Jake spent most of the night scouring the city for buildings where survivors might have found shelter for the night. He needed to use Mind Reader two more times to progress it to 100%. Once he reached that milestone, he could upgrade the ability to Rank II. It could potentially allow him to explore someone’s mind more thoroughly than merely viewing a few minutes of their most recent memories.
Those buildings that didn’t have any mutants indicated that survivors had taken refuge on one of the floors. It didn’t take Jake long to find a building with survivors inside. He located the floor where a group of them had settled in for the night. It was the middle of the night, and all of them were fast asleep in their sleeping bags, positioned at the wall farthest from the entrance.
The room where the group gathered was huge, and as Jake crept toward the sleeping survivors, he wondered why they hadn’t established a watch rotation. It was strange. Most survivor groups took that precaution. Something felt off, prompting Jake to slow his pace. He carefully looked around, listening intently and trying to figure out what was wrong.
At first, he didn’t notice anything out of place, but as he took a couple more steps toward the sleeping survivors, his Feral Instincts sent a signal of danger. Jake froze. Nothing changed around him. There seemed to be nothing that posed any kind of threat. However, his Feral Instincts continued to warn him of an impending danger. As he took another step toward the group of sleeping survivors, the sense of danger grew stronger.
He halted his approach and focused on the sense of danger, trying to identify what was wrong. He couldn’t quite tell. Looking around, he tried to detect any traps the sleeping survivors might have set up. It was dark in the room, but his nearly perfect night vision allowed him to see remarkably well. He examined the walls, the floor, and the ceiling but couldn’t find anything that resembled a trap. It was strange—something was off, but he couldn’t pinpoint what.
He closed his eyes to focus fully on his hearing. He listened intently and was able to detect a barely perceptible hum. The sound seemed to emanate from ahead of him. Without opening his eyes, Jake crouched down and placed his palm on the floor, focusing on his tactile sensations. One of the upgrades he’d acquired for Enhanced Senses had greatly improved all his senses, including the sense of touch. As he concentrated, he felt slight vibrations that seemed to originate from somewhere in front of him, just like the hum. Additionally, he sensed something else: the air felt slightly electrified, sending a prickling sensation across his skin.
The barely noticeable hum—undetectable to regular human beings—along with the electrified air and the vibrations reminded him of magical anomalies. He had always felt these three indicators whenever he approached magical anomalies, although they were far more powerful and pronounced in those situations. Jake had long since learned that the humming sound and the electrified air signaled the presence of a magical activity—the more potent the magic, the more pronounced the signs. Magical anomalies were incredibly powerful, making the telltale signs of their presence easy to detect. In contrast, the magic present in this room felt much weaker.
Jake opened his eyes and stood up, scanning the room once more for any signs of magic at work but finding nothing. After giving the matter some thought, he decided to take another small, cautious step forward. That was when the first two upgrades he’d acquired for Feral Instincts kicked in. The first upgrade, capable of detecting both the direction of a potential threat and the distance to it, indicated that some kind of danger lay just a short distance ahead of him. The second upgrade, which heightened his danger perception, allowing him to identify the nature of the impending threat, told him that the danger before him was some sort of invisible magical trap. This confirmed his earlier suspicion that there was indeed some magical activity in the room.
Jake now understood why the group of sleeping survivors ahead of him hadn’t bothered to set up a watch rotation—they simply didn’t have to. Instead, they had put up protective wards somewhere in the room. Back when he was a regular survivor, he occasionally stumbled upon various magical scrolls that allowed him to learn spells he could use whenever he wanted. Each scroll contained a single spell that could only be cast once, and the scrolls themselves were extremely rare. Among all the items found in this game-like world, magical scrolls were likely the rarest, even more so than mana consumables. For this reason, Jake had cast spells only when push came to shove. He had never found scrolls that taught how to set up magical traps or wards, but it looked like such spells did exist, and the group of sleeping survivors must have employed them in this room.
Jake was glad he had acquired the upgrades to his Feral Instincts. Without the first and second upgrades, he wouldn’t have been able to detect the magical trap in front of him. With no visible signs of danger in the room, he might have continued to stealthily approach the sleeping survivors, ultimately triggering the invisible magical trap. Thanks to the upgrades, he was able to avoid that unfortunate outcome.
He still didn’t know what kind of magical trap it was, though. Was it something like a simple alarm designed to wake the survivors if an uninvited visitor entered the building and crossed the room while they slept? Or was it something more dangerous, like a fire magical trap? Perhaps it was intended to explode if triggered, or maybe it was an ice magical trap meant to freeze him upon activation. Jake wished he could somehow locate invisible magical traps and wards and identify them. Maybe one day he would learn such a skill or acquire an upgrade for Feral Instincts that could do just that.
The hum and electrical sensation he felt were quite weak compared to those caused by more powerful magical anomalies, suggesting that the protective wards or magical traps set up by the survivors in this room were relatively harmless for him. Still, there was no reason to tempt fate. While the invisible magical trap probably wouldn’t cause him much, if any, harm if triggered, he chose not to take the risk.
Besides, triggering the magical trap would likely wake the survivors as well. And he wanted to avoid unnecessary confrontations with humans, so he slowly backed away until the faint hum of the invisible magical trap couldn’t be heard anymore. Satisfied that he was a safe distance away to avoid accidentally triggering it, he turned and left the room.