Ben walked like a man carrying something fragile and very expensive — which, in a world that chewed up people and spat out respawns, meant he walked like a scared idiot who had just survived three boss fights and was therefore allowed to be nervous.
The passage beyond the broken wall narrowed, bending twice before opening into a low, rectangular chamber. Stone benches lined the sides like the ribs of some sleeping animal. Torches — long-dead torches — blackened the walls in sooty half-moons. In the center, on a raised slab that looked chiselled more for reverence than utility, sat a lectern of carved rock.
And on that lectern rested the tablet.
It was not large: maybe the height of Ben's forearm, the width of his palm. But it was carved so finely, in a substance that might have once been stone and might now be something else entirely, that it looked less like an object and more like a puzzle box of light. The breaks ran jagged through it: a crescent missing from one edge, hairline fissures webbing toward its center. Where the fractures opened, a faint light bled out in rueful pulses — the same gentle, holy shimmer that clung to the [Ruins of the Holy Light]. (Sorry readers, I just want the word count to be massive so that it can get featured.)
For a moment Ben only stared. The tablets and lecterns in old fantasy movies were always traps or puzzles that would explode when touched. This one pulsed like a heart.
He crouched, closer, fingers hovering. The glyphs carved on its surface made no sensible pattern to him — not the alphabet he'd learned in school, nor any rune he'd read in a book of "Useful Curses and Where to Avoid Them." But the curves hummed in the same frequency that the ruins did; gooseflesh crawled along his arms. The light sighed when he breathed over it, like the tablet had just been waiting for a guest it hadn't expected to get.
"Okay," Ben said, loud in the empty room. "You're definitely not a menu. You're like… an ancient iPhone. A very temperamental iPhone."
He slid his hand under the tablet's cool flank and lifted. It was heavier than it looked — a dense, satisfying weight that made his arms protest. He balanced it against his chest like a newborn that might bite back.
As soon as he stood, two tiny, compulsive noises announced their presence: a scurry and a thin, angry squeak. The chamber's shadows uncoiled, and a pair of rats slid from under a long-broken bench. They were bigger than the dungeon bats had been, with yellowed teeth and enough whiskers to start a small brush factory. They eyed the tablet with territorial malice.
Ben turned, raising the tablet like a shield. "Oh no, you don't," he said. Then, because you don't approach rodents diplomatically in the middle of nowhere, he made haste for the nearest broken bench with a chunk of flint. Two quick throws, an awkward scramble, and the rats lay squashed and silent. He grimaced, more at having to do that than at the act itself. Rat meat was technically edible, but he had standards in two categories: "This is food" and "This is not food unless I'm on my actual last day."
With the rodents disposed of, he wrapped the tablet in a length of woven vine he'd been carrying — what passed here for a satchel — and shouldered it. The return trip to the ruins would be longer than the trip out; tunnels never seemed to want you to leave quickly. He moved carefully, every step measured not only for the sake of staying alive but for the sake of not snapping the lectern's broken edges into something worse.
The dungeon's corridors were thinner than before, and for a while Ben could hardly hear himself breathe over the booming of his own heart. He passed niches where ancient tools had been abandoned, a collapsed alcove whose tiles were patterned with the ghost of a sigil. Small things that indicated this place had once been tended to — that people had cared for it, preserved it, called it holy.
Back outside the dungeon, the world breathed differently. The forest's canopy above the ruins let in a hotter, blunter light. Ben ducked into the open and, for the first time since he'd descended the stairs, looked around. The [Ruins of the Holy Light] sat there, stones like a crown around the basin where the rock hummed. The glow held steady, as it had since he'd first woken in the circle, but where before it had felt like a small, reliable lighthouse in an ocean of bad things, now Ben suspected something more — a pattern, perhaps, like a machine that would accept parts and return strength.
He made his approach slow and ceremonial, because if there was anything this place demanded it was that people act like they understood its old, tired dignity. He set the tablet on the altar at the heart of the ruins, the broken crescent pointing north as if it were a compass ready to be healed. The tablet's light matched the ruin's — an imperfect echo, the two pulses hovering in near-synchrony.
Ben glanced at the little stone rock (the one that had been the heart of the ruin's light since before he arrived). It still sat on the shallow basin, perfect, its surface duller up close but warm to the touch. On impulse he lifted it, feeling the faint vibration like a nearly-remembered song against his palm.
Something in him argued to just shove the rock back into its place and move on, satisfied. He almost did. But curiosity was now background music to his life, and during the quiet parts it hummed louder.
He fitted the rock into the crescent notch of the broken tablet.
