I awoke slowly to a world of life. A bed of soft moss gently cradled me from behind as dappled sunlight streamed in from above. Large branches swayed to the silent song of a lively wind. It filled the forest with a low rustling that hadn’t been present in the previous iteration. Surprisingly, it was barely noticeable under the absolute cacophony of the other noises that filled the forest.

I slowly sat up, then jolted upright as a bunny scattered into the brush. Insects chittered in the background. Where in the previous iteration, the ground had been covered in short grass, now a full array of ferns, bushes, moss, and a whole host of other shrubbery covered the forest floor.

I sensed the system speaking to me, but I pushed the gentle intrusion back. Instead, I observed my surroundings. The trees surrounding spawn were identical to before. Down to their placement on the forest floor. My nemesis, however, had gained two additional rat friends. Seeing the change was oddly satisfying. It felt as if my struggle in the previous iteration was the impetus for the beautification of the chunk.

The only physical change I could see nearby was a small wooden chest resting at the base of the oak tree. It was one of those stereotypical pirate's treasure chests, with aged wood strapped together with pitted iron banding. It nestled between two of the oak's roots as if it had been there forever. Opening it, however, revealed the chest was empty. It seemed to beg to be filled though, so I killed one of the rats and tossed in the raw rat meat before closing the lid.

The system kept buzzing. I sensed a new skill and several updates to the interface, but I chose to explore first. The trickle of a stream called to me, and I let my steps carry me to the sound. On the western edge of the chunk, I found a burbling brook spawning from the edge.

I knelt beside the water and took a careful sip. It was ice cold and indescribably refreshing. Smiling, I rose and followed the small river east.

Blue butterflies congregated around the water, imperiously shooing away other creatures with their regal dance. I knew diddly squat about insects, let alone their names, so I made up one that seemed to fit: Cobalt Admirals.

Two-thirds of the way across the chunk, I came across a cluster of three squat trees with leaves colored in rich oranges, reds, and yellows. It was like the trees were stuck in the height of fall. I named them maples and continued on.

I stumbled across another rabbit, though with more time to observe, I noticed a few oddities compared to a normal rabbit. Its spotted brownish tan coat was fairly standard, at least to my untrained eye, but the enormous, four-inch claws that curled like a velociraptor's were definitely fantastical. It stared at me fearlessly, twitching its nose periodically as it munched continuously on some sort of root.

It scampered off as a larger creature shouldered its way through the undergrowth. It was a boar of some kind, though the large silver spines arching out of its back made it like no boar I’d ever seen. It was peaceful to me, however — perhaps due to my high combat level — so I calmly let it pass.

“Spined Silverback,” I said, tasting the name as I casually caught a lamp from thin air. “And the rabbit is a Spotted Snuffler.”

A couple of steps later, I’d traversed the breadth of the chunk. The stream unceremoniously launched off the edge, cascading into the dark void in a spectacular shower of mist. A picturesque rainbow glittered merrily over the horizon.

I risked leaning over the edge to catch some of the rising spray and grinned as the crisp sparkles tickled my cheeks.

I returned to spawn, patting the huge oak tree fondly as I glanced at the three rats circling around spawn. I wasn’t here for rats, though, so from spawn, I navigated to the mining camp and the quant smithy adjacent to it. The mining camp had grown after the reset. The rock golem still ploddingly patrolled the camp, but the real difference was in the rocks. The four copper and tin rocks had shifted slightly to accommodate three rust-red mounds of stone. Touching them left a trail of red dust on my fingertips, reminding me of iron rust. Convenient. I dub thee: Iron.

I poked my head into the smithy, quickly collecting the tinderbox and hammer before stepping out. It was finally time to address the system.

I took a huge breath, closed my eyes, and focused inward.

My status popped up, but this time I was privy to far more information. In addition to the levels of each skill, I could see how much experience I had collected and how much experience was required for the next level. Shockingly, I’d gained a grand total of 76,340 woodcutting experience, all told. The small analytical part of myself seemed to take this in stride as if this was a normal amount of experience after nearly 100 hours of woodcutting.

Despite only a 4 level difference, there was over a 20,000 experience gap between woodcutting and firemaking. It really drove home how much harder higher levels were to obtain and how the rat grind had really pushed me past the beginner levels. Any future levels in my high-level skills would take many hours of efficient farming to have any hope of gathering the requisite experience.

The only major note was my lagging recovery level. I'd gained barely any recovery experience during the rat grind, and it kind of shocked me how effective defense was at keeping me healthy against low-level enemies.

Looking down to the bottom of the list, I found a new skill had been implemented. Hunter. Perusing the skill opened up another — far more refined — interface that showed what animals could be hunted at each level. Perusing the list, I saw all three animals I’d found and named recently, including a few that I hadn’t.

