Apocalypse Cultivation (Jake's story), ch 23

After the transition, Jake experienced a moment of confusion and disorientation before his senses cleared.  He was standing on a level area on top of a rocky outcropping.  The sky was overcast, and the only light came from the horizon, with a dim, reddish hue.

The air smelled.  In fact, Jake was beginning to feel a definite sense of similarity in some ways between this place and the hell world he’d existed on before dying.

Suddenly, one of the distant hills moved, and Jake blinked as he realized it was alive.  Giant, he thought. Must be.  The giant stood and resolved into a huge, vaguely porcine-looking creature that had to be at least sixty feet tall, maybe even one hundred feet tall.  Judging the height for something so large at a distance could be tough. Its enormous tusks had moss growing at the base.  Piggy eyes idly swept across the landscape as it turned and lumbered to another area, ponderously dropped to all fours, and began scooping at the muck.

This was when Jake realized that almost all the area he could see other than the rocky ridge he stood on seemed to be dominated by swamps, or darky, scrub-filled areas between swamps.  There were flying animals in the sky, either birds or bats.

Then Jake extended his senses and felt a flash of mild surprise.  The place he was in--or world he was on--was steeped with dark energy.  It wasn’t ideal to cultivate, but he could still probably refine this energy for his own use.

A rock at Jake’s feet began to glow softly before he heard a voice in his mind say:

<Your task is to kill as many giants as possible.  The trial will be complete as soon as you touch the glowing stone on the ground in this location.  Touching the stone without having killed at least one giant will result in failure>

After that, the voice disappeared and Jake was left on the rocky hill, feeling the warm wind ruffle his torn clothing.

The first thing he did was make a mental note of where the extraction point was.  His internal clock was still messed up, but all of his daoist senses were otherwise functioning just fine.  That done, Jake knew that needed more information.

Well, he thought.  Let’s check this place out.

***

Jake kept his distance from the giant, sticking to the rocky hills that seemed to circle the large swamp he’d appeared by, and separate other swamps from each other.  Each swamp area had one giant, and all of them seemed to do nothing but dig around in the muck, eating...something.

The giants were truly hideous.  Their huge, blocky bodies were strangely proportioned.  They were distressingly naked, but Jake still couldn’t tell what sex they were.  Maybe they weren’t male or female.  Matted hair, or maybe fur, covered their backs and most of their limbs.

Something was tugging at Jake’s instincts, so he didn’t approach the swamp too closely.  Instead, he just kept to the rocky areas and continued scouting.  Being stealthy seemed silly since all the giants were so far away but Jake kept it up.  There were only two trials for this challenge.  The fewer trials a challenge room had, the harder each usually was.

And Jake hadn’t forgotten the Faceted’s smug tone.

He managed to find a handful of cave systems in the rocks.  Most were not very large, but they were a welcome sight.  The giants made Jake a little nervous, and having a place to escape to or hide in made him feel a little more confident.  He could imagine how happy the asshole Faceted would be if it could dump him back on earth, mostly crushed, a half second away from expiring.

Any of these giants could crush him like an empty can.

It was dark outside, and pitch black in the caves. None of it was a problem for him. He had his shadow ghoul vision.

To be thorough, Jake checked out each cave that he could find.  In addition to discovering bolt holes, he wanted to make sure nothing nasty might be inside, waiting to catch him off guard.  He used his new, fledgling life detection ability as well.  The surrounding energy interfered with his senses, but his detection still seemed to work out to a shorter distance.  He didn’t see anything living other than rats and other standard swamp creatures.  So far, nothing.

Something still wasn’t right.  Jake stayed wary.  The giants were way too straightforward a threat.  He didn’t trust it.

The world seemed stranger the longer that Jake explored.  Despite the dim light, there was still a decent amount of heat in this place.  Jake figured it was around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  There was little to no breeze, and the smells just lingered.  He crept down from the rocky ridgeline, slowly approaching the swamp where the giant was digging around.  The dry land full of scrub and brush in this area, what he was starting to think of a biome, was shaped like a peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the swamp.  And of course, all of it was contained within the stony ridges.

The way the biomes were set up didn’t look natural.  Each one almost seemed like an individual holding pen for the giants.  They seemed like they could easily escape, but maybe they didn’t feel like it.  Jake didn’t know.  He was just making wild ass guesses.  Landry had always called them WAGs during his first life.

Suddenly, Jake’s instincts and his senses screamed at once.  He acted immediately, smoothly lowering himself down into the mud between two shrubs, staying completely still.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, but he didn’t get complacent.  Jake didn’t move a muscle.  Then as he watched, something came out of the ground about twenty yards ahead of him.

There was no way to tell if anything in this world cultivated or could feel his abilities. He hid his aura as best he could and with the lightest of touches, he slowly circled his cultivation base while constricting his meridians, keeping his presence as small as possible.  The combination of his chi detection in combination with his more mundane allowed him to understand what was happening.

