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

Skipagans looked like thin, silver ribbons when they swam. A school of them could be dazzlingly beautiful to the human eye, but to predators, the giant tangled mass of bladed streamers sent fear signals to the brain, prompting them to hide.

Hollis watched as a small group of sandbar snakes drilled into the rocky shore as the skipagans passed, leaving nothing but their flailing, seaweed-like tails sticking out of the surface. Very few other fish could be found in the crater-pools of the river delta.

The mass of silver ribbons was fascinating, but it presented a problem for the four fishermen as they sought to reel in vittles for the ever-hungry patients staying at Tawny's eternal wellness retreat. Finding food was a constant concern. Winter would come to the land and freeze them into their beds. If they didn't gather the food and medicinal ingredients they needed to care for the patients at the hospice, many would die.

Willo was fascinated by the fish and got as close as he dared to the surface of the water so he could dance along with the shimmering seathings. He flashed his yellow glow and watched it reflect a thousand times off the water and silvery scales below.

"Gotta trap 'em," Otis had said in his gruff, matter-of-fact way when Hollis asked what there was to be done about the mass of fish scaring away the good eating.

"How would we trap a fish like that?" Hollis asked after his Fishing skill returned all but blank on the inspector when he checked. This was advanced knowledge. He had watched the fish for a couple of days and had yet to see them do anything but swarm around. Throwing his fishing net over them didn't return a single fish. They might really have been silver light.

[Fishing lvl. 3] This is a rare sight, these skipagans. A zesty taste of the sea, for certain, but hard to catch in numbers. Not good for bait. Not good for a fisherman's sanity. Best wait for them to clear out.

[Naturalism lvl. 6] You see a freshly spawned school of skipagans enveloping some unnatural tidal pools. These larval fish are not dangerous. They should be cleared out after the next rainfall. Where they go is a question of much debate.

Larval? Hollis questioned. Some of them were five feet long, even if they were thin and flat. What did they grow into if they looked like this as larvae?

He considered checking Folklore for an answer, but before he could, Otis waded out into the water half-naked like a wild man and stood amongst one of the biggest masses of writhing, silvery ribbons. If they had been blades, he would have been cut to pieces. Instead, they swirled around him without a care.

Otis didn't say anything, but he waited to be sure that Hollis was watching before he stuck his hands in the river, scooped up as much of the cool water as he could, and gradually allowed it to fall back down like a tiny waterfall.

The effect was instant. Three separate skipagans found the stream of river water pouring out of Otis' hands and decided to swim up it, like salmon headed upriver to spawn.

The three long ribbons seemed to disappear after they reached the remaining pool of water in the mountain man's hands, which clenched around them.

Otis marched up out of the water, causing water to cascade down off his body and more skipagans to attempt to climb up into the air, only to seemingly disappear when they got to the top of the falling water.

Hollis peered down into the partially open fist that still contained a small dribble of water. One fish of the three he had seen remained in the man's hand. It didn't resemble the beautiful, threatening streamer anymore. It looked like a minnow, and a shrimp had a runt of a child.

Where was the long, silvery streamer? Hollis laughed as he stared down at it. He would have felt ripped off if this creature was presented to him as a salad topping. It wasn't even silver any longer, but a dull, pinkish gray.

Otis dropped the little fish-ish into the water, and it quickly swam back toward its school. As it did, a long, thin silver ribbon appeared from its body.

It was an illusion. The whole thing was a defense mechanism.

"That's fascinating," Hollis said, honestly. "Still, how do we trap them?"

Whether the writhing blades that seemed to come off the skipagans' bodies were real or not didn't matter if they scared all of the suitable fish away from the delta.

For that, Otis merely grunted and pointed up at the canyon walls in the distance, which enclosed the crater pools where the river met the sea. The land up above didn't gradually lower down to sea level; no, the cliffs from the southern reach of Beckett's Sound simply dropped off a hundred feet or so onto sand beaches. At high tide, the beaches disappeared, and the water rose up the side of the cliffs, flooding a good portion of the canyon's interior.

None of this was natural. To Hollis, it looked like…

[Archaeology lvl. 3] You see the scars of an ancient battle along the southern coast of the abandoned continent. You can only imagine what powers cut these clean lines through the canyon and cliffside and dragged much of the shore into the sea.

The canyon abruptly stopped at the beach. Eons of rain and wind had done their best to wear the stone down, but they had failed to hide the sharp edge of the canyon's end.

