Exploring the Moon Goddess Realm

       The silver crescent keeps spinning in the corner of my vision. It waits for me.

[Moon Goddess Realm: Fully Opened. Enter?]

       My body aches in places I did not know could ache. Every muscle feels frayed. But curiosity beats pain, and I press my back against the motel wall, close my eyes, and think one word.

Enter.

     The room falls away. Beneath me the floor goes missing, and warmth floods up my spine. A low tone hums through my skull, then fades to silence.

When I open my eyes, I am kneeling in the grass.

       Real grass, thick and cool against my palms, with dew soaking through my torn trousers. The air smells of wet earth and something sweet underneath. A pale gold light spills from a sky with no sun, bright enough to read by, soft enough to sleep under.

I stand up slowly and turn in a full circle.

        The Realm stretches for what must be a mile. To my left lies a field of rich black soil, rows of loam so dark it looks wet. A hill ringed with silver-white stones rises on my right, and on its crown sits a stone building with a flat roof and wide iron doors. At the center, ten steps from where I landed, a spring bubbles out of a basin of white marble.

The water is so clear that I can count every pebble on the bottom.

[Moon Goddess Realm: Size 1 Square Mile. Storage Zone, Cultivation Zone, Spring of Lunar Purification. Time Rule: Items stored here do not age, spoil, or decay.]

I read the last line twice.

         No spoilage, no decay. Everything I put in here stays exactly as I found it.

My brain starts running numbers. In my last life, people died in the first month because food rotted, fuel gelled, and medicine went bad in a heat wave. Warehouses emptied in four days. Neighbors killed each other over a case of bottled water. I watched Brandon's pack eat the last of its stores in nineteen days and start on its own omegas.

Here, a ton of rice stays a ton of rice for a hundred years.

        I walk to the spring and kneel at the marble edge. My reflection stares up at me, hollow-cheeked, bruised, with eyes the color of a knife left out in rain. I scoop the water in both hands.

       It tastes of river stone and a hint of mint, and it goes down smooth.

Then it hits my stomach, and the world lights up.

       Heat spreads from my chest through every limb. My cracked fingernails knit shut. The silver-polish burns on my fingertips fade like stains in bleach. My knee, still bleeding from the fence, seals itself with a soft tingle. Old pain I have carried so long I forgot it was pain, the dull ache in my ribs where Garrick once cracked three of them, the stiff left shoulder, the scar along my spine from the cellar door, all of it drains out of me.

I gasp, gripping the marble.

       Hunger vanishes, and the shaking follows it out the door. Since I was seventeen my body has felt like something I rent, and today it finally feels owned.

[Spring of Lunar Purification: Malnutrition cured. Chronic injuries cured. Strength +4. Stamina +6.]

       I sit back on my heels and press both palms against my face. Steady and warm, they smell faintly of mint. I press my forehead to the marble and cry like a child. Nobody has made me feel this safe since the day my mother died.

        Someone told me once that the worst part of being starved is forgetting what being full feels like. They were right. Now I remember.

I let myself have thirty seconds. Then I stand and walk up the hill.

         The panel pulses at the edge of my vision.

[Genesis Points: 120. Shop unlocked. Silver bullion: 10 points per kilogram. Basic supplies: limited stock.]

           Tempting. Every point spent now is a point missing when it counts, so the shop can wait, and my boots keep climbing. Near the crest, I glance back at the spring, glowing softly in the strange gold light, and make myself a promise: nobody will ever pour this water into a cup for another man's wounds.

            The warehouse doors swing open at my touch. Inside is a hall as big as a hangar, gray stone floor, empty racks along both walls that stretch back into shadow. Three hundred feet of nothing, big enough to park a hundred trucks. It echoes.

I stand in the center, and the plan comes together, piece by piece.

            Money comes first, because everything costs money. I have eighteen dollars and a dead mother's ledger I have not found yet. After that, I need to get land, somewhere remote, defensible, cheap. Food, fuel, silver, medicine, and steel follow, enough to outlast every pack in this country. People come last. Skilled ones. Humans, mostly, because the Alphas will ignore them until it is far too late.

And Brandon.

            I think of him standing at the foot of the stairs with his empty fist in the air. Chloe's mouth stretched open in a scream. Two hundred guests watching the omega they called trash walk out through broken glass.

They will remember tonight for the rest of their short lives.

           I raise my voice, and the empty hall throws it back at me.

"This time, no one starves me out."

           The echo fades. For a few seconds the Realm is quiet.

Then the  panel snaps open in my vision, and the silver crescent flashes red.

[WARNING: Hostile Signatures Detected. Distance: 0.2 miles. Count: 7.]

[Outside time continues to run. Estimated arrival: 90 seconds.]

          Ninety seconds, and not one more. The rain was supposed to wash my scent away, and I believed it. The tracker in my boot explains how they found the motel. The system says the signal is moving away now, but seven hostiles are already close enough to reach the building. Clever girl, I tell myself. Brandon never lets go of anything he owns, and he has never owned anything he did not hunt down.

       The seconds drain away. For a few minutes I have felt safe, and now the old terror comes roaring back to collect. Then boots hit the motel stairs outside, a heavy tread, then a second set, then a third. Even from inside the Realm I feel their steps through the system.

A fist slams against the door of room nine. The whole frame jumps.

         "Open the fucking door, blood-bag!" Garrick's voice is a rock in a blender, rough with the shift. "The clerk sold y ou for fifty bucks! We can smell you in there! Open up, or I tear this shithole down with you inside it!"