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

The sight of Beckett's Sound would always hit Hollis like a cool autumn breeze. It was comforting, yet chilled him to the bone. The abandoned village built into the ruins of an abandoned city, the massive mountains north of the Sound, the giant lighthouse in the distance. He only wished he could see it in its prime, well, one of its primes. The village alive with bustling settlers, the fantasy city of three hundred years ago, either would be a wonderful sight.

Now it was a cemetery, but still, a beautiful one.

"Maybe the rabbitines are shacking up with the packrats in the ruins of old Beckett's Sound," Royle suggested as they approached a small clutch of stone buildings that had once been the home of traders and craftsmen. The dirt road gave way to cobblestone as Hollis walked up the main street of the village. Royle rode behind him on Jaq.

"They do have the same adaptations. Rabbitines can store multitudes of other rabbitines in their fur. Packrats can store a metric ton of garbage in theirs," Hollis answered. Lots of animals had the same adaptations but with notably different abilities attached to them.

"Packrats could store other packrats in their magic pockets too, but they prefer the trash," Royle said. "Having met packrats, I don't blame them."

Hollis laughed. "You had some unpleasant run-ins with those things too, huh?"

The giant, goblin-like rats were early enemies in the game. They were clever and could wield weapons in their little hands.

The men rode on, largely without aim. The town had been pillaged over the years, though not exactly picked clean.

"I'm sure there's a journal or a government report in one of these buildings that has information on the fog," Hollis said. "Maybe we could find a newspaper with a clue or a letter where someone apologizes for summoning the fog. That's how this would have been solved in the game."

"Just point and click," Royle said. "It was a lot easier when you couldn't enter most of the buildings, and you could only select items that had uses. Now we got this whole town to rifle through."

The village wasn't huge, but it was still large enough to intimidate Hollis if he had to comb through it systematically. Still, he had to try. A clue might not jump out to his eyes, but the inspector had been more than generous in the past. If he could enter the right room and lay eyes on the right thing, he knew text would appear in his mind telling him he was onto something.

Unfortunately, if there was a clue hidden in the obvious places around Beckett's Sound, it was hidden too well. After hours of investigating the local newspaper office, the courthouse, the jailhouse, and even a few random homes, Hollis was left searching for theories.

"Were there other Kaziers here around the time of the evacuation?" he asked Royle as he overturned a filing cabinet and was rewarded with nothing but some paper mache and a mummified fish.

"Sure there were," Royle said. "Hey, you know what? Maybe they took all the clues with them."

"It's not so crazy. Surely, they would have investigated what was going on. It was their job," he responded, not commenting on his suspicion that Royle was mocking him.

"Surely."

"It's possible that this whole thing was the result of some quest a Kazier unlocked but didn't stick around to beat," Hollis suggested. "Like the tiger grass one. Remember that?"

Royle whistled. "You have no idea. That actually happened not long after I got here, like it was straight from the quest. Terrifying stuff. Kaziers and settlers out burning the fields. Crops ruined, people dead. All over an ornamental plant."

Tiger grass was used in some places as a houseplant and as a house pet. In the game, you could find some in a pot next to a trader from Periapt's unnamed far eastern land. It was a funny plant, just a large shock of grass topped with fluffy seed heads that looked like a long-haired cat’s tail. It wiggled around not unlike a house cat when it rubbed up against your leg. It even purred.

In the game, if you bought certain seeds from that trader, there was a chance that some of the tiger grass's seed would also be inside it. If you then planted the seed, or traded it to someone who did, the tiger grass would be cultivated alongside the wheat or barley and would grow to a massive size, taking over the whole field and bringing similar crops under its control like a plague.

Now, gone feral, the grass that seemed like it had a house cat soul would roar if anything came near it. If it grew throughout a field, it could get as tall as a man, and you could see what appeared to be something moving in it, stalking through it. If you made the mistake of getting too close, you wouldn't see a tiger, but the sharp grass would tear you up all the same.

Hollis had done the quest twice. There were different ways to kill it. Sharp weapons worked, but lighting it on fire was the best bet.

"When the winter came that year, people either went hungry from the lack of harvest, or spent their life savings on the tradesmen coming from the sea, taking advantage," Royle said. "I came back here after one of my trips out west. The place was still devastated, between the people it killed and the people who starved."

Hollis couldn't imagine having to live through that. In the game, the incident happened in the summer so there was time to grow new crops. Having it happen even a few months later when those crops were ready for harvest would be devastating.

"I kind of want to grow some," Hollis said. "Is that weird?"

"Not at all. There's still some ranging in the ruins if you wanna go look," Royle said.

