We Lease The Kraken! - A LitRPG Pet Shop System Story.

Sunlight filtered through a dense canopy of tangled leaves and trailing vines, painting shifting patterns across a narrow path of moss and ancient stone that vanished into shadow. Warm air drifted through the forest, rustling the edge of a doormat woven from living, interlocked roots. Somewhere high above, birds sang in strange, fluting calls, while the thick, humid air pulsed with the steady drone of unseen insects.

Jeremiah hesitated at the threshold, eyes flicking to Mero. Part of him almost expected the fairy to cackle and slam the door in his face, but Mero only offered a dramatic bow, blue wings gleaming in the green light. "After you, shopkeep," he intoned, a sly grin tugging at his lips.

Jeremiah stared into the forest for a long moment, heart pounding with a mix of awe and disbelief.

"Do I even want to know?" he muttered.

Mero's grin sharpened. "Would it change anything? For now, just think of it as a shortcut. If you want a longer answer, we can talk later — but you're burning daylight."

Jeremiah shook his head, hitching his pack higher on his shoulder. A resigned, breathless laugh escaped him. "Fair enough. Let's go, then." With one last glance over his shoulder at the familiar world behind, he stepped across the threshold into the green.

Billy chirped, a bright, clicking note, and zipped after Jeremiah, swirling inside his floating bubble of water.

The air changed instantly — cool and vibrant, tingling on Jeremiah's skin like a plunge into a mountain stream. The door swung shut behind him with a gentle click that somehow echoed through the living silence, lingering in the air like a promise.

Jeremiah's boots sank into a carpet of moss, spongy and cool beneath his soles. The forest opened around him—a cathedral of ancient trees, their trunks broad and furrowed with age, branches interlacing high above to filter the sun into wavering emerald and gold. Here and there, the undergrowth gave way to wide roots, gnarled and rising like the backs of sleeping beasts. Clusters of ferns grew thick in the dim, humid light, their fronds arching overhead in feathery canopies of their own. In the distance, pines and spruce pressed in, their needles perfuming the air with sharp, resinous tang; further still, the shadow of immense cliffs stood like the edge of the world, their faces sheer and pale, vanishing into a sky already bruised with cloud.

The forest floor was littered with last autumn's leaves and tiny, sharp-edged cones. Somewhere close by, water burbled — the unmistakable sound of a stream tumbling over rocks. Birdsong echoed through the trunks, not just familiar trills but strange, warbling calls and sudden bursts of metallic chime. Now and then, something unseen skittered in the underbrush. The air was alive with the scent of earth and green things, laced with something sharper, colder, as if snow lingered just beyond the next rise.

Jeremiah spun slowly, taking it all in — then caught sight of the cabin he had apparently exited the back door of, half-swallowed by brambles and trailing moss. He blinked, a sense of double vision dizzying him for a moment; it was almost identical to the staff lounge back in the Menagerie's courtyard, right down to the tilt of the roof and the hand-carved beam above the door. The only difference was the silence. Here, there were no mugs left on the railing, no boots by the door, no lingering hint of Lewis's herbal soap or Maddie's tufted fur on the step.

He moved cautiously to the front, boots crunching through fallen needles. The porch creaked under his weight — a sound too familiar — and he pressed his palm to the sun-warmed wood, half expecting it to dissolve beneath his touch. He wiped a thumb across the window, clearing a narrow patch of dust and pollen, and peered inside.

The interior was nearly a mirror of the real staff room: the narrow cot against one wall, the battered table, even the chipped enamel mug resting beside an untouched glass of water. The shelves stood empty, stripped of personal clutter, and the air inside hung motionless, undisturbed. No trace of Lewis's careful handwriting on the notepad, no scatter of garden tools or half-finished crossword. It felt less like a lived-in space and more like a memory, conjured and waiting.

As Jeremiah examined the area, Billy zipped in widening arcs across the clearing, the shimmering bubble of his water-borne armor casting fractured rainbows over the mossy ground. He darted between bramble and root, undaunted by the alien hush, his delight thrumming along the bond. Once, the little kraken looped the cabin's porch, splashing Jeremiah with a cool spray as he darted past, before vanishing again in the green-dappled haze.

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Jeremiah let himself be distracted, if only for a moment, by Billy's antics. The clearing was a haven, hemmed by ancient trunks and swaths of sunlit fern. But at its edge, where moss gave way to tangled undergrowth and shadows pressed close, something shifted. Jeremiah stepped closer, feeling the boundary as a prickling along his skin. It wasn't a wall, not exactly, but an inflection point — like the first step from a well-lit room into deeper shadows.

