It was only a few minutes after I had made my offer. An offer which was emphatically accepted by the hyper elemental and silently agreed upon by the mantis. I decided that it was probably best to figure out my immediate situation before I escorted two monster people to the surface. So I had a talk with the two of them, during which I told them that I needed rest before we left to explore the surface and that they would need to stay in the caverns for a while before I came to get them. Which was true, but there were a few complications to that. Firstly, I was pretty confident that the elemental was basically a child and would probably act like one. Meaning there was no chance that she would stay put for however long I needed to take to figure things out, get myself ready to start hiking towards the forest where the system directed me to. And then there was the off world quest that I needed to figure out.

  I reached the end of the tunnels of the rabbit burrow, nearly in the open air, soon enough. I had spent some time collecting the bodies of the monsters in my inventory as I went, running along the tunnels and with a simple tap of my hand I brought it inside my inventory. I had gotten every loot as a quest reward, funnily enough. It's really quite useful, maybe even overpowered if this happens a lot as I didn’t even have a limit for how much I could hold. The only problem was keeping track of what I had… But in this case I could do a quick inventory when I set up camp.

  I couldn't help but look up at the moon that was rising in the sky as I panicked internally. It was bright red tonight, oddly enough. Blood moon. And it looked like a storm was coming, dark clouds starting to cover the bright sky. Neither of what I saw bode well…

  As I looked, a system notification popped up in my view causing me to look down at it, distracted from my thoughts with the sudden and random interruption.

  “What? The system is erroring?” I asked, frowning as I wondered how concerned I should be with this development. ‘Well… I got two divine beings watching over me and they can probably fix their system, right?’ I was comforted by the thought, but before I could relax more writing was written on the screen and attracted my attention.

  “What the fuck was that? Did- did the system just glitch? Nemunue? Monque? Another entity has become a system admin?! What the hell does that mean?!” I started panicking as the system started showing even more shocking and concerning things one after another. The quest coming up as a ‘conflict of requirements’ was almost exactly what I expected after my sudden decision, hell I thought in the split second after I made the offer I might have failed the quest. A system error wasn't terrible. ‘But what the hell is this?! Admin unavailable? How?! They are divine beings. And what the heck is Entity ERROR?!’

  I got no answer.

  ‘Well… I completed the quest..?’ I tried to look at the bright side of all of this, before a sudden shift in the screen caught me off guard.

  “Off world quest… revoked? Well… I suppose it's a good thing. I still need to figure things out here, leaving for who knows how long would be bad…” I commented out loud at the notification, though I frowned. ‘This really is not good though. An ‘entity’ that possibly took over the system, and therefore basically my life now, is now dictating my quest rewards and possibly quests in general…’ I thought to myself privately, feeling a bit of a chill going down my spine. I did feel the feeling of a large amount of stones appearing inside my inventory, confirming that I got the rest of my rewards though. 24 large stone bricks. ‘And even worse, I have no clue what is going on. My divine patrons are doing nothing, they might not even know what is happening if they really are busy. Now-’ I worked up a bit of a sweat at the implications. I was alone. Then-

  The system screen blinked at me, the message updating in real time as the words appeared on the screen. A weird blue light seemed to almost emanate from it, throwing me off as it seemed to come alive and rotate in a pulsing pattern, though only lightly. THAT was concerning even more than getting a message from whatever took over the system. A change to the system screen had only happened like that when Monque had talked to me the last time. At least this time it looked tamer. No glitching or chaotic red.

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  “Ok…” I muttered with a small shake of my head, a little bit of the worry about what was going on fading. ‘But how do god’s become indisposed? And why would I need “watching?” Though… It's probably related to the system. Does the system need a controller working things behind the scenes? Do Nemunue and Monque always watch me?’ I pondered with a bit of a frown.

  “And just who, or what, are you then?” I asked, unsure how best to go from here now that I was talking to this other person. “The system is not giving you a name… It's just flagging you as an error.” I explained a bit more, feeling a bit awkward as I looked at the now blue system screen.

  “The Vortex…” I read their name slowly, something not quite sitting right as I read that name. ‘Strange. It almost feels familiar, but I can't quite place it.’ I thought, then glancing at the corrupted text where The Vortex was barely decipherable with some misgivings. The system is not handling things well.

  And with those cryptic words the system screen vanished leaving me in the dark night, seemingly alone.