The stone lodged like it had been waiting for the join its whole existence. For a second nothing happened. Then — like the snap of a lock or the click of an ancient mechanism rediscovering its rhythm — the air tightened.
Light fogged upward from the seam. The ruin's glow brightened in an instant, reaching up like a living thing that had been fed. The tablet's broken edges knit, hairline lines knitting and smoothing until they were whole. The crack sealed not with violence but with the same gentle pressure a wound might use when a hand is held to it.
Text, luminous and calm, hovered in the air above the altar like an edict.
[Ruins of Light (Repaired)]
[Purity: 100%]
[Purified Area: 1 km²]
Ben made an involuntary noise that was half-laugh, half-whistle. The words felt like a punchline the world was delivering after a setup of centuries.
"Purity?" he asked aloud to no one. "One hundred percent? You're kidding me." He felt the ridiculous urge to clap, like the ruins had just passed a very strict inspection. Part of him expected a judge to walk out from behind a pillar and hand him a ribbon.
Instead, the ruin itself answered.
Light surged. It pushed outward in a soft, inexorable wave, the same gold-white hue he'd learned meant not-shadow. Where it passed, moss that had seemed lifeless eased into color; tiny threads of green that had been frozen straight unfurled and took on a glint. The air tasted cleaner, if air could taste. The stones, which had been cold and forgetful, warmed as if someone had thrown open a window on a gray morning. Insects that hadn't buzzed in weeks — or perhaps months — began to stir, tentative and bright.
Ben staggered back a couple of paces. The sensation at his chest wavered: warmth, safety, like the difference between a house that's only a house and a home that keeps you from the storm. The novels he'd read spoke of grand miracles in the form of armies saved or kingdoms reformed; here, the miracle was small and tactile — a purified square kilometer. But in this forest, small miracles compounded like interest.
Where the light passed into the trees, black rot shrank. The black-veined bark at the Forest's edge recoiled like a tide running out. Plants that once had crept witheredly at the boundary seemed to regain their spine. A thicket of small saplings in a ring around the ruins straightened as if someone had whispered posture into them. Birds that had been absent altogether returned in hesitant arcs, tiny and loud, scratching the air with an audacity Ben hadn't heard since he'd first woken up.
The shadow creatures — the horrors and the creeping things that slid like spilled ink — did not simply scatter. They unraveled. Those within the new field of light thinned, a buzzing dissolving like salt in water. A small, malformed shadow clung to a stone and, tutted by the brightness, sizzled into wisp and then nothing. It was neither theatrical nor melodramatic; it was mercilessly practical, like frost melting at noon.
Ben felt his own skin pulse as some small, internal wound — the paper cut from dragging a stone shard across his palm yesterday — closed with a faint tingle of warmth. Not dramatic healing, but practical: a splinter falling out, a thorn unhooking itself. He put his hand to the seam where the rock met the tablet and felt the tiniest current: like the hum of a far-away loom, steady and ancient.
He laughed then, and it came out as a raw, relieved sound. "All right," he said, louder this time. "So you were the heart of whatever this place was supposed to do. Fix it and—whoosh—safe little bubble? Not bad. Not bad at all."
The ruins themselves, now whole again, shone brighter than before. The pool in the center of the basin—where he'd seen the rock rest—swirled with a clarity that suggested drinking. He stepped closer and peered into the surface. Ripples ran out like the halo around a coin tossed into still water, and shades of pale script shimmered across the stone rim for a second before subsiding.
He remembered the fountain in the dungeon, the FOH he'd scribbled in banana-smash script. It had felt like private luck to find a thing that healed, but this — this was architecture that kept darkness honest across a field. Repair the thing that was meant to be whole and it returned to its job: halting corruption.
Ben's mind, quick to quantify things that had no business being quantified, started making lists.
One repaired ruin = Purity 100% = Purified Area 1 km².
If the ruins were like the old man's yearly ritual — each one a sentinel — then there were perhaps other tablets, other rocks, other loci of light waiting to be mended. Maybe the old summoner had tried, year after year, to summon someone to reattach the pieces and had tired of chasing the world's edges.
He imagined the old man's hands again, bent and shaking over a bowl of blood, and wondered how many nights had ended with nothing but lit candles and the same patient failure. The thought cut thinly across him: he and the summoner were not unlike one another. Each of them pushed against a slow disaster; each had learned to be stubborn in the face of a world that had given up.
