I woke up the next day, long after sunrise. I was sprawled halfway out of the tent, and my fires died out hours ago. Despite that, nothing tried to eat me, possibly on account of my filth and stench.

I stared angrily at the countless clam shells littering my camp. Was it them? Or maybe the spirit of the wretched crayfish decided to haunt my lower intestine? Or maybe, the water was not as purified as I thought? I was weak as a kitten, and my legs shook. I decided to nourish myself with some berries, reasoning that my diarrhea couldn’t get any worse than it already was.

Noticing no adverse results from the meal, I decided to try to wash myself in the river. I was disgustingly filthy, and my coat was all but gone. Luckily, the day was warm and the water was pleasant. I slowly lowered myself from the end of the jetty, holding the branches tight so as not to be pulled downstream. When I soaked enough, I got back up on the trunk and scrubbed myself clean-ish with a pine branch. The prickly needles removed most of the dirt and applied a nice smell to my skin. I was a human being once again.

As I sat, contemplating my misery, a flock of ducks swam by. Only by watching them, completely ordinary birds, that I finally realize that almost none of the other animals and plants I saw here were exactly like on my Earth. Everything was subtly different. Giant wolverines and unicorn giraffes aside, the seemingly normal animals and trees were only superficially alike the ones I knew. Clams were rounder. Crayfish, thicker. The reeds, I just noticed, were taller and purplish at the tips. The bush birds I scared earlier were nothing like the quail and woodfowl I knew, and resembled fat, stub-winged parrots instead. One bit of luck I had, the big mosquitoes ubiquitous in the soggy bushes were almost completely uninterested in me, and seemed harmlessly lethargic. Good thing too, I was not looking forward to getting any disease mosquitoes carried.

My latest adventure with food poisoning gave me food for thought, even when it removed actual food from my belly. Why was I not dead yet, or at least running a fever? Being a modern man from another version of this planet, I certainly could not possibly have immunity to any of the germs here. After countless small cuts, leech bites, impromptu water burial of a rotten corpse, digging through mud, and eating random bottom-dwelling critters, I should be infected with every bacterium, amoeba, and virus this place had to offer.

And yet, explosive barfing aside, I was fine. Either whatever force brought me here also gave me complex vaccination, or I was not…recreated here exactly as I was back home. In fact, was I sure I was recreated? It felt like I burst into atoms and reconstituted, but how could I possibly know for sure? Was I transported here, or maybe copied? Maybe there is another me back there, currently enjoying a nice weekend with the family?

Hammer. Nail. Hammer. Nail. No use wasting time on philosophy. An existential crisis wouldn't help me get fed, clothed, and hydrated. Whatever, or whoever put me here made me relatively well suited for this unique environment, at least when it comes to my immune system. The one mishap was likely caused by over-exerting it with unwashed and undercooked clams. If I were to get sick again I would likely die of disease, and there was nothing I could do about it, so it was pointless to worry.

I decided to focus on problems I could hit with a hammer, metaphorical or otherwise. I was happy with my shelter, at least for now. But everything else needed serious improvement. I needed to start a new fire, which meant a better way to make one. I need clothes that won’t fall apart in less than a day. The algae mats wouldn’t do. I needed a way to produce something sturdier than that.

And most of all, I needed tools. The sticks, shards of bone, and clam shells could not really be fashioned into anything useful. The only things worthwhile I managed to make out of them were a tiny bone chisel and an awl made of a broken shell. For bigger tools, I needed to find stone, hopefully flint or chert, but that meant exploring the woods away from my camp.

It made me appreciate the civilized world even more. A few days ago, I could not imagine how it felt to have literally nothing. Even the most downtrodden homeless man in the poorest country on my Earth was a king, compared to me right now. I was constrained by a never-ending chain of needs. I needed tools to make tools, and to get material for these tools I needed other tools, which yet depended on something else…

If not for the duplicators, I would be completely helpless, which made me even more determined to stick by them.

I spent the next hour or so trying to make a fire, which annoyed me to no end. I promised myself to never let the fires burn down again. The morning dew alone was enough to extinguish the embers in them, and make my fire sticks too damp to be useful. Finally, I found a tiny bit of dry charcoal at the bottom of an ash pile, and with some drill action managed to reignite it. This time I built the bonfires much higher and fed them a lot of resin-filled fatwood from the pine. The outcome was a set of four slowly burning piles that filled the air with dark, noxious smoke, which was bound to deter any living being with a functional nose.