He narrowed his eyes, squinting past a clutch of curling ferns. The forest beyond looked ordinary enough at first, until he tried to focus on any one part of it. There — a pale violet flower, half-hidden beneath a fallen branch, its petals trembling in a breeze. He fixed the image in his mind, tracing each vein, the curl of the stem, the glint of dew. But the moment he glanced away, even to check Billy's position, the details unraveled, slipping from memory like water through his fingers. He frowned and tried again, this time with a patch of amber mushrooms clinging to a low stump. The same sensation followed.

He reached out, hand hovering just past the last border of light. The air was cooler there, dense with the scent of crushed leaves and something fainter — ozone, maybe, or the metallic tang of distant storms. Before his fingertips could brush a low-slung branch, a translucent System window blinked into being in front of his nose.

——————❇——————

Leaving Safe Area.

Please choose Tutorial Mission.

OR

Enter Testing Grounds — Free Roam.

——————❇——————

Jeremiah blinked, hand frozen mid-air. "Strange," he muttered, letting his arm drop. He turned, searching for Mero, and found the fairy perched atop a curled roof beam, his wings lazily fanning the motes of sunlight. "Okay, I give. What's going on? What is this place, really? What is the Testing Grounds?"

Mero grinned, the expression almost too wide for his face. He fluttered down, settling on a crooked fence post at Jeremiah's elbow. "Now, that's a tricky question, even for me. But I'll give it a shot." He stretched, arms overhead, then settled into a practiced lecture pose. "Technically, you're standing in a bit of is typically called the Wyrd Wilds. It's a place where the Wyrd overlaps with the Dream Constellation. To put it simply, it is a place where the Wyrd runs thick and the world's rules get… bendy."

Jeremiah frowned, glancing uneasily back at the boundary. While information about the Dream wasn't as widely available as the Wyrd, it was simpler to understand, at the very least. What was known as "The Dream" was a layer of reality typically explained as the collective psionic manifestation of the subconscious of all sapient life.

Only those rare few born with a connection to the Dream Constellation — so-called "Dreamers" — could actually interact with this world, of course. For the vast majority of people, the "Dream" was more of a literal term.

"So it's… not real?" Jeremiah asked with a frown.

Mero snorted. "As real as anything gets. Beings of all stripes wander in and out of the Wilds — Dream Beasts, Fae, other oddballs — through various means all the time. The System didn't make most of what you'll find here. But this slice?" He spread his arms, indicating the boundary that shimmered at the edge of the clearing. "This bit's been pinched off. It's the System's personal domain, thanks in no small part to your sister's genius and some very clever deals. It can, ah, borrow things from the Wilds proper. Plants, animals, oddities — pull them in and shape them for its own uses."

Jeremiah's eyes narrowed as he watched Billy whirl between the trees, the little kraken's bubble distorting the green gloom. "So the things I find here — the creatures, the plants — they're real? I'm not just fighting System ghosts or… training dummies?"

Mero's tone softened, serious for once. "No ghosts. No dummies. It's all alive, as alive as anything back in Nexus. The System might set the rules, and it can tweak things, but everything in here breathes, eats, hunts, and grows. Even if the rules get… weird sometimes." He shrugged, glancing sidelong at Jeremiah. "Keep in mind, this isn't yer personal playground, Jerry-boy. It's a crucible — meant to shape System Users, test 'em, teach 'em what they need to know. The creatures aren't just for you; plenty of folks end up here, one way or another."

Jeremiah's brow furrowed. "Wait — does that mean there could be other people in here? Other Users?"

Mero's eyes glinted with a complicated pride. "In theory, yeah. As I mentioned before, the System has been handing out pieces of itself for years, in bits and pieces. Most of those folks just got little fragments, some training quests, maybe a Skill or two to play with. And many of them pass through the Testing Grounds at some point, for one reason or another. Theoretically, you could bump into another tester in this place, or just some poor sod who stumbled through the wrong archway at the wrong time. Then again, you could walk for a month and never see a soul. Time and space don't play by your rules here. The odds of running into someone by accident are slim."

Jeremiah exhaled, shoulders dropping as he tried to process the scope of it all. "Great. So I could get lost in here forever and not even realize it?"

Mero's grin was unrepentant. "That's the spirit! But relax. The System's got its ways of keeping you safe — relatively. You'll always find your way back to the door, one way or another, if you desire it. And besides…" He gestured toward Billy, who had just discovered a patch of glowing blue moss and was poking at it with delighted curiosity. "You're not as alone as you think."

Jeremiah managed a crooked smile. "Yeah. I guess I'm not."

A gentle wind swept through the trees, carrying the promise of distant thunder. Jeremiah glanced once more at the hovering prompt.