The ruin hummed a low song. Around the edges of the purified circle, plants tentatively leaned toward the light as if it were a promise. A rabbit — real one, eyes bright and not greedy — hopped into a small clearing and sniffed the air. It sat, blinked, and munched at a tuft of leaves in a way that suggested tentative trust. Ben watched it and felt a peculiar sensation: not triumph so much as responsibility. The bubble of purity was a thing to be stewarded, not celebrated.
He stepped back and sat on the cracked rim of a fallen column, the tablet balanced now like a fat book at his feet. The stone he'd used to repair it sat in its notch like a heart in a ribcage. In the center, the basin warmed, and the light spread outward until tree shadows outside the one-kilometer radius became less hungry, less toothy in their silhouettes.
"You're telling me this whole place is like some sort of light-grid," he said to the tablet, to the ruins, to the summoner in his head. "Fix a node, heal a square kilometer. Fix every node… and maybe we get a whole forest that behaves like a normal, non-apocalyptic biome."
He felt ridiculous for thinking like a systems designer in the middle of a cursed clearing, but ridiculous had been working for him so far. The tablet's glow steadied, steady as a bell's aftersound. It would, he suspected, preserve its work for a long time. He imagined the old summoner's face, and for a beat, he felt less like an intruder and more like an apprentice who had arrived a century too late but with the advantage of blunt tools and fewer illusions about dignity.
As twilight wove itself back into the leaves overhead, Ben made a humble promise out loud: not to let this go. Repair one ruin was ridiculous. Repair ten — maybe that was laughable. But if the pattern held, repairing the network might be the only way to give the world some breathing room. It might also mean other summoners, other relics, other long trips and smarter fights. He anticipated the boredom and the fear and the grit entwined in that work and felt oddly cheerful.
For now he had one whole ruin and a one-kilometer pocket that smelled less like death and more like possibility. He stacked a few extra logs from his supply near the basin, more as an offering than necessity — the ruin did not need his fire, but his rituals were the only language he knew. He draped the rodent-smeared vine he'd used as a cover across the lectern like a flag of bad trades well made.
Ben sat and waited as the sun slid from gold to red. The purified area softened the dusk into something that could be navigated without constant, machine-like terror. For the first time since the forest had become his world, he felt like the place might be negotiated with, not merely survived through.
Night still came, and with it the expected shapes at the boundary of the purified ring. Shadows gathered at the edge of his new light like sleepwalking things unsure whether they had the right to cross. They tested the seam, reached out, and dissolved. The ruins hummed comfortingly. Ben, exhausted and elated in equal measures, let himself fall back on the grass and stare up through the trees.
It was easy to be sentimental about things when the world offered you a little grace. He kept the tablet where it could be seen from the center of the ruins and slept with one hand tucked near it, as if he could protect a thing of light by proximity. The thought was childish and probably pointless, but it made him sleep.
When he woke, the world had not fallen apart. Rabbits had left tiny dung-balls in a neat line; one of his pit traps to the south had a small sapling growing through the edge, roots drinking from something cleaner now. Ben laughed in his throat, that same raw sound, and a little of the burden he had felt in the chest shifted. He had done something. The ruins worked.
He stood, stretched, and mapped the repaired ruin on the banana-leaf map in a shaky, triumphant hand: [Ruins of Light — Repaired: Purity 100% (1 km²)]. The line wobbled in the middle, because his hand kept shaking from adrenaline and fatigue. He added a tiny note: "Find more tablets."
There were more tablets. He was sure of it in the way a man is sure he will need more food tomorrow. The puzzle had widened: this was not just survival; it was a campaign. Each success would be small and precious, like a lighted match in a dark cavern. Each failure would be expensive and likely to be fatal. But for the first time, Ben had a direction that felt bigger than his own stomach.
He slung his axe over his shoulder, picked up the tablet (the weight of it was comforting now) and headed back toward the traps, the small farm patch, and the banana tree. The world had not suddenly become safe. Shadows still moved at the perimeter, and his traps would still bite. The forest would still be a place that required cunning and respect.
But with the ruins fixed, there was now a square kilometer where he could sleep without the sense the darkness was a living mouth waiting to close. That, at the end of the day, felt like victory enough to write home about — if there had been anyone left to write to.
He did not tell the world its debt. He kept the play between the tablet and himself; he kept the secret as a tool, as leverage, as hope. He folded the banana leaf map into his pocket, looked at the glowing ruins behind him, and walked away with the tablet under his arm, already tracing the route in his head for the next piece.
Ben named it in his head and then kept calling it that so often the name stuck — Dungeon of the Tablet. It sounded heroic in a stupid way, like a place that belonged on a badly translated quest board. The dub was helpful; labels made a jungle tolerable the same way duct tape made a broken axe tolerable: not elegant, but it worked.
