Morning arrived with thin sunlight filtering through the cave entrance.
No one had slept particularly well, the ground was hard, the sounds outside were unfamiliar, and the combination of exhaustion and unspent adrenaline made for restless, shallow sleep.
They ate what they had, which wasn't much, before moving on.
"We need a plan for the day," Victor said, while the others were still stretching and blinking. "We can't afford to sit still and we can't afford to move without purpose."
"We should split into pairs, each with a task."
The others agreed.
Lily and Ethan would do some foraging for food and scouting for threats.
Sam and Maria would also forage but focus more on observing and recording the state of the landscape, any signs of other survivors, anything that might tell them what the broader shape of this new world looked like.
Walter and Victor would stay close to the cave, reinforcing the entrance, setting traps, making their temporary base just a bit safer.
AJ would stay close too, he had his own work to do.
He had to further familiarise himself with his new body with a focus effort on improving his movement.
If he couldn't keep pace, couldn't reposition, couldn't at least cover ground without constantly falling behind, then he would remain a burden no matter what other abilities he had.
He spent the early morning trying. The results were the same as they had been the previous day, lurching, spreading, losing coherence mid-motion.
He tried rolling, which produced a slow, undignified wobble. He tried extending one part of himself forward and dragging the rest along after it, which worked but was far more effort than it was worth.
Compressing himself into a denser shape improved stability but made forward motion harder. He sat still after each failed approach and thought about what wasn't working.
The problem, as far as he could reason it out, was friction. His body gripped surfaces readily, it would be useful for some things, but made moving a miserable experience.
He needed to reduce the contact between himself and the ground.
That was when the memory surfaced. His first moments on the ground after the transformation had finished, the strangers nearby, the urgency to hide.
But beneath the panic was a detail he hadn't had time to examine. Something had spread outward from his form before he moved.
A faintly slick patch beneath him. He had produced it without knowing he was doing it, some automatic response he hadn't triggered since.
He focused inward, trying to find whatever had caused that. It was harder than he expected, it was like trying to flex a muscle you've only just discovered you have, with no reference point for how that flex should feel.
He tried for several minutes and produced nothing. He tried adjusting his focus, going down to the very base of his form where it met the ground.
Slowly, faintly, he felt something begin to seep from his underside.
He tried to spread it deliberately and almost broke the process. The moment he pushed at it, it faltered. He had to hold the intention loosely, let it happen rather than force it, and that particular mental position took practice to find and maintain.
But the thin layer spread.
He then tried to move forward.
The difference was immediate and startling. Instead of gripping and dragging, his body glided, not fast, not gracefully, but with much less resistance.
He slid a short distance, stopped, and considered what had just happened. Then he did it again. He refined the consistency, adjusted where it pooled, and tried again.
Each attempt was slightly smoother than the last. Within an hour he was moving at a decent pace. He would be able to keep up with the others.
For the first time since the transformation, he could actually keep up.
Lily and Ethan had left first, their footsteps settling into a natural rhythm. Ethan had a loose, unhurried quality to his movement that masked how alert he actually was, his eyes tracked the treeline constantly while the rest of him seemed almost casual.
He had fashioned a better spear overnight from a branch he'd been quietly working on.
Lily, for her part, checked all of the various plants they passed. The enhanced knowledge from Maria's wish had settled into her like something she'd always had.
It felt less like information and more like instinct, the way experienced foragers describe knowing what to look for without necessarily being able to explain how or why.
She moved through the undergrowth picking out edible plants with quick, confident hands while Ethan moved ahead to check what lay around each corner before she got there.
Lily looked up as she heard Ethan suddenly gasp, as she approached he turned around with a big grin on his face. He had caught a small rodent with his spear.
"Clean shot," he said, setting it down.
"Nice," Lily gave a thumbs up.
Sam and Maria covered more ground, they didn't gather much but Sam's notebook had gained several pages.
He had been cataloguing the transformed landscape methodically. Which species of plants had changed and how. The way the faint energy in the air seemed to pulse more strongly in certain areas than others. As well as the locations of footprint trails and other signs of creature activity.
Maria focused on the more practical side of things. She looked for potential water sources beyond the river, secondary shelter options in case the cave became untenable. She also helped with the signs animals that were moving through the area and checking which direction they seemed to be going.
Consuming dense materials was the second task AJ had set out for himself.
Soft organic matter wasn't difficult. Moss, leaves, grass dissolved into him with almost no effort, their energy simple and accessible.
But when he turned to denser materials, bark, roots, the small stones that lay around the cave entrance, his body hardly responded.
He could sense energy locked inside these things, but getting to it was like trying to open something without knowing where the latch was.
He started small. A fragment of bark, pressed against his surface. He tried to absorb it the way he absorbed moss.
