Hello. You’re reading it, which means you are currently alive, and not running from something sabertoothed, excellent! Fantastic start. You are also seemingly safe enough to waste time reading a handwritten diary you just found, and not say, worrying about your empty stomach, imminent frostbite, or dying from a mysterious infection.

Stellar job, lets keep it that way.

My name is Jacek Mularsky. I am a simple carpenter from Poland—or was, in my old life, before I became a castaway in this strange land. I apologize for my bad English. I never formally learned this language, yet I decided to use it anyway. After all, whoever finds this diary is more likely to know it than my native Polish. if you happen to be Polish, please raise up and sing our national anthem, otherwise, carry on.

I wrote my story down so that maybe the information would one day reach my wife, Anna, and my two children, Staś and Michaś, whom I will likely never see again. I hope they had a good life without me. This is also a primer for you, to help you survive in this strange, wild land. Many have been stranded in this place, and nearly all perished. I am one of the lucky survivors, and so are you, at least temporarily.

And the others? I will tell you their stories too. And I will embellish the hell out of them, since I only managed to pry bits and pieces from their memories when they felt like sharing. But after all the things we had been through together, I feel like I truly knew them, my friends and enemies both, to guess what they were thinking, and what they were doing when I was not around. Oh, some of them will not like the way I portrayed them, especially some specific, ornery Korean-Australians!

Candace, if you are reading this, I'm likely dead already, and it is too late for you to stop me, haha!

You must know dear reader, that the hardships of surviving in this land had ground parts of my mind to dust. When you spend so much time alone, or in the company of traumatized survivors fighting to live another day, every part of you not useful to that end simply erodes away. Please forgive my plain language, and lack of nuance. I am no longer a civilized person but a primitive man, by necessity. This will not be a story of me bearing my soul and emotions to you, I could not face these on my own, let alone share it. It is a story of the clever tricks I used to fend off death, and not so clever tricks that almost got me killed, so that you could learn from my mistakes.

If you found this diary, you likely had also found the rest of the supplies I left for you. Use all of it wisely. You probably know this already, but you are far, far from home, and the wilderness around you is a harsh teacher who tests you all the time and rarely gives you a second chance. You might have already stumbled on the bones of those before you who made tiny, stupid errors of judgment, or were just plain unlucky. Do not join them.

Please, survive.

DAY ONE. ON A HIGHWAY TO HEL

I woke up in immense pain. It was as if, in one instant, my body and brain were torn to the tiniest bits, and then immediately and violently imploded back into my shape. I flailed around as if electrocuted, and my every nerve trembled with suffering. I gasped for air, but felt like inhaling fire.

Just as suddenly as it started, the pain stopped. I was curled, naked and cold, on a floor of dead leaves and soggy soil.

Slowly, I regained my senses. A minute ago, I was coming home from work, driving down the northbound highway to Gdańsk, minutes from taking a turn towards the seashore and my hometown of Hel, Pomerania. Tired and hungry, my only thought was to reach my destination fast enough to tuck my kids to sleep and dig into dinner leftovers. Immediately after that thought, I exploded and somehow appeared in this dank, dark woods, naked as a newborn and shivering.

What the Hell happened? Did I somehow managed to crash into the barrier and get hurled through the windshield and into the roadside woods? Even though it seemed like the most reasonable explanation, I dismissed it immediately. If I crashed into the woods at one hundred and seventy kilometers per hour, I would be torn to mangled shreds by the impact. Not to mention, what would be left of me would not be naked and intact, but pulped together with my clothes and bits of the car.

I sat up and examined my body. No obvious injuries revealed themselves, though I knew next to nothing about first aid or medicine. I could very well be dying from brain damage, and hallucinating the whole weird situation.

I shook my head to dismiss the thought. ‘Be Practical’, as my foreman often said. 'No need to dwell on details you cannot understand, and problems you cannot solve, find a hammer and bang on some nails instead.'

I had no hammer in hand, and there were no nails conveniently ready to be hammered in, but I had my wits. Or what was left of them? I sighed deeply to calm myself down, and assessed the situation.

