Resolving to finish examining the chest's contents and only then reflect on what had happened, Ayan picked up a neat stack of scrolls tied with thin cord. Unrolling the first, he studied the system text carefully and understood—these were teleportation scrolls, unbound to any specific destination.

  Their mechanism proved surprisingly simple: activation required only visualising a place in Seratis one had previously visited whilst holding the unrolled scroll. The magic would transport one there almost instantly, regardless of current location. Distance held no meaning—even from one continent to another.

  Counting the entire stack, Ayan discovered exactly twenty-five such invaluable scrolls in the chest.

  Besides the teleportation scrolls, neatly arranged rows of small vials appeared—potions for restoring mana, health and vigor, one hundred of each type. Ayan carefully took one of each, holding them to the torch's light, examining the thick, shimmering liquid within the transparent glass.

  Studying their system descriptions, he noted with interest that these elixirs worked differently from ordinary healing draughts, which simply restored a set amount of a given parameter. No, these potions acted far more subtly and effectively—they significantly accelerated parameter regeneration for a set time, thus proving equally useful at any character development level, from lowest to highest.

  Carefully returning the vials, Ayan found himself pondering the value of all this wealth. Both the teleportation scrolls and these rare potions represented exceptionally costly items which, despite their price, were snapped up instantly.

  Selling them all at once or even piecemeal, he could earn a truly impressive sum of game currency without much effort—more than enough not to worry about lack of funds until reaching at least level fifty, possibly higher.

  Also in one section, carefully placed in a separate velvet niche, lay a small spatial cube—a perfectly geometric object the size of a fist, crafted from some dark, almost black material with barely visible silver runes shimmering on its faces.

  Lifting the cube and studying its system description, Ayan discovered with surprise that this seemingly simple artefact contained an entire portable camp in folded form. Deploying it required simply placing the cube on relatively level ground and giving a mental activation command—the space within would release, materialising a full temporary camp with all necessities. Collapsing followed the same principle—touching the cube and mentally commanding it to return to its original state sufficed.

  Ayan weighed the cube in his palm, thoughtfully examining the flickering inscriptions, but didn't try activating it here. Sufficient space existed for deploying a full camp, yet the lad resisted temptation. Carefully returning the precious object to its velvet niche, he continued examining the contents.

  The next item amongst the neatly arranged treasures proved an elegant metal whistle model, no longer than a little finger, crafted from some light silvery alloy with delicate filigree work across its entire surface. Taking the miniature thing in hand and bringing it closer to the torch's light to better examine the engraving's details.

  Finishing his admiration, Ayan focused and began carefully reading the artefact's system description.

  "Summoning Whistle"

  Personal

  Unranked

  Durability: 1/1

  Required level: 0

  Indestructible

  Not for sale

  "Grants the ability to summon a companion once and establish an unbreakable, permanent bond for the entire existence of your character in this world.

  Summoning activates automatically immediately upon complete reading of this system description."

  "Bloody hell!" Ayan groaned mentally. "Again?!"

  The next instant everything around Ayan vanished, as though someone had yanked an invisible thread of reality, and he found himself in an entirely different space. An endless emerald-green meadow surrounded him, stretching to the horizon in all directions, across which stood, sat, floated in the air or lazily lay the most diverse animals and creatures of all conceivable shapes and sizes.

  Here were both majestic dragons with iridescent scales, and tiny bright birds the size of his thumb, and incredibly bizarre creatures Ayan had never seen even in the wildest fantasies, and terrifying-looking monsters with fangs and claws that sent shivers down his spine at a glance.

  A graceful butterfly with bright yellow-and-black wings suddenly flew from nowhere, settling delicately on his left shoulder, daintily shifting its slender legs.

  A new system message immediately appeared before the lad's eyes:

  "Warning! Confirm final companion choice! Do you wish to permanently bind creature "Swallowtail Butterfly" to yourself?

  Yes/No"

  "No!" The lad's loud exclamation echoed across the entire meadow, instantly drawing universal attention, and from all sides—slowly but surely—absolutely all the numerous inhabitants of this strange meadow began moving, crawling, flying and drawing closer to him.

