The next two weeks went by in something of a blur. Oliver found little to eat, and drank fresh water wherever he could find it after the second day. Fortunately, despite his earlier misgivings, it seemed to have little adverse affect on his stomach.

He kept the mountains at his back, finding it unlikely that the harpies had flown over the peaks and deposited him on the opposite side and having little against which to set his direction in any case. They were large enough that this proved sufficient.

The landscape around him had remained largely consistent after descending from the mountains. Trees, mostly pine at first, gave way once more to deciduous foliage.

Though he remained on his guard, he saw little sign of wildlife. The beasts here seemed content to leave him be, for which he was grateful.

On two occasions he heard wolves in the distance – at least, that was what he preferred to imagine was making the unearthly howling sounds that echoed through the evening forest. He took to sleeping in trees after the second time, for what good it did him. Of course, calling it "sleeping" was putting it generously.

Lack of sleep and lack of food eroded focus, until despite his earlier resolve to become a master magician it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the next and maintain some modicum of awareness of his surroundings.

To his frustration and confusion, there didn't seem to be an obvious way to acquire another spell or skill besides the one he already had, Second Wind.

This new interface did not grant him any way to add something to his list of abilities; there was no search interface, though he tried to persuade it to show him one many times.

Despite his frustration, he experienced no more of the strange lights and aura that accompanied a system calibration event, though he went over the circumstances that caused it to occur each time carefully.

The key thing seemed to be simply becoming convinced that there was something possible. It was as if the System was drawing on his underlying mindset and expectations in order to determine what to show him. Each time he'd managed to trigger a change in it, he'd convinced himself that it was not only possible, but required – obvious.

If it was a matter of belief, something that was much too wishy-washy and undefined, he was a little tiny bit screwed. He didn't do vague well. He dealt more in reasoned, logical decisions (when at all possible), numbers, and quantifiable formulae. And so he hoped that there was simply an underlying condition he had yet to suss out, one that would grant him the ability to tweak the interface at will.

He did at least manage to establish that his interface was editable, and could retain information. However, it did not appear to be Turing-complete, much to his frustration.

After discovering he could modify the contents of cells, the first thing he tested was entering a simple mathematical formula. Addition, subtraction, and multiplication worked fine, but whenever he tried to enter a more complex formula the spreadsheet simply refused to provide an answer.

He also started a list of ideas in a new column that he needed to explore further in the future, in order of importance:

1. How can I get access to more spells?

2. How can I get back to that three-dimensional graph view I saw?

3. What is that graph showing me, anyway?

4. Where is the additional mana coming from?

He'd noticed the number at the bottom of the Mana column continued to increase slowly, day by day, at a rate of around 1 per day, implying that there was some sort of mana generation or collection going on.

This was a great relief, as he didn't relish the idea of killing other living beings to collect mana.

It also went a long way towards explaining the existence of mana in the first place, considering that it was spent on activations of skills and presumably spells. In any case, it was an input into the mana flow of what was presumably the closed system of this world.

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He had other questions, too:

5. Why did some of the soldiers I fought seem stronger and heavier, while others seemed of normal mass and reaction times?

6. Example: the first soldier I killed. Also the man I broke out of the jail cell.

7. Does this relate to the paths and ways that commander had referred to? There were three ways he mentioned: the way of the body, the way of the soul, and the way of the mind.

However, to his great frustration and concern, that was about the extent of the System experimentation he'd had the wits and energy to complete while out in the wilderness. By the end of the first week, he'd all but given up experimenting with it until he was in a more secure environment, or at least one with food, despite knowing what an advantage being able to use spells would confer.

He felt as if he were still missing some piece of the puzzle, perhaps something obvious to the people of this world that he was failing to grasp.

Hunger became his constant companion, the cold his bed-fellow. The forests were similar enough to home that when he found a handful of cattails, he ate the starchy roots with relish despite the gritty dirt that he wasn't able to fully wash off.

He avoided the bright red berries that he thought might have been autumn olives, discovered and ate about twenty wild leeks only to wake up the next morning stinking like onion, and found himself literally dreaming about hamburgers, steak, milkshakes and cold beer by the end of the first week.

–

About a week and a half into his trek, he came across a long trail of broken trees which led into the distance, torn up roots and trees, broken boughs and snapped trunks forming a path about forty or fifty feet wide, and roughly to the direction he was traveling.

He swung wide of it in order to avoid crossing paths with whatever had created it, but couldn't change direction without compromising his plan of traveling in a more or less straight line and hoping that it intersected with the road he'd been on before.

Towards the end of that day, he encountered the source of the destruction despite his precautions. It was an enormous body. From the angle he was approaching he could only see the curve of one shoulder and the back, and what was possibly part of an arm or a wing, but it was at a scale which dwarfed anything he'd seen yet save for the dragons which had attacked the camp he'd been in before.

As soon as he spotted it through the trees he froze, breath quickening. He looked around, listened for a little while. After seeing and hearing nothing, he backtracked as quickly as he could and made his way around the enormous body.

Where there was a carcass, there would be scavengers. And with a carcass that bit, the scavengers might be commensurately large; in any case, he would be a tasty snack to even conventionally sized predators.

After the initial surprise, he was able to make his way around it uneventfully and continued on his journey, though thereafter he found himself unable to sleep as well. What monstrous denizen had he seen? What did it eat? How did it survive in this biome? It must have been a flying creature of a kind, since the path of broken trees began abruptly and was of great size.

And the paths of broken trees he came across with some regularity took on a new meaning. Fauna.

One morning as he was relieving himself against the tree in which he'd slept, he looked up and to his right and saw claw marks up and down a sturdy old pine reaching halfway up the trunk, and a trail of broken boughs, crushed plants, and enormous lizard-like footprints leading away from it, sunk deep into the mud. Somehow he'd missed the trail in the night – well, it had been dark when he stopped.

Whatever it had been was heavy enough to leave behind deep tracks, tall enough to reach high up the tree, yet agile enough not to knock it over. He found himself visualizing some kind of lizard, yet knew that a lizard that large in this climate was impossible – the weather, which had stayed consistently wet and gray – was far too cool to sustain a cold-blooded creature of that size.

Though, he'd already seen plenty of things that defied logic here, so maybe they were magic giant lizards. And wasn't that a lovely thought, he concluded.

He slept even more poorly the nights following, and did not dream of food again.

–

At the end of the second week he stumbled across the logging operation.

He'd been hearing the banging sounds echoing through the wood for a little while, and though at first he'd resolved to avoid them, the sounds of shouted conversations that reached his ears soon after quickly overrode that decision.

He listened for a little while to confirm what he was hearing, then changed course and swung to the right, where the sounds were coming from.

It was with a feeling of intense relief that he came to the edge of a man-made clearing, where a number of men were hard at work turning trees into lumber by means of axes and saws.

He waited a little while, watching them. Some of the men were hewing away at the trees, sending chips of wood flying far and wide. Others dragged felled trees away – in one notable case, single handedly – while yet others were occupied with stripping away the branches from the logs.

After a few moments, Oliver stepped out of the trees with some trepidation, much relief, and a strange portending of change on the horizon.