Hollis paused to consider if he had accomplished enough so far that day to go on a side quest.

"Let's do it," he said.

And so they did.

~-~

The ruins were an intricate maze of old stone walls, some built in place hundreds of years ago, others fallen into place years later. In the game, it was easy to get lost inside. With Jaq around, that was a virtual impossibility. The horse always knew the way out, Royle assured him.

Willo had to light some of the dark corners of the ruins using his Spotlight ability, which not only chased away the darkness but also let Hollis see whatever the light illuminated with great clarity from far away.

"Now light up that alley," he said. He didn't need to tell the glowbug what to do; they shared a mental connection. Still, he felt he needed to narrate for Royle. "I think we can assume that there wouldn't be any in this section because grass needs light."

"Tawny's right, you would make a good farmer," Royle responded.

"In fact, I was a farmer," Hollis said. "Had my own land, crops, livestock. Even a red barn."

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Royle laughed. "A country boy."

"Not exactly," Hollis said. "Just practice for when I came here. It was all part of the plan. My livestock were glorified pets. Gave them away before I left."

There was a pause in the conversation before Royle asked, "Why did you want to come here so bad?"

Hollis thought for a moment. He liked Royle, but there was being friendly, and there was being friends. He wasn't the latter quite yet.

"People would be surprised just what someone will do to make up for a mistake," he said.

Royle didn't respond. He sat quiet on Jaq all the way until they found the tiger grass.

"Isn't it a beauty?" Hollis said of the gold-and-white striped grass. "Amber waves of grain right there."

A street between two stone buildings stood before them, all but the farthest edge covered in the golden grass, and that was only spared because it never got sunlight.

The grass would have been six feet tall and too thick for a man to walk through, but as they looked upon it, the blades and grain lay bent over low, rising and falling in a gentle breeze.

"Is it snoring?" Royle asked.

"I think it might just be," Hollis answered. "I think it's asleep."

[Naturalism lvl. 6] You see an invasive species of carnivorous grass. One false step can turn even the most powerful beasts into fertilizer. Little is known about the breed.

Because this species is exotic, the indicator might not have much information on it. If it wasn't native to the abandoned continent or the Outer Islands, his character could never know much without specialized research. Luckily, he could do that research himself.

The entire tract of grass was dormant, but one area seemed larger, fuller. This was the area with the invisible "tiger" in it, Hollis knew. The tiger could move pretty quickly.

"I only need a handful of the seeds," he said. "There's some there, leaning over the edge."

"Make sure you use your non-dominant hand," Royle said.

Hollis wasn't going to use his literal hand at all. He grabbed his pocket knife and practiced swiping its blade through the air. There was no skill exclusively associated with melee weapons. Brawling covered them in a fight, but Hollis suspected this wouldn't be Brawling.

This was harvesting. That meant it would actually use his Cultivation skill. Luckily, he had recently upgraded it thanks to his battles with some squirming skeletons.

He moved closer to the edge of the tiger grass, listening to the slow, even breath of the plant, wondering why it imitated a tiger, wondering if the spirit of an actual tiger lived within it, which might mean that studying this plant would help him learn to use Spirit…

No.

He needed to focus.

[Naturalism lvl. 6] In grasses such as tiger grass, the seed is enclosed within a dry fruit called a caryopsis, or grain.

That wasn't important. The indicator had no sense of priorities.

Once Hollis was close enough, he swiped the blade at the nearest stem bearing a large seed head, which would contain more than enough seed for any experiment he might want to do.

The feathery bunch of seeds fell to the ground, and Hollis quickly grabbed it up. It was lucky he was so fast, because as soon as he had it in his hand and had backed away a few feet, the roar of the invisible tiger echoed so loud he could feel it in his ribs.

It was an incredible thing, the tall leaves now at their full height, moving and bowing like something deadly circled within them. Those leaves were sharp enough to cut through every layer of clothes he wore and right to his bones.

Jaq fought every urge to rear up and throw Royle, but he was clearly disturbed and turned back toward the exit, practically begging his rider to let him run. Royle himself was very quiet in the ruins.

"Got it," Hollis said, wrapping the seed head in a cloth and tucking it in his pocket. When he saw Royle's discomfort, he wondered if it was right of him to ask him to come here. A pang of guilt rose up in him. "We're good to go."

Royle must have given Jaq permission to exit, because the horse started running. Hollis had to run himself to catch up.

As they exited the ruins, Royle said, "If you get any of that in Tawny's garden, she will kill you, you know."

"Yeah, I know."

~-~

They decided to investigate the fields and forests west and north of town. Hollis had been through them, but not extensively.

