Jin opened his eyes.
He did not see anything at first. His vision was blurry and dark. His head throbbed with a heavy, rhythmic pulse. It matched the beating of his heart. Every time his heart pumped, a wave of pressure hit the inside of his skull.
He tried to blink the blurriness away. A strange sensation washed over him. He felt weightless, but also incredibly heavy at the same time. He felt like he was floating.
The blurry shapes slowly came into focus. He saw a massive canopy of leaves. They were huge. Each leaf was the size of a small car. They were dark green and covered in thick, pale veins that glowed faintly in the dark.
He looked past the leaves. He saw a sprawling expanse of land. He saw twisted metal and burning fires scattered across a wide area.
It took his Earth-trained brain a long time to process the image. The perspective was completely wrong. The ground was above him. The sky was below him.
He blinked again. The confusion cleared, replaced by cold reality.
The ground was not above him. He was upside down.
Jin hung suspended in the air. He was dangling high above the forest floor. He tried to move his arms. They hung loosely past his ears, pointing straight down at the distant ground.
He felt a tight, crushing pressure around both of his ankles. He forced himself to lift his chin. He looked up at his feet.
Thick, rough vines wrapped tightly around his legs. They were as thick as industrial steel cables. They gripped his ankles like a vice. The vines connected to a massive, horizontal branch of a colossal tree.
He remembered the crash. He remembered the metal hull of the cargo ship tearing apart like wet paper. He remembered Nyx throwing her body over his to shield him. The ship must have disintegrated entirely when it hit the thick upper canopy. The momentum threw them out of the wreckage.
He survived because of pure, blind luck. He fell into a dense patch of these massive vines. They tangled around his legs and snapped tight, arresting his fall before he hit the solid earth hundreds of feet below.
He looked at the sky. It was dark. Millions of bright, harsh stars pierced the blackness. There were two small, pale moons hanging low on the horizon.
When the ship hit the atmosphere, it was early morning. The sky had been a hazy red, bleeding into daylight. Now, it was deep night.
He had been unconscious for hours.
The air was much colder now. The humidity of the jungle wrapped around him like a wet blanket. He shivered. His silk palace clothes were torn to shreds. His skin was covered in cuts and dark bruises, but nothing felt broken yet. The pressure in his head was getting worse. The blood was pooling in his skull from hanging upside down for so long.
He had to get down.
Jin slowly turned his head. It was a difficult movement. His neck muscles strained against the awkward angle. He scanned the surrounding branches. The bioluminescent glow from the plant life gave him just enough light to see.
He looked for the wreckage of the ship. He saw pieces of it scattered everywhere. A large section of the metal hull hung from a branch fifty feet away. It was bent into a U-shape. Small fires still burned on some of the debris, sending thin trails of grey smoke into the night air.
Then, he saw her.
Nyx was hanging about twenty feet to his left.
She was not upside down. A thick cluster of vines had caught her around the waist. She hung suspended in the air like a broken marionette. Her arms and legs dangled toward the ground.
Jin stared at her. He waited for her to move. He waited for her black visor to turn toward him. He waited for her telepathic voice to echo in his mind and tell him the extraction plan.
She did not move.
Her black graphene suit was in terrible shape. It was designed to absorb massive kinetic impacts, but it was torn in several places. Deep gashes exposed pale, unaugmented skin underneath. Her featureless obsidian visor had a large, jagged crack running straight down the middle.
She was completely unconscious.
Jin felt a cold spike of real fear. Nyx was a Level 4 Divinity Realm cultivator. She was a monster of war. She survived a direct plasma hit from an imperial cruiser. She manually pushed a dead spaceship across a border.
But shielding Jin's fragile Foundation Level 3 body from the impact of a planetary crash had drained her completely. She burned every single drop of her Aether to create that final kinetic barrier. Without her Aether, her body was just flesh and bone. The impact knocked her out cold.
Jin was entirely on his own.
He hung in the dark. He listened to the sounds of the jungle. It was not quiet. The Zenith wilderness was alive. He heard the deep, guttural roar of something massive moving through the underbrush far below. He heard the sharp shrieks of hunting birds in the canopy above.
He was a piece of bait dangling on a string. If a predator climbed this tree, he could not run. He could not fight. He would just be eaten alive.
He needed to free his legs.
Jin took a slow, deep breath. He filled his lungs with the damp, glowing air. He needed to pull his upper body up to his feet. If he could reach the vines, he could untie them. Or he could find a sharp piece of debris and cut them. He just needed to reach his ankles.
He focused on his core muscles. He engaged his abdomen. He imagined pulling his chest toward his knees.
It was essentially an upside-down crunch. For a normal Earth human, doing a full crunch while hanging by the ankles was incredibly difficult. For a Foundation Level 3 cultivator, it was supposed to be easy. His muscles were supposed to be dense and efficient.
He pulled his arms up. He reached his hands toward his trapped feet. He squeezed his core tightly and pulled his torso upward against the pull of gravity.
He made it halfway up. His hands were just inches from his knees.
Then, the pain hit him.
It was not a dull ache. It was a sharp, blinding spike of pure agony. It originated right in the dead center of his lower back, just above his tailbone.
It felt like someone drove a hot iron spike directly into his spinal column and twisted it.
Jin gasped loudly. The air rushed out of his lungs in a ragged wheeze. His vision flashed white. The pain was so intense it completely short-circuited his nervous system. His muscles spasmed violently.
He lost all control of his core. His body went entirely limp.
He fell backward. He dropped the few inches he had climbed. He hung completely vertical again, his arms dangling past his head. The sudden drop jerked his spine. A second wave of agony washed over him.
He squeezed his eyes shut. He gritted his teeth to keep from screaming. A scream would just attract the beasts below.
He breathed in short, shallow gasps. He waited for the white-hot pain to fade. It took several minutes. The sharp agony slowly settled into a deep, throbbing ache that radiated down his legs and up his neck.
He analyzed the pain. It was corporate damage assessment.
The ship crash was violent. Even with Nyx's kinetic shield, his body took massive blunt force trauma. He hit a branch, or a piece of metal, or simply the sheer force of the sudden stop injured him.
His back was severely damaged. It might be a slipped disc. It might be a hairline fracture in a vertebra. It might be deep muscle tearing.
Whatever it was, his spine could not support the movement. If he tried to force himself up again, he risked severing his spinal cord entirely. If he paralyzed himself, he was truly dead. A paralyzed prince was a useless prince.
Jin opened his eyes. He stared at the dark jungle floor far below.
He hated this. He hated being helpless. On Earth, he could always work harder to fix a problem. He could stay at the office for another ten hours. He could rebuild a spreadsheet from scratch. Effort always equaled a result.
Here, effort just resulted in broken bones. He was weak. His Level 10 genetic cheat meant absolutely nothing right now because he had zero Aether and a broken body.
He looked over at Nyx. She still hung motionless in her tangle of vines.
Logic dictated his next move. Action was impossible. Action resulted in catastrophic physical failure. The only viable strategy left was inaction. He had to preserve his remaining strength. He had to keep his heart rate low to slow the blood pooling in his brain.
He had an asset. The asset was currently offline. He just had to wait for the system to reboot.
Jin let his arms hang limp. He relaxed his neck. He stared into the dark, bioluminescent leaves of the giant tree. The throbbing in his back was a constant reminder of his failure.
He waited for his shadow-guard to wake up. He hoped nothing with teeth found them first.