  Such an unexpected turn of events genuinely frightened the youth to his core. Not so easy to remain completely detached and calm when monstrous creatures of incredible size purposefully and inexorably advance from all sides, each easily exceeding the dimensions of a standard city flyer.

  Whilst from the clear sky true living flying mountains with enormous leathery wings hurtle straight towards you, each beat casting giant moving shadows onto the meadow's emerald grass.

  Completely bewildered by the unfolding madness, Ayan instinctively tried to turn and flee from this nightmare, but in his haste and panic his own legs treacherously tangled, and he crashed full-force onto the soft fragrant earth.

  Desperately bracing both trembling hands against the soil's resilient surface, the youth was about to quickly rise and continue his flight, but was suddenly distracted by another intrusive system text appearing before his eyes.

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  "Warning! Confirm final companion choice! Do you wish to permanently bind creature "Devoralus Worm" to yourself?

  Yes/No"

  "What? What bloody worm?" Only now, completely confused, did Ayan unexpectedly discover that his right palm had accidentally but firmly pinned a small wriggling worm to the damp earth—indistinguishable in appearance from an ordinary earthworm.

  No time remained for retreat, and the lad confirmed the choice merely to escape this meadow.

  Barely had he mentally confirmed the choice when the entire mad, monster-filled world surrounding him suddenly dissolved in an instantly occurring bright, blinding flash of snow-white light that completely filled his entire field of vision for a fraction of a second.

  When the blinding radiance finally dispersed and ebbed, Ayan found himself on all fours in the middle of the familiar stone hall inside the cave.

  The youth's entire body trembled finely from experienced stress and accumulated tension. His legs completely refused to obey, his hands shook as though fevered, whilst his heart pounded in his chest with such frantic frequency as though he'd just run several kilometres without stopping.

  Unable to hold himself on trembling limbs any longer, Ayan simply collapsed bodily onto the cold uneven stone cave floor, stretching out to his full considerable height. His chest heaved and fell in quickened rhythm, whilst his lungs greedily and convulsively gulped air, attempting to restore disrupted breathing after the experienced shock.

  Perhaps had the lad possessed a normal, full life in the past, filled with entertainments ordinary for a healthy person—with regular visits to modern amusement parks, trips to full-immersion holotheatres where one could experience the most incredible adventures in absolute safety, and many other such activities available to any ordinary teenager—his current reaction to what had occurred wouldn't have proved so violent and uncontrolled. But reality was entirely different, and Ayan's organism honestly processed all the stress accumulated over these few minutes, which for him proved absolutely unfamiliar and soul-shakingly overwhelming.

  Restoring normal, even breathing required no less than a good ten minutes of continuous lying on the hard stone floor. Only after this, feeling his heart finally stop pounding madly and his pulse return to relative normality, did he somehow sit up, leaning on trembling hands, and immediately notice a small worm unhurriedly crawling across the stone surface right by his massive bare feet.

  Lifting the tiny creature onto his large palms with the utmost caution, as though fearing to accidentally crush the fragile being, Ayan began examining his unusual pet significantly more attentively and closely, trying not to miss a single detail.

  The first fleeting and superficial impression that the small creature resembled an ordinary earthworm familiar to every person very quickly dispersed without trace upon more detailed inspection. The strange being, which had stretched lengthwise like a true snake ready to strike and stared at its owner with its unusual mouth opening, in no way resembled ordinary, eye-familiar representatives of this fairly common invertebrate species.

  Upon closer examination it seemed that instead of familiar soft and moist skin, this creature possessed very small stone plates—a kind of scales running strictly overlapped and densely, almost hermetically covering the being's entire body from all possible sides, like natural armour.

  Using his new, significantly improved vision and focusing all attention on the tiny pet, Ayan looked even more closely and noticed with surprise an interesting detail: between individual stone plates occasionally appeared some strange light-brown oily substance. He almost automatically thought to himself that in distant antiquity, when technologies were only emerging, ordinary people might well have mistaken this mysterious liquid for motor oil due to external resemblance.