Monsters were emerging from the ground, at least a dozen of them.  They were filthy, mostly almost silent except for one or two that softly hissed.  Their hands had claws, and they all moved in jerky, unnatural ways, like a spider.  Vampires, thought Jake, but these were of a more advanced variety than he’d just killed back in Macon.

One of them reached down and casually snagged a running rat.  After a squeak and a crunch, the rodent was dead, and the vampire had a snack before tossing the furry body to the muddy ground.

Jake focused on staying completely still.  His senses told him that every vampire emerging from the ground was at least as strong as he was.  This was the most danger he’d been in since he’d been sent back to the past.

The vampires approached the distant giant.  At least two of them had some sort of bags, or sacks.  Despite their dirty appearance, they all seemed to be wearing tools.  These were definitely not feral vamps.

No more were coming out of the ground, so as Jake watched, hyper-alert, he began slowly, stealthily edging backwards.  As he moved, he also covered himself with mud, hopefully to confuse any senses the vampires might otherwise notice him with.  Part of him considered giving up on this challenge, conceding.  But if he did that, he’d be walking away from potential rewards, and more importantly, a place to grow stronger without any passage of time on Earth.

This place could be useful.  He couldn’t fuck this up.

As Jake kept retreating, trying to move deeper into the brush without making any noise, the vampires reached the giant.  It didn’t seem aware of them at first. This made sense.  They were relatively tiny, after all.  Even when they climbed up the giant’s foot to its ankle, it still kept digging at the swamp.  The enormous beast was on its knees, so after climbing up on its foot, the vampires were fairly high up.  Jake stopped moving in case they turned to look back.

One of the vampires produced a knife and cut the back of the giant’s calf, right above its ankle.  The move was done with practiced precision.  Below the giant’s leg, on the ground, one of the vampires with a sack held it open and collected the blood that flowed, catching it before it ran to the ground.  Another vampire with an open sack stood next to the first, waiting in line.

Meanwhile, the vampires on top leg made another cut and began to scoop handfuls of blood, greedily slurping it up.  By the time the giant was alerted to their presence or maybe had felt the cuts, it began to turn.  Meanwhile, the blood suckers were already retreating.

Jake worked to keep his heart still as ice.  If he were discovered, he would die.  Luckily, the vampires seemed too preoccupied by the turning giant to spot Jake, right up until the last one paused before darting down a hole.  It was a male, and he turned, sniffing the air, his blood red eyes glowing in the dimness.  Since the monster was so close, Jake could actually see how the vampire’s skin was starting to burn, even in the pale twilight-esque light.

The vampire swiveled his ears while almost looking directly at Jake, but the giant had finally turned.  One huge leg shot out, towards the last standing vampire.  The monster hissed and fell down his hole, right before the tip of the giant’s toes dug a furrow in the muck.  A swath of bushes were wiped out in an instant.

There was a riot of noise and an explosion of mud everywhere as the giant’s foot plowed through the scrubby wetlands.

Jake stayed still, playing dead, and kept his energy even, even as he watched the foot from only a few yards away.

The moment the giant began to turn away, Jake scrambled backwards, still trying to be stealthy, but also putting some speed into it.  He had to get the hell out of dodge.  That last vampire seemed to have sensed something.  Jake didn’t want to be anywhere nearby if the things came back out of their burrows to investigate.

He made it to the rocky ridge and ducked into a cave he’d seen before, one that had features he could exploit if he were chased.

For about one terse hour or so, Jake stayed completely still in the darkness, all of his senses dialed up to the maximum level he could justify, watching and waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.

Finally, he relaxed.

No wonder the Faceted had seemed so pleased.  “Giants,” my ass, thought Jake.

He definitely thought he’d been right to not choose mermaids now.  Maybe predation was the underlying theme of this challenge.  If the mermaid trial was anything like this one, he probably would have been dropped into an ocean full of sea monsters that ate mermaids or something.

No wonder the Faceted had suggested rabbits.  Maybe Jake would have been required to kill a thousand mutant rabbits before completing the challenge, all while being hunted by dragons that ate them.

Fucking Faceted, he thought.

Jake briefly thought about retrieving a flashlight from his storage ring, but decided he didn’t really need it.  In the very darkest parts of the cave, he could actually make his eyes glow and use that small light to illuminate everything, at least to his eyes.  He moved deeper into the cave, taking one branch to a dead end.  Then he shimmied through a crack into a room that was barely big enough to sit cross legged in.

As a human, such a place would be claustrophobic.  Even most monsters might think twice about holing up at the end of a little crack like this, but Jake could phase.  His shadow ghoul phasing ability remained one of his most powerful trump cards.

He settled down to meditate, and then to cultivat--in that order.  Whatever was going to come, he needed to be in tip top shape.  So settling his nerves and thinking was important.  Then he would work on bolstering his energy a little bit, and after he felt like he was ready, it’d be time to explore again.

One thing was sure--this trial was much more complex than he’d been hoping.  But maybe if he played his cards right, he could turn things around for his benefit.