Slumrat Rising

Chapter 49: Wheels and Meals

Truth “thoughtfully” relieved Loudmouth of his spear. He gave it a quick once over. It was just a long, polished bit of wood with a broad metal head. Maybe it had ritual significance? You could hardly call it a weapon. Though with his current body, that calculation changed. He looked down on Loudmouth. He didn’t have a way to tie up the villager. Nor did he have a way to gag him.

Truth sighed. He carefully kicked the unconscious man once in the head. Hopefully, the brain damage wouldn’t be too severe. Sometimes cultivation could clear up those sorts of injuries, and they had to have some kind of doctor here, right? Or shaman? Something?

Right?

Feeling low, Truth skulked towards the rammed earth huts. He avoided the ones with smoke rising out of them until he realized all the huts had smoke rising out of them. It looked like he would have to knock out even more people.

The village was a scattered collection of huts built around a stretch of dirt road. There were little fields out back of the houses, and it looked like there was a well centrally located. There were three wagons parked in town, seemingly haphazardly. Big, ugly things. Well, not big. Small ugly things, big compared to the sleek people carriers he remembered from living in Jeon.

Truth kept skulking. People were cooking dinner. Three or more generations gathered around a wood-burning fire, cooking in iron pots or pans. Vegetables, mostly, flavored with bits of dried meat. Big plastic jugs of water, bleached by the sun.

Tucked under the eves of one hut, he found a broken down two-wheeler. The system had highlighted it in blue. A preview of the treasure finder reward? The seat was rotted out, the foam half lost. It looked like some… quite a bit… almost all of the critical talisman lines were broken or worn away. The chained spirit powering the thing was still in place, thank Prager.

He stared at the two-wheeler a little longer. It was a broken wreck, but the really broken part was the talisman system that moved the magic from the spirit to the wheels. You didn’t even need control runes for steering, as the operator just aimed the front wheel with a couple of handlebars. And as a qualified Talisman Maintenance Technician, repairing this wasn’t a big problem with the right tools. An odd thought hit him, and he stifled a giggle.

Truth gently extended a finger, letting his long nail rest on a worn section of the talisman. He half closed his eyes and ran the Meditations. All he wanted was for his right index fingernail to be strong enough to etch metal. Not much. Nails were already hard. The metal was designed to be carved. Not a giant leap. Ferociously holding the image in his mind, he traced a little bit of the line.

It worked. Stellar demons be praised; it worked!

Truth smiled. Now he had a plan. Working swiftly, he repaired the two-wheeler. It had a little rack on the back, which was lucky, though he would have to steal some rope. It was the work of but a minute to do some high-speed (very high speed) snatch and grabs through the village’s windows- a jug of water, a pot of food, rope, and barely a minute more to attach them to his iron steed. Just for luck, he tied the spear along the frame. He peeled out in a plume of dirt as outraged villagers started searching for the wiseass stealing their food.

Mission Complete! Reward- improved standard of living, access to your Personal Development Sheet.. Chain mission begun- Travel to the City of Shomburuti and secure lodgings. Waypoint added. Reward: Improved standard of living, next mission in the chain. Bet you wish you had punched yourself in the nuts and gotten that One Hour Treasure Finder reward now, don’t you? HINT: Some missions are repeatable!

It felt oddly good to hear the “Mission Complete!” chime. It really shouldn’t, but it still made him smile. He was developing the ability to selectively ignore parts of the System messages. At least until they could revisit the subject of jamming the System into a wasp's nest.

Truth drove down the desert road for an hour as fast as the bound spirit could spin the wheels. There was a collapsing wreck of something up ahead. Some kind of service station, perhaps, where one could load up on food and water or repair damage to your vehicle. Long abandoned now, crumbling concrete and corrugated steel roof still releasing the heat of the day.

Truth pulled into it and ate his very first meal. It was… terrible. The food was clearly not done cooking, the vegetables tasted weird and unfamiliar, and the dishes ranged from savagely bland to Not-Even-God-Can-Save-You spicy. The only halfway decent thing was the enormous flatbread every kitchen seemed to have, with its slightly sour, nutty taste.

Unfortunately, the look and texture of the bread reminded Truth uncannily of sponges used to clean and degrease weapons in long-term storage. The kind of ash-gray color that seemed to fade into the night.

Which he saw through remarkably well. The night, not the bread. That was still opaque. Truth looked up into the extraordinary heavens, the galaxy's edge making a starry road no longer hidden by the glow of Harban’s lights and pollution. Yeah, his eyes were amazing now. He didn’t have perfect night vision, but low light vision? Yep, yep, yep.

Were the Shattervoid up there, looking down, trying to find their missing child? He would move heaven and earth to find the Sibs if they were taken. And it sounded like the Shattervoid could literally do that. Maybe they glassed Jeon while he was dead in the well or used that massive spirit attack like in Kofi. Hopefully not. His sibs still lived there, as far as he knew. Slaves to Starbrite. He tried not to imagine how long it had been.