His body failed to engage, the bark sat there, softening at the edges with agonising slowness, releasing almost nothing. The small pebble he tried was worse.
He tried pulling it completely into his body, applying even pressure from all sides, the stone sat inside him unaffected for several minutes before he gave up.
He kept at it, limiting himself to small fragments and working through them methodically.
After a while he noticed that the piece of bark was finally being broken down. The second piece took slightly less effort than the first, and the third was easier still.
It was not dramatic improvement, there were no sudden breakthroughs, no moments of unlocking, just a slow, cumulative adaptation, like a path wearing itself into the ground one footstep at a time.
By midday, root fibres that had completely resisted him in the morning were giving way in minutes. Even the stubborn stones eventually yielded to him.
He began to understand a new truth about his form, his capacity to consume things was not a fixed ability but something that could, and needed to be trained.
The more he worked at it, the less it would cost. Given enough time, he suspected that nothing would be able to resist him.
Victor spent the morning making the cave harder to approach. He set up multiple sets of spiked sticks around the cave to injure anyone who didn't pay enough attention and ward off those who noticed the traps
He left them uncovered and marked for now to avoid catching friendlies.
He then reinforced the entrance narrowing with a pair of sharpened stakes set at low angles, it wasn't much but it would slow down anything that tried to push through in a hurry.
He ended up finding a second shallow alcove in the rock at the rear of the cave that was just large enough for two people to tuck into, which could come in handy.
He double checked everything and adjusted what needed adjusting.
The others returned in the late morning, converging on the cave entrance within minutes of each other as though the group had a shared sense of when to come back.
Lily and Ethan arrived first, setting down their haul, a spread of edible plants, mushrooms, and the small rodent Ethan had caught with his spear, which he was still quietly pleased about.
Sam and Maria came shortly after, carrying less in their arms but more in Sam's notebook.
They sat together at the cave entrance and ate, pooling what they'd found. It wasn't a feast, but it was sufficient to be called a full meal.
Maria described the surrounding area in practical terms, there was one other possible water source within a reasonable distance of the cave, the direction the larger animal tracks were headed, which was reassuringly away from them. She presented information that mattered, no more and no less.
Sam added what he'd mapped, places where the transformation of the landscape had been most dramatic, and two separate sets of human footprints they had deliberately avoided.
"The footprints concern me more than the wildlife," Sam said, setting his notebook on his knee. "The animals are more likely to keep to themselves than people."
"We'll keep the traps visible from the outside for now," Victor said. "Anyone approaching will see them. That tells them something about us, and we learn something about them depending on how they react."
"Good work, everyone," he said as he stood up. "Take some time to rest and then straight back to it."
The last task on AJ's to do list was creating materials from his internal energy. He had gotten an initial taste of it earlier with the slippery substance he now uses to move but that was more instinctual than deliberate.
He settled outside the cave entrance in the afternoon light and turned his attention inward.
He was looking for the energy he'd accumulated throughout the day, from the moss, the bark, the roots, the river water. He knew it was in there, somewhere.
He could feel it humming inside him, but it was like a thin mist. Whenever he tried to pull it together, it simply slipped through his grip, leaving his mind aching from the effort.
He tried picturing what he wanted to produce. Moss, the simplest thing, something he had absorbed dozens of times today and understood better than anything else.
He held the image in his mind and pushed the energy toward it.
Nothing happened.
He tried adjusting the image, focusing on texture rather than appearance, on the faint dampness of it, the way it had felt when Lily pressed it against his form.
He tried directing the energy more firmly. He tried relaxing his direction entirely. He tried a dozen variations over the better part of an hour, and each time the energy shifted slightly in response to his intention and then dispersed back to its resting state.
He stopped trying to force it and sat with the problem instead.
The issue, he thought, was that he was approaching it like a physical process, like squeezing clay, something you applied pressure to and shaped directly.
But the energy didn't respond to pressure, every time he pushed, it scattered. It seemed to respond to an intention, a direction, rather than a command.
Not grasping at the smoke or trying to push it but opening a door and letting it flow on its own.
He held the image of the moss in his mind again, clearly, patiently, without pushing, and waited.
It took a long time. Long enough that he began to wonder if he was wrong, if this was simply something his body couldn't do yet.
But then, faintly, he felt it, a slight gathering deep within, energy began to pool together.
He didn't rush it. He held the image and let the energy accumulate at its own pace, resisting the urge to push when it slowed.
What finally emerged from his surface was small, about the size of a fingernail. It was an uneven, rough-edged lump that didn't really look like moss.
It fell onto the ground and lay there.
The effort had cost him visibly, his form had contracted slightly, the energy he'd used leaving a corresponding gap in his mass.