Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 77: The Blue Serpentile Fruit

There was no further argument. John left his friends at the entrance of the tunnel and ran into it. For half an hour, he sprinted through the tunnel, realising how many cores were wasted on carving it. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

He encountered a few large groups of Fog Seekers that slipped through the walls of the corridor; he silenced them with single, fluid slashes, barely slowing his pace as he snatched their cores.

Finally, he reached the end. The path stopped abruptly, facing a wall of impenetrable, swirling black fog. This was the point where his friends’ cores were exhausted.

"Tsk! They didn’t even cross half the distance I walked to get to them from the last device!" John muttered, shaking his head. Their progress was doomed to fail if they kept adopting that clunky, resource-heavy tactic.

Instead, John adopted a much more efficient way of travelling. "After fighting all this time in that fog, I gained close to three thousand and a half cores," he said, checking his Inventory. The count was staggering, but he knew he couldn’t waste them.

"The fastest way is to throw one core, walk for the maximum allowable distance, and then throw another. Like this, I can connect my way back to here without even waiting for a single core to absorb darkness..."

He moved like a phantom. He would toss a core into the black fog, didn’t wait for it to flare and anchor the reality of the retreat path, then sprint through the fog, and repeat. He wasn’t building a wide, comfortable tunnel; he was laying down a thin, flickering line of safety that stretched like a needle through a dark fabric.

He calculated the distance mathematically, based on the number of breaths it took to move from the centre of one area to the centre of the next. It was a narrower path, but it covered a vastly larger area in a small span of time, and for a fraction of the cost.

"Time to clear the area around," he whispered. Every few hundred meters, he would step off his starlight path into the absolute blackness of the fog around. He would silence the Fog Seekers gathered in the fog, harvest their cores, and return to his line of light to continue the journey.

In a mere four hours, the sheer number of kills he secured nearly doubled his initial stock of cores. Even after he had spent over a thousand to lay the path, he still had more than five thousand cores left.

Then, his eyes noticed something that was totally different. He skidded to a stop as a massive shape loomed out of the black, coded structured world.

"Finally!"

In front of him stood a tree of impossible proportions. It was reminiscent of the ancient, gnarled oaks of Earth; its trunk was so broad it occupied nearly the entire area his latest core had cleared. Its bark was a deep, charcoal grey, and its branches reached up into the darkness like the fingers of a giant.

Hanging from those branches were clusters of dark blue, oval-shaped fruit-like items. They looked like oversized grapes, shimmering with a faint, oily luminescence.

In his special vision, the tree was a magnificent pillar of green code, while the fruit hummed with a deep, pulsating blue-coded structure. He didn’t particularly like the poisonous look of the colour, but hunger was a far more pressing threat than aesthetic preference.

"Let me test it first," after throwing more cores around, clearing a space around the tree, he decided. He knew his system would flag any lethal hazards the moment he made contact. He climbed the rough, thick bark of the trunk, pulling himself up to the lowest cluster of fruit. He reached out and plucked one.

[Ding! You have gained 1x Blue Serpentile Fruit!]

[Ding! Eating it will replenish your hunger and satisfy your thirst to a degree!]

[Ding! There is a hidden, subtle bonus effect when consuming it for the first time!]

"Hidden subtle effect? Relieve hunger and thirst at the same time? At least it’s not poisonous... Okay, let’s give it a try then." John sat perched on a thick branch, the dark blue fruit resting in his palm. He took a bite.

The fruit was incredibly refreshing, a burst of cold moisture that coated his parched throat. It was slightly bitter at first, a sharp herbal tang that made his tongue tingle, but it finished with a deep, lingering sweetness. As he swallowed, the gnawing ache in his stomach began to subside, replaced by a cool, comfortable feeling.

[Ding! You have eaten the Blue Serpentile Fruit!]

[Ding! Your senses are slightly enhanced!]

Suddenly, the world shifted. It wasn’t a violent change, but a gradual lifting of a veil. The black fog around him began to lose its opaque, black density. It didn’t vanish, but it started to fade into a semi-translucent, dark grey nature. The change was revolutionary.

"Wow! I can see further using my ability!"

Previously, the densely packed black code of the fog had acted as a barrier to his sight, limiting him to a mere ten meters. Now, with the fog thinning, his vision pierced through the dark grey-coded atmosphere. He could see for more than thirty meters in any direction with his naked eyes!

The monsters were harder to spot now—their pale grey bodies blurred more perfectly against the new dark grey background of the fog—but he could still make out the shimmering outer linings of their code. "Let’s see... One, five, seventeen... fifty-three... Damn! How many of these things are out there?!!"

From his high vantage point on the branch, he decided to push his limits. He activated his Wireframe Sight. The world turned into a grid of dark grey lines of code, and his vision expanded to over one hundred meters. He saw them then—hundreds of Fog Seekers lurking aimlessly in the depths, a literal sea of predators waiting for a sound to draw them in.

"I’ll worry about them later with the others," he muttered, his hunger and thirst returned, so he finished the entire group of fruit he picked, and then picked a few more for his friends.

He jumped off the branch, landing softly on the ground, while storing away his harvest in his Inventory. He began his return journey, following the narrow pathway of starlight he had created. He didn’t forget to collect the Activated Fog Seeker Cores he had left on the ground earlier, and hunted down every large cluster of monsters he spotted in his new, expanded vision.