Truth buried his handsome new face in his strong, new hands and tried to breathe. A new body, new life, but hard to have new thoughts or shake the weight off an old soul. He still cared about his siblings. Still worried about how they were doing. What happened to them when he vanished? And the worst thing he could do would be to try and contact them. He had to be dead for them to be any kind of safe, at least for now. Maybe things would be different if he was strong enough to make them different.

He stood and looked back up to the stars. The vast demonic and angelic furnaces that spewed endless cosmic rays out into the universe. The planets and their spirits spun in incomprehensible majesty around this little blue marble and over the head of the haunted flesh of a once-dead man.

What was he supposed to do? He had defined himself by one thing- protect the sibs. That was it. He could do anything, endure anything, and accept anything if it meant reaching that goal. And now it was taken from him. Truth felt the world come loose around him as though he were falling through the void up into the sky. What should he do now? What could he do?

Truth stilled his body. Took a deep breath. Stretched lightly and began to cultivate. He worked through the same motions he had practiced since childhood when he first realized that he had a way out of the hive-like slums. He didn’t need the exercise to draw in the stellar rays anymore, but the motions were soothing. Meditative.

The starlight fell onto his body, and the stellar rays fell into his body, flowing through the Nine Worm path like water, like lightning down a wire. Filling him. Vivifying him. He could feel his flesh warming, returning to full strength after the stress of the day. The energy both warmed and relaxed, then cooled and soothed.

He could feel the reckless, relentless power transformed into stellar energy, pooling through his first and second apertures and knocking loudly at the door of the third. He could sense that during his body reformation, his flesh was adjusted to more perfectly align with the star chart of his apertures. The Stellar Dowsing continued to show its immense worth as the seemingly endless stream of energy flowed through him, preparing him to climb to the highest heights of cultivation.

Truth breathed, and it felt like the universe breathed with him. He stretched and moved, letting his body mimic the slightest bit of the impossibly brilliant procession of stars. As above, so below. Until you were great enough, strong enough, to say to the universe that, actually, it mirrored you. His body flowed without thought until the sun hid the light of the stars in the dawn’s glow. Only Astaphe, the star of both lust and wisdom, lingered. When everything was hidden in the sunrise's pale blue and ruddy orange, it twinkled on the edge of the horizon. Then it, too, finally faded away.

What would Dad do in this situation? He would find a hole and crawl into it. Become paralyzed, only stirring for schnapps and red bats. So the correct thing to do was move. Work to improve his condition. Get stronger. Once he was strong enough, he could make things right.

Truth hopped on the two-wheeler and sped down the road. A few gulps of water washed down the last of the spongy bread. It was enough. He would reach Shomburuti in a few hours. No idea what he was going to do for lodging. The Free State was notoriously lawless, but he didn’t like the notion of just… killing some poor stranger and taking their home. Truth remembered cutting down civilians with his needler and shuddered. Somehow, knowing that he was compelled to do it didn’t make him feel better about having done it. The civvies were just as dead.

Ah. Wait. There was a loophole there. There was one group of people he had absolutely no problem killing. Truth slowly started to grin. It wouldn’t be nice going back to the slums, but you had to start somewhere and work your way up, right?

HINT: You still haven’t looked at your personal development sheet, dummy. And you really, really should.

Truth almost flipped the two-wheeler, yanking it over to the side of the road.

Truth vividly remembered the Body Tab the System generated… what was years ago now, actually, but felt like a couple of months. He had avoided looking at it since, as the numbers were… awkward.

BODY DEVELOPMENT

Stellar Ray Attunement- 63%

Strength- 2.3

Speed- 2.5

Perception- 2.4

Proprioception- 4

Reflexes- 5

A person who hadn’t been using a body development spell should have a stellar ray attunement of between thirty and fifty percent, and the other values should be roughly equal to their level. Each whole number was intended to correspond to the “average” Starbrite employee of that level, with the numbers after the decimal corresponding to how far past that level the body cultivator was. It didn’t tell the whole story, of course. Not nearly. But regardless of Starbrite’s manipulation, Truth’s numbers were more than a little off.

Even then, Truth knew these weren’t “Wow, great job on your PT!” numbers. They were “Just think of all the people who will benefit from what we learn from your vivisection! No, of course we can’t use anesthesia, it would totally invalidate the results,” numbers. Although the System must have known, given it generated the numbers. Or was it just his local System? But then, why would the evil little sprite keep it secret? His head swirled with questions.

Now, Truth had cultivated exactly once since his rebirth, and it had felt spectacular. So high hopes for the attunement. As for the rest… well… he was still Level Two, and he was clearly a hell of a lot better at everything, so…

BODY DEVELOPMENT *NOT GIMPED EDITION*

Stellar Ray Attunement- 90%*

Bone Density- 5.1*

Strength- 3.7*

Speed- 4.0*

Proprioception- 7.0*

Reflexes- 7.0*

Level Progression- 93%

Truth gave the sheet a hard look.

“Summon Humanoid System Interface.”