Chapter 95: How about one more night?
It didn’t take us long to leave.
For what it was worth, the perimeter around the jungle was relatively narrow. And while extremely dangerous due to the near-constant presence of its infinitely regenerating guardian beasts, it only took us about three minutes to cross.
Still, the moment we stepped out of its range—a fact confirmed by Selia herself—we both breathed out a long sigh of relief.
"Phew!" Selia straightened her back before heaving over as she bent backwards, stretching out her spine to the point it started to click. She then brought it back straight and wiped the sweat from her forehead.
"We did it..." Just next to her, I was down on all fours, breathing in and out as if my life depended on it.
And to be honest, it pretty much did.
What was a relatively leisurely stroll for Selia was a dash at the limit of my physical ability for me.
But now that we’d crossed the perimeter, I could finally take my sweet time to slowly bring my breathing down to a controlled pace and put the fright of crossing this open terrain behind me.
"That... really... was... something..." I uttered whenever I managed to gather enough air to make out a single word.
"Calm down first, speak later," Selia ordered while going the extra mile to reach out and gently pat my back, as if to help my heart get back into a more reasonable rhythm.
Seeing how there was no longer any rush, I took my sweet time to bring my heart rate down. At the end of the process, I went ahead and wiped my mouth from all the drool that gathered as I could do nothing but just breathe in and out over and over again.
The grass beyond the jungle was softer than I expected. No sharp roots stabbing through my hands when I braced myself, no creeping vines crawling up my legs. Just grass. Normal, mundane grass.
Right now, this grass made for just the best bedding possible, soothing my pained, oxygen-starved muscles with its cool, slightly wet touch.
I rolled onto my back and let my lungs burn themselves out until they finally remembered how to act like lungs again. The sky stretched overhead, painfully blue, cloudless, vast.
Selia dropped down beside me, her robe brushing against my arm as she sat cross-legged. She closed her eyes for a moment, tilted her head back toward the sun, and drew in a long, satisfied breath.
It was... peaceful.
Save for the burning in my lungs, this moment felt incomprehensibly tranquil. All we did was just rest in the grass, just outside of the reach of the jungle’s guardian beasts, and yet we chilled out as if we just ate a filling dinner, stuffed ourselves up with a dessert and then enjoyed a cup of hot, chamomile tea.
I almost laughed at the thought — but my lungs were too pained for me to ever turn that thought into action.
We sat there in silence for a while, letting the stillness seep in. No screeches from predators in the canopy. No rustling of leaves that wasn’t our own. No unseen eyes glaring from the dark. Just wind. Just the rustle of grass, and the occasional chirp of some insect too small for me to see.
It was heavenly.
And maybe that was exactly why the thought hit me when it did.
"We should stay another day."
The words slipped out before I could think about how ridiculous they sounded.
Selia’s eyes snapped open. She blinked at me, once, twice, her expression frozen somewhere between confusion and concern.
"...What?"
"I mean it." I forced myself upright, brushing dirt off my hands before meeting her stare. "Think about it. The jungle regenerates overnight, right?"
"Yes," she said slowly, suspicion dripping from every syllable.
"So if we wait until tomorrow, we can check on the plants already." I leaned in, lowering my voice as if we were conspiring. "The coffee. If it takes root, if the jungle’s regeneration doesn’t erase it... we’ll know. One night is all it takes to see results."
Her lips parted. No words came out at first, only the sharp narrowing of her gaze as she tried to measure my sanity.
"It’s not one night, though," Selia silently pointed out.
"Huh?" I twitched, my idea attacked from a whole different direction than I expected.
"It’s an entire day and then the whole night."
The silence that followed was quite stifling.
Selia’s sigh came heavy, and she pressed her palm against her forehead. "You do realize," she said, "we barely have enough supplies for today. We could try to stretch them, but..."
Her voice trailed off, leaving the meat of her point unsaid.
’Ah. Right.’
That was... a problem.
I stared at her, brain scrambling. Water. Food. Shelter. Those were the basics, weren’t they?
