wanted.
He had to break through.
He had to locate his divine aperture and force it open, create the pathways for this energy to flow, or die trying. Because the alternative was already mapped out,his swelling would continue until his organs failed, his skin split, and the energy that should have been his salvation painted the cave walls.
Williams closed his puffy eyes,or at least tried to; they were already mostly shut. He reached inward, searching for something he'd never known, something he was never been taught to find.
The information was there, buried in his mind, but it was all theory, not practice. He needed to feel it, he needed to manipulate spirit energy for it to circulate. He needed circulate spiritual energy inside his body to form his meridians and ultimately find and open his divine aperture.
The pressure was building. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, each pulse sending another wave of spiritual energy through his congested system. Pain flared across his body, a symphony of agony.
"Move,move!" Williams focused on intent.
The correct way to manipulate spiritual energy as recorded in the memories he got.
It took hours with no visible change. The spiritual energy was not responding to his intent. No matter how he tried,the spiritual energy was not responding to his intent.
Williams strained, focusing every ounce of his will on the bloated, saturated mass of energy flooding his body.
He visualized it moving, flowing, circulating just as the memories had described. He pushed with his mind, commanded with his thoughts, begged with his soul.
All for naught!
The energy sat there, thick and stagnant as over-fermented wine, content to pool in his tissues and slowly kill him. His swelling had worsened. He could feel his tongue pressing against his teeth, too large for his mouth. His throat also felt tight and greatly compressed.
"Why?" The question burned through his panic. "The memories say intent moves spiritual energy. Intent is the key. So why won't it move damnit??"
He forced himself to think, to calm down and really think past the pain and pressure.
His father's voice echoed from childhood lessons: "A fool repeats the same action expecting different results. A thinker understands why the action fails."
Fine. Think, think!!
The memories said intent moves spiritual energy. But intent wasn't working. So either the memories were wrong:unlikely, given they'd been implanted by whatever cosmic force ran this culling. Or was he missing something?
"What does intent actually do?"
He remembered reading once, back on Earth, about how thoughts create actual physical changes in the brain. Neural pathways strengthening due to mental strain and training.
"Intent should be similar right, it certainly isn't magic, but the will of the mind that should triggere certain actions, behavior and physical processes right? If one intends to walk,the mind, body and soul all follow to trigger the necessary action of walking. If one intends to stay stationary,all of him, especially the body complies.
So maybe spiritual energy worked the same way. Maybe intent didn't directly command energy like a general commanding soldiers. Maybe intent triggered something in his body that then moved that energy.
But what?"
Anatomy!
The word crystallized in his mind. He didn't know his own spiritual anatomy. The memories gave him theory—meridians, apertures, circulation paths—but they didn't give him his map. Every body was different. Every spiritual pathway unique.
He'd been trying to move energy through terrain he couldn't see.
"Stupid. Stupid!"
New problem: how do you map something you've never perceived? The energy itself was the only guide. But it was stagnant and unmoving, refusing to cooperate.
Another memory surfaced,something about cultivators "gathering" spiritual energy from the environment to begin circulation. They created a concentration, a density difference, and energy naturally flowed from high concentration to low.
But his body was already saturated. There was no concentration difference. The energy was evenly distributed, perfectly still, like water in a flat pond.
"Wait,saturation,equilibrium. Spiritual energy doesn't flow because no difference in their concentration in my body."
If he wanted circulation, he needed to create spiritual difference. He needed one area of his body to have less energy than another, so the energy would naturally move to balance it.
But how? He couldn't expel energy,he didn't know how, and even if he did, he'd lose precious spiritual power he needed for breakthrough.
Unless...
"What if i concentrated energy? What if I use intent not to move energy broadly, but to pull it toward one point? That would certainly create density in one area and deficit in another. And that deficit should be enough created flow. Yes, yes ! This is the correct way!"
He smiled with contentment.