Chapter 266: First to Fall
Specks of soil swirled around Coop’s feet after he disturbed the pristine earth with his sudden appearance. Behind him, a blank canvas of untouched loam stretched to the horizon of the Underlayer, passed over by his long mistjump. Ahead, the endless expanse of repetitive dirt plains reached out like a stagnant sea of black and deep browns, barely reflecting the mysteriously sourceless light. It was a whole bunch of unoccupied emptiness, yet another abyss.
It had only taken ten long spear throws before Coop was feeling overwhelmed by the solitude once again. There was something truly alien about the cavernous underground that he couldn’t quite pin down, and it wasn’t helped by the infinitesimal hunger that was unsatisfied whenever he wasn’t actively on the hunt.
The next mistjump’s considerable distance placed him near the first landmark he had discovered since leaving his companions behind. He paused after he landed, taking a second to double check the surroundings while reconsidering the vacuity of the caverns.
Coop tried to assess how his disposition was affected by the Underlayer logically. His initial diagnosis was that he was instinctively detecting a complete and utter lack of life and it was triggering some prehistoric defense mechanism.
Before the assimilation, if he had wandered into a natural location that was totally devoid of any life, he would hesitate to explore it in fear of some invisible danger. The lack of living organisms would be taken as a sign that there was a deadly gas or some other imperilment that should be avoided. A completely dead place was just unnatural on planet Earth and at some point, ancient humans had learned to be wary in a way that carried on through the ages.
Coop had never been in a place so devoid of life before he entered the Underlayer. There were no trees, no burgeoning grasses, no molds or algaes, not even pioneering insects to break up the monotonous silence with their buzzing. Whatever breeze was present felt artificial, as if it wasn’t the stagnant air being refreshed, but rather mana flowing in a way that was barely discernible to human senses, causing a flow that was more similar to water beneath the surface of a turbulent ocean than the winds on a mostly flat plain. The air hardly moved, and if he let his mind zero in on it, the open expanse felt suffocating despite being sizable. The feeling wasn’t improved by the way the blanket of soil absorbed sounds.
When he was far off the coast, lost in the ocean, the constant waves and the occasional small disturbance on the surface reminded him that time was still flowing. When he was high in the sky, the clouds drifted and various birds glided to high elevations, untethered to the firm ground. In the Underlayer, there was no sun slowly shifting across the sky, no tiny critters proving they owned the habitat, and no real weather patterns to break up the monotony. There weren’t even regular Primal Constructs variants waiting to be confronted.
Coop cleared his throat for no reason other than to make a sound, but the effect was dampened by the ubiquitous dirt, making it seem even more stifling. It would take some effort to make the Underlayer seem comfortable even if it appeared to lack significant hazards.
He gazed at the giant pillar that had drawn his attention in the first place, tracing its edifice with his eyes as it climbed into the vaporous silvery clouds toward the top of the cavern. Unlike Ghost Reef’s column, this one was off to the side, occupying an area near enough to a wall for Coop to clearly see the slight curvature in the edge of the Underlayer, constructed of the same uneroded stone as the solid monument. Ghost Reef had been placed in what seemed like a central hub in comparison. The entire tunnel seemed more than 100 miles wide, so there was plenty of room for variance in the placements of landmarks.
There were no control points around this pillar and no Primal Constructs claiming territory for the miles around that he could see. Coop took a moment to consider if there was a correlation between the connections of the Underlayer to the surface with the locations of civilization shards. It was clear that this one wasn’t near anything at all, but perhaps it had originally been representative of a shard that was already lost.
The connections had all been made at the start of the assimilation at the same time that the civilization shards were landing on the surface, waiting to be claimed, so he thought it made sense that there would at least be a similar amount of coverage, if not a direct correlation. Having a direct connection like Ghost Reef would be rare, but having access to a way down proportional to shards seemed logical.
Coop shrugged his thoughts away, wondering where exactly he was. He had no internal odometer and the way he blasted his spear forward meant that he had no real sense of the distance he was traveling. The fact that the Underlayer shortened the equivalent distances on the surface didn’t help clarify his travel either.