As the resin turned to tar on the fire, I smeared it all over a pine branch and wrapped it in algae fiber to make a torch, which I multiplied and wrapped in a bundle that went on my back.

With a sturdy ashwood spear in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, I entered the woods.

Just like the last time, walking through the dark, thick forest seemed a bit like being at the bottom of a shallow sea, with only stray rays of sunlight puncturing the green gloom. My torch illuminated the path, but also made the bushes cast sharp shadows, almost all of which looked like a wolverine ready to pounce.

Do wolverines even pounce? I know wild cats pounce. Wolverines probably approach you nonchalantly and mug you, insult you to your face, and slap you around before killing you, just on general principles of assholery.

I was paranoid about getting lost in this green maze. Even less than fifty steps away from the river, I could no longer see my camp, and every tree seemed like its neighbor. This wouldn’t work. I backtracked to my campfire and gathered several handfuls of cold, white ashes from yesterday.

Going back sapped my courage, but being able to mark the trees I passed was too important. I proceeded carefully at what I thought was a right angle to the riverbank. Each bigger tree I passed got marked with a white handprint. After twenty, maybe thirty minutes of going in a relatively straight line, the trees became sparser, and I could again see the sky. The mighty oaks, beeches, and ash trees gave way to conifers, and the soggy, moss-covered ground to sandy clearings with tall grass sprouting in clumps. The path was littered with what looked like delicious and ripe boletus mushrooms, but I knew better than to make such assumptions. What looks like an edible delicacy from my Earth, could be pure poison in this world. Thank clams for this valuable lesson. However, if I were to find some verifiably potent poisonous mushrooms, I would take my time to gather them as a snack for my friend Logan. Serve him right for desecrating a human body and pissing all over my pine!

Distracted with my revenge fantasies, I almost fell into a hidden ravine. At the last possible moment I managed to use my spear as an anchor, and thus, instead of falling down the ravine and breaking my neck, I rode down on my ass right to the bottom.

I immediately jumped up despite the pain, terrified that my torch had been extinguished, but a gentle blow brought It back to life. Just in case, I started another one. My clumsy trek, and yelps of pain as I fell might have attracted curious predators, and this was my only protection.

A few minutes passed and nothing came to investigate. I looked around and my fears were replaced with joy. The ravine was a tiny canyon patiently carved into the sand and clay by a stream of clear water. I have not even noticed it before, but all that time I was walking gently uphill, while the stream must have been going downhill parallel to my path. It likely went all the way to the river.

Was this water safe to drink? It seemed to be coming from a crack in a chalky rock that formed the bones of this rise. It likely did not contain any harmful bacteria, but it could very well be full of arsenic, mercury, or even Kryptonite for all I knew. I dipped my finger in the ice-cold water and licked it. It tasted like nothing in particular, which is how, I supposed, fresh, clean water should taste like. I drank a handful and decided to stop. If it didn’t make me feel icky, I could go back tomorrow and drink some more. Beats hot water fountain gymnastics over a duplication pool.

And the ravine kept on giving its gifts! I noticed the walls were stripes of different kinds of sediment, but the bottom one, just above the water-giving rock, was fat, thick clay the color of rust. I knocked out some and after adding some water, rolled it into a ball. Playdoh!

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I had never made anything out of clay, but I remembered from history books that people used to make pottery out of it. Or maybe they still do? I decided to try, boiling water in bark containers gets old fast. I made a small dish and held it over the torch. It dried and cracked but did not seem to get harder and was certainly not waterproof, as it dissolved in water easily.

Drat. I realized that a torch would not provide enough heat. Brick factories heat that stuff up in big fiery kilns, so I guessed I had to make it red-hot before the clay pot was fired. At least, thanks to my magical duplicators, I did not need to worry about fuel.

I gathered several handfuls of clay and decided to walk down the stream. I could not get lost this way, and if it just disappeared in the bushes I could always go back to where it sprung from, and climb out towards the path I marked with handprints.

