The Primal Hunter Volume 7

To The Moon! 2

In the next instant, the windows to the outside world disappeared, and Jake felt the shift. Through his sphere that extended outside of Sandy, he saw everything warp. It was as if space contracted around Sandy before everything suddenly broke apart.

A headache instantly assaulted Jake as he took in the environment of the subspace. He saw reality itself stretch and contract in impossible ways as concepts such as distance became nothing more than relative terms. Despite the headache, Jake held on, vaguely feeling himself and Sandy move. Despite the odd changed space, Sandy still managed to wiggle forward, as if swimming through a world that simply didn’t make any sense from Jake’s perspective.

For a moment, Jake considered releasing a Pulse of Perception, then thought twice about doing that unless he wanted to knock himself out. He was curious, true, but not curious enough to potentially deal soul damage to himself by overloading his brain. The chances of it happening were low but still too high to entertain his vanity.

Instead, he contracted his sphere to relieve his headache, pulled out his cauldron, and went into the alchemy bubble Sandy had created for him. Well, alright, that Sandy had tasked people from the Order to create for Jake, but it was the thought that counts.

Jake had a lot of profession levels to go before he would catch up to his class, and while half a day, or even half a year, wouldn’t do much to close the gap, every little bit counted. Seeing as he was good on potions, Jake worked a bit on poisons, and the hours quickly passed. The trip to the moon, which Jake had expected to be a long endeavor, was over before it had barely begun.

“Alright, we’re pretty close now,” Sandy said after what had only been ten and a half hours.

“How do you even know we’re close?” Jake questioned, as the outside world still didn’t make any sense to him when he expanded his sphere back out a bit.

“Because I’m smart.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t really answer anything… Like, what’s the tell?” Jake kept pressing.

“Alright, alright. You know how when you’re swimming through the sand, all the sand looks identical, but if you get really close, no two pieces of sand are the same, and sometimes there’s even other stuff mixed in, like small bones, stones, and whatnot?”

“Sure, let’s say I do.”

“Well, it’s a bit like that. Big stuff is like bones and stuff within the sand, while space itself is like every little sand grain. It varies a bit, and when close to bigger stuff, like planets—or the moon, in this case—every grain is also a bit different. So, it’s just about feeling for that. When I then know I’m close to where I wanna go, I wiggle out, and boom, I’m right at where I wanna be.”

“I see,” Jake said, nodding at the very sand-based explanation. He was pretty sure he got it, at least partly, even if it still didn’t make that much sense. It was honestly interesting how stuff like this worked. Sandy legitimately saw the world as filled with sand everywhere, and going into subspace like this was just diving into dense sand. Others could see the subspace entirely differently, maybe like being underwater, a dark void, a beam of light, or nearly anything else.

The result was the same, though. This conceptual understanding also explained how Sandy would get faster and better at locating stuff in the real world with time and levels. Speed would simply be how fast Sandy could swim through the sand, while the worm naturally also got better at sensing their environment, same as when they were a sand worm.

“Alright, here we go…” Sandy said as the world shifted once more, and Jake instantly knew they had returned to regular space. Expanding his sphere fully, he quickly confirmed this was indeed the case. A few moments later, when the windows also reappeared, Jake looked outside.

Jake had to admit… space was pretty. It didn’t interest him as much as the celestial object below him, though. They were still floating a good distance above it, outside of the thin atmosphere of the moon. Or, wait, what had Arnold called it… an exosphere? Not quite an atmosphere, but something that strived to be one.

“Can you let me out?” Jake asked. “I assume whatever natural barrier protects the moon won’t pose a problem.”

“Yeah, it’s super weak,” Sandy agreed, and Jake felt himself being sucked out of the stomach to appear in space.

The shock of the sudden transition was a bit disorientating, especially as he went from somewhere with a nice environment to the cold emptiness of space. However, he quickly adapted, his body more than powerful enough to float in space without any issues.

Being outside, he would also finally make full use of his Perception. He laid eyes on the moon below, and from the get-go things were looking pretty positive, as he spotted a creature shuffling around on the surface.

[Lunar Elemental – lvl 258]

Jake reckoned this elemental was some variant of earth elementals infused with lunar energies. Not lucenti energies, mind you. The lucenti affinity was moonlight, a mix between the moon—or lunar—affinity and the light affinity. Meanwhile, this elemental was just pure moon rock.

“You feel any natural treasures?” Jake asked. Should he be surprised he could speak normally in space? Maybe, but he really wasn’t.

“Hm, a few, but nothing major. At least, not on the surface. I do get some responses from inside, but they’re oddly hard to sense. Oh, and on the other side of this thing, I also feel a higher energy level there.”

Jake smiled at that. “It’s only fitting the dark side of the moon is the most dangerous and interesting part of it.”

In reality, it shouldn’t really be called the dark side, though. Arnold had referred to it as the far side of the moon, as while only one face of the moon ever pointed toward Earth, due to its orbit, the moon did have a day-night cycle, and all parts of the celestial object received sunlight at one point or another during its orbit around Earth.

This remained true even after the system arrived, though it did look like the far side had a higher energy density than Earth. Why this was, Jake naturally wasn’t sure, but he looked forward to finding out as he and Sandy quickly reached an agreement.

“Only losers stay on the light side of the moon,” the space worm said.

“Well, I sure ain’t a loser,” Jake said, smirking.

He and Sandy began flying above the moon as they headed for the big space rock’s dark—or far—side, Jake hoping to find something worth hunting and Sandy wanting to find something worth eating. Below, he kept an eye on everything that moved. At first he only spotted elementals, which was a bit of a bummer.

However, soon something changed.

Jake felt a shiver run down his back as he rapidly shifted his gaze and peered over the horizon. He felt something staring back at him, but it disappeared before he could see what it was. Nevertheless, his eyes opened wide as he felt the unquestionable presence of something he had never expected to feel so soon after returning to Earth.

B-grade.