He left the Ruins of Light with the tablet snug against his chest in that vine-woven sling. The repaired glow hung behind him like a patient lighthouse; the forest beyond it looked marginally less like a horror movie and slightly more like a place that could, with effort, be negotiated. He felt bigger than the dirt on his boots.
Today he was going back west. Not for glory, not for curiosity this time — for rock. Big, honest rocks that didn't act offended when you chipped them. He'd seen seams of heavier stone on the dungeon maps (scribbled on banana leaves and scrawled on his hands), and somewhere in that maze lay chunks of ore. He needed iron. Iron meant actual tools. Tools meant efficiency. Efficiency meant fewer times screwing up and dying because his twig axe shattered in the middle of a boar's face.
Down the familiar passage he went, torch held at the ready, breathing measured like a man who'd learned the difference between "brave" and "stubborn." The dungeon didn't welcome him but did not immediately try to eat him, so that alone was progress.
Five Days Later.
Unexplored Corridors
The areas he'd skipped before were narrow branches off the main tunnel — places that felt less like corridors and more like the inside of a ribcage. He moved slow, peering into alcoves and tapping stones with a small hammer he'd fashioned. Knock, listen. Knock, listen. It had become a ritual. Stone speaks if you know how to hear it; sometimes it answers with nothing but echoes, sometimes with small treasures.
The first unexplored room smelled of iron and old damp. Sunlight never touched this place. The gloom did not soften; it just became more familiar. His torch threw halos against carved walls and for a moment he thought he heard the distant rush of water, or maybe that was just his own heartbeat.
Then he saw the rocks.
They sat heaped in a low cavern like someone had abandoned a quarry inside the mountain. Boulders the size of barrels, slabs with natural facets screaming to be struck just so. Ben's pulse quickened in a way that was probably healthier than the pulse that came from running away. This was work, not fear. This was the kind of reward that didn't hiss.
He approached the nearest slab and thumped it. The sound was a dull, resonant boom. Good stone. Hard. The grain promised it would chip clean rather than crumble into frustrating dust. This was exactly the kind of rock you flintknapped into pointed things that would make other rocks weep.
Beyond the big rocks, in a shadowed seam along the wall, something glittered faintly — flecks like the wink of someone's coin. He crouched, scraping away lichen with a thumb. Iron ore. Not a vein big enough to feed a blacksmith's forge, but enough that, with a proper pick, he could extract a chunk and maybe melt it later if he found a place to make heat good enough for smelting.
He rapped the seam with a small stone. Tiny dust motes fell away; a rusty powder clung to his fingers. He could taste copper in the air when he breathed near it — metallic, cold. He smiled. The world had just handed him a clue: ore is here, but ore hates weak tools.
He tried to wedge a thin shard beneath the seam and lever it. No dice. The rock held. The shard bent. Ben cursed under his breath and felt the familiar flush of impatience surge up like a fever.
It was glaringly obvious: he needed a pickaxe. Not the sad emergency-handled splinter he'd slapped together before, but a proper pick: a heavy head, a shaft that wouldn't snap when the world tried to teach him humility.
Back to the Ruins — Plan Mode
The return trip was faster, if only because he had a focus. He navigated by the marks he'd made on trees and the banana-leaf map that had gone from joke to lifeline. The Ruins of Light appeared through the trees like a pale promise; when the tablet caught the basin's glow again, Ben felt a wash of something like relief.
"Okay," he told the ruins as if they were a foreman on a building site. "I need supplies. A proper workbench of sorts. Stone, wood, and space to not break my teeth."
If you were a man in a world that made sense in cruel ways, you get creative. Ben's creative solution was to make a crafting table. Real games cheat it into existence with an animation and a progress bar. In real life, or at least in his life, it was a matter of engineering: flat surface, leverage, and a place to clamp his rocks while he flaked them into precision tools.
He gathered an armful of flat flagstones from the ruins' collapsed edges and some threshold slabs that had been dislodged by his earlier fights. He stripped off bark from a half-rotten log and snapped a few young trunks from a fallen limb. His hands remembered the knot-work. He lashed the slabs together with braided vines until he had something like a tabletop and a stout leg. It wobbled a little, but Ben favored function over ceremony.
The thing he made looked ridiculous — a slab balanced on three logs and lashed with grass rope — but when he steadied it, it became a very good, very honest work surface. He scrubbed the top with a stone until it was smooth enough to strike flint against without flaking the whole world to powder.
"Behold," he said to no one. "My artisan station."
