novelden Chapter 205: Second Clone
Chapter 205: Second Clone
Eren came down to the farm kitchen before sunrise and walked straight into a negotiation.
Emily was at the long table with both hands wrapped around a cup of the blue herb tea and Selena was standing over her with a wooden spoon. From the doorway it looked less like breakfast and more like a hostage situation.
"Tell her," Emily said the second she saw him. "Tell her I need the Emberfeast meat. Your child is demanding it, not me."
Eren knew the dish. Emberfeast was an old village recipe, spiced meat cooked slow over coals, and it carried the name of some elven festival from so long ago that nobody in the village could even remember what the festival celebrated anymore. The recipe survived, the festival didn’t. And the rule of the dish never changed in all those centuries. The meat had to come from a fresh hunt, a real forest beast with strong monster blood in it. Ranch meat was an insult to the pot.
"I would love to cook it." Selena pointed the spoon at the cold room without turning around. "But Emberfeast needs an actual animal, little mother. We have bones, two sad rabbits from Rury and chicken parts. Chicken has no blood worth tasting."
"Then someone should bring you an animal." Emily looked at Eren over the rim of her cup and didn’t blink.
Good morning to me.
"I was going over anyway." He kissed the top of her head on his way to the bread basket. She smelled like sleep and that herb tea and a little bit like the soap she pretended she didn’t steal from his shelf. "Big and bloody. I’ll find something."
"Big and bloody and I’ll handle the rest." Selena finally turned around and looked him up and down slowly. Eren still couldn’t decide if that look was motherly or something else and he wasn’t brave enough to ask. "And when your human family arrives this week, I’m cooking for thirty. We need a second freezer, Eren. A real one. The big chest type from that appliance store in Söke, five hundred liters at least."
"Add it to the list." The list on the fridge was a full page by now and every line on it cost money he was watching disappear. He didn’t say that part out loud.
Emily caught his wrist when he passed her chair and pressed his palm flat against the side of her belly. It was a habit by now and he’d stopped fighting it months ago.
"Something is eating you," she said, watching his face. "Since the city."
"Money. The list keeps growing teeth."
It wasn’t the money. The marble in his pocket had been doing laps in his head since that night on his parents’ balcony and today he was finally going to settle it. But that was a conversation for after, not for six in the morning with a pregnant hunter who could smell a lie from across a field.
"Mhm." She let go of his wrist and went back to her tea. "Bring the meat, silly."
He found the wolves on his way to the portal spot behind the house. Rury was walking the fence line of the chicken yard like a prison guard and the chickens were all pretending very hard that she didn’t exist. Fury was lying on the low hill above the cow field, supervising. The two of them had claimed the entire farm as their territory weeks ago and every animal on it as their personal responsibility, and they ran the place like two teenage alphas of the world’s safest kingdom.
[Bring back something with horns.] Rury didn’t stop her patrol. [I want to try horns.]
"It’s a meat hunt for today."
[Horns.]
Fury lifted his head, decided everything was normal and dropped it back on his paws. [The big females eat grass all day. I watched them. That’s the whole job.]
Fury was a lot more qurious about this farm in general while Rury was all about farm hen and chicken eggs these days.
"They are called cows, buddy."
Fury sniffed to Cow’s way and grinned like he learned something new in school. Cubs were adorable even if they had the body of two metres of giant wolf bodies.
Kids are kids no matter their species are..
Eren opened the door with his own mana and the cold autumn morning of Earth swapped for the loud green spring of Aradne in one step.
The forest didn’t waste time reminding him whose memories he was walking on.
Forty minutes northeast and his body kept doing things his brain hadn’t ordered. He ducked under a leaning branch he’d never personally walked under. He gave a cluster of sun-warmed boulders a wide lazy curve without looking at them because three lazy predators lived in those rocks and the first copy had jogged this exact arc every morning for a month. The knowledge was in his legs, not his head.
The screaming started about two hundred meters out from the big tree.
Fire birds. Dozens of them in the outer canopy, doing the same sunrise concert they’d done every single day of the copy’s life out here. He had used them as an alarm clock and honestly they were better at the job than anything Eren ever owned on Earth.