There was one final thing I needed to check before I could rush out to train my new skill. Like the other system interfaces, the Chunk Objective interface was significantly refined. Instead of a collection of vague thought-feelings and images relating to my tasks, I had a nicely collated list I could pull up whenever I needed.

1. Hunt a Cobalt Admiral

2. Chop a Maple tree

3. Burn a Maple log

4. Cook Item_0x626F72

5. Charge a weapon with an Agate

6. Mine an Iron Ore

7. Smith and equip an Iron Chainbody

Only a scant few of the items were obfuscated by a lack of a name, and I knew for a fact I already had the required stats for most of these objectives. The only item on the list I was scared of was the crafting requirement. I had PTSD from the last crafting requirement, but with three rat spawns and an infinite fresh water source, I was sure I could make the grind enjoyable should it come to it.

First things first, clear the easy objectives. Cutting and burning a maple tree was easy with my excessively high woodcutting level, and the fire granted a +9 boost to recovery. The bronze axe I was using had also lost its speed bonus and instead gave a +6 boost to my woodcutting level. In exchange, it seemed as if the rate I could chop down a tree increased with my woodcutting level. With my absurd woodcutting level, it was hard to tell the difference between the axes, though, since both regular trees and oak trees dropped logs once a minute with either axe. At least the consistency was nice.

Next, I delved into the mine. Power mining copper and tin served as a pleasant distraction, and before I even noticed, my mining level hit 24. With the bronze pick equipped, I now had 30 mining, so I went over to the iron rocks and gave them a shot. It worked. Sort of. I got an ore, but it took way too long, so after some consideration and some mental napkin maths, I returned to peacefully grinding out copper and tin. Besides, I would need more bronze bars to level up my smithing level later on.

Time passed, and I blinked away a pleasant little notification:

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

I did just that, pleased that my rate had significantly increased with the six levels, and then turned my attention to smithing. Lugging the ores to the smithy turned out to be the toughest part of the whole adventure, but before long, I got a similar matching notification:

Grinning at how easy and fun it was to gain levels this fast, I collected some more iron ore and crafted myself a full set of iron gear. Grinding the next nine levels to be able to craft an iron chainbody was far more arduous. Instead of only around 5,000 experience to go from level 20 to 30, I needed just over 12,000.

It was more than double the amount of experience, but it took me less than twice the time to complete. The reason was twofold. With higher mining and smithing levels, I was getting faster. Iron ore took longer to mine than copper or tin, but just like the update to the woodcutting axe, my bronze — and eventually iron — pickaxe increased my levels. The real kicker, however, was that I was mining iron. As a tier three material, it granted three times the experience as tier one materials such as copper and one and a half as much as bronze. 60 experience per rock and ingot wasn’t earth-shattering when I needed multiple thousands, but it was still a noticeable bump in efficiency.

Every once in a while, I hopped over to the copper and tin rocks. I didn't know what exactly compelled me. Doing so wasn't optimal, but I found it enjoyable to suddenly mine the rock in record time. It felt like a solid metric of my progress to feel the amount of time it took to mine copper from one minute to thirty seconds or less. During one of these benchmarks, an uncut agate spawned at my feet. Apparently, regular rocks now had a small chance to drop gemstones. I squatted down and picked up the gemstone. Idly, I took out my chisel and cut the stone. Maybe taking a small break from the mining grind was warranted. I needed to figure out how to ‘charge’ a weapon anyway.

Standing, I paused as I felt a twinge on the inside of my knee. Looking down, I saw a crusty bloodstain trickling down my leg.

“What the,” I muttered, flopping down and rolling up my pant leg. It had apparently been bleeding for some time, and I’d only noticed it now. Some water and gentle scrubbing revealed...nothing. There was no obvious injury there, and my defense was far too high for any of the critters to have a hope of piercing my skin. Only when I pulled my skin apart did I see a razor-thin cut on the inside of my knee that filled slowly with red blood as I pressed on the surrounding skin.

I puzzled over the oddity for a bit, not sure where it had come from or why it was there. It reminded me of the cut to my shirt, and it would be bad if I started degrading in between resets. I spent fifteen minutes triple-checking myself and my attire for any further damage, but there wasn't any. Still, it was worrisome, and I made a note to check periodically in case there were more of these...cuts.

Charging my battleaxe took a little bit of finagling. As usual, I tried my long list of tools on the weapon, but nothing immediately worked. Eventually, I figured out I needed to use the smithing hammer on the gemstone and axe while standing near the anvil. The result was an iron battleaxe of frost that radiated a cool cyan glow. Striking with it unleashed a cone of frost behind the target that turned out to be perfect for triple farming the clustered rat spawns near the oak tree.

By the time the sun was starting to set, the joy of covering the trees in glittering ice crystals had waned, and I was fully kitted out in a brand-spanking new set of iron armor.

----------------------------------------

I found myself sitting on the chunk border an hour later. My legs carefully distanced from the lethally sharp edge as I munched on a cooked rat steak. The waterfall roared to my right, and the forest chittered behind me. To my side, a maple campfire crackled and popped as it cast its flickering shadows around my rudimentary campsite.