For one, I was in the woods. Or more precisely, I was in the Woods, because the place definitely deserved a capital letter. I have been an avid hiker and camper all my life, but never, ever seen woodland this ancient and dense. Even the oldest, wildest national parks looked like a suburban garden compared to this green ocean. The tree I woke up under was a gargantuan oak thicker at the base than my arms span. Everywhere I looked, its equally powerful brothers stood. Oaks, beeches, and occasional ash tree. I could not look further than a few dozen meters in any direction because the path between the mighty trees was littered with giant dead logs and wild shrubbery so thick it could stop a battle tank. I caught a whiff of a sulfurous smell that suggested there must have been a swamp or backwater pool nearby. I could not see it, which was bad news if I was to try to hike anywhere.

Lances of bright light raced between the branches, more accentuating the darkness under the canopy than illuminating it. It was eerily like being underwater. The brightness of the sunny spots suggested it was mid-day or close to. Which was another piece of a puzzle in the weirdness jigsaw, because my last conscious memory was of driving late in the evening.

Was I asleep for half a day? Did not feel so. And where was I? This surely did not look like any woodland in the middle of Poland. In fact, I severely doubted woods like this existed anywhere on the planet anymore. Maybe in some remote parts of Russia or Canada? But how would I even end up in the Canadian wilderness all of sudden? Is there an international conspiracy to kidnap middle-aged Polish workmen and dump them naked in the middle of Nowhere, Alberta?

My musings were stopped immediately, and my hopes for a rational explanation dashed, when the first animal appeared to investigate my sudden and loud arrival.

It was a goddamned unicorn.

Well, that was my first impression, until a more rational part of my mind got into gear and protested. There was no such thing as unicorns! What I saw was a pony-sized creature that looked like an unholy spawn of a rhino and a giraffe, by way of a donkey. It had a prong-shaped horn on its nose, flabby nostrils that flared quizzically, sucking in my scent, and it was striped brown and gray. I was immediately certain that no such creature existed anywhere in the world, not even in the most remote parts of Canada. But I had a vague, stomach-clenching feeling that animals like that did exist, once. I remember seeing a similar critter in a documentary … about prehistoric mammals.

Crap. If my hypothesis was true, I should not have been asking where I was, but when.

The unicorn, because seriously I don’t know what its scientific name was supposed to be, something-therium probably, came closer, huffing. I almost got up to run away, but It would be obviously silly, I could not outrun a horse-like critter that likely evolved to live in these woods. Instead, I remained perfectly still, avoiding eye contact and trying to smell non-threateningly, even though my body was slick with fear-induced sweat. The creature came almost close enough to touch me, huffed a bit louder, and then suddenly head-butted me in the shoulder hard enough to put me on my back.

I dared not to fight back, and laid there splayed out like a dead bug. The horned pony-thing, satisfied with its display of violent territorial domination, trotted away into the bushes.

I waited a few heartbeats until I could no longer hear it ruffling the shrubs, and bolted in the opposite direction. I had enough fauna encounters for a long while, and wished not to ever run into another supposedly extinct animal again. I was soon going to be disappointed.

After running for what felt like kilometers, but what was realistically only a few hundred meters due to the thick foliage and obstacles in my way, I reached a clearing. The dark woods gave way to bright green weeds, entangled with brambles. There was a field of reeds with thick brown bulrushes crowning them.

A swamp? No, it smelled clear, and the reeds stretched sideways toward the far horizon. Maybe a river? It would make some sense if whatever kind of Earth I was on matched our own. The highway I was taken from ran the length of a long valley and crossed a river at one point. Surely this place had an analogous river, after all, weird prehistoric world or not, water always flows downhill along roughly the same geography.

Getting to the river bank across the brambles and the reeds proved impossible. If I tried, I would be hopelessly entangled a few meters in, and completely covered in cuts. Instead, I opted to hike along the overgrown shore, until I could find some beach or another access to open water. It was a good decision too, as underneath the wild brambles growing over everything, the tangled bushes were heavy with ripe berries. I did not even realize how hungry I'd been before I stuffed a third handful into my mouth.

