Chapter Three - Kareth Slave Camp, First Night
Era of Concordance, Year 812 – Day 218 of the Twelvefold Cycle
Kareth Slave Camp, Eastern Swamplands
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Ruki slammed into something hard and unforgiving
.
The lavender from Liia's palace was gone. So were the stars. All she could feel were the aching bones in her body and the rotting smell of flesh as she forced her eyes open.
"Ugh," Ruki groaned bitterly as she realized had been thrown into a body that wasn't hers. "Why would I expect anything less," she thought, the pain different from the hospital bed but just as unpleasant. "Couldn't give me a normal landing, Liia."
Careful not to make a sound, Ruki adjusted her small frame and began to take stock of the situation.
A quick glance told her enough. She was inside a cage. The way her body had woken up, naturally curled around itself, reminded her too much of how the last girl in this body had died. Ruki shook the thought away. One new feature, however, demanded her attention immediately. A tail, her tail, was tucked underneath her.
Canvas walls rose around the cage in a sagging circle, forming a tent big enough to swallow crates, racks and her cage in the middle.
The air inside was thick and damp. As Ruki scanned the dim space, her ears tracked more than her eyes did. The only light came from torch flames outside, their glow leaking through seams in the canvas. Guards walked past, their silhouettes cutting across the tent walls in uneven shadows.
Outside, the world was muffled noise and shifting shapes. Voices blurred together under the soft hiss of light rain.
Ruki stared at the bars again, the shape of her situation finally settling on her shoulders. Her body had started to shake without her permission, and she knew exactly why. She hated being confined.
"Again," she thought. "Back in a box."
Not a hospital bed, not plastic rails and beeping monitors, but close enough that her chest tried to seize. She dug her nails into her palms until the sting cut through the rising panic.
"I got this. I won't let that happen again," she told herself. "This time I decide my own life."
Ruki's tail twitched against the filthy floor, heavy and wet. Pain flickered up her spine with the movement. Ears she hadn't grown up with flicked toward the sounds outside the tent, catching more detail than human ones ever could.
"Remember the signs for a beast," lingered in Ruki's head, the one warning she knew she had to hold on to from Liia.
"Yeah," Ruki rasped quietly. "Got it… but I have to focus on myself first," she thought.
Ruki forced herself into a crouch, every muscle protesting as she moved. Her balance felt wrong, like her center of gravity had been dragged lower without asking her.
"I've seen doctors do this so many times," she thought, pressing her shaking fingers together. "If they can poke and prod me, I can at least check if I'm in one piece."
She started with her hands.
Ruki turned them over slowly, flexing each finger. The skin along her wrists was rubbed raw, the flesh tender enough that even a light touch made her hiss through her teeth. No rope now, just a rough ring of dried blood where it had been. Her fingers still obeyed her, though they trembled.
"Hands… wrecked, but working," she told herself.
Next were her legs. She drew one knee in, careful not to slam it against the bars, and squeezed her own thigh. Lean. Sore. Muscles actually pushing back against her grip instead of feeling like wet noodles. When she flexed, a strength she didn't recognize answered in her calves, and that scared her almost as much as it reassured her.
"Legs can move. That's new," she thought, remembering days when standing up had felt like climbing a mountain.
Her tail came next, because ignoring it wasn't making it go away. Ruki reached back, fingers brushing along unfamiliar fur until she found the base and gave it the slightest tug. Pain shot up her spine, sharp and immediate, and she sucked in a breath between her teeth. Heavy, sore, but attached. Her tail twitched on its own in response, like it was offended.
"Okay. Definitely real," she thought, jaw tight. "Not some hallucination."
She pressed the heel of her palm into her forehead. Her skull throbbed under the pressure, a dull pounding behind her eyes like she'd been thrown off a gurney. No huge lumps she could feel through her hair, but the ache was loud and insistent.
Then her mouth. She tried to swallow and almost gagged. Her tongue scraped against the roof of her mouth, dry and rough like cracked leather. Her lips felt split at the corners when she licked them, and there was no saliva to soften anything.
Hunger pulsed underneath it all, a raw, gnawing emptiness that made her stomach pinch and her hands clench uselessly in the straw. It sat behind every breath, every thought.
"Hands, legs, tail, head… all here," she thought, forcing herself to breathe through her nose until the dizziness eased. "Miserable, but here. I'm alive. For now."
Something flickered in the corner of her vision.
She went still.
A faint chime, more felt than heard, hummed somewhere behind her eyes. Translucent blue text blinked into existence above her, hovering in the stale air.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING…]
[User: Ruki Yusato]
[Race: Beast Lord (F)]
[Location: Kareth Encampment – Eastern Swamplands]
[Level: 1]
[HP: 27 / 100]
[MP: 40 / 40]
[Stamina: 13 / 60]
[Conditions: Starving, Dehydrated, Injured]
[Unspent Stat Points: 3]
[Unspent Skill Points: 1]
[Passive: Resonant Vein]
[Passive: Aegis Code]
Ruki stared at the words until her eyes started to water.