  On the rear end of the body, where most living creatures' tails were located, no additional openings or appendages could be found—it simply ended in a rather large and sharp stone spike of proper conical form with rows of teeth like a drill bit, and that was all, no other features. But the worm's mouth cavity represented a true natural wonder—a practically perfect ring of numerous sharp teeth of various forms and purposes.

  Ayan counted a full twelve different rows of these teeth, arranged in concentric circles: the very first, outer rows began with rather long and sharp fangs that more resembled a predator's curved claws, designed for seizing and holding prey, and closer to the very end, the depth of the maw, gradually transitioned into flatter grinding teeth resembling miniature graters. Quite possibly additional tooth rows hid in the very depths of the body, where light didn't penetrate, but discerning them proved impossible even with improved vision.

  No familiar sensory organs—eyes, antennae, feelers or other similar appendages characteristic of invertebrate creatures—did Ayan discover during the most thorough inspection of the tiny body.

  More detailed and attentive study of the mouth cavity revealed a genuinely curious feature: the ring-shaped tooth rows, despite first impression, couldn't be called technically whole or solid—on both edges of each separate row, in seemingly random order, several teeth were missing, as though simply pulled out or having never grown at all.

  Ayan quickly figured out and guessed that precisely such unusual structure allowed this bizarre creature to effectively compress its numerous jaws, closing them like a vice.

  However, the fact that gaps in each subsequent row weren't positioned strictly above each other but were shifted in different directions and located in completely different places, as though gradually rotating and shifting clockwise from outer edge to inner, suggested a far grimmer and more unpleasant thought: these toothed rings worked not simply as a trap, but rather like a living conveyor, slowly and methodically pushing unfortunate prey ever deeper, straight into the predator's stomach, giving the victim not the slightest chance of escape.

  Involuntarily imagining himself in the place of some hapless ant or careless beetle, which these terrible teeth slowly, row by row, draw into a living meat-grinding mechanism, Ayan against his will shuddered from the mere thought of such a death.

  "Well, what am I to do with you now?" he murmured quietly aloud, continuing to peer closely into the dark, almost bottomless void of the worm's gaping maw lying on his palm.

  Thinking of nothing better and finding no other solution, Ayan decided to follow the system's direct instruction, insistently requiring he give the worm a name.

  "Are you called Devoralus, or is that your species' name?" he asked quietly, tilting his head sideways and examining the motionless stone creature on his palm.

  He thought long and concentratedly about a name for his new and quite unusual pet, turning over various options in his mind, trying to find something suitable and worthy. Finally, after long deliberation, he pronounced firmly and confidently:

  "Your name is Rayan."

  This unexpected meeting and subsequent binding seemed to him truly fateful, almost symbolic. After all, he himself in real life was, by and large, the same worm—helpless, weak, unable to move properly, a cripple. Therefore it seemed absolutely right and fair that their names be consonant with each other, linking them by an invisible thread of common destiny.

  After the name was finally assigned and fixed by the system, a completely new icon appeared in his interface with a schematic image of the pet. Mentally clicking it with curiosity, Ayan immediately saw Rayan's detailed status. Nothing particularly surprising or outstanding appeared there, save one thing—the small creature proved unranked, which was quite unusual for so weak a being.

  Not bothering much over this oddity and postponing reflections for later, he retrieved a piece of jerky from the sack and treated the worm. Rayan approached the offered treat with visible experience and obvious expertise: methodically began eating from the very edge of the piece, moved strictly along the rim, never once deviating from the chosen route, as though carefully pushing himself forward with his terrible circular maw, and gradually, coil by coil, drew the entire piece of meat spirally into himself.

  "I see you've grown quite hungry," Ayan remarked with a light smirk, observing the unusual feeding process and understanding why his species had been assigned such a name. Following the vivid example, the youth likewise began unhurriedly chewing the salty jerky, attempting to assuage his own hunger.

  The complete absence of drinking water in his supplies increasingly troubled him and began causing serious concern, but going towards the sound of the underground source rushing somewhere in the darkness he still categorically refused, remembering possible negative effects.

  He hoped only that Zhalgaztur would nonetheless not forget his problems and replenish his meagre fresh water supplies upon return.