Periapt [Survival in the world of a Cursed CRPG, Progression, Crafting, LitRPG]

There were ways to test the safety of drinking water in Periapt that did not exist back on Earth. Some flowers would change color if the water were contaminated with toxins or heavy metals. There was allegedly a sacred wood that could be added to a canteen that would suck up anything that wasn’t pure and render the drink safe.

At the time the tutorial was set, there were still trade routes, both leading out into distant towns along the westward trail and those that went overseas to the outer islands. Sometimes items like this could be found in the inventory of traders who traveled those routes, but it was rare, and they were usually so expensive that their only function was to inform the player that those objects existed.

Hollis did not have any of that. He had brought water filters and purification tablets in his backpack, but of course, he had not been allowed to keep them. So, what he had in its place was a much older technology, with a little bit less magic involved.

He had a metal canteen and a small fire. With a little patience, he could simply boil the heck out of any potential drinking water, and it would fix most problems he was likely to come across.

The water he chose was from a small stream running down from the mountains in the north. He checked it for obvious signs of danger, along with a quick sniff, and then filtered it through some cloth and boiled it.

It tasted fine afterward. He would have to wait to see if his slightly recovered Bile meter would take a dip. It didn’t seem likely.

In the game, there was a sickly-looking NPC who would tell explorers to mix a little alcohol into their water as a purification method, but it was either a joke or a programming bug, because that method didn't work.

Hollis now had drinking water and a full load of wild strawberries and edible spin cap mushrooms. All he needed was enough food to keep away the hunger pangs and the associated debuff. Being full was going to be a rare luxury.

The well sat, just as intimidating as ever. He feared he would find the bodies of innocent settlers huddled up in the corner of a cold, wet floor. Still, he had to know what had come of the woman who had left her husband a note at the trailhead all those years ago.

He lifted the lid and climbed into the abyss, with Willo zooming around him as he went down. Most of the way down, the hole had the same general footprint as a small car. It appeared to have been carved right into the earth.

One of the mysteries of Periapt was just how advanced the society was before they fled the continent. It could easily have discovered electricity already. Any copper would have been scavenged long ago. While there was metal, the ruins of old Beckett’s Sound didn’t show much greater sophistication than stone and rebar lattice. They were picked clean or rotted out.

He climbed further down, and once he had traveled seventy-five feet or so, the room around him opened up considerably. Willo’s tail was not enough to light the whole place. It was an underground warehouse, not unlike the one he routinely bought cereal boxes from not so long ago.

The ladder led all the way to the bottom, though it was no longer set into the wall, but into a large stone pillar. When he reached the bottom, he found that someone had stacked old wooden crates to help others avoid a drop of about four feet.

Those crates barely held Hollis’ weight. They had been sitting in water for the longest time. Perhaps the only reason they didn’t collapse was that, by some magical construction method, these crates were not nailed together, but either carved from a block of wood or else grown whole, already shaped like a box and needing minimal hardware to serve their purpose.

It was the little things like that that caught him off guard about this place.

He stepped down from the boxes and found himself about two feet deep in water, but it was only that area that was flooded; the same square hole that had been carved into the ground above was carved beneath him now. He walked over to the edge and climbed onto relatively dry ground. That had not been clear from above.

He looked at the structure, trying to figure out any rhyme or reason for the design of the well.

[Archaeology lvl. 2] This design does not remind you of any well you have ever seen.

Willo did a remarkable job of anticipating where he wanted to see. He zipped around quickly, providing both a general light and a bright spotlight wherever Hollis wanted to look.

Hollis began using his Investigation skill. He didn’t have a choice. It just activated. As he looked at things, the inspector screen listed the object and his thoughts about it.

[Investigation lvl. 4] This was a water wheel once. Now all that is left of it is the moss echo.

…That is the remains of a hydraulic pipe. The oldest kind, the kind for water.

…There is a stone platform under the water here. It was carved from one piece of stone.

Then, all at once, the revelation hit him.

“This was an elevator,” he said excitedly. “Some sort of water-powered elevator.”

To reward his revelation and possibly take some of the credit, the inspector commented on his find.

[Archaeology lvl. 2] While the electric motor was a new technology in Periapt, other types of mechanized motion had been around since ancient times, a blend of magic and science.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

…Elevator technology made it to the outer islands, but this is not a design you recognize.

…You made a discovery!

While increasing his skill level did make him more knowledgeable about any given subject, the limit was that his “character” was an explorer who had lived and trained in the outer islands before venturing into the abandoned continent. If knowledge did not reach the outer islands by the time of the continent’s evacuation, then the inspector wouldn’t tell Hollis about it.

Whatever this elevator was capable of once, it certainly wasn’t anymore. Hollis bid Willo to move on, making larger circles around him to help him find a path.

Hollis found two obvious exits to the room. One was through a set of warped wooden doors on the west side of the room. The other was a giant hole in the wall, big enough for one of the ships in the harbor to fit through. Unfortunately, it had collapsed about thirty feet in, with large boulders blocking the path thoroughly.

The warped wooden door was his only option. He took one last look around the room, noticing the piles of rot or rust here and there. Moisture and time had robbed him of any answers that might have once been here.

He carefully made his way to the wooden doors, pushed them open, and entered a large, dark hallway.