The layout wasn't identical to Untold Eternity's HUD, but it was close enough that her body tried to fall into old habits. Same pale glow. Same sharp fonts. Same faint hum of possibility.
A hysterical laugh clawed at the back of her throat.
She swallowed it down.
"I guess these are the tools she said she'd give me," Ruki thought, forcing her breathing to slow. "That's nice… but if this is real now, what does 'improving stats' even feel like?"
It was a good question, but one she knew she'd have to answer later.
The system prompt hovered, patient and silent.
"Later," Ruki decided.
Voices outside the tent sharpened as her ears adjusted, sound sliding into focus the way numbers once had on a chart.
"…telling you, the kid in there's done," a man said, right on the other side of the canvas. His voice had the flat, bored tone of someone talking about trash, not a person. "Stopped breathing around midday. We dump her with the rest when the pyre's lit."
Ruki's heart skipped, then slammed back into rhythm.
"They think I'm dead," she thought.
Another voice snorted.
"Let the morning crew handle it," the second man said. "We've been standing watch on a ghost for a day and a half. I'm done babysitting corpses. Envoy's not even here yet."
"Lady Mira will have our asses if the church dogs show and we don't handle the deal correctly."
"Envoy sent a runner," the second man replied. "Storms over Seravell's southern road. He's three, four days out with his holy parade. They're late. Beast caravan from Black Fang is late. Everyone's late. Only things on time are the damn mosquitoes."
Boots shifted in the mud. Ruki pressed herself flatter against the filthy floor, as if that could make her less real.
"Beast caravan?" she thought, stomach turning.
"The Colorbreak mutt's their worry, not ours," the second guard went on. "We hand off the Companion, hand off the stock, take our coin, and finally get back to Black Fang for a drink that doesn't taste like swamp."
"The stock won't fetch much," the first man said. "No royals in the bunch. Checked ears, checked eyes. Just a pile of half-starved pups and that pointy-eared bitch they pulled out of the marsh."
Pointy-eared bitch.
"An elf?" Ruki thought, fingers tightening in the straw. "They've got an elf here too?"
Her fingers curled deeper into the filthy bedding, nails digging in until they scraped the floor beneath.
"But the Companion…" the first man lowered his voice, like even saying the word too loud might bite him. "You really think the Empire's gonna pay that much for one beast?"
"That's none of our business," the second man said. "I don't give a damn what the Holy Empire does with their beast. Our job's simple: drop this off and get paid."
He yawned, long and loud.
Ruki shut her eyes for a heartbeat.
"If they're late, I have to get to him before they collar him," she thought, pulse thudding in her ears.
The guards shuffled off, their voices fading as they walked their lazy circuit.
Ruki's mind ran back over what they'd just handed her.
"Vyrell," she thought. "Holy Empire envoy. Three to four days away. Beast caravan from Black Fang late, but still coming. A bunch of kids. An elf prisoner. Everyone so relaxed they're calling me a corpse and leaving me for 'later.'"
"Window," she decided. "Tiny, but it's there."
"If I stay in this cage until morning, one of those bored idiots is going to open the tent, see me breathing, and 'corpse girl' turns into 'escape risk' in under a minute. I will die."
Her gaze drifted back to the bars, to the sagging canvas walls beyond.
"If I'm gone by the time someone remembers to drag the body out," she thought, "they'll just assume some other poor bastard already did the gross work. Low security cuts both ways."
"Alright," she muttered quietly. "Step one, get out of this damn box."
She flicked her gaze back up to the floating menu and locked onto the last line.
[Unspent Skill Points: 1 – Allocate? Y / N]
"Yes," she thought.
The interface shifted with that soft, clean motion she knew too well. A new pane unfolded above her like a ghost-screen, text stacking into a familiar list.
In Untold Eternity, the early game had always looked like this in her memory. A mess of Tier 1 tricks spread across too many races and classes. You were stuck on a starter kit until class change around level twenty, when you finally committed to an advanced path and your build actually started to matter. Before that, levels one through five were just you grabbing whatever tools kept you alive long enough to get there.
Damage skills, tiny buffs, awkward lunges, basic weapon forms names she recognized flickered past her eyes. All of them useful in the right hands.
She did not care about any of them.
She scrolled until the line she wanted appeared.
[Available Skill: Physical Art – Hollow Step (Tier 1)]
Her pulse kicked hard enough that her ears twitched.
Hollow Step.
In ranked PvP, serious players always picked movement first. You stacked damage later, once your class kit came online. If you died out of position at level one, all that theorycraft meant nothing. Hollow Step had been the low-tier Physical Art every solo-queue monster secretly loved.
