David reached the construction site without incident. The walk wasn’t long, and the place sat close to the perimeter where patrol drones and defense turrets kept watch.
Still, he wasn’t careless. His mana reserves sat at about half, and the comforting weight of the pistol on his hip reminded him he wasn’t defenseless. A couple of spare magazines were tucked into his pocket. Enough for a fight, maybe, but not enough to go wild.
And there was a new problem. It late into an iteration and the panthers already started spawning. So he should be more careful.
Before him yawned a pit, gouged out by heavy machinery. The excavation site was deeper than he expected. David slowed, eyes drawn to the exposed cross?section of earth on the far wall.
He hopped down, boots crunching against loose soil, and crossed toward it. The closer he came, the more the wall revealed its story: layers stacked one over another, a history of the ground laid bare. Near the top, the familiar brown of ordinary soil, rich and crumbly. But further down… something else.
He pressed a palm to the cool surface, tracing the line where the loam ended and another texture began. Clay. Dense, smooth, almost slick under his touch. A whole new foundation hidden just beneath.
David placed his hand flat against the clay and let his mana perception flare to its fullest. The world shifted—suddenly alive with threads and murmurs of laws intertwined beneath the surface. There wasn’t just one here; the clay carried its own resonance, but tangled among it were smaller, weaker echoes of other laws. He focused, filtering them out, tuning his senses like a musician striking away discord until only one remained.
The system answered.
New attribute: [Minor Law of Clay]
The words rang in his mind, and suddenly he could sense clay scattered all around—pockets and veins, lumps hidden beneath the earth like a secret map only he could read. His lips tugged into a grin. If he could do this with clay… what about gold? He imagined stumbling onto a vein, harnessing its law, stepping out of this dome rich beyond measure.
The thought made his chest ache. A normal life. Money, freedom, the world outside the dome as it used to be. Did it even still exist? He shook the thought away, a shadow of disappointment tugging at him. Daydreams wouldn’t help him here.
“Focus, David. Laws first, fantasies later.” He exhaled sharply, pressing his hand to the clay once more, anchoring himself in the present. The earth still hummed with power, waiting to be understood.
Through his random experiments, David began to grasp the deeper mechanics of the laws. The system, it seemed, demanded homogeneity—not on the surface, not even to the naked eye, but at the atomic level.
Soil, messy and alive, was a patchwork of fragments: roots, sand, stones, decomposing matter, each governed by a dozen minor variations. No single voice carried clearly enough for the system to register. But clay… clay was different. A hydrated silicate, if he remembered his half-forgotten chemistry lessons right. It was a single element on a molecular level.
And that, apparently, was enough. Where soil drowned him in noise, clay whispered with clarity. He should experiment more with some sort of clumps of material
David’s mind wandered as he pieced together the puzzle. If the system favored atomic uniformity, then perhaps ice and water were cousins in its language—two forms of the same principle.
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He closed his eyes, willed mana into his palm, and a shard of ice appeared there, clear and cold. With a thought he let it hover just above his hand. For a moment, it sparkled, catching the brutal Texas sunlight. Then heat began to win. Droplets formed, sliding off its surface, the shard shrinking by the heartbeat.
David leaned in with his perception, narrowing all focus to the quiet unraveling of solid into liquid. And then—
New attribute gained: [Minor Law of Water]
He nudged the new law with a trickle of mana, and the melting shard collapsed into a hovering sphere of water, perfectly suspended above his hand. It was like a big captured raindrop, reflecting bits of sky and earth.
He tilted his head. “If ice to water works,” he murmured, “then what about water to steam?”
A shadow slipped across the edge of the pit, silent as a passing cloud. David, hunched near the wall and he was busy coaxing his sphere of water into steam, noticing nothing. His focus was narrowed to the trembling droplet above his palm, his last thread of mana clinging to the experiment.
The shadow moved.
A blur of muscle and fangs dropped into the pit. The panther slammed into him with bone-crushing weight, pinning him flat against the dirt. The air shot out of his lungs in a ragged gasp. The hovering water burst apart, soaking his face and chest. His pistol, his one reliable fallback, was trapped beneath the pressure of a massive paw. Another paw rose, dark claws glinting in the sun, poised to rip him open.
Panic and calculation flashed through him in the same instant. He had no mana left for fire, lightning, ice—empty reserves, spent on experiments. Almost empty. Not quite. He reached, straining his perception, and felt it: above, layers of soil… and then the heavy mass of clay.
“Please work,” he hissed.
The last embers of mana left in him surged. The clay above ripped free in a jagged sheet, plunging down like a crude hammer. It struck the panther across the face—not enough to kill, not even enough to break bone, but enough to stagger. The beast snarled, blinded for a heartbeat, one paw leaving David’s ribs as it clawed at clay blocking its eyes.
That sliver of freedom was all he needed. His hand shot to the holster, tore free the pistol. He brought it up at point-blank range and squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. A third time. Each shot slammed into the beast, tearing through fur and flesh. The panther convulsed, its field—whatever shield it carried—absent or useless at this range.
With a final shudder, it collapsed to David’s left, dust rising as its weight hit the earth.
“Bon appétit!” said David, what? It was catchy.
David shoved the limp weight of the panther off himself. He spat grit from his mouth and glanced down at the smear of clay on the panther face. The trick had worked—but not without cost. His mana pool was bone-dry.
Then he noticed something else. The tug on his reserves had been… lighter. Using clay already present in the world instead of summoning it from nothing demanded far less. He filed the thought away quickly. With natural material, he could force out four clay projectiles for the cost of just two bolts of lightning. Less destructive, yes—but sometimes volume mattered more than power.
Lightning. Maybe he should try to apply the same principle? But where was he supposed to store lightning anyway? A Battery? His pocket? He shook his head, wont work.
His attention shifted to his shirt. Or what was left of it. The fabric hung in tatters, eaten away by the acidic blood that had spilled when the panther died. He peeled it off, grimacing at the sting where droplets had splattered his skin. The damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. His enhanced vitality—thank you again, levels—had saved him from worse.
David balled up the ruined cloth and tossed it aside. Then he crouched by the corpse. One hand gripped his knife, the other moved the head. He forced the blade in with steady pressure, ignoring the sickly hiss of fluids seeping out, and began cutting toward the bulge at the center of its forehead.
A wet pop, and then the prize slid free: the third eye. Glossy, unnatural, faintly throbbing with residual power.
“Enough,” he muttered. “No more laws. Not this run.”
He slipped the knife back into its sheath and rose. The sun was already dipping, shadows stretching across the excavation pit. His mana core felt like an empty shell rattling in his chest.
Maybe he had still time in this iteration to experiment with his core.
With one last look at the panther’s hulking corpse, David turned and began the climb out of the pit.