It took only a few steps to notice that the ravine was a popular route for the local critters, or maybe simply a natural trap they fell into. The path was littered with slugs, frogs, and crawlies that mostly trudged downstream in a lazy truce with one another, like cars in traffic. I passed a family of what looked like water rats, who eyed me curiously wiggling their tiny noses. They only scampered off when I almost trampled on them. It confirmed my suspicion that this ecosystem had not seen a human in a long time, maybe ever. The animals knew no reason to fear me and treated me as an unusual, but harmless sight. A few minutes later I encountered a snake, a beautiful specimen of striped asp. It regarded me warily with its golden eyes, and I gave it a wide berth. Somehow, I only then considered the obvious problem, that such pristine wilderness must be lousy with snakes, which added to my list of things to be afraid of. It's not as if I had a phobia of these things, I simply knew that if one bit me, I would have no means to save myself. I decided to tread carefully from then on, and always give my sleeping mat a thorough shake-up before lying down to sleep.

Right before the ravine ended, and the stream disappeared into a tangle of reeds and hunched willow bushes, I encountered the most bizarre sight of that day.

At the mouth of the ravine, the stream formed a shallow pool blocking most of the path out. The narrow passage between the sheer clay wall and the water was home to a whole colony of hedgehogs. Or at least I assumed they were hedgehogs, even though they were twice as large as the ones I knew, and had long, powerful-looking snouts that made them look more predatory than cute.

You clever bastards!” I thought to myself. I realized what this was about. The hedgehogs, just like the other small animals, would fall into the ravine, and, unable to get out, would travel downstream until they reached this small delta. Unlike the frogs, toads, bugs, and snails, the hedgehogs had no intention of leaving this place and blocked the path to feast on the never-ending supply of mobile morsels of food that crawled right into their jaws. I always thought hedgehogs were solitary creatures, but these guys seemed to have allied to perform their slug genocide more effectively. This arrangement must have been happening for a long while, I saw old bones and corpses of long-dead hedgehogs stomped into the mud by their brethren. They did not seem afraid of me, and not one of them rolled into a ball like they normally would. If anything, they looked ready to charge me for distracting them from their meals. Gently, without setting them off, I crouched and gathered as many quills littering the ground as I could. They would make great needles, awls, and pins for my next experiments in cloth-making.

I passed the strange spiky herd and proceeded out of the woods and toward the river. There was no way to follow the stream up to the river itself, the path was overgrown.

I decided to climb a small hunched willow tree to see further. I could see my fallen pine, left-wise from me, which I assumed was West or South-West. From my higher vantage point, I also saw that the river on my right was spreading into a funnel-shaped delta, made of small islands and shallows, swarming with birds. On the distant opposite shore of the river, I saw what looked like grassy plains and occasional green hills barely visible through the mist.

What was the river even falling into? I did not remember a lake being there in my world, and surely it was not the Baltic Sea, as it would be kilometers away. This of course, assuming that this Earth’s geography matched my own, and I was deposited in the same spot I was taken from, which was just my hopeful assumption borne out of desperation for a logical component in my world-hopping mishap.

Still, setting aside my musings, I knew that if I were to look for civilization or maybe even primitive tribes of people, it would be in a place like that. A flat plain right next to a river rich in fish, waterfowl, and shallows of fertile sediment that could be spread on the fields would make a perfect place for a village, or even a small town. Even hunter-gatherers could not dream of a better spot to set their camp on.

So where were all the people? Surely I, and the unfortunate pine-guy, could not be the only people to arrive here, and what about the natives? I scanned the river for boats but there were none. No fields graced the land. No smoke trailed from any fire anywhere, save for a thin smidge on the left, coming from my own camp. Still, the green meadows of the North-Eastern shore were certainly my next travel destination, once I figured out how to make a raft that would survive the trip.

Disheartened, I decided I was done with exploring for the day. I finally accepted the fact that I was utterly alone, not just cut off from my family, but from all of humanity as well. I would never give my younger son a piggyback ride, or play soccer with my older son. I will never kiss my wife or see the laugh lines in the corners of her eyes. I will never grab a beer or a dozen with my friends, never high-five my work buddies over a job well done. Hell, I even missed my asshole of a foreman. I would love for someone to yell at me right now, and explain why I suck as a carpenter, in minute detail.

Breathe in, breathe out. Hammer. Nail. Focus on solvable problems.

