Chương 3: Unknown Energy

Across the expanse of a thawing, frozen plain, a solitary figure is walking alone without direction. On the horizon, the sun was beginning its slow descent, casting long shadows over the melting ice. Overhead, three celestial bodies hung in the twilight sky, one massive sphere flanked by two smaller companions. They looked less like moons and more like fully formed planets, so close they made her wonder if this world was somehow physically tethered to them.

Hours had passed since she'd turned her back on the crater. She wore only the simple white dress she'd pulled from her inventory back at where the ship landed while her engineered skin easily shrugging off the cold. Then, without warning, a familiar chime broke the silence inside her mind. [NOTICE] [Calibration complete. Two utilities unlocked.] [UTILITIES] [Quantum Optics] — High-frequency spectrum scanning, energy detection, data gathering, and complex environmental analysis.

[Echo-Mapping] — A sensory technique that emits continuous, high-frequency sound waves to scan the surrounding perimeter. She stopped walking. Curious, she turned her focus inward and let her vision shift. [Quantum Optics: Active] The world changed instantly. Where there had only been white snow and grey stone a second ago, faint threads of light now clung to everything that moving and alive. She look down at its flow inside the veins of the frost-covered grass at her feet.

She crouched beside the nearest one, tilting her head, watching the light pulse in a slow, steady rhythm like a heartbeat.

"Interesting," she murmured. She reached out and focused harder, the way the archive's understanding of the ability suggested she could. The overlay sharpened, resolving finer detail of how it moved drawn up from the roots, pooling in the leaves, radiating faintly outward like the plant was breathing it in and out. [QUANTUM OPTICS: ANALYSIS] [Subject: Planet local flora] [Observation: Energy absorption occurring through root structure. Possible metabolic function.] So the light wasn't just decoration.

It was doing something. Whatever this energy was, it seemed to be feeding the plant the way sunlight fed things on Earth according to the knowledge archive... except this energy is way compressed and denser. She filed the thought away, turning her attention outward, scanning the horizon for anything else worth looking at. A small, skittering shape caught her eye near a rock, a some kind of six-legged creature no bigger than her hand, its fur bristling with the same faint glow as the plants.

She watched it dig at the frozen ground, unaware it was being observed, and let herself simply enjoy the sight of it. It was strange, she thought, how much simpler curiosity felt than everything else she'd been carrying since she woke up. She held the enhance vision a moment longer, then let it fade, deactivating [Quantum Optics] before turning to the second utility.

"Activate [Echo-Mapping]." The change was immediate, but nothing like the last one. There was no visual shift only a strange new awareness, as if she'd grown a second set of senses layered invisibly over her then a pulse rippled outward from her, silent and instant, and came back carrying shapes, the rock outcropping ahead, the small creature still digging, the shrubs, the uneven dips and rises of the terrain stretching in every direction.

Each one settled into her mind as a rough, glowing marker, pinned in place like a map only she could see. She experimented, widening the pulse's range bit by bit, watching the map grow outward each time. But then the data gather began to slow down. She understand that the smaller the range the data returned almost instantly. Making the radius larger, and she could feel the delay of the wave that she's receiving. [NOTICE] [Active utilities will continuously drain the energy reserves.] [Current reserves: 64%] She noted the number without much concern. Sixty-four percent felt like more than enough to keep exploring. For a while, she simply walked with both active, layering the glowing energy-sight over the pulse-map, cataloging everything that crossed her path. A cluster of pale, luminous fungus grew in the lee of a boulder, its light pulsing out of sync with the plants around it.

She stopped often, crouching, tilting her head, and murmuring small observations to herself that no one else would ever hear. The place was full of lights, and the world around her was full of living things that coexisted, each of them connected to this foreign energy. Then her eyes landed on her system status, checking her reserves. She paused. [Current reserves: 58%] Six percent, just from walking and looking with her utilities active.

It was a quiet, unglamorous kind of cost, easy to ignore while she was distracted, but it was still a cost specially since sun was sinking.