Including Ruki.
"I can't afford to toy around… this isn't a game, and I'm not sure how this world works aside from what Liia has gifted me. It's safe to say I'm probably the only one who can do this, and there isn't an option to respec abilities at least not one I know here," she thought.
She selected it without hesitation.
[Skill Learned: Physical Art – Hollow Step (Tier 1)]
[Description: A controlled displacement. Step up to 4 meters in any direction within line of sight. Does not pass through solid walls. Cooldown: 18 seconds. Cost: 10 Stamina.]
[Note: Precision timing may allow passage through narrow gaps or unstable obstacles. Misuse can result in collision, disorientation, or injury.]
"Line of sight, short range, disgusting collision," Ruki muttered under her breath. "Feels about right."
She licked her cracked lips and studied the bars.
The cage was not a solid wall. The spaces between the iron bands were narrow but not tiny. Through them she could see a strip of muddy ground, the base of a crate, the bottom of a tent pole.
"If I mess this up," she thought, stomach knotting, "I slam into iron, make noise, and then I really am a corpse."
If she stayed in the cage and waited, they would burn her.
"Risk versus reward," she thought. "Same lesson. New body."
She shifted herself slowly.
The world tilted left, then right, as blood rushed in her ears. She pressed one hand to the bars until the spinning calmed, then fixed her eyes on a patch of mud just outside the cage, no more than a meter away.
"Four meters max," she breathed. "I only need one."
She drew in a breath.
Another.
On the third, she focused the way she always had before a difficult cast in Untold Eternity: tighten the thought, fix the endpoint in her mind, push everything else out. Back then, the full-dive rig had translated that intent into motion for an avatar on a screen. Now her own nerves and muscles had to answer.
She pictured the endpoint in detail: one knee in the mud, shoulder clear of the bars, hand already braced to catch herself.
"Now," she thought.
[Physical Art – Hollow Step (Tier 1)]
The tent went silent.
Not quiet silent. For a heartbeat, all sound cut out. No rain, no guard chatter, no crackle of torches. Her stomach lurched as the world smeared sideways, edges dragging like wet ink.
Then everything snapped back.
Her knee hit cold mud instead of straw. Her shoulder clipped the cage hard enough to make the whole thing jolt. Pain flared down her arm. A crate stacked beside the bars scraped against a support pole with a low, accusing groan.
Ruki froze on instinct.
Outside the tent flap, somebody snorted in his sleep, rolled over, and dropped into an even uglier snore.
She held her breath for three full heartbeats, every muscle pulled tight.
The tent stayed still.
Sound crashed back in all at once. Light rain hissing on canvas. The distant pop of firewood. Men laughing somewhere across camp.
Exhaustion slammed through her legs, turning them to half-set jelly. Her Stamina bar pinged in the corner of her vision.
[Stamina: 13 → 3 / 60]
[Hollow Step – Cooldown: 18s]
Her thighs shook like she had been forced to walk the hospital ward twice on bad lungs.
"Okay," she thought. "You work. You also suck to use at low SP and no food. Not spamming you tonight."
She dragged herself deeper into the shadow behind the crate and forced herself to look instead of shake.
From here, the tent finally made sense. Barrels and boxes crowded the sagging canvas walls. A crooked rack of spare leather armor leaned in one corner, straps dangling like dead snakes. Someone had tossed a dark, hooded cloak over the end of the rack, half-soaked from the rain that crept in at the seams. A pair of scuffed boots sat beneath it, one toppled on its side. A short knife lay abandoned on a crate, still sheathed, as if a guard had set it down and never bothered to pick it back up.
"Of course," she thought, a thin, bitter laugh pushing against her teeth. "If something is dead, you don't need to properly guard it… it helps that they're this relaxed."
The thought soured at the edges.
"If they thought I was just another body, why stick me in here instead of a pile," she wondered. "Only Beastkin I've seen in this tent, and they 'don't have any royals.' Sure."
Her tail twitched, heavy and sore against the back of her legs.
She slid toward the armor rack, keeping low. Straw scratched against her knees. The air was thick with canvas, iron, damp leather, and the sour trace of too many unwashed bodies. Her fingers closed around the cloak first; the fabric was rough and still a little wet, but it would hide her ears and most of her face. She dragged it around her shoulders, tugged the hood up, and let it fall low.
A cracked leather chest piece followed. It was a size too big, straps hanging awkwardly, but once she cinched them tight it felt like something between a shield and a promise not to snap in half the first time someone swung at her.
Last, she took the knife.
The hilt was worn smooth, shaped by someone else's grip, but it fit well enough into her palm. She slid it through a loose strap at her waist and let the weight settle against her hip.
"Step one," she thought, glancing back at the empty cage. "Box cleared."
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End of Chapter 3