My torches were running out, because while they burned brightly, they also did not last long. I did not want to be in the woods without my only means of protection. I climbed down the willow, and tried to trek along the riverbank towards my camp, but soon realized it was a doomed idea. The bramble-entwined bushes were so thick that there was no way to get further than twenty steps in, without being helplessly stuck.

I turned around and walked back to the ravine. The hedgehog gang was locked in a mortal struggle against the striped asp, which had crawled downstream. Or to be precise, the struggle was only mortal for the snake, because the spiky mammals seemed to be completely impervious to its venomous bites, and were playing tug-o-war with it, each trying to tear out a chunk. They ignored me completely, even when I pushed some of them out of the way with the butt-end of my spear. They did give me an idea though. Their quills made them safe from bites, and in fact, the snake hurt itself trying to attack them. Maybe I could not cover myself in quills, but I could easily surround my camp with sharp spikes, thorny vines, and bushes until it became a fortress. That would certainly add to my defense. And since, thanks to my physics-breaking artifacts, I could never run out of resources, I could just as well fill the ravine with spikes, and turn it into a deadly trap. Maybe bait it with some carrion or fish, so that the next predator that comes along ignores me, goes there to investigate, falls down the hole, and dies impaled?

I walked back, all the way to the spot where I previously butt-slid into the ravine, before I remembered that my mission was to find some stones, not just sightseeing. I poked around in the clay and found several potato-sized lumps. Slamming one against another to break them open revealed them to be gray chert, or at least something much alike, glassy and razor-sharp along the edge. None were big enough for a hammer or an axe, but, I guessed, definitely better than nothing. I could not climb out of the ravine having hands full of this primitive merchandise, so I tossed all my possessions over the edge and tried to climb after them. I was almost out, holding grass roots tightly to pull myself up, when the slick clay gave under my feet and I fell back in, pulling a big chunk of soil and undergrowth on top of me.

I puffed and scrambled to get the stuff off my face when I felt a sting on my left forearm. It was a big, fat orb-weaver spider, the home of which I must have torn apart during my misadventure. I was covered in webs, which I then noticed were former pieces of a silk tapestry over five meters across, spreading from the roots of the trees on one side of the ravine to another. I gently flicked the spider off my arm and apologized. I always liked the little industrious creatures for their single-minded passion for building. Spiders, birds, beavers, ants, any creature that can spend days on end building its own home, was all alright in my book. What was not all alright, was the burning pain spreading from the spider bite. I hoped the spider was not deadly venomous. It would be ridiculous to survive an encounter with a wolverine twice my size, only to die to a creature the size of a thumbnail. I always thought dangerous spiders only lived in warm climates, but I learned that assuming anything about the fauna and flora of this place was potentially a death sentence.

But then again, hammer and nail, nail and hammer. I was bit and that was it. There was not much I could do about that fact. It's not as if I could grab my phone and call help. I knew I would either die or I would not, and after all that happened to me in the last two days, I had exhausted all my reserves of fear. I started patting myself to get rid of any other angry arachnids that could have been crawling on me and tried to scrub off the spiderwebs I was entangled in.

I was surprised at how strong the spider silk was, it was like being wrapped in a hair-thin fishing line. Fascinated, I gathered several strands and palm-rolled them into a silky string. It was as strong as steel wire, yet so lightweight I could send it flying with a breath. What kind of mutant spider makes such strong silk? Was I going to develop spider-related superpowers, now that it bit me? My name was not Peter Parker so likely no, though if I did, it would be barely the third weirdest thing that has happened to me lately.

On the second try, I took a running jump and got a hold of a thick pine root hanging off the edge, one that provided better support than the thin roots I grabbed before. This time I climbed out easily, despite the protestations of my unimpressive muscles and creaking knees. To my chagrin, it turned out my torch fell straight into a sandy heap when I threw it, and extinguished itself completely. No amount of blowing on it or feeding the embers dry grass could salvage it, and I was keenly aware I was defenseless and far from camp. I jogged towards it following the handprints market on the trees, only slowing down to tear strands of spiderwebs from the bushes I passed. Now I saw that the fat orb-weaver spiders were everywhere around, I just never noticed them, and the incredible bounty they provided.

By the time I reached my tent, I was sweaty from the exertion and the fear, panting, and exhausted. Covered in dirt and cobwebs I must have looked like something dragged from the bottom of a cellar. I did not manage however to catch my breath, because what I saw at the camp seized me with terror.