"I should be more careful of using them." She made a mental note to be more deliberate about when she kept both utilities running. She was midway through crouching over a cluster of ice-crusted moss, watching its faint glow ripple outward in slow waves, when the [Echo-Mapping] pulse returned something new. A Large shape, Still. Roughly sixty meters out, tucked behind a ridge she hadn't bothered to look at. She went still herself, not making any noise.

She let the pulse repeat, narrowing her focus onto that single marker. The shape didn't move yet not asleep, she realized after a second pulse, but waiting. Predators back on Earth, according to her archive, didn't hold still that long without reason. She raised her [Quantum Optics] again, angling her focus toward the ridge instead of the moss at her feet.

The overlay sharpened, and there it was: a dense, coiled mass of energy, far denser and darker than anything she'd seen in the plants or the small skittering creature. Whatever it was, it ran hotter, brighter, and far more concentrated than anything around it. [QUANTUM OPTICS: ANALYSIS] [Subject: Unidentified creature with high energy density] [Warning: Energy signature significantly exceeds surrounding baseline. Recommend caution.] The word caution sat heavier in her mind than it should have.

Whatever it was, it hadn't noticed her yet. The [Echo-Mapping] pulse would have told her if it had suddenly turned, shifted, or started closing the distance. For now, it simply sat there, coiled and waiting. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Slowly, carefully, she began backing away, angling herself around the ridge in a wide, silent arc, checking the mapped shape every few steps to confirm it hadn't shifted.

Each pulse felt louder in her own mind now. She kept both utilities running despite the cost, because right now, blindness was a worse risk than a drained reserve. Only once the shape had shrunk to the very edge of her [Echo-Mapping] range did she stop, unmoving, and finally let her shoulders drop. She deactivated both utilities at once, and the world went quiet and plain again with just her normal sense eyes, the cold air, and the fading light of a sun that had almost fully disappeared behind the horizon.

She stood there a moment, processing what had just happened. An hour ago, these utilities had felt like something to play with. Now she understood, with a clarity that settled uncomfortably in her chest, that they weren't just utilities. They were the only reason she'd walked away from that ridge instead of straight into whatever was waiting behind it. She glanced down at her reserves one more time. [Current reserves: 51%] Fifty-one percent.

She thought back to the creature behind the ridge, to how densely its energy had burned compared to everything else she'd scanned today. If something that large and dangerous could carry that much energy inside it, then whatever this glowing, ambient energy was, it had to be worth more than just a metabolic byproduct.

She raised her [Quantum Optics] again, this time turning her focus not on any single plant or creature, but on the air itself, towards the same faint, drifting light that clung to everything living on this frozen plain.

"Analyze this energy," she said. [SYSTEM ANALYZING...] [Energy Classification: UNKNOWN] [Likely source: Ambient atmospheric saturation] The system explained what little it understood: this energy behaved like a kind of life-force, something the local plants and animals relied on to survive… including, apparently, whatever had been coiled behind that ridge. She observed the energy again, and then an idea formed in her mind.

"System, Is there a way to convert this ambient energy into an alternative power source?" she asked. [SYSTEM] [By using EVALUATION we can analyze the Energy to understand its structure and compatibility] [EVALUATION] [Estimated Time: ~30 minutes] A small warning light blinked in the corner of her vision. This wasn't free. If the evaluation failed, or her body rejected the energy, she'd be stranded out here with nothing left in reserve.

But with full dark closing in and nothing better on the horizon, waiting felt just as dangerous as trying.

"Begin evaluation," she whispered into the cold, empty air. [EVALUATION: Started] She felt the air around her being gently pulled in—threads of glowing energy drawing toward her like a slow whirlpool. Every ten minutes, an update flickered past. [EVALUATION: 33%]... [EVALUATION: 100% — SUCCESS] [Energy cataloged as: Unknown Energy] [Compatibility: 96%] [INTEGRATION is now available.] [Estimated Time: 1 - 3 hours] [Cost to integrate: 30% of current reserves. You currently have: 42%.] [Proceed?] The shimmering blue interface hovered before her eyes, casting a faint glow over the darkening grass. She stared at the cascading data, absorbing the implications. This "Unknown Energy" wasn't just a passive background element. It was dense, vital, and incredibly concentrated. It was an ocean of free-flowing, volatile power, just waiting to be tapped.