Eighty-Seventh of Winter, 39.5.2

The craters are from falling stars, Maury says, and the Dragon that Chases the Sun came in an egg riding one. This is a fact to him and his people. The Sun-Chaser, they say, is the last remnant of the days when the sky was thick with beasts of enormous size. It always surprises me how they can know so much and so little at the same time.

The journal entry appeared to Hollis with no fanfare, yet he had little time to think about it before it faded from his view.

Otis was pointing to the series of ledges and steps carved into the cliffside, stair-stepping all the way up. Each ledge was about the size of a boxing ring.

The first ledge would hang right off the surface of the water at high tide. As Hollis investigated it, he started to piece it all together. He ignored the inspector. As useful as it was to get confirmation on his assumptions about the world of Periapt, it did steal some of the satisfaction when the inspector would confirm his guesses before he had a chance to do so himself.

Because it was still low tide, he needed to climb up the cliffside to reach the first ledge. It wasn't merely a flat rock. It was carved out, with a stagnant pool of water at its center. The carving created a channel where any water overflowing from the pool would pour down into the sea below.

On the other side of the platform was another ledge at about chest-height. Upon climbing onto this next level, he found another stagnant pool and another carved channel that would direct water down onto the ledge below.

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Hollis assumed it was like that all the way up to the top of the cliff.

He was piecing it together now, how the trap would work. Water could be poured into the top pool, causing it to overflow down onto the next ledge, and then the next, all the way down the cliff. It would cascade all the way down to the delta's pools below, creating a false waterfall.

This was an old trap. It must have existed years before the fog ran everyone off. Could it be that this predated the attempts to repopulate the continent?

[Archaeology lvl. 3] The weathering on this rock indicates that this trap was built decades, if not centuries, ago, though there is evidence of recent repair along the foothold on the cliff.

Willo flew from foothold to foothold, shining his light into the indents before flying back under Hollis' shirt collar, where he was growing accustomed to staying.

The cliff didn't only bear footholds. There were lots of thin, woody vines running up the cliff all the way from the river delta below. His eyes traced their growth down to the freshwater pools below. Hundreds of feet beyond that, the place where the saltwater started marked a great, fearful unknown of the southern sea.

After taking a moment to appreciate the view, he focused back on the vines. They didn't grow anywhere else in the immediate area. Their path traced right up along the staircase of ledges to the top of the cliff.

More than that, the vines were dead. They had once been thick and hardy, but now they barely hung onto the cliffside.

He recognized them as woody grape vines. They were the same kind used by Tawny and the other canyon residents to water their crops. His first walking stick in the game was made from this plant.

It turned out he had just the skills he needed to activate this ancient trap. He would need to breathe life back into these vines and compel them to bring water up from the pools below. With three dominant lines making their way diagonally up the cliff, that would mean reviving hundreds of feet of vines.

In the ruins, he had managed to grow a single root out thirty or forty feet through painful effort. Here, the body of the vines was already there, so it wouldn't take as much Blood to get them healthy again.

All that was left was to do it. He hoped he could do it before the tide changed. Unlike on Earth, the tide was not so reliable here.

"I don't care what the inspector said," Hollis joked, "I'm eating as many of these things as I can get in a pot."

Willo glowed with jittery brightness, as if he were laughing.

The work was slow and methodical. First Hollis had to breathe into the roots of the vine system down at the base of the cliff. It was difficult. They didn't want to be here; Hollis knew it the moment he breathed into them. It was a feeling. This place was sickening to them.

At high tide, they would be engulfed in saltwater, which they hated. He took a moment to contemplate the implications of his sudden sympathetic bond with the rotting plant and decided that, since the plant was not being given Spirit but only Breath, it was not alive. Not really. It was more like an extension of himself than a separate being.

"Don't worry," he said anyway. "You won't have to go through it for long."

He breathed into the plant's main stem, and the slimy, rotten woody mass of it seemed to breathe with him.

He activated the plant's Indeterminate Growth adaptation and the life-restoring abilities that stemmed from it, allowing it to grow and regrow perpetually.

Dig in those roots, he commanded the plant as he gave it Breath and guided it with his Mind. It did as he asked, but its response was lagging.

It needed Blood.

He knew the drill. He prepped himself mentally for the cost and then beckoned the plant to grow faster, to heal its rot and ruin.

One big push was enough to heal the bark-covered exterior of the main trunk of the vine. Hollis braced himself for any pain that might work its way into his hand after that exertion. It wasn't that bad. In fact, Hollis looked down at his hand in surprise.

Blood ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱ [9/10]

He had spent Blood, but the pain he expected didn't arrive. Was that the difference his growth in Cultivation had earned him after his time in the ruins?