"You think those buildings were skyscrapers once?" Royle asked of the ruins they had just escaped. "If I remember right, their bases are so huge, they must have supported towers or something."

Hollis actually knew the answer.

"They were pretty tall, yeah," he said. "I don't know how big they have to be to be skyscrapers. Truth is, they weren't the biggest buildings in Old Beckett's Sound."

"How would you know that?" Royle asked.

"Down in the facility, there was a scale model of the city, with a pool for the sea and everything. What you don't know is that most of the city was actually built on giant piers out into the water. We're talking huge buildings that made those stone ruins look like some rundown apartments on the edge of town."

"Wow," Royle said. "It was a proper city?"

"A metropolis," Hollis said. "Most of it on the water. Not modern stuff. Mostly old-fashioned structures, like windmills so big they would make the ships in the water look small. I don't know, maybe they powered the city. Bridges hundreds of feet up between buildings. It must have been something to see in person."

Royle took all this in quietly. Hollis continued to describe what he had seen underground. Eventually, the watchman noted, "And now it's all underwater. Home to sharks and squids... You know, water breathing is classed as an ability, not an adaptation, so people can barter for it without needing gills or nothing."

"I think I'll stick to exploring the land, thanks," Hollis said.

"So we found something you're afraid of," Royle said.

But Hollis didn't respond. He didn't even look over at his companion. For a moment, Royle waited in expectation, but then his connection to Jaq told him something was wrong.

"What is it?" he asked.

Hollis surveyed the open forest before them. What he saw bewildered him, but only for a moment. The ground and all the plants in a circular area about thirty feet in diameter were cloud-white, covered in a thick layer of frost.

"The ground is frozen," Hollis said.

Royle's guard went up; he prepared to tell Jaq to flee. "Are we in danger?" he asked, but he was asking his horse, who was very knowledgeable in that specific thing.

"No, no," Hollis said. "We probably shouldn't walk on it, though."

"The indicator isn't telling me anything," Royle said. "Usually it will tell me stuff if people describe things, even if I can't see it myself. What could cause this?"

"An explorer who buried a widowmaker gull carcass here after he was finished with it a few days ago," Hollis said.

Royle took a moment to respond. "Wait, are you talking about yourself? You buried a bird here?"

"Not deep enough, apparently," Hollis said. "Widowmaker gulls freeze themselves for defense or to drop down on prey. Apparently they don't lose that gift in death."

The frost was still thick. If only he had saved the feathers, they must have had powerful crafting uses. Of course, they could just as easily have frozen him to death.

"Well that's fun," Royle said. "Nobody ever told you you aren't supposed to eat seagulls?"

Hollis laughed. His attention was on the frost. It had accumulated thick enough to qualify as chunks of ice. He was surprised the remains of a single gull could do all of this. It appeared to be freezing the water from the air.

No, not just the air, the fog.

"I think the fog has come this far," he said. "Some of it never left. Got frozen to the ground. Right over here, some kind of huge snake or something froze right where it slithered."

[Naturalism lvl. 6] You see the remains of a serpentine creature subject to considerable predation. Its species is unidentifiable.

"Something picked this snake clean after it got stuck in the ice," Hollis said. "There are bite marks."

"The fog?" Royle suggested.

"Maybe," Hollis said, imagining how fog might eat a snake. If a field of grass could be carnivorous, why not water vapor? "Anything else might have gotten stuck. Maybe crows, I don't know."

The men took in their finding.

"Guess there are animals up this way," Royle said. "At least snakes."

"See, what did I tell you?" Hollis asked. "If there's a snake here this size, it must be eating something."

"Something with a fluffy tail and an adorable twitchy little nose?"

"I sure hope so," Hollis said.

But hope was not all he had at his disposal. He had the ability to track. He circled the ice patch, looking for signs of game, and it wasn't too long before he found them. [Tracking lvl. 5]

"Follow me," Hollis said as he jumped on the trail of his quarry.

He tracked through the forest for some time, reading even the most minute signs. The game trails he had seen when he first found the rabbitines had not been used recently when he looked at them that morning.

These were just being broken in. They were new. And old. They were everywhere. He had come so close to finding them when he was out here before, but had not managed to.

He managed to follow them, his eyes to the ground for so long he didn't even register what he was looking at when he glanced up at the direction they led as he passed through a glade.

"This has been one heck of a day," he said. First, he had seen the ground frozen through. Now…

[Vigilance lvl. 6] You see a grove of trees on fire in the distance. The flames leap into the sky, but there is no smoke.

No smoke in those burning trees, no. But there were noisy birds. Lots of them, and they didn't seem to care at all that the branches they stood on were covered in flames.