Finally, after some trekking, and grazing until full, I managed to find an opening. An ancient pine had fallen across the brambles and the reeds, and its crown punched a hole straight into the open water. I climbed the dead trunk and could immediately see the meandering river.

Gazing across the water, I was immediately crushed by the hopelessness of my situation. I was alone, naked, unarmed, and there was almost certainly no civilization anywhere nearby. And even if there was one, I could never reach it. As far as the eye could see, I was surrounded by primordial wilderness in all directions. If I had a boat I could attempt to float downriver and search for people there, but I did not have one. And even if I did, the trip could easily take weeks, and I would die of hunger and cold, way before that.

Resigned, I crawled back along the pine log when something caught my eye near its stump.

Stump! The pine did not fall on its own, it was cut! By humans surely? I ran towards it and stopped immediately when I saw what had cut the tree.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

It was a man, or at least what was left of one. A half-rotten corpse had bisected the tree at ground level, and caused it to fall. The corpse was naked, and where it touched the wood, it flickered in and out of focus, like hot air over sunbaked asphalt. I was struck with sudden realization; this man had been teleported into this world the same way I was, except he was not so lucky as to displace air on his way in, he displaced a solid chunk of pine, and whatever process deposited him in there could not handle that much mass in one place.

Braving the stench of decay, I knelt to examine the flickering effect between the rotting flesh and the wood. It seemed like a solid optical illusion. as if the space itself between the surfaces of the two masses was undulating and pouring one form into another, endlessly.

I could not make heads or tails out of this process, but at least It was immediately obvious how the man died, and it was mercifully quick. When he bissected the tree, the tens of tons of pine simply collapsed down on him before falling sideways, and immediately crushed his chest to a pulp. At least he did not suffer.

I was strangely calm seeing a corpse. I saw death on construction sites, and it was often grisly, but this half-rotten fellow was not a distressing sight, more of a sad one. If he lived, at least I would not be alone.

I noticed the corpse’s legs, arms, and face were clearly gnawed on by some critters, and felt sorry for him. I mean, dead or not, he was a human being and deserved more respect than that!

With uttermost care, I used a thick branch to pry him off the stump and then dragged what was left of him into the water. I could not bury him, having anything to dig with, but could put him under the submerged pine. Sure, being eaten by fish was not much better than being scavenged by woodland animals, but at least it was out of sight, and thus, in some way, appeared more dignified.

I contemplated a short prayer for the poor guy, but as a lifelong atheist I could not think of anything appropriate.

“So sorry dude. Hope you did not suffer much. Your friends and family probably miss you. If it's any consolation, I promise to find whoever had us both stranded here and kick them in the balls for you”.

I could not come up with anything else to add and felt silly. Returned to the stump to investigate the undulating flicker once more.

Once the corpse was removed, the flicker seemed to pool into two droplets of nearly identical size that clung to the flattest surfaces of the stump. The wavy undulation seemed to have calmed down, and the droplets were almost flat, with the wood matter cycling within them in a precise rhythm.

Up to that point, I did not dare to touch the flicker. It did nasty things to that man and that tree, and I remember my teleportation to be excruciating. Who knows what it did to matter, let alone living tissue? Maybe it distorted spacetime, or emitted deadly radiation, or rearranged atoms somehow? On the other hand, I was obviously still alive, and not showing symptoms of radiation sickness, at least not yet. I decided that careful examination of the flickers could not kill me any deader than being naked and unarmed in the middle of nowhere clearly would.

I dropped a twig in one of the droplet-like pools of flickering space-time.

Two identical twigs were forcefully expelled out of the other pool.

I jumped away in fear and sheer disbelief. ‘What the actual fuck’ was on my mind, but my lips failed to process it into words.

Carefully, as if they were pieces of active uranium, I picked the new twigs. They were perfectly alike. Same marks on the bark, same number and position of pine needles, same tiny droplet of sap at the broken end.