I looked out over the void.

The system had created a sunset, and it was beautiful. Golden reds melted into buttery yellows that seemed to blend seamlessly with the subdued blues of the fading sky. The horizon held a sense of ethereal warmth, casting a gentle glow upon everything it touched. As the day gracefully transformed into night, the hues deepened, painting the world in a wash of colors.

I found myself truly at peace.

At first, I doubted my presence in this world. I’d died to monsters. Nearly dehydrated to death. In fact, there were a lot of near-death experiences in this place. But. With each passing day, the world grew. It didn’t feel like home. Not yet, anyway, but I no longer felt like a sore thumb, arbitrarily placed in a sandbox for some higher power’s amusement.

I fit.

I just wished I could share this experience with someone.

I slept that night, rising early with the dawn and eager to start the day.

The next easiest task on the list involved cooking the unknown item. There were a thousand and one things that it could be, but I had a fair guess what it was. Walking into the forest, I almost immediately found one of the pair of spotted snufflers roaming the chunk. Instead of leaving it be, I attacked. It fell in a few blows without even granting a token resistance. After its death, the reason became obvious.

>

It was lower level than the rock golem. Even its vicious-looking claws couldn’t make up for the 30+ level difference between us. It did drop a piece of unidentified meat, which I collected, named raw snuffler meat, and cooked. The result I named smoked snuffler and munched on it happily, satisfied that the taste was very different from the rat meat I’d been subsisting on until now.

With a wide grin, I set out into the forest and easily came across the Spined Silverback. It put up more of a fight but still fell quickly, as it was only level 14. The unidentified meat it dropped turned into what I dubbed Boar Steak and had a rich musky aroma to it that reminded me vaguely of whiskey. I bet that this was tier-three meat, but without a way of losing health, I couldn’t test it.

Cooking the boar steak checked off the second to last chunk objective, which only left catching the Cobalt Admiral. I set about the task gamely, confident that it shouldn’t be too hard. That was until I realized I was attempting to capture a butterfly with my bare hands. At first, I tried to brute force the task by rushing into the river and grasping wildly for the agile creatures. When that didn’t work, I tried stealth. Holding stock still in the center of the stream for minutes at a time successfully allowed the butterflies to return, but reaching out to grab one of them was still met with failure.

Then I returned to the smithy to try and force some sort of tool or trap to help me capture the slick buggers. There was no built-in method, so I tried freehanding the iron. That...failed. All I was left with was a lump of deformed metal that somehow looked even sadder and more pathetic than the first copper dagger I’d ever made.

I tried several other ways to make tools. Using the knife on logs didn’t yield a favorable result, and simply stacking the logs to form a rudimentary box was awfully unstable without nails to hold the structure together.

At last, I managed by weaving two dozen pieces of string harvested from rat tails into a sort of prehistoric net. It was ugly, with a loose weave that was already fraying at the edges, but after tying a couple of sticks to the sides and tossing it at the butterfly swarm, I finally caught one.

The Cobalt Admiral instantly turned into a set of gossamer thin butterfly wings that fit neatly in my palm. Before anything else could occur, the world went dark with the familiar notification.

I floated in the void. Calm and satisfied. It felt good completing the chunk. My levels had increased a fair amount. Sure most of those levels had been in smithing and mining, but the whole process hadn’t taken much longer than two days. Besides, with higher non-combat stats, all my other stats would benefit from the +9 boost from tier-three equipment.

I perused my stats for a while. Making idle plans and wondering what would come next. The one thing I really wanted was to try and ‘hunt’ the spotted snufflers or even the spined silverback. Killing them hadn’t granted hunter experience, so maybe they weren’t ‘huntable’ monsters, but hopefully, the system would update that in future patches.

As I mused, I started noticing that it was taking a fair bit of time for the system to do its thing. Opening up the interface didn’t reveal much, so I delved into that vague sense I’d developed for the system. It was...chugging. The system was definitely working hard on something. It felt big. Giant even. Bigger than any of the updates so far.

I got the sense that it wasn’t just new enemies or skills this time, but there would be more...space? It felt bigger, at least.

I waited. Patiently at first, then less so as the minutes ticked by. The void was lifeless and static around me. Completely uninteresting and unable to act as a diversion. Bored, I started humming half-remembered tunes. The sound echoed in the void. Soft and melancholy. I tried not remembering where the songs came from, simply focusing on distracting myself with the melodies. After what felt like an age, the system whirred to life, and my world opened up.

Finally!

Familiar trees surrounded me, and I could hear the sound of the river gurgling away in the distance. Nothing looked different. In fact...it looked suspiciously the same.

So what had changed?

Turning around, I froze as I spotted something on the horizon. Something big and entirely outside of my small chunk’s borders.