Back in Istanbul he used to set five alarms on his phone, five minutes apart, with names like "wake up" and "last chance" and "you’re fired." He slept through all five of them regularly. The only alarm that ever truly worked on him was his mother, who would walk into his room, rip the curtains open and announce the time like a town crier delivering bad news to a village. There was no snooze button on that woman.
And there was no snooze button on four thousand birds either.
"Good morning you ugly beautiful bastards!" he yelled up at the canopy, because somebody had to keep the tradition alive.
Most of them ignored him, same as they’d ignored the copy for thirty-eight straight mornings. But a few heads turned and a beak pulsed orange somewhere in the high branches.
[The new tree-human greets us like the dead one did.]
[It still carries the bright thing. Left pocket. I count its warmth from here.]
[Is it going to court a Worker again?]
The stuttering beak-pulse spread through three branches and Eren felt his ears heat up all over again.
"That was one time," he muttered at the canopy. "One time."
The turtle was in its usual wet spot between the two fallen logs, same as always, chewing moss with its blue-veined shell catching the morning light. Eren was weirdly happy to see it. Neither he nor the first copy had ever shared one real interaction with this animal. It just existed there every single morning, calm and alive and completely uninterested in anything, and after thirty-eight days of that, it somehow counted as a relationship.
He crouched a few meters away.
"Good morning turtle neighbor." The copy’s words, on purpose. Then his own. "He thought about you at the end, you know. You made the list."
The turtle kept chewing. Eren nodded like that was a full answer and moved on.
..
Hunter’s Tracking caught the herd half an hour later, a smell like wet iron and a stretch of torn-up ground leading into the low bushes east of the tree.
There were four of them grazing in the open. Boars, sort of, if a boar was the size of a small car and wore overlapping plates of grey hide that looked like dried cracked mud. Three of them ripped bushes out of the ground roots and all. The fourth one was calmly picking up fist-sized rocks with its mouth and swallowing them whole.
Eren watched it eat a third rock and his brain refused to move on.
Why are you eating rocks. Is that.. seasoning?
[Observe: Target Identified: Stoneback Boar (Grazer Variant) - Level 33]
-Status: Healthy
-Species Note: Swallows stones to grind plant matter internally. Stomach region hazardous during butchering
So the rocks were teeth. Fine. Sure. Everything on this planet had a workaround and at least this one was just disgusting instead of deadly.
He picked the biggest one and came out of the bushes at full speed. The herd’s heads snapped up together. Enchanter’s Focus locked onto the big one’s eyes and the charm grabbed it for half a second, and inside that half second the Prediction Window showed him the weight rolling onto its back right leg. It was going to swing left and charge through the spot where he currently was.
So he wasn’t there. Eren cut right, let the boar thunder past his shoulder close enough to feel the wind off its plates and dragged a scimitar across the soft seam behind its jaw. The blade stuck to it’s side and dark blood ran down the grey hide but the thing barely slowed, slammed its head into a tree that had done nothing to anyone.
The trunk cracked with impact!
"Okay, you are as goog as dead now.."
He went low on the next pass and his second scimitar opened the back of its hind leg. The tendon gave and the boar’s whole rear end dropped into the dirt, and it screamed a sound like a kettle full of gravel. The other three bolted through the bushes at that scream and didn’t look back. Eren stepped in over the thrashing head, put both hands on one grip and pushed mana into the steel.
[Congratulations! Your skill Mana-Infused Stabbing (Uncommon) levelled up]
-Level 1 > Level 2
The blade went through the skull plate like it wasn’t there. The boar shuddered once, twice, then stopped. It was definitely dead.
[You gained 000% energy of Stoneback Boar (Grazer Variant) - Level 33]
He looked at the three zeros for exactly one second and went back to work.
The butchering took an hour and was educational. The species note had not been joking about the stomach. When his knife got too close, something inside shifted with a wet clicking sound, an actual bag of stones grinding against each other inside a dead animal, and Eren stood up, walked three steps away and had a short private conversation with the sky.