Matter duplication. Somehow, being teleported naked through time and space did not freak me out as much. At least, in my limited knowledge of physics, time travel and teleportation were just extremely improbable. Matter duplication was straight-up impossible, it clashed directly with the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Like an ape-man approaching fire for the first time, I threw both of the twigs into one of the pools, and soon had four. My inner curious toddler took over, and I kept throwing twigs into the pools, one, or the other, or both at once, until I had a pile of kindling at my feet. Tried the same with pine cones, leaves, a small rock, and even a grasshopper I caught. As long as it fit in one of the pools, it would be pulled in with enough force to rip it off my hand, and shoot from the other. The more I resisted the pull, the stronger it would shoot out. I dared not to put my hand into the pool though, that would almost certainly be a bad idea.

Overcome with curiosity, I put a long pine root in one of the pools, then quickly tied the emerging end to the back end, forming a circle. The resulting infinite loop spun wildly, shooting additional roots upwards at enormous speeds until it tore itself to pieces. I decided prudently not to strain this clearly unstable, impossible system with more physics-defying experiments, lest it exploded somehow.

Cautiously, I duplicated some berries and ate them. I had no reason to believe the duplicated matter was safe to eat, but what was exactly my alternative? I wouldn’t survive living off the land otherwise. If copied berries were poisonous, at least I would find out soon and die of poison instead of exposure, infections, hunger, or wildlife.

I did my best to brush the stump clean of dried corpse bits, those were almost certainly not safe to eat, and I did not want them to contaminate my food.

I gorged myself on the berries again, reasoning that they were also the only safe source of water, because I did not trust the mucky river water to be safe to drink. Supposedly, one might drink the juices straight out of the tall reeds, but I was not keen on trying that out.

Distracted with my experiments, I did not notice the sun getting lower, and it started to get cold. Only the first shivers down my spine reminded me that unlike my friend the unicorn, I had no fur to protect me. But what if I could make fur? I had an infinite spring of whatever type of matter I wanted. If I could make even a small handful of cloth out of something, I could copy it infinitely and cover myself with it.

I rushed to collect the materials, and almost immediately realized I had no idea how to make cloth, and out of what? I vaguely remembered that the simplest cloth is essentially a criss-crossed pattern of threads, and that these can be made out of plant fibers and wool found in nature. Wool was out of the question, I was not going near any furry animal if I could help it, the unicorn was more than enough. I contemplated using my own hair, but at their length, they would be useless.

What about plants? Is there good fiber in grass or weeds? I tore apart every plant in the vicinity, from grasses and reeds to brambles and dandelions. Unfortunately, the fibers inside were either short and brittle, or coarse and wiry like steel wool, completely unsuitable for the task.

Finally, rummaging through the reeds, I noticed a wet patch of cotton-like algae floating on the surface. At closer inspection, what looked like runny green scum was actually a knot of wet fiber. I gathered several handfuls and brought them to the stump.

How do I turn this mess into cloth? I tried to separate the fibers into strands, and then twist them into green, wet yarn, but the results were not very promising. After an hour of twisting and duplicating yarns, all I gained was a pile of soggy dreadlocks that fell apart when pulled.

I tried weaving them over a grid made out of sticks, but this only hastened their demise.

Desperate, I decided to beat the green blob into a flat sheet. Amazingly, after a few minutes of abusing the mass with a heavy stone, it turned into a mat, not unlike a thick, coarse felt, like the one used under furniture legs.

Encouraged by the results, I started rolling the felt with a piece of a branch, until I had a strip the size and thickness of a winter scarf. All that abuse also pushed most of the water out, making the mat just moist, not soaking wet anymore. A few duplications later, I had over thirty such scarves to work with.

My initial idea was to make some yarn and sew them together into a makeshift poncho. But that plan was quickly proven impossible since the yarn was not remotely strong enough to sew with, and besides, I had no needle. Finally, I decided to beat the edges of the scarves together, until they knotted. The result was not much stronger than velcroing a few rags together, but it made a heavy, thick cloak with a ragged hole in the middle.

