Self Development plan
With the danger past him, the rush of adrenaline Leon had experienced during the fight with the andriod began to fade away.
It had been the only thing dulling the searing pain from the injury the android had inflicted on him. With it clearing out of his system, the pain came rushing back, more intense than ever.
Leon's brows furrowed, and an agonized expression crossed his face as he felt searing pain radiating from his injured stomach with every breath he took, crawling up his spine and shooting through his veins like wildfire.
"Just how badly injured did that one strike from the android leave me?"
He wondered as he decided to take a look at it.
He pulled his shirt up and glanced down.
An area the size of a fist on his stomach was swollen, purple, and bruised. Pressing it caused a sharp sting, and the skin around it was tender to the touch. If he left it be, he might risk the injury worsening.
"Damn thing really did a number on me," Leon cursed the android he'd destroyed for the pain it had caused him.
Could he endure it?
Yes, he could.
But he didn't need to, and he wasn't a masochist who enjoyed pain.
In order to do something about the bout of pain he was experiencing and treat his injury, he set the massive backpack on his back down.
It was filled with various essential goods he had looted from the supermarket close to his community shortly before he disappeared from Earth and appeared in this alien space.
He unzipped it, taking out a bunch of things. The things he took out included painkillers, a tube of gel, and bandages.
He took the painkillers, tossing them into his mouth. He coated them with his own saliva to make them easier to swallow, not wanting to waste any of his limited water supply just yet. If he used his water supply sparingly, drinking only when necessary, it would last him up to six days.
'The effects of the painkillers will soon kick in, dulling my pain for a while,' he thought after taking the pills. 'Now, let's do something about the injury on my stomach.'
He grabbed the tube of gel, designed for injuries like his.
He squeezed some onto his fingers and applied it to the swollen and bruised part of his stomach, feeling a slight cooling sensation as it took effect. Once the cream was absorbed by his skin, he bandaged the area with the bandages he'd taken out earlier.
What was still usable, he put back in his backpack and zipped it up.
Then he stood up and looked around.
Finally, he was surveying his surroundings.
He was in a rectangular room that was about 50 feet long and 30 feet wide. It was illuminated by a bright white light radiating out of the stone embedded in the center of the ceiling overhead.
Black and white tiles made up the floor below his feet.
Each tile was marked with a number. No two tiles had the same number.
At one end of the room, there was an extremely strange red door. Leon found it strange because it lacked all the crucial function of a door. It didn't have a keyhole, a handle, or a lock.
On the other end of the room, a hole could be seen in the wall. It was so tiny that even squeezing through it would prove challengeing for a grown man like him.
He decided to investigate the hole first for no other reason than the fact that it was closer to him than the door.
The light of the room didn't reach through the hole. The other side of the hole was submerged in darkness.
He turned on the flashlight function of his phone and flashed it at the hole.
A surprisingly wide corridor was revealed.
It was large enough for five people to walk side by side.
As for how long it was, it couldn't be discerned—the light from his phone didn't reach far enough to see where it ended.
"Hell, what's with the unbearable stench?"
Drifting from the corridor, the smell of rot wafted through the hole, pouring into the room.
Leon's nose wrinkled in disgust.
But more than his disgust in this moment was his horror.
Just what kind of hell had unfolded in the corridor for it to smell so bad?
He covered his nose and backed away from the wall with the hole.
"Unless absolutely necessary, I won't explore the corridor."
After deciding that, he went to the opposite end of the room where the weird red door was located.
He tried pushing it open.
Then something weird happened.
As if someone had pushed him, he fell on his butt.
Leon: "…"
Except for him there was no one else in the room. So who the hell pushed him? Could it be a... ?!!!
Goosebumps rose all over his skin as if he had come to a startling conclusion.
"No, stop thinking about it."
Thinking about such things while you were alone and trapped in an unfamiliar place was too damn scary.
He stopped letting his thoughts run wild, not letting them wander in that direction anymore. The last thing he wanted while trapped in a deadly place was to feel afraid of the unknown.
"There are no ghosts in this world."
He repeated that to himself three times to calm his nerves, but honestly, even he didn't believe his own words.
He was pulled into an alien space against his will and faced a murderous android as soon as he arrived here. What else could not happen? An encounter with a ghost didn't seem out of the question.
Suppressing his fears, he stood back up with a calm expression on his face as if he wasn't the one acting silly due to being afraid just now.
He cooly brushed himself off, and tried to force the red door open again.
As he applied force on it, the same thing happend again. He was pushed backward and fell hard on his butt.
This time, he stayed on the ground until he had come up with a rational explanation to explain what he had just experienced.
"Any force I apply to the door rebounds entirely onto me. Great. Just great."
The crushing realization that he was doomed to explore the insidious corridor if he ever wanted to escape this hellhole brought out his inner sarcasm.
"Do I have no other choice?"
His eyes moved about, landing on the andriod he'd destroyed by blowing its head off.
Leon inspected it, thinking there might be a crucial clue somewhere on its body.
His effort bore fruit when he discovered a piece of paper from the once dangerous but now useless heap of metal.
A series of numbers were written on it,
'Seems like a piece of a puzzle,' Leon thought, feeling like he was on to something.
When it came to solving puzzles, he wasn't particularly good, but he wasn't hopeless either.
He quickly tied the numbers to the numbered floor tiles and thought, 'Maybe these numbers represent the sequence in which the numbered floor tiles should be interacted with.'
'It's worth a try.'
The first number in the sequence was 2. Leon approached tile 2 and began experimenting, trying to get some kind of response. He spat on it, punched it, kicked it, and even stomped on it, but none of these actions brought any change.
Everything he had done so far seemed to be in vain.
Frustration crept into his mind, but he decided to not give up, trying something else. He jumped onto the tile, and to his surprise, it pressed down with a satisfying click.
His eyes lit up when he saw that.
"It's as I expected. There's a secret mechanism in this room, and to activate it, I need to press the tiles mentioned in the paper in the correct sequence."
He did just that, and a great change took place.
Rumble!
The floor beneath his feet trembled as a pedestal rose from the center of the room.
Atop it, an orb, a seed, and a hatchet were placed.
A note was tucked under each item. Leon noticed these notes when he went to collect the items from the pedestal.
He picked them up, thinking they might hold vital information.
The very next moment though His lips twitched as he struggled to hold back a curse.
Various sentences were written on each note, but they were in a language he didn't understand!
He had to figure out the function and usage of the three different items himself. He began experimenting.
After experimenting dozens of times but failing to get a response out of them, Leon thought back to the novels he used to read in his free time, which he had plenty of after the world started collapsing and people began disappearing.
In those novels, some items could only be used after letting them taste your blood.
Maybe these items were like that too, responding only to blood.
He pulled a dagger from the sheath strapped to his hip and cut his finger, drawing out a small amount of blood.
A drop of blood was poured onto the seed first.
It gave no reaction.
He moved on to the hatchet, dripping his blood onto its handle. This time, too, there was no reaction.
Leon sighed. 'Was I thinking too much?'
But he still continued with what he was up to, smearing the blood dripping from his finger onto the orb.
As a result, he received a solid reaction from it!
The orb released colorful rays of light that sank into his head.
His mind flooded with an intense amount of knowledge, and he felt overwhelmed. The knowledge was about many crucial things related to his new reality, and as he processed it, even the words on the notes started to become comprehensible.
He was in the process of digesting it when various symbols began to appear before his eyes. He wouldn't have been able to understand them before, but now it felt like looking at something familiar.