Chapter 22: Day 1 (again) let’s get started

Event starting in – 00.01 minute.

I was sitting on the wolf fur and meditating waiting for the event to start. Just as the clock neared 1 second to the event, I felt a tiny white light embed itself in my chest. It didn’t cause any reaction and I could still not sense any spiritual energy, so I decided that I must have been mistaken.

Time to first disaster First Event begins. Day 1/7 23:59:58

I first called out my screen and was relieved to see that my status and skills were the same as at the end of the novice period. I then looked through my inventory, everything that I had painstakingly gathered was still available, except the 1 small crystal which were showing as locked. I felt momentary regret as I could have just learned the sun salutation technique and not practiced it.

Then I stepped out of the shack, curious about my surroundings. My shack was located on the foothills of an enormous mountain surrounded by mountain range. The valley where I was standing was a small, curved area of about 5 kms. Three sides (north, south and west) were blocked by steep slopes leading to high mountains and towards the east was a sloping cliff with lush forest at the bottom. It would be difficult to go down or climb up without a proper harness and rope. There was a small stream of water flowing from the foothills of the mountain on the south curving inwards and disappearing into the west mountain range. The ground was fertile as grass, bushes and trees were abundant and area near the stream was covered in stones and rocks.

It took me a couple of hours to go around the area to explore and assess the situation I had landed in. I could hear the insects and birds but had not heard any roars yet, so I will need more time to figure out the dangers surrounding me – safety is always relative. The more resources the area has, the more dangerous it usually is.

By now it was breakfast time, and I was hungry. I returned to my shack and sat outside on the ground, munching on an apple, and looking through this system that had been provided to us. The status screen I had earlier seemed to have converted into an excel sheet with tabs. First tab was obviously my status screen where the footnote I looked forward to having completely disappeared, second tab was titled ‘regional chat which turned out to be a chat with all participants located in a particular area. There were 25000 participants, and some were actively typing ‘hello’ with system actively translating everything to the accessors language. With 100 billion participants, I couldn’t even imagine how many planets or species they were coming from or how they communicated – it was an overwhelming thought.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

If you have ever played a game, you’d know, as soon as a new player joins and says hello, everyone responds with a hello or hi or welcome, which soon fills the screen and more. I was sure participants will start writing more once they get over the ‘hi’ phase. Not having communicated with anyone in a while, I was eager for these messages. The names of the participants were unpronounceable forming weird letters like ‘JGO’ to phrases like ‘mountain wind’. My name sounded normal to me ‘Caishen’, I am sure it will be weird to others. With experience in hosting global calls in my previous life, this sounded almost normal to me – unpronounceable long names, to different accents were nothing to sweat over.

The third tab was ‘world chat’ which was currently empty with occasional hello messages. The fourth tab was ‘Market’ which seemed very similar to game showing 5 empty slots to place an item to sell, with 3 options for marking the price – coins, barter, or auction. The seller could list a fixed price or invite a price or sell to the highest bidder. The bottom section of the tab was for buy where 10 slots (currently empty) were placed which were refreshing every 5 minutes. You could choose to trade or wait for the refresh. This means I would not be able to see everything that was available for sale at any given point. I guess that makes sense since going through billions of trades would be counterproductive.

I had 7 days to prepare and no idea about what the disaster would be. Cultivators and magicians probably had some way of staving off dangers around them and others, as I had been informed were stronger as well. Which means building out a log cabin and a fence for my safety would be the priority before I get to exploring and hunting and gathering Exp for level up.

I had the stream so water should not be a problem, I would boil as a precaution. I could get firewood so the main concern would be shelter and food source. I had a lot of meat and edibles, but I didn’t want to rely on my inventory as it would run out eventually. Reinforcing the shack was the most difficult part. It didn’t seem like the system will help me rebuild my rickety shack as the system didn’t seem very conducive to helping weak humans.

I thought about looking for a cave but didn’t think it was a good idea to abandon the shock. Who know how the system would evaluate the disuse. So, the next best thing is to clear out the area and build a fence.

I started from behind the shack closer to the north mountains and started operation clean up, clearing out the overgrown foliage and working around the trees which were in the vicinity. With increased strength and agility stats using knife and axe, all the foliage within the area of 250 meters was stored in my inventory, which I then laid out in the sunniest spot for drying. I could always use this for fire and some of the flexible vines for tying the logs together for stability.

Without taking a break for rest or meal, with just apples I continued with my work and started cutting the trees within the cleared-out area. Cutting trees with my increased strength and the axe I got from the novice area wasn’t difficult. By the time the third tree fell, I heard the notification.

Life skill woodcutter – basic (Increased strength while felling trees – 5%, enhanced ability to understand wood grain for cutting – 5%)

It was heartening to know somethings were unchanged. I continued cutting trees and gathered about 50 logs clearing out the area and then carried on with the trees in the perimeter next to it. I needed about 100-150 logs for 1000-meter fence as they were of different width.