"Proceed," she commanded. [WARNING] [System integration requires maximum processing allocation.] [During this process the Utilities will be unavailable. Do you wish to continue?] She hesitated, standing frozen on the melting snow as she weighed her options. Up until now, her [Echo-Mapping] had been her lifeline.

It allowed her to detect threats within a 0 to 100-meter radius long before they could see her, while her [Quantum Optics] granted her the ability to see through the active energies around her by giving her the precious seconds needed to slip away and avoid conflict entirely. Voluntarily locking that radar and enhanced vision meant that she would only rely on her regular senses to observe her surroundings. Still, they were far inferior to the heightened awareness of her active system utilities.

There was no perfect option. She chose the gamble. She walked to the base of a massive, ancient tree and sat down against its trunk. The system's notification echoed in her mind. [System Utilities Disabled] [Unknown Energy Integration started.] [Integration Completed: 0%] The energy began seeping into her, and it didn't feel gentle. It felt like fire spreading through her veins, clashing violently with her existing systems before her body could force itself to adapt.

[Integration Completed: 7%] [Integration Completed: 8%]... [Integration Completed: 42%] Time passed and the integration process was running uninterrupted when through her ordinary hearing, she heard something. Frozen grass, crunching. Not the heavy tread of something large. Small, light footsteps. Something was circling the tree, just a few feet away from where she sat alone. Then the creature entered the clearing. Her eyes locked onto the small, green-skinned humanoid creature.

It stood barely a foot tall, clutching a crude, roughly fashioned knife in its clawed hand. Its prominent, pointy nose and long, swept-back ears immediately triggered a match within her mind. According to the knowledge archived in her memory, it looked exactly like a goblin. A cold spike of logic hit her mind. Such a creature was supposed to exist only in the realm of human fiction, an old fantasy trope, never once scientifically proven to exist on Earth. Maybe just a local species of this planet? she wondered.

She looked down at the tiny scavenger with calm, calculating eyes, examining its physical form more closely. The knowledge archive embedded in her mind wasn't actually a full record of Earth's database; it was simply a curated dataset imported by her creator, designed to give her a baseline understanding of reality after she woke up. And the fictional books inside her archive were telling her that this creature was a goblin. But was such a creature truly just a fictional entity? Maybe I'm just lacking data?

And why, of all things, would her creator import what seemed to be unnecessary fantasy books into her vital knowledge archives? It was an illogical waste of storage. Well, it didn't matter right now since she didn't have the processing luxury to ponder her creator's strange curation, because the tiny creature was about to act. It crept closer, ears twitching, baring a row of sharp yellow teeth. It raised its knife, eyes locked on the seemingly fragile little girl, and lunged.

She snapped up from the roots of the tree, twisting her torso just as the creature lunged. The rusty blade sliced through the empty air where her chest had been a millisecond before. Her stature was remarkably small—not much larger than the creature itself. Her frame was that of a human child, roughly seven years of age, clad only in a simple, small white dress. The thin, pristine fabric offered a zero armor rating against physical attacks.

A single clean strike from that jagged knife would tear right through the cloth and pierce her synthetic skin. As she repositioned herself, the goblin stumbled from its missed strike, hissing in frustration as it spun back around to face her, surprised that the little girl avoided its attack. To survive here, she couldn't rely on durability and need to avoid its attacks completely. She dropped her center of gravity, slipping into a simple, precise defensive stance.

Her small hands came up, palms open, her weight distributed perfectly between her feet as she readied herself for the confrontation. In the deep twilight of an alien world, blind to the very energies she'd only just learned to see, the small girl stood her ground against the creature of myth. The battle for her survival had begun. [Integration Completed: 50%]