Putting my cloak on, I decided to use the last rays of the sun to climb on the fallen pine. I admired myself in the water’s reflection and burst out laughing. It was a sight to behold. An exhausted looking middle aged man with a thinning mop of hair, and a patchy beard. My legs and hands were covered in mud and scratches. My face was stained with berry juice running down my chin. The picture was made more amusing by a bulky, hairy green coat that made me look like a corpse of a Muppet, or perhaps a very low-budget version of the Swamp Thing.

“You're One Ugly Motherfucker!" I quoted to myself, though maybe invoking The Predator while deep in the woods was too much of a jinx.

What now? I climbed onto a particularly wide and inviting branch and contemplated my situation. What do I need to survive in this situation? From what I remembered from the Boy Scouts, if stranded in the woods, one should secure water, shelter, and some way to get warmth. Food comes much later.

I did not dare to drink water out of the river, as it had the color of snot, and was full of wriggly things. Some of these wriggly things clung to my calves, and had to be pried away leaving bloody welts. Besides, I just water-logged a corpse not three meters away, which likely did not improve the taste.

Technically, I could get a meal and water out of the berries, but this was not sustainable. I was pretty sure that eating nothing but berries for days would play merry hell with my intestines and give me the shits, which is an easy way to speed up dehydration. I vaguely remembered that clean water can be squeazed from the top of reeds, because they work as a natural filter, but I was not confident in the reliability of my memory, and did not want to test this hypothesis on myself just yet.

Boiling water over a bonfire would make it safe to drink, not to mention the fire would provide warmth, and fend off animals. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to start a fire without matches. Rubbing sticks together supposedly worked, but I never saw that in action, let alone tried it myself.

Shelter? The weather seemed good, and It did not seem like it would rain or snow anytime soon. As far as I could tell, this looked like a perfect Spring day, possibly April or May judging from the blooming flowers, never mind that it was January where I came from. So anyway, the shelter could wait.

The sun was setting down, so I decided it was probably the last moment I could try to start a fire.

But how? I remembered that back in the day people used flint and tinder. Flint I could not find, but tinder, aside from being an online dating app for youngsters, should be some easily flammable material. That at least was not beyond my understanding. Dry bark, dry grass, punked wood, I collected all of the flammable things I could think of and duplicated them. All I needed was an ember or a spark, but that was the crux of the problem, wasn’t it?

So how do you rub sticks to make a fire? Literally rubbing one stick against the other did nothing but make them a bit smoother. I tried all kinds of dry sticks from various trees, and got no results. Tried sawing one stick with another, and that produced some heat, but it was not remotely close to igniting it.

An idea hit me. Working in carpentry, I often struggled with tools dulling over time. Dull drill bits were especially noticeable, as the wood would heat up and sometimes blacken when I attempted to make a hole with one.

Can I drill wood with wood? It was time to find out. I found a particularly straight stick with a pointy end and tried to drill it into various bits of wood. It slid off solid oak, and only made a smooth impression in the pine. It drilled right through pine bark without heating it. Finally, I found a piece of dry, punky willow, and after what felt like an hour of turning the stick in my palms, managed to create some heat.

The hole in the willow blackened and became hot to the touch. However, no matter how hard I tried it would not produce an ember! I tried pouring some ground punk wood into it. Then some reed fluff. Nothing. Blew gently on it during drilling, to provide oxygen, but it only made things worse.

Finally, after tiring myself to exhaustion, I dropped the drill out of my blister-covered hands. I was livid! The wood would heat up nicely and quickly, but only almost to the point of ignition, never past it. The fire-stick now had a blackened tip, smooth as glass. The hole in the willow was full of compressed soot, now cold.

My palms felt like I burned them on a red-hot stove and then did a hundred pushups. I could not try again even if I wanted to.

Exhausted, cold and sweaty, I crawled back on my fallen pine jetty, to stare at the setting sun and the lazy meandering river. I had no fire. I had no real shelter. I had no weapon in case another unicorn came out of the bushes. At least I had my rapidly falling apart algae coat, for all the good it did.

With the last of my strength, I sacrificed some of the scarves of my coat to tie myself to the pine branches, lest I’d fall into the river in my sleep. I was supremely uncomfortable, but sleep caught me like a bullet to the head.