  I chuckled a bit. ‘Now I get a melodramatic god. My patrons should take a lesson or two.’ I thought with some satisfaction and lingering confusion. ‘Though there were things that they hinted at… The Vortex, many names, seeing what they are, calling me chosen of god’s… And getting its approval. Sacrifice and cost. Right. So, I should watch out for what the heck that's about.’ I thought deeply for a moment, frowning, then I shook my head. “Eh, whatever. That went as well as I could have hoped…” I reassured myself and the empty air in the rabbit burrow. Or warren technically. Time to move on.

  It took half an hour to set up a campfire and cover some ground with the remains of my tent to sleep. By then it was raining outside… I had made a good decision to come here, and stay here. Because of the tunnel entrance’s location in a hill, water didn't go far inside and I was well away from the entrance where it was nice and dry. With the campfire, it felt quite nice. The heat washed over my body from the campfire while I could listen to the rain outside without getting wet.

  I decided to go ahead and retrieve some rabbit meat and put my rabbit meat in the usual cooking pot and let it cook so I could eat a decent supper. Even after the full 2 MRE packs I had eaten after I cleared the rabbit tunnels, I was starving. Food is going to end up being a huge problem down the line. I had enough rabbit for a while if I don't get into a huge fight last I checked, but that's still a problem. Because no way that ideal was happening.

  Speaking of food, I needed to look through my inventory. Figure out just what I got and what I have now.

  “Wow, that's a lot of mangled bodies…” I commented as I focused on sorting out my inventory in my head, my mind's eye moving around and sorting things out inside my inventory. It only took a thought to move things relative to each other in my inventory thankfully. I could make some order inside it.

  In the end it took the entire length of the rabbit meat cooking for me to make a sort of sorting system so I could figure out what I had. And it was quite the list. I only vaguely knew what I had at this point without paper to count and actually inventory things. Plus, I barely knew what half of the things I had really were.

  For example, I had a grand total of around sixty monster insect corpses of varying species and sizes. The two glowing centipedes, around a dozen of the medium dog sized spiders with shells and a dozen more of the poisonous ones, a dozen beetles of the same size, at least two dozen softball sized fly corpses, a few of some kind of worm around the same size as the others with a big toothed mouth, and then less then ten crickets about that same size, though there might be two types like the spiders were. A whole lot of dead bodies. And I left the eel behind, so unless the pair in the cavern wanted it I would get that as well.

  I had no clue what I would do with them. MAYBE I could get some kind of food from them, but I am sure that most of them are poisonous. Maybe there were poison sacks in some of those that I could get out and use for hunting though. And the shells could be a good resource. Especially the glowing ones, which I could definitely use for light. But that's a hell of a lot of work butchering things I haven't seen before or have the vaguest idea what they are like inside.

  And time plus effort are things that I need to use efficiently. But time before processing the bodies is not an issue, is it? I remember that inside my inventory, time doesn't pass. The corpses would stay fresh. Well… They wouldn't get worse at least. They were already either in pieces or with huge parts of damage, and I didn't collect them immediately either.

  I set aside all the bodies in a separate area inside my inventory for later, a little distance from the other stuff. That other stuff being the tools from my first off-world quest, a bunch of wood of a few different sizes and types, my garbage bag of rabbit meat… and my Auton handgun. Honestly… I didn't put much thought into that when I got it, mostly just getting a laugh about the hand-shaped gun. But I wasn't sure about what it could really do. I should try it out tomorrow. I gotta hand it to the gun, it's quite disarming and I am handing a hard time taking it seriously. Pun’s absolutely intended.

  If nothing else, the handgun could replace my flint and steel for sure.

  I bit into the last chunk of rabbit meat, ripping it from the fork tool in my multitool, chewing and swallowing down the tough meat from beside the fire. I looked around at the inside of the rabbit made tunnel I was inside, feeling a bit of mixed amusement and satisfaction as I surveyed my surroundings. ‘The rain died down… It doesn't sound as loud as before.’ I noted as I struggled into my sleeping bag to warm up a bit and sleep.

  As I was falling asleep, I noted a subtle white glow start to bleed into the tunnel from the direction of the entrance. But I didn't worry about it, much too tired after everything. The warmness of the fire and my sleeping bag combined with my absolute tiredness was insurmountable. I felt like my eyes were covered in sand paper, and so I closed them. I relaxed as I slipped into darkness. I was finally done with today… Everything was just too much. Thank the gods and The Vortex, whoever and whatever that was, it was over…