The path forward was clear for the most part. The left side of the underground structure had collapsed, but most of the hallway was still walkable.

Unlike the room he had just been in, this place had once been very nice. The floors were made of deep green stone tile, and the walls had wooden slats placed over them, covered with plaster, then wallpaper. Wooden millwork had made the place feel more like a palace than a dark underground bunker.

It had, at least. Now the wallpaper was a moldy ghost of its former self. The wood was warped and degraded. Stone was showing back through almost everywhere.

There were bronze sconces for some form of light everywhere, but he couldn’t figure out what would go there just by looking at them.

[Archaeology lvl. 2] Oilwood lamps were a popular method of house lighting for most of Periapt’s history, but they could be dangerous underground because of fumes.

… Bioluminescent crossbreeds were developed shortly before the exodus of the continent.

Hollis was quickly learning the benefits of that type of lighting. Willo landed in one of the sconces, casting his glow throughout the hallway.

He continued onward. The rooms on the right were unlocked. Their wooden doors were only an obstacle because they were liable to fall apart when touched.

The first room he entered was just as ornate as the hallway had been. Hollis walked in and poked around, looking for anything worth looting. He found a ceramic plate with ancient remains of food still on it on a desk that had rotted so uniformly that it had basically sunk into the ground. He decided to leave it.

He found the rotten remains of old papers that had fed mold colonies for years. The books he could see were leatherbound, but they never gave any hint of being in good enough shape to read. By that point, Hollis had pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose to keep out centuries-old spores and rat droppings.

The next room he looked in was also some kind of office, but a much bigger one. In it, he saw a chalkboard hanging on the wall. Its last message was still visible.

“You may take my carriage, Margarette, should it serve you. I am to depart until this has all been handled. Whatever comes next, I trust you will meet it with the discretion and resolve that first recommended you to us. Farewell.”

It was unsigned.

However, someone had drawn squiggles with a piece of chalk sometime after the message was written. They were thick and childlike.

Hollis’ eyes drifted to the remains of a nearby desk. An object that didn’t belong had been placed on top. It was a carved wooden bird. Not thin and finicky, but thick and tough, meant for play.

It wasn’t rotten or moldy. It had a coat of dust on it, but nothing more. It was a sign that people had been through this place some time in the last few years. He wondered why it had gotten left behind.

Hollis grabbed the bird and put it in his backpack.

Further on, there were more rooms, but these were worse for wear than those he had seen previously. The ceiling had broken, letting in a trickle of water that accelerated the decay.

The end of the hallway opened up into a room even larger than the warehouse with the water elevator.

It was like an atrium at a mall. There was an upper story with a wraparound balcony. Whatever light source had been here was long gone, leaving the room pitch-black.

Much of the room was occupied by a gigantic fountain or pool of some kind that had broken and spilled water out a few inches deep through the walking paths. Hollis walked forward slowly, trying to understand what this pool actually was.

It wasn’t until he got as close to its edge as caution would allow and Willo shone directly down on it that he recognized it.

It was Beckett’s Sound in miniature. In the center was the lighthouse across the bay from the city. The fields were plowed neat and tidy with crops. The forests were thick and gigantic.

The piers and docks reached out into the bay for nearly a mile, and buildings were built on top of them, which meant the stone and metal ruins Hollis had seen were only a fraction of the actual city.

Beckett’s Sound had been truly breathtaking. This miniature was big enough that Hollis could walk through the streets if he were careful. It was made of stone and clay, so it had survived better than anything else in the facility.

The oceans and rivers had real water in them, thus the appearance of being a fountain. The water was too murky now for it to look like the ocean.

The recreation of the town was detailed enough that Hollis could confirm his theory that the well had been in a beautiful garden. He could even see the mansion that had once been on top of it.

It was some kind of estate.

He could have stayed there and examined the miniature all day, but that would have to wait. His task was to follow a group of people who must have come that way years earlier. That meant examining the surrounding rooms and hallways.

He went about going in and out of every available corridor or broom closet on his path around the room. There were collapses all around, so whatever vast network might once have existed, he saw no signs of it now.

He took out his compass and held it to Willo’s light. Its north was actually closer to west, since it pointed to a mountain in the distance. That meant west was across the miniature of Beckett’s Sound from the way he had come in.

Turpentine Canyon could not be too far in that direction. If there were another exit out of the complex, that would be a logical place to put it.

As Hollis circumnavigated the fountain, he found a room that, unlike other doors, had a sturdy metal door. He opened it to find that a collapse had robbed it of its back half, revealing nothing but a dark chasm down into blackness.

It also revealed the first sign of life in the whole building. Or death, as it were. Human death.

A corpse was sitting against one of the walls. Hollis wasn’t there to disturb the dead. He was looking for the living, but he wanted to see if there was any clue, any clue at all, as to whether this was a new or an old body.

It only took him a few steps to realize that the skeleton was in far too good condition to be three hundred years old.

He returned to the main room and closed the metal door behind him. After he found the way out, he might work up the determination to check the body more closely, but he needed to know his exits first.

Hollis continued his path around the giant copy of the town until he was almost to the westward corridor. In the distance, he heard noise. It wasn’t quite a splash, but it was the sound of water moving. It came from the fake ocean at the center of the room.

He quickened his pace. It was a long way around.