Soulless Soul

Chapter 64: When the Sun Goes Down

"Yeah, I actually engineered it myself," Chloe said, her voice carrying a rare trace of pride that broke through her soot-stained exhaustion. "It’s all tied directly to my active Attribute, [Forge]. Although the edges are pretty rigid—I can generally only use the things I create myself, or I have to manually authorize and give them to certain specific people to use, otherwise the attribute completely destabilizes."

"Is that so?" Sky murmured, wiping a stray drop of condensation from the heavy glass container. "You’re one absolute hell of a creator, Chloe."

"Thank you," she replied, her digital visor clicking softly as she accepted the compliment, a small, genuine smile returning to her face. A lucky chance of making herself useful.

Sky didn’t waste any more breath. He brought the smooth, patterned glass rim of the bottle directly to his cracked lips and greedily drank the cool, refreshing water. The liquid tasted impossibly pure, lacking the typical metallic, trash water he had been taking in the slums. He drank deeply, letting the fluid soothe the raw, burning sensation left behind by his frantic sprint through the gnarled forest. Indeed, no matter how much he greedily gulped down, the physical amount of water shimmering inside the glass didn’t seem to decrease by even a single millimeter.

"Is this thing really endless?" Sky asked, pulling the bottle away and peering through the translucent blue gem.

Chloe touched her short purple hair nervously, her fingers adjusting a loose strand as she shifted her weight on her pile of dried seaweed.

"Uh... not exactly," she admitted, her voice dropping into a slightly hesitant, sheepish register. She leaned forward, extending a slender finger to point directly toward the very bottom of the heavy bottle. "If you look closely through the refracted light at the base, you’ll see a tiny, glowing embedded gem. As long as you don’t physically remove that focal stone, the attribute will keep actively producing water."

"Oh, is that so?" Sky said, his gravelly voice trailing off as his dark eyes locked onto the glowing gem at the base.

Suddenly, Sky’s face completely changed.

His casual, relaxed posture vanished in an instant, his expression turning horrifyingly serious as a realization dawned on his mind. He remembered the exact weight and configuration of the materials currently sitting in his own pockets.

"Chloe... I think I—" Chloe’s happy, lighthearted expression disappeared instantly. Her face darkened to a shade of pure slate, her cracked digital visor flashing a warning crimson line as she deduced what his clumsy grip had just accidentally done to the fragile lower seal of her creation.

"I’m so sorry!" Sky immediately yelled, dropping hard to his knees right there on the massive, rough bark of the tree branch.

He threw away his usual brooding, lone-wolf pride and began frantically begging for forgiveness. For several long, agonizing minutes, he endured a barrage of Chloe’s angry nagging, her voice rising to a high-pitched, furious lecture as she scolded him for trying to destroy an Uncommon-tier item she had spent hours refining at the Forge Table.

Once her anger finally burned itself out, she let him go with a heavy, dramatic sigh. In exchange for his absolute submission, she deftly unsealed the base of the container, pulling out a cracked, spent fragment and replacing the core gem in the bottle with another one—the very high-density gem Sky had hurriedly pulled from his inventory and handed over as compensation.

Sky let out a massive sigh of pure relief, wiping a fresh layer of cold sweat from his forehead as he sat back on his heels.

At that exact point in the evening, Vesper had already completely finished organizing the dried bark materials and lighting the small, localized campfire. The flames flickered with a quiet, controlled heat that managed to push back the biting chill of the biome without throwing up a massive, revealing column of smoke. Without looking up from her work, her slender hands reached smoothly across the wooden branch toward Sky’s discarded rucksack and pulled it open to inspect their food supplies.

She paused, her fingers freezing over the contents.

"What exactly kind of meat is this?" Vesper asked, her voice dropping into a cold, monotone as she pulled out a heavy, crimson-tinted slab that radiated a faint, volatile energy.

Vesper looked directly at Sky, her piercing gray eyes locking onto him through the flickering amber firelight.

Sky’s entire body immediately tensed up, his muscles locking as his hardwired survival instincts screamed a sharp warning. There’s no way in hell I can openly tell her this is raw Savage Beast meat harvested, he thought frantically. If she realized he was carrying the flesh of the very monsters that had destroyed Chloe’s mecha suit, her absolute conviction might turn its blade directly toward his neck.

He quickly prepared a highly elaborate, misleading answer, ready to fabricate a lie about a hidden supply cache near the eastern transition zone.

But Vesper didn’t press the matter or ask a secondary question. She simply laid the slab across a clean, heated stone near the embers, treating the mystery material with her usual detached pragmatism.

Seeing that she had dropped the interrogation, Sky pretended absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He turned his attention completely away from her rigid posture and continued his casual conversation with Chloe to break the awkward silence.

"Regardless of the gem durability, it’s still a truly phenomenal Attribute to possess down here," Sky muttered, taking another small sip from the bottle before handing it back.

"Getting clean, drinkable water inside this world isn’t an easy task. Most independent runners flatline from dehydration before they even see a boss door."

Chloe nodded rapidly, her cheeks flushing slightly with a pleased, vindicated expression at his evaluation.

"I know," she murmured softly. "All those grueling, exhausted hours I spent sitting alone on that plush rug in the living room tinkering with scrap gem weren’t a complete waste of time after all."

Soon, the rich, savory smell of roasting meat filled the quiet air of the canopy, the fat sizzling against the hot stone and making Sky’s stomach growl in appreciation.

At the exact same time, the artificial sun began approaching the dark violet horizon line, its light fading rapidly as the dungeon’s temporal cycle advanced.

Then—

RUMBLE!

A deep, deafening, ground-shaking rumble echoed from somewhere deep beneath the roots of their massive tree, vibrating right through the thick bark of the branch they were sitting on.

Sky immediately crawled to the edge of the canopy and looked down into the dark abyss of the forest floor. Between the towering, jagged crimson walls of the lower labyrinth pathways, the very first traces of a strange, bubbling red water began to sluggishly appear, rising out of the cracked earth like an incoming tide of liquid rust.

"What the absolute hell is that?" Sky whispere,

Vesper glanced over at his panicked expression, her silver hair catching the fading twilight.

"Oh," she said, her voice perfectly level. "Are you honestly just seeing this phenomenon for the first very time?"

"Yeah. First time," Sky muttered, looking around slightly awkwardly as he adjusted his hood. "During my getaway, I was basically staying entirely in the upper trees and jumping around between branches to conserve my stamina. I never stayed on the ground long enough to watch a sector transition."

Vesper gave him a strange, deeply unimpressed look, her gray eyes deadpan.

"Are you secretly some kind of monkey?"

"Huh?" Sky’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits, his raspy voice tightening with irritation.

"Are you actively trying to pick a fight with me right now, Priestess?"

Vesper immediately looked away, her face turning back toward the roasting meat.

"I said absolutely nothing."

Sky stared at the side of her face suspiciously for a few more seconds, his knuckles white, before finally turning his attention back toward the horizon

.

The entire eastern sky was already growing pitch black, the stars outside the multi-paned glass windows of reality replaced here by cold, twinkling strings of dead server code. The air temperature was plummeting rapidly.

Then, Sky shifted uncomfortably against the gnarled bark, his eyes tracking a sudden, ominous rustling in the dark purple leaves far below their position.

"Hey... Vesper," he asked, his voice dropping its defensive edge and turning dead serious.

"Do those six-legged Savage Beasts have the physical capacity to climb all the way up here when the sun goes down?

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