Cultivation System found
1468 Words
Azir ran around the ruined cafeteria and went through the living quarters.
Most of the doors had caved in, but the third door on the left was more or less whole.
He yanked open the warped metal door and stepped into the dusty, deserted room. His eyes fell on a heavy metal suitcase, military issue, shoved under a broken bed frame.
Azir knelt and wiped the dust from his hands.
He threw back the heavy latches, and the lid flew open with a loud squeal.
Inside were eight cans of canned food rations and four bottles of clean water.
He took a bottle, twisted off the cap, and drained the water.
It tasted a little of plastic, but to his dry throat it was perfect.
He rested against the wall and took a deep breath.
A faint smile curved his lips.
With his little sharp knife coming out of the thumb ring, he opened the can and found salted and sliced preserved meat.
He ate.
At last, he ate.
He glanced at Dexy.
Sixteen hours to go.
He stooped to put the rest of the food in his basket.
His hand brushed the bottom of the suitcase.
The foam padding shifted and revealed a hidden compartment.
Then they came to a strange metallic sphere, marked with glowing ancient symbols.
It didn't look like any tech from Planet QX9.
"What is this?"
He mumbled to himself.
The ground buckled.
An earthquake?
Azir didn't wait to find out.
He slashed his hands through the dark and grabbed the aluminium basket and bolted for the exit.
The other rodents about him went into chaos, shrieking and scrambling over each other in blind panic, trying to get away from the moving walls.
Steel beams snapped like twigs, showering sparks and debris down the corridor.
Adrenaline pumped through Azir as he threw himself through the narrow gap of the collapsing blast door, tumbling onto the yellowish surface just as the entrance caved in behind him.
He shot up, gasping, but his eyes bugged out in horror.
A few miles away, a great tornado of dusty green clouds was churning over the barrens.
"Not again!" he gritted his teeth.
He slammed a button on Dexy.
The wrist device changed at once, lengthening and widening into a heavy-duty mechanical drill, the spotlight shining on the razor-sharp strands of the giant, whirling screw.
He jabbed the spinning bit into the earth, desperate to dig a foxhole.
But the ground was different here.
The soil was packed down hard, hard as rock.
The drill screamed against the bedrock, rattling against his bruised arms.
Azir pushed down with all his weight, knuckles white as his life flashed before his eyes.
The green tornado was gaining speed, ripping up the plains, roaring towards him like a living monster.
Faster, break through!
At the last second, the drill punched through the crust, carving out a narrow crater.
Azir retracted the tool and plunged body-first into the hole.
The moment his boots hit the bottom, he flipped Dexy's setting.
The drill heads reconfigured themselves, radiating over the pit's opening and creating a dense, clear kinetic shield.
The sky beyond the clear barrier went entirely black-green.
The roaring storm swept over his hole, and he looked through the glass and saw the swarms of rodents being violently torn from the ruins, swirling helplessly through the storming sky.
Deep inside the cramped, dark hole, the world outside was a deafening roar of wind and vibrating glass.
Azir pressed his back against the cold, hard dirt wall, pulling his knees tightly against his chest.
Through the transparent shield above his head, the green tornado cast a sickly, chaotic glow over his face.
He watched another cluster of rodents fly across his field of vision, torn to pieces by the flying debris of the facility.
A bitter, breathless laugh escaped his lips.
It turned into a dry cough, his throat still burning from the stale air of the lab.
He looked down at his trembling hands, then at the aluminium basket clutched between his boots.
He had barely survived a C-rank beast.
He had been diced by mutated scavengers.
He had been crushed by a collapsing building.
And now, he was buried in a dirt hole, hiding from a sky that wanted to swallow him whole.
All of that.
All of this brutal, exhausting terror, to get a single bottle of water and a block of preserved meat.
The realisation hit him.
There was no sight of living men or dead ones, as if something swallowed them at once or they vanished into thin air.
Life on Planet QX9 was a constant struggle for survival. Minute to minute, it took blood, sweat and good luck.
There were no days off.
The universe didn't care that he was an assassin, or that he was tired, or that his bones were cracked.
The moment he let his guard down, even for a second, this world would eat him alive and spit his bones into the yellowish dunes.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
The dim holographic grid of Dexy blinked onto his wrist, the numbers flashing a stark 00:00. The five-hour sleep timer had officially bled out.
The storm died.
In its place was an eerie, ringing silence.
The chaos had vanished from the sky above the transparent kinetic shield.
He tapped the interface, and the clear shield hissed as it retracted.
His bruised, stiff body was dragged out of the narrow dirt crater, sinking a little into the newly displaced ground with his combat boots.
The tornado had rewritten the landscape; the rolling yellow dunes were ironed flat, and the lukewarm air felt heavy, smelling faintly of ozone and battery acid.
Azir looked down at the metallic aluminium basket resting at his feet, containing his remaining bottles of clean water and cans of salted meat.
Azir could not stop thinking about the glowing symbols on the metal sphere.
A regular research lab should not have technology like that.
Since landing on this planet, he had explored many ruined labs and knew their tech well.
But this sphere was different.
It was either from a forgotten ancient time on QX9 or it came from another world entirely.
He checked his wrist device, Dexy.
The screen read 11:00:00.
He had exactly eleven hours left before his pain medicine wore off.
Getting another shot from the system costs 920 points, which would leave him with nothing.
He had a tough choice: go back into the dangerous lab to look for medical supplies, or start hunting monsters from scratch.
He walked over the hard, yellow dirt back to the lab.
When he got there, his heart sank.
The broken metal door he had escaped from was gone.
The earthquake and storm had buried it under a huge pile of concrete, metal beams, and dirt.
The entrance was sealed shut.
Azir set his jaw and pressed a button on Dexy.
The device grew and changed into a heavy drill.
Its spotlight shone on a small gap between two huge concrete blocks.
If he could drill through here, he could reach the hallway leading to the living quarters.
He pushed the drill into the rubble and pulled the trigger.
The drill screamed against the rock and metal, throwing sparks and yellow dust into the air.
The heavy shaking vibrated up his arms, making his broken finger throb through the numbing medicine.
The danger was clear.
The loud noise could attract big monsters from the plains.
Even worse, the buried building was unstable.
The pile of rubble groaned every time the drill moved forward.
One wrong shake could cause another collapse and bury him alive in the yellow sand forever.
But Azir held the drill tight, leaned in with all his weight, and refused to stop.
Suddenly, the drill's spotlight flickered.
Dexy glitched mid-work violently.
Before Azir could pull back, the heavy mechanical casing collapsed, folding itself back down into a quiet wristband.
Without the drill supporting the gap, the mountain of rubble gave way.
Heavy concrete blocks and twisted metal beams came crashing down over him.
He braced for the final, crushing blow.
Slowly, the heavy slabs of concrete began to lift away on their own.
The metallic sphere rose gracefully from the ruins, its ancient symbols glowing with a blinding intensity.
Azir crawled out from beneath the hovering concrete blocks, his heart pounding against his ribs.
He scrambled backwards, never taking his eyes off the floating object.
The sphere hummed gently, a sound so deep it jolted right through his chest.
As it hovered in the air, the ancient symbols on its metal surface began to slide and rearrange themselves like pieces of a living puzzle.
A sleek screen materialised across the curvature of the sphere, seamlessly embedded into its metallic surface.
[Cultivation System Found]
- Writer
