I lay in the silt. My face was slowly sinking into the black sludge.
My left arm, which had taken the main impact of the fall, was mangled. My shoulder blade bit into the soft tissues from the inside.
"Attention. Left shoulder: joint destruction. Right leg: deep laceration, blood loss. Current core temperature: 34.2°C. Stage: hypothermia. Probability of lethal outcome if immobility is maintained: 87% in 15 minutes."
"Shut up..." I wheezed. The sound of my own voice seemed alien.
I tried to move my right arm. The dirt under my nails burned. There was no fear. There was only curiosity: how much longer could this body function before entropy took its toll?
Zeno's face flashed in my head.
"I hope... you are free."
If Zeno had died...
No—I told myself furiously, Zeno is alive he is definitely alive.
I needed movement. The magic barely responded—the channels "sparked" and faded, exhausted by the jump. The biological budget was depleted.
Slowly, overcoming the resistance of the sticky silt, I pulled up my right leg. The wound Richter had inflicted on me back in the cart opened again.
In my condition, to stand up meant to pass out.
Reluctantly, I began to crawl.
Every inch was a calculation. Inhale. Lunge. Breath control.
After a while, I crawled to the roots of a fallen tree, sticking out of the bank like the ribs of a giant skeleton. Here, in the shadow of the uprooted turf, grew a thick layer of gray moss. Sphagnum.
My knowledge of biology obligingly tossed up the data: high hygroscopicity, bactericidal properties due to phenolic compounds. In my case—the ideal dressing material.
I tore off a handful of wet pulp and, clenching my teeth until they almost crumbled, pressed it to the open wound on my thigh it's still a good thing I studied in my past life.
[Will to Live] responded with a sharp flash:
"Attention. External impact on the affected area. Risk of septic shock: 12%. Hemostasis achieved at 60%. Recommendation: ensure airtightness."
I tore a strip of fabric from my torn jacket, the one issued in the Order—and tightly pulled the improvised bandage, using my teeth and one working arm.
If my armor was with me none of this would have happened—a thought slipped by. My broken thumb crunched in protest, but I ignored it. A finger is a minor detail that can be sacrificed for the integrity of the whole system.
My stomach twisted in a spasm. The emptiness inside began to hurt more than my shattered shoulder. The body began to devour itself.
"Devour," I thought grimly, pressing my cheek against the cold wood. "Eat my muscles, eat the fat, just give me another five hundred meters. I don't need any more."
In the fog, somewhere upstream, a dry click echoed.
I froze.
They were close. The Order's rangers. They were sifting through the territory like a fine-mesh net. Fortunately I knew their protocols: if a target fell into the water and did not surface, they would look for a heat signature or acoustic anomalies.
I slowly began to burrow into the damp foliage and silt. Layer by layer, I covered myself in rot, until only the tip of my nose remained above the surface.
"[Will to Live]..." I whispered. "Lower the heart rate. Minimum... thirty beats. Lower the temperature of the peripheral blood vessels."
The skill answered with a heavy, viscous feeling in my chest. My heart began to beat rarely and heavily. The blood slowed down. The world around me began to dim, sounds became muffled.
I closed my eyes. Above my head, just a couple of meters away, a gray shadow floated through the fog. The soft step of a hobnailed boot on stone. The rustle of a cloak.
The ranger walked past.
I waited until the sound of his footsteps dissolved into the hum of the river. Only then did I allow myself one deep, inhale.
"At that moment I felt like the luckiest person however pitiful that sounds."
But still, I had to keep moving.
The fog ahead became yellowish. The smell of rot gave way to a sharp, sweetish taste of methane and hydrogen sulfide. I entered the Dead Swamps zone. Here the ground beneath my feet disappeared, turning into a shifting suspension of peat and water.
[Will to Live] registered the environmental change:
"Attention. Concentration of toxic gases exceeded. Risk of hypoxia: high. Recommendation: minimize physical activity. Oxygen consumption is critical."
Suddenly I heard the wet, squelching sound of something massive. It was moving parallel to me, about ten meters away, hidden by a dense shroud of vapors.
I froze, pressing myself against a rotten stump. My breathing turned into a series of short, silent inhales.
"Not now,"—at that moment I looked so pitiful that I began to mentally appeal to all the gods I knew. "I don't care, god, Buddha, goddess... just let me survive."
To the right, through a gap in the fog, I saw a silhouette. A huge, slime-covered carcass, resembling a skinned bear with unnaturally long limbs.
I applied the last trigger available to me. I commanded the skill to completely shut off the blood flow in my limbs, directing all the remaining heat to my brain and lungs. My skin became ice-cold. To the creature's thermal vision, I most likely disappeared, blending into the general background of the frozen swamp.
The monster squelched past, leaving behind the smell of old blood and decomposition.
When the rustling died down, I set off again. My consciousness began to split.
Zeno? — is that you? — I thought that Zeno was walking next to me, knee-deep in this sludge.
No answer followed—and the mirage dispersed.
Damn I'm already losing myself in this place—I thought mentally at that moment.
About five minutes later, I found a small depression under the roots of a dead cedar. An ideal place—a natural pocket where heavier and colder air accumulated, protected from the wind.
I crawled inside.
"System is entering hibernation mode. Energy consumption reduced to 5%. Time until critical system failure: unknown."
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