Yes, partially, he reasoned. There was another reason, however.

This plant, unlike the sour gum root in his pack, could get energy from the sun. Tiny leaves sprouted near the base of the woody vine. It could get power from that, which meant it didn't need all of its energy from Blood. That revelation was a welcome one. It wouldn't save him completely because he was doing this so quickly, but it would make it easier.

So he continued, following the vines up the cliffside. He made them hardier, more secure against the rock, and gave them more leaves as necessary to ease his Blood expenditure.

Blood ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱ [7/10]

Breath ▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱ [5/10]

Mind ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱ [7/9]

Bile ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰ [10/10]

Spirit ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱ [9/11]

This was wearing him out, but he was making progress. He looked back at the others. Otis was with his dogs at the far end of the beach, fishing in the ocean. His dogs were pretty good at barking into the water and sniping a passing eel with their sound bites.

Royle was scaring fish upstream by dropping rocks in the water with his arcing gravity ability. Even a small stone could make a tremendous splash. Dakota and his bonded giant muskrat were further upstream, waiting for the fish to power their way to them.

He had used his ability to harden and sharpen objects to turn a tree branch and all of its twigs into a many-pronged spear. They were having mild success while they waited for Hollis to finish.

He took a deep breath. If he could just finish the job, he could activate it and watch the fruits of his labor immediately. That thought was enough to encourage him to get back to work. By the time he made his way to the top of the cliffs with three strong vines ready for use, he realized he had made a small mistake.

At the top of the cliff, a small bush had formed, filled with wild grapes. It was no big deal, even if it was inefficient. At least some of his efforts were wasted on forming the small purple food.

He laughed.

"Here's the fruit of my labor," he joked with Willo, who let loose a bright burst of light.

The final step was pretty simple. He found an area at the top of each vine where the plant was still thick and cut through it with his hatchet. He got all three in one swing.

The freshly cut vines were now ready.

"Sap Ascent," he beckoned as he released Breath into the plant. The vines answered him immediately. Water poured through them as it would through a garden hose.

The three vines formed a stream that ran down into the highest ledge's pool, which quickly began to fill up to the top and overflow.

Like a game of wet dominoes, the trap was sprung. Water poured from ledge to ledge, falling down as a small waterfall. Hollis grinned ear to ear as the sound of the water grew and the stream picked up. His adrenaline surged, and he breathed into the vines with greater enthusiasm.

More water flowed, and soon, the first drip hit the tidal pools below. Hollis' eyes darted around the water, hoping to see the giant writhing mass of silver streamers headed his way.

The water flowed faster as he searched. Soon, it was a proper water fixture. The stream was heavy and fast. The stagnant pools were clearing up and filling with white-capped rapids as the water flowed and swirled through them.

The waterfall at the bottom of the ledges was now full-size. The body of water below was completely transformed by the torrential stream.

The skipagans noticed the moment a proper wave hit them. They became a silver river as they slithered and swam toward the waterfall.

Just as they had when Otis had demonstrated their behavior, the little shrimp-fish began swimming up the stream in a beautiful, glowing surge. Hollis cheered as the fish jumped from ledge to ledge, following the flow of water upward.

He had worked for hours, fighting a tide whose timing was unfamiliar and overlong. He worked from ledge to ledge, giving his Blood, Mind, and Breath to make the trap work.

The first of the fish made it up the cliff in just over a minute. Their pretty streamers filled the highest pool until the whole thing looked like liquid mercury.

The water down at sea level barely contained one silvery fry. Those that remained were difficult to see from the top of the cliff.

Finally, after keeping the water flowing for as long as he could bear, Hollis released his hold on the plant. It drained itself quickly. Once again, it was a dead, woody grapevine.

He looked down at the pools on each ledge and the multitude of skipagans they contained. He was satisfied with his work. A handful of wild grapes was his reward. He scooped the little, sweet fruits into his mouth and tried not to think about whether they were literally made with his blood or not.

Willo flashed his tail excitedly as he flew over the surface of the highest pool. The little Ghost Light Beetle loved the shining fish.

"It's pretty cool, isn't it?" Hollis asked.

Willo must have agreed, because in his excitement, he let loose a long, yellow stream of light that followed him as he flew. Other than the color, it looked like the skipagans' illusion. Willo went from a singular bulb of light to a whole glowing ribbon.

Down below, Dakota and Royle cheered Hollis' success. He sent them a thumbs-up.

Turning back to the fish in the pool, he thought, Now, how do I eat you?