Luc stood a few feet back from the cliff edge, not trusting anything with edges anymore.
Nothing came back up. He waited anyway — because large things had a way of not being as finished as you wanted them to be. But the jungle held its silence, and eventually he accepted that it was over.
He turned away. The alertness behind his eyes didn't.
The jungle had nearly killed him once in the last ten minutes. It didn't feel like a place that was done trying.
"System. The points."
Available: 3.
He thought about it properly.
Strength was out. Two points on a baseline-one frame wasn't going to make him hit harder in any way that mattered — not against things like that snake. Mana was the same problem. He didn't even know what mana did yet, which made investing in it a bet he couldn't evaluate.
Speed, though — speed had just saved his life. And perception. That half-second of hearing the snake's displacement before it struck, the way he'd read the terrain near the cliff — that wasn't luck. That was information. And in a jungle that wanted him dead, more information meant more time, and more time meant still being alive to figure everything else out.
"Speed — two. Perception — one."
Allocated.
Luc started walking. The difference was subtle. Not a surge, not a cutscene upgrade. Just — less friction.
Like something had been adjusted a degree toward functioning correctly. His steps came back a little quicker than he expected. The joints a little looser.
He paused.
A leaf fell from the canopy, maybe fifteen meters to his right.
He heard it on the way down.
Not the impact. The descent. The faint whisper of air parting around it. He turned toward it on instinct before it even landed, watched it settle against the jungle floor, and stood there a moment processing what had just happened.
He kept walking. More carefully now.
Every sound got its own assessment. The rustling ahead — something small, many-legged, mutually uninterested. The movement above — birds shifting roost.
A low rhythmic thrum to his left — water, not close but not unreachable.
He filed it away.
"System," he said after a while. "What am I actually working with? Full feature list."
Basic functions: stat tracking, task generation, status assessment, combat logging. Advanced functions are gated behind user relevance thresholds.
"Meaning I don't qualify."
Correct.
He stepped over a root.
"What about mastery paths?"
A pause — slightly longer than the others.
Where did you encounter that term?
"I didn't. I'm asking. There's always a progression system beyond raw points."
…Paths represent optimization vectors, the System said, with the reluctant precision of someone reading from a document they hadn't agreed to share. Directions of development through which a host may deepen capability in chosen domains rather than distributing improvement broadly.
"So — specialisations."
That is an oversimplification.
"But roughly."
Roughly, it allowed, in a tone that made clear the concession cost something.
"And I unlock them when?"
When you become relevant enough to warrant them.
Luc decided that argument could wait until he had shoes.
He'd been watching the canopy — a habit he was aggressively developing — when his gaze dropped back to ground level just as he was stepping through a patch of softer earth near a bend in the treeline.
He stopped.
Crouched down.
The soil was disturbed in a pattern — compressed, deliberate, repeating. Not an animal's sprawl. Not the random scatter of something fleeing. Evenly spaced. Bipedal. The shape at the front was flat and squared-off in a way that soil didn't make on its own.
Something with a sole had made these.
He stared at them for a moment. "Human," he said quietly.
The word felt different out loud than it had in his head. Not hope. Not yet. But something dangerously close to it.
He stood and looked in the direction they led — deeper into the trees, angling slightly uphill. The decision didn't take long. He had no map, no destination, nothing pointing anywhere. But someone had walked through here recently enough that the edges were still clean, and that someone had come from somewhere.
He followed.
The trail was not cooperative.
It vanished twice — once where the ground hardened into a shelf of dark rock, and once where something had churned the soil into a mess that could have been anything. Both times he stopped. Looked. Tried to think about where a person walking in a straight line would emerge on the other side.
The second time, he stood there longer than he wanted to.
For a moment he thought it was gone for good. That he'd been following disturbances in the soil and calling it a trail, that he'd invented the whole thing out of desperation and walked himself further into nowhere.
Then he found it again, a little further on than expected, half-hidden under a fallen frond.
He let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.
"Am I even going the right way?" he muttered.
Uncertain, the System said.
"That's becoming your whole personality."
Accuracy is not a personality.
He kept walking. The uphill grade was gentle but consistent, the trees beginning — just barely — to space themselves a little wider. More light coming through at an angle that said the afternoon was still moving, time passing whether he made progress or not.
He felt the weight of something small and dense shift in his hoodie pocket. The goddess hadn't lied about the coin, then. He'd check later.
He smelled it before he saw it.
Something on the air that didn't belong to the jungle — not rot, not green, not the wet-soil heaviness of everything around him. Something drier. Older.
Smoke.
He stopped walking.
It was faint enough that he would have missed it completely an hour ago. He stood very still and breathed it in again, making sure it was real.
He pushed forward, and the treeline began to thin in earnest — the undergrowth pulling back, the canopy opening in ragged patches. The ground levelled. The trees gave way.
He reached the edge of the jungle and stopped.
Below, maybe two kilometres out, a valley opened up — soft and wide, threaded through with a dirt road he could just make out against the darker earth. And at the near end of it, clustered where the road bent around a low hill, rooftops. Walls. The angular geometry of buildings that had been built rather than grown.
Above it all, a thin column of smoke rose steady and unhurried into the afternoon sky.
For the first time since arriving, the world didn't look like it was trying to kill him.
He stood there a moment, just taking it in.
Probability of human presence: high, the System said.
"Yeah," Luc said quietly.
Something in his chest loosened — not safety, not yet, but direction. A real, visible, undeniable direction.
He adjusted the one remaining sock that had survived the day, and started down the hill.