Flintknapping — The Slow, Ridiculous Art of Making a Pick
Flintknapping was a profanity of motion and patience. He'd learned that earlier when making knives and the first sad axe-thing. This time he had better rock. He set his first boulder on the bench and took out a hammerstone — a round, heavy chunk he'd been saving for an occasion that required more dignity than breaking boar skulls.
Step one of flintknapping was establishing a platform — a clean facet to strike from. Ben held the hammer at an angle, aimed for an edge, and struck. A neat flake peeled off, sharp as a curse. He grinned. The rock yielded. Little by little, flake by flake, he chipped a triangular head that would one day become the pick's durable end.
It took sweat and a steady jaw. A couple of times he whacked out pieces that shattered wrong — nasty fragments that flew like spite — but in the end the head took a shape he could respect. He knapped the edge, feathered the strike angles, and finally had a heavy, wedge-shaped head with a flat butt where it could be lashed.
Now for the shaft. He selected a straight sapling — not too green, not too brittle. He whittled it with care, hollowed a notch at the top, and bored a little groove so the stone would bite in and stay.
The lashing was the most important bit. He'd learned from too many broken tools that a bad tie is a death sentence in the middle of danger. He braided vines into a cord and wrapped the stone head in resin-soaked fibers until the joint felt like a single, uncompromising thing. The resin hardened over the day's sun and set the stone like cement.
When he swung the new pick experimentally, it felt heavy, alive, and properly rude. It thunked into a test slab with a satisfying ring. The bench collected dust and chips, but Ben had his prize: a pickaxe of flint and heart.
The Return: Real Mining
Back into the Dungeon of the Tablet he went, heart pinging with the small, clean thrill that comes when you carry an actual tool that should have existed all along. The rocks that had ignored him before now accepted his company with the same startled gratitude as someone finally answering an old knock at the door.
He struck the iron seam with authority. Ring—ring—ring. Bits of ore sloughed free like scabbed metal. He worked methodically: strike, pry, clear, reposition. After the first half-hour, the seam spit out a fist-sized chunk of ore that looked like a small, angry moon — grey and pocked with rust-colored veins. He whooped like a twelve-year-old who'd just stolen a dragon's coin.
Ore in hand, he didn't slow for the sentimental. If he could find enough chunks, he could smelt later — if he found a way to make heat hot enough. That problem lay in future Ben's shoulders. For now the pick had validated itself: the world yielded when you wielded the right leverage.
He also hacked off a couple more big rocks — slabbed them into rough shapes that would double as hammerstones, wedges for later work, and a crude anvil replacement. The dungeon gave him a little treasure pile: two fist-sized lumps of ore, half a dozen slab chips that would be useful for future flintknapping, and a heartbeat of victory that was loud and simple.
He shouldered his haul and made for the surface, thinking about harvest plans, store rooms, and the obnoxious feeling of being competent. The Ruins of Light glowed like a patient promise when it came into view, and Ben grinned like a man returning to camp with both dinner and a book that says how to build a future.
At the ruin he stowed the ore in a shaded crevice. He put the best slabs near his artisan bench and set the pick beside it like a dagger on a squire's belt. The crafting table creaked; everything in the forest creaked; it was chorus of improvised civilization.
Ben knew this didn't solve everything. Smelting ore into usable iron would require more than a pick and a heart — he needed a furnace hot enough to do the job, flux if the ore wasn't pure, and a place where the forest would not so angrily attempt to compost his work. He had plans, though: a shelter behind the ruins for a small forge pit, a bellows made from leather and wood if he could find skin to spare, and a list of villagers' tools he could replicate when he got good enough at being a human forge.
But for the moment, he sat with his dirty hands on his knees and allowed himself the small luxury of pride. He had turned need into labor, and labor into supplies. He had improved his odds, not through magic or cheats, but by using the rock under his feet and the stubbornness in his chest.
When night fell, the ruins kept the shadows at bay and the tablet hummed like a quiet engine. Ben slept with the pick tucked under his blanket, feeling like the stupid hero of a series that still had episodes left. The forest was still a place that would kill you for being careless. The Dungeon of the Tablet still had more secrets. But now, at least, he had the means to dig them out.
Tomorrow he thought of a furnace. Of heat, of melting, and of taking raw ore and turning it into something that could stop a tusk or swing a blade. Tomorrow, he would become that slow sort of blacksmith who made the world obey with swing and sweat.
For now, though, he closed his eyes and let the night be a soft, honest black. The pick lay beside him, heavy and promising, and the Ruins of Light kept the immediate dark from chewing straight through his camp. That was enough.