But water was the real bottleneck.
We could live weeks without food, miserable as that sounded. Shelter? We had the grasslands. Exposed, yes, but we could just treat it as an overnight camping trip.
Our ancestors lived their entire lives hunting and gathering food, so surely nothing would happen if we slept through two days without a roof over our heads!
That only left water, the only part of our supplies that we simply couldn’t ignore and, as if luck would have it, the part that we were already short on.
"Okay," I said, raising a finger like I’d just solved a math problem. "Water first. If we can get water, one day without food isn’t the end of the world. I’ll find some."
Selia looked at me. Not with the awe of someone watching a genius, but with the bone-deep tiredness of a teacher who had seen one too many naive students declare they’d figured out life.
Her look said everything. Oh, you sweet, foolish thing.
I cleared my throat and tried again. "Look, I’m serious. It’s not that bad. We can handle hunger for a day. Worst case, I’ll keep us busy."
"And what," she asked, folding her arms, "will you busy yourself with when your stomach screams louder than a beast?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
It was easy to mention the studies that proved humans could go without food for not days but weeks. It was easy to recall how the very same study mentioned humans could survive without water for three days tops.
But between study and reality, there was a prose of life. And the fact that something was possible in an edge case obviously didn’t mean it was easy, enjoyable, or suited for someone like me—unused to the actual harshness of life and the uncivilized world!
’Okay, she has a point.’
And then, almost as if the heavens decided to cut me some slack for once—just as I was about to give up on the idea, a sound reached our location.
Rustling. Heavy. Violent. From the jungle we had just escaped.
Selia stiffened instantly, her head snapping toward the treeline. Her expression soured, lips pressed into a thin line as her hand twitched toward her sword.
A group stumbled out. A party, battered, bloodied, covered in scratches that weren’t all shallow. Their armor was dented, their robes torn. One man practically dragged another on his back while a woman limped along with a gash across her thigh.
In front of them, the seemingly empty periphery of the jungle stirred.
We barely made it through before the guardian beast regenerated. And it’s been some time since we’ve crossed that patch of open space.
The guardian beast wasn’t the same as the one Selia faced. No, it was a whole new iteration of it making me question the nature of the whole process.
’Is it randomly throwing parts of animals it learned about together or...’
A shiver moved down my spine.
The other option was quite worrying.
’Or is the guardian beast evolving, treating those encounters as data to rate its designs and later improve on them?’
Its body was grotesque, a collage of twisted roots and sinew reknit into something larger, crueler. Its limbs bent wrong. Its head split into jagged maws that dripped sap like blood. And it followed, relentless, out of the trees and into the light.
Quite noticeably, there was something different about this beast.
While a grotesque monster like any other, it was visibly uglier, more mangled than the two beasts I saw Selia face before.
Like a special boss born only once every thousand times.
Selia’s face hardened.
"They’re not going to make it," she muttered, her jaw tightening.
I followed her gaze. She was right. The party staggered like drunks. Every step they took looked like their last. They wouldn’t even have the strength to raise their weapons when the beast lunged.
And Selia...
I saw it in her eyes before she said anything. The frustration, the unwillingness to watch others die when she had the power to intervene.
"...Just go," I told her, cutting into her silence.
She looked at me sharply.
"I’ll be fine," I said, forcing my voice to steady. "For as long as you need to deal with it, I’ll be fine. And maybe—" I gestured toward the limping group "—they’ll be grateful enough to share some of their supplies."
Her brows drew together. Hesitation warred across her features, adventurers’ sense of camaraderie pulling one way, concern for me the other.
Even though we were out of the jungle of death, this place was by no means safe for someone as weak as me!
Selia didn’t need to spell it out. I was myself fully aware of it, both through rational reasoning and from how I could feel her worry through our bond.
For a breath, she just looked at me. And then, with a soft exhale, she gave the smallest nod.
"Stay here," she said.
And with that, Selia stood, sword in hand, her short robes catching the wind as she strode toward the wounded group and the grotesque beast that was just about to lunge at them.