He wrapped the organs separately. Rury had demanded horns and the boar had no horns, so the liver and the heart were going to have to buy his forgiveness. Knowing her, they would.
He hauled the wrapped quarters to the big tree before evening and then climbed, because the last part of the day was the part he’d actually come for.
The platform looked the same as a month ago. The bark bed, the vine ropes, the day-marks scratched into the trunk. Spring had added a thin line of green moss along one edge of the bed and the forest was slowly moving back into the room. The three stone cups still waited on their shelf of knotted wood.
Eren settled cross-legged on the platform and took the Dungeon Heart Fragment out of his pocket and smiled. This thing was really helpful and he was lucky to got this from that weird dungeon.
He climbed down, shouldered the meat, faced an empty stretch of trees and opened the door home with nothing but his own mana, the way the skill had always worked, the way his gut had somehow never believed it worked.
The portal split the air and the farm kitchen light spilled through. Selena lifted an entire boar quarter off his shoulder with one arm, looked at it the way other women looked at jewelry and announced that the Emberfeast was happening this week.
His hand kept drifting to his empty left pocket all evening. During dinner, during the bath, during the half hour Emily used him as a mattress and fell asleep mid-sentence with her belly pressed warm against his side. The pocket was just a pocket now and some stupid animal part of his brain kept reporting it missing.
He didn’t sleep good that night.
..
Eren was in Aradne Planet inside the forest of Clone 1 used. Way far away from the old elven village area and dragon or Totem Tree.
He climbed down with the Fragment warm in his fist and stood in the small clearing by the roots, and he went over the speech in his head one more time. He’d been writing it for two days.
Hey, don’t panic, I know you’re confused, this is going to sound insane but you’re..
Every version of it sounded like a villain explaining his plan and he hated all of them. The first copy had lived five weeks and died in a lake without ever learning what he was, and Eren had promised himself the second one would at least hear it from his face.
He held the marble out on his open palm, took one breath and reached for the skill the way he reached for the door.
"Okay, System Lady," he muttered. "Clone. And please don’t be weird about it."
He braced for the skill to pull something out of him, mana, blood, years off his life, anything. Nothing left him at all. Only the marble moved, its blue light draining out of it like water down a sink until his palm held a plain cold ball of grey metal.
[Skill Activated: Clone (Legendary)]
-External Mana Source: Dungeon Heart Fragment
-1000 Mana consumed
[Congratulations! Your skill Clone (Legendary) levelled up]
-Level 1 > Level 2
-New Effect Unlocked: Memory Continuity - Clone entities are now generated with the user’s complete memory record, including archived records of all previous clone entities
Eren read the new effect twice and his stomach dropped on the second read.
Wait. Complete memory record. That means he wakes up already know-
[Generating Clone Entity: Eren Teya - Copy 2]
The air three meters in front of him thickened. Light gathered at waist height and started building a frame inside itself, a skeleton sketched in pale blue lines, then meat wrapping the lines, then skin wrapping the meat, fast and completely silent, like watching a 3D printer run with the sound turned off. The whole speech in Eren’s head died mid-sentence because there was nobody left to give it to.
[Clone Entity Status: Active]
The light let go and a man dropped half a step onto the grass and caught his own balance.
Eren’s mouth opened and stayed open.
The man in front of him was thin. Round human ears. Soft around the middle, narrow through the shoulders, a full head shorter than Eren was now, wearing nothing but plain shorts. The crooked nose from a glass door eleven years ago. It was the body from his parents’ bathroom mirror, the one that got winded running for a bus, the one from before all of it.
The canopy above them went quiet branch by branch.
[It made a small one of itself.]
[The small one has the dead one’s smell. Exactly the dead one’s smell.]
The copy didn’t scream. He didn’t stumble backward or demand to know where he was or do any of the things the dead speech had been built for.
He looked down at his own hands first. Turned them over slowly, closed them, opened them again like he was counting everything that was missing from them.
Then he looked up at Eren and there was nothing lost in his eyes at all.
"So I’m the second one." Clone said..