The listings had barely settled on the board when the interface began to pulse, faint and insistent, like a heartbeat buried under glass. For a long minute nothing changed. Then the first acceptance rippled across his vision, and another, and another—each trade snapping shut the instant someone, somewhere, met his terms. The system did not ask Ethan to confirm or decline. It simply executed, cold and impartial, and siphoned the world toward him in neat parcels.
He watched the offers flash and vanish. Spears paired with stone. Bows matched to fiber. Arrows flowed away for clay. Somewhere a hungry shelter surrendered cooked meat for the same. Water appeared as a soft icon—gallons counted out one by one—then tucked itself into the holding queue, waiting for him to place it.
A soft chime cut through the stream.
[Private Message — Stonehand]
How did you make that many? Spears, bows, even prepared food. No one else is producing at this scale. Are you alone or part of a group?
Ethan closed the window without answering. The less he said, the longer he stayed alive.
Another chime, a separate thread.
[Private Message — Ashra]
If you are alone, join us. We are three. We have shelter, enough food for now, and we take shifts on watch. There is strength in numbers.
He let that one fade too. Numbers did not guarantee strength; sometimes they diluted it. And the message read like a hook baited with need. He was not ready to bite.
The pulse of completed trades steadied into a rhythm. He could almost feel distance collapsing—the hands that had shaped stone, the feet that had carried water, the fires that had browned meat—each reduced to a line of text and a flicker of gain. Survival had been turned into arithmetic, and tonight the sums favored him.
The ache in his ribs reminded him that arithmetic did not stop claws. He reached for the small hide-wrapped bundle he had set aside and unbound it. The Strider's venom gland lay within, slick and dark-veined, as wrong to the eye as it had felt beneath the blade. The prompt returned the instant his gaze settled.
[Item: Thornhide Strider Venom Gland]
• Consume → Gain Poison Resistance (Lv.0)
• Sell → +0.5 Civilization Code
Half a Code would push a number upward. Poison resistance might keep his heart beating. He chose the latter.
He forced the gland into his mouth and swallowed before instinct could reject it. The taste struck like rot and metal. His throat convulsed, and for a breath it felt as if his body would wrench the thing back up by force. He clamped his jaw and held it down. A moment later, the venom struck. He felt it crawl through his veins, inch by inch, threading like molten needles under his skin. Muscles seized. Breath caught. Vision narrowed until the dark pressed in from every side.
It wasn't just pain—it was invasion. The toxin tore through him at the smallest scale, unzipping cell walls, popping them like blisters, stripping fibers into frayed threads. Nerves lit white; each heartbeat drove the damage deeper.
Then the pattern changed.
The same poison that shredded began—impossibly—to lace things back together. Filaments knit across the torn edges, membranes drew closed, and tissues pulled into shape as if stitched by hot wire. For a few heartbeats the repairs held.
They didn't last.
The venom reversed course and broke its own work, slicing through the fresh seams, unraveling the hurried stitching with surgical cruelty. Again it mended. Again it cut. A brutal rhythm took hold: tear, suture, tear—each cycle faster, each repair a fraction steadier than the last, as if the body learned under the whip.
Blood felt too hot, then suddenly even. Signals that had scattered began to find their paths. The tearing returned once more, weaker this time, and the stitching followed, cleaner, tighter, until the poison's saw-toothed edge dulled against what it had just rebuilt.
Breath came back in ragged drafts. The hammering in his chest eased to a hard, even beat. Heat drained from his skin, leaving him slick with sweat and shaking, the venom's fury receding as if the tide had turned by itself. The pain did not vanish so much as withdraw, mile by microscopic mile, until the last of it bled out and he was left shaking, drenched in sweat, and breathing like a bellows.
[Poison Resistance: Lv.0 Acquired]
Minor toxins will cause reduced damage.
He lay there for a long count, palms pressed to the dirt, waiting for the tremors to ebb. When his hands finally steadied, he washed his mouth with a rationed sip and closed the empty bundle. The gland was gone. Its lesson remained.
A faint scrape whispered along the wood.
He stilled. The sound came again—light, repeated, close enough to feel in the stakes. He palmed a spear and slid into the wall's shadow, keeping low where starlight could not find him. The scratching sharpened into dry clicks, like hard pads worrying bark.
Something low and elongated eased its head between two branches. Wedge-like skull, pale reflective eyes; the lips peeled back to show hard, clicking bite-pads. He drove the spearpoint through the gap. The tip met a ridge, skidded, then bit. The shaft kicked in his hands. The thing writhed and clamped, legs scrabbling, and for long, ugly seconds it did not stop—only slowed, strength pattering into the dirt in thin lines of blood.
Another shape hugged the wall and tried to climb. He jabbed too shallow and it fell, latching to his boot. Leather tore; he stamped and felt a joint give with a dry crack, then pinned it high in the body. It thrashed, the click-rasp rising to a thin wire, then faltered to uneven jerks as the ground beneath it darkened.
Two more pressed at the narrow entrance—one low and quick, one higher, forelimbs feeling for purchase. He set his feet and used the stakes like a second set of hands. He slid the shaft along the wood, hooked the higher one off-balance, and raked the point under overlapping plates. Warm blood sheeted over his knuckles. It scissored emptily at the air and kept fighting, but every kick lost force. The lower one darted, nicked his shin; pain flared, and he answered with short, mean thrusts—no clean finish, just more holes, more leaking—until its motions dwindled to a tremor and then stilled.
