Kane chewed on a bitter blackberry and glumly looked over the limited supply of scraggly half eaten bushes, feeling defeated. He had been in the copy of a forest for about a week, and he had figured out the gist of his situation pretty well. And yes, it was dire.

First of all, Kane had needed to know if the forest was shrinking, or if his only limiting factor in survival was the food from the berry bushes. So, he had went to a tree about a 20 minutes' walk from his central camp, where the fading was just starting to be noticeable, and placed a circle of stones around it. Every day, which was differentiated by every time he woke up after sleeping, he had walked to the marked tree and examined it to see if it looked more faded than before.

For the first three days, Kane had scrutinized the tree and not believed that it looked any more faded than before. Of course, fadedness was a hard value to gauge, but if it was fading, then it was doing so too slowly for him to notice. This was what he assured himself of, at least.

But on the fourth day, Kane noticed something that he could not deny. As usual, he brought his eyes to the matte, faded bark and examined it; it looked like the same faint brown as usual, but he thought he saw a very faint greyish mark that he had not seen before on the tree. Confused he touched the bark and stared at the mark, mind racing as he thought about what could have changed.

It couldn’t have been an animal, right? There was no life here. Then, what...

And then, in a harsh burst, it came to him. He rushed to the other side of the tree and saw the large grey rock, much larger than the rest, on the opposite side of where he had been looking, He had seen through the tree and he hadn’t been able to do that before. The area was shrinking.

Kane was on a timer.

~

Kane walked back from his breakfast of blackberries, and toward the campsite, which was nothing but an area cleared of sticks and leaves, which happened to be close to the river and the berry bushes. His stomach still felt hollow and unsatisfied and he felt a great craving for more of the unripe blackberries. But he had to ration.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

After frantically searching the forest for food on the first day he had woken up hungry, Kane had found 3 separate patches of blackberry bushes, all unripe. These bushes were all about the same distance from the area he had woken up in. So, they won't fade until the last minute. He had thought.

Also, he had examined the amount of food on each patch and decided that if he rationed, he could get about 2 weeks per patch. It would be a crazy coincidence if the forest just happened to shrink to nothingness by the time 6 weeks pass.

Kane had briefly thought about picking all the berries to save the energy of walking each day, but decided that he didn’t want to risk them rotting. Of course the natural laws in this place were spotty, with the infinite daylight and lack of life, but he wouldn’t put it past the asshole creators of this place. He would wait to pick them until the berry area was about to fade.

Kane got back to his campsite and sat against his favorite tree. He was hungry, and tired, and sick from cancer, but he had to do the most important part of his routine: figuring out how to mark his soul.

After the shock of fading forests, asshole gods, and disappearing parents, Kane had been thinking far from clearly. Actually, he had shut off the part of his mind which would have him panicking, screaming, sobbing, and going catatonic, and had been kind of been numbly accepting things as they came and processing the information he got.

After a week of being alone in the forest, Kane still shut out some of the thoughts that he didn’t want to reflect on; but he was calmer and more rational now, and he realized that he had been unreasonable in believing that he had no hints about how to mark his soul.

All he had to do was ask himself what really changed after shifting to the fake forest. If you didn’t count the environment: the infinite sun, the fading trees, the equidistant berry bushes -things which were distracting to be sure- there was only one real change.

The red book floating beside his shoulder.

He was asked to mark his soul, and he had an intimate connection to the book more real than his connection to his limbs. He was asked to mark it and what do you do in a book but write. It was a simple deduction, really.

The only problem was that Kane didn’t have the faintest fuck of a clue about how to write in the book.

So that was why Kane spent most of his “day” staring at the book’s pages, exploring his connection to it. Making it hover, marking its pages turn, but really, trying to mark the pages.