For a moment the night was only angles and breath and the thud of the haft. He held the rhythm—thrust, draw, reset—because fear wanted speed, and speed meant misses. Hold the line. Make them bleed until they cannot stand.
The last body jerked for the entrance, quicker than the rest. He let it commit, stepped along the inside edge of the choke point, and drove the spear diagonally, using a post to guide the tip into the seam where the armor thinned. The impact rattled his shoulder. The thing kicked twice, then again, then only twitched—bleeding out by inches.
Silence returned in a ragged hush. He listened with his whole body. Nothing moved.
Ding.
[Civilization Code +0.0011]
Ding.
[Civilization Code +0.0012]
Ding.
[Civilization Code +0.0012]
Ding.
[Civilization Code +0.0012]
He dragged the bodies just far enough to work quick, ugly cuts for later use, then smothered the remains beneath damp soil caps so the scent would not carry. Blood streaked the stakes where they had pressed and clawed, but the wall still stood.
Only then did he crouch by the nearest corpse, fix his gaze on the dulling eye, and hold—counting in his head while the seconds stretched.
Ding!
Species Identified: Barkhide Vermin
Status: Inactive – Deceased
Origin World: Hethra
Dimension: B-9
Technology Level: Unknown
Civilization Code: 0.11%–0.12% (per specimen)
Small, yes. Slow, yes. But if he had slept through that first scrape, they would have been inside with him. The wall had held. Tonight that was enough.
Trade chimes softened and then ceased. The interface rolled through its final confirmations and, at last, offered a single tidy reckoning of the day.
[Inventory Updated]
• Wood: 23
• Stone: 105
• Fiber: 100
• Clay: 202
• Spears: 3
• Bows: 2
• Arrows: 14
• Cooked Meat: 8
One more task.
He crouched at the clay basin and pulled the water from the holding queue. It arrived as cool weight: the suggestion of six sealed gallons resolving into reality at his hands. He poured carefully. The basin darkened where the water touched, clay drinking before it held, and then the hollow brimmed with a calm, clear sheet that caught the faintest spill of starlight. He allowed himself a single mouthful. The rest stayed where it would be safest.
He banked the last coals and sat with his back to the shelter wall. The Safe Zone's mild warmth took the edge off the Strider's old cuts and the fresh scrapes the vermin's plates had left on his forearm. The ache of his body was not an enemy; it was a record. He let his eyes close.
The world did not.
Two figures moved through the trees with the kind of quiet that came only from long practice. They circled the crude perimeter until they found the narrow way in—a single-file passage, set at the wall's center, that would force anyone entering to do it under watch. The man lifted two fingers to signal a hold, then traced the air along the entry, testing for line or snare.
"Only one way through. Step lightly."
He went through first. The woman followed, light on her feet, and let the dark settle around her.
Inside, their eyes adjusted to hard-packed earth and the low shelter shouldered into the cliff. Near the rock, a shallow hollow held still water that caught a thin scatter of stars. The sight hit them like a blow. Their dry throats trembled, tongues rough against their teeth, and for a heartbeat the pull to lunge and drink erased every other thought.
Discipline answered first. Each lifted two fingers to brow, then lips, then heart. Both set their palms to the earth beside the hollow and held them there until breath steadied and the urge dulled enough to master. Only then did they unstopper their skins. The woman dipped and filled. The man knelt and did the same. They drank in small, careful swallows that soothed without greed, heat easing from their throats in slow threads. They refilled their skins to a firm weight and capped them tight. She smoothed the rim of the shaped ground without disturbing the surface. He checked straps and stoppers. They left enough water untouched that the hollow looked as it had when they found it.
"We could have traded within our own," the man said at last. "We have been moving too often to make anything worth offering."
"I spent what we had to pull you from the ice," the woman said. "There has been no time to cook, cure, or craft. That changes soon. We will return and trade fairly for what we used tonight."
They turned toward the shelter. Through a narrow seam in the wall they found the sleeper inside: an unfamiliar face half-turned to the dark, an arm streaked with dried blood, a chest rising and falling in the slow rhythm of exhaustion. The woman fixed her gaze and did not blink. The man kept watch on the gap behind them, weight set to move if the wind or the forest changed.
[Scanning in progress… 00:58]
[Scanning in progress… 01:46]
Ding.
[Scan Complete]
• Species: Homo sapiens
• Status: Wounded, Fatigued
• Notable: Solitary settlement; unfamiliar construction
"Not of our people," the man said. "Not any I have seen."
She loosened the cord of a small pouch and felt the cool neck of a vial meet her palm. "Do you remember the ice lands?" she asked. "You were the one trapped there. If I had not used Father's token to draw you to me, you would still be under the snow. The token is gone. We cannot pull each other back again if we are torn apart."
"We need a place that holds," she added, eyes moving from the centered entrance to the ugly, effective wall and back to the water that made the night kinder. "This one endures alone. That means he knows something we do not."
"Not tonight," he said after a long breath. "He bleeds and sleeps. Let him wake with his water still his."
"Not tonight," she agreed.
They stepped back from the hollow. At the centered gap, the man raised two fingers again, held, and swept the air once more for line or snare. Only when he was certain did they slip out the way they had come, closing the dark behind them and leaving the rough wall, the quiet sleeper, and the held water undisturbed.