Todd had a busy day. Whilst working on the tools for construction and mining, Arthur had given him a task he had been agonizing over. Before Arthur went to find out where Mei was, he had stopped by the smithy and given him the task to design and forge a prototype for minting iron coins before the village meeting.
With a somewhat clear picture on his mind on what to do, he tapped impatiently at the anvil with his knuckles. His strength lay in the quick adaptation and making things, but one aspect of the task felt terrifying. ‘Damn you Arthur. I repeatedly told you that I am no good at this.’ On the table a few feet from him laid a few quickly forged pieces of iron that were smooth, round and shiny.
“These coins are so fucking ugly. How can I show my face proudly to the folks when the image inscribed is just like a pile of groyote droppings…” Todd rubbed his face with a troubled expression. ‘In a way, the currency represents the village. I can’t see anyone wanting to use coins that look like shit as their official currency.’
Groaning in annoyance, he slapped the anvil and got up. Carefully placing his hammer on the tool rack, he got up and walked out of the smithy. Downcast and troubled, Todd took in a breath of fresh air while looking at the skies above. It seemed that even the weather reflected his mood as he saw large and dark clouds approaching in the horizon.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Nature, I mean.” Clear and soothing voice caused Todd to raise one of his eyebrows and turn to look behind him.
A woman in her early 20’s stared at the horizon with clear, brown pupils that reflected the sunlight, dressed in a simple brown dress and carrying something that could be loosely described as a sculpture made of clay with her.
“I suppose it is in its own way.” Curtly answering, Todd lowered his eyes to look at the thing in the woman's hands and asked. “What’s with…that thing? It’s not even properly dried so aren’t you worried that it will be ruined?”
“It’s fine. It’s just an experiment I made for a quest I received from my pottery shop.” The woman replied with a cheerful voice and raised the mass of clay to her eye level.
“Well, it ain’t pleasing to the eyes, I tell ya. Guess we have some problems in common.” Todd put his hands on his crudely sewn pockets and started to walk away while kicking small rocks along his way.
With a slight chuckle, the woman smiled gently and followed Todd with her eyes. “You are just as my friend told you are. Stubborn and crude, but at least you don’t sugarcoat and lie about your thoughts. I like that.”
Promptly ignoring everything happening around him, Todd walked forward across the street to a shack that gave off the vibe of ‘keep out’. The standard home that Todd made a few adjustments for himself; a friendly sign “No visitors.” hanging above the door, a few hand-planted thorn bushes by the windows and a stack of crude stones for making sharpening stones.
Todd cracked his head on both sides before entering his home, laying down on the crude wooden bed filled with grass and leaves and closing his eyes briefly. While thinking of the design for the coins, his lips started to arch wider and wider as minutes passed. The ideas he had before were a bit too simplistic. Being frustrated enough about the designing part of the coins gave him a viable way to show his displeasure and get away with it.
“Heh. Heheheh. HAHAHHA. That’s it!” With a somewhat malicious cackle, Todd got up from his bed instantly and rushed back to his blacksmithy to make the prototypes he would show in the meeting.
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While trying to figure out the specifics of the magic system, Arthur had a ball of fire floating above his palm and a severe frown on his forehead. ‘I know everything here is explained simply by the word “Magic” but how the hell does it work?’ Struggling to maintain his concentration while observing the small ball of fire floating above his hands, he felt a chill run through his spine and the fire dissipated like it had never existed.
Arthur rubbed his eyes in annoyance and tried to regain his focus, but nothing happened.
“Chief, maybe you should just drop it for today. I seriously doubt you can solve the mysteries behind magic by exhausting your mana and focus.” Russell offhandedly gave some advice on the side while he was working on researching frost magic.
“Aight. I’m gonna go for a run to clear my mind. Are you sure you are fine researching that alone?”
Arthur waited a short while for an answer before realizing that there’s not going to be a response. Somehow it reminded him of a scientist too deep into his research, but he felt it was an admirable quality. He took his wooden flask from the counter in silence and promptly left the mage tower.
He took a deep breath of fresh air, closed his eyes and thought of the changes that had been happening on a personal level. Before coming to this strange, new world, Arthur could easily replace workouts with pizza and movies and he couldn’t even stand the idea of jogging. Now all that had changed with the status screen as the situation was completely different; One could have a clear understanding and indication of improvement and there were actual tangible benefits of improvement; survival for instance. The values in life he had previously meant nothing here, and so he had to adapt and improve.
The jogging route Arthur went was the same as the days before, with the exception that the borders of the village had slowly but surely expanded outwards. In the previous days, he had set small wooden stakes to measure the rate of expansion, and it seemed somewhat varied. On a good day, the border expanded by 4 meters outwards from the previous marker, and on a bad day, it was merely half a meter. Arthur frowned as he was eyeballing the conspicuous stakes nailed on the ground and then shook his head. It would seem that he would have to further investigate the topic.
Along the way while keeping an eye out for the translucent purple borderline, he sensed the subtle changes in the weather. ‘It looks like a storm is coming. Back to the wind and the low pressure system is always on the left, huh?’ The cloud base in the distance creeped ever closer to the ground and it stretched to great heights, the wind direction started to veer with increasing strength.
Making a mental note to himself to remind the villagers to amass the rainwater in empty containers, he continued onwards to the treeline while following the borders. A shallow, mossy valley revealed itself from behind a large rock formation and Arthur noticed something strange.
‘Blood?’ The thought ran through his mind as he neared the location.
While trying to regulate his breathing, he could somewhat imagine what had happened here. A small pool of blood with marks on the ground that in Arthur’s eyes were an indicator of a struggle. Gulping silently, he followed the tracks for a good five minutes before finding the owner of the tracks, leaning unconsciously at the foot of a great tree.
An unkempt man with a scruffy beard, bleeding from his abdomen with a makeshift spear as his crutch to keep him in sitting position. The dark, semi long hair covering his face and shallow breathing that rhythmically raised his chest up and down heavily were enough for Arthur to see that he was still alive. There was no such man in Arthur’s memories. Granted, he was not 100% sure that he could recall every single villager, but a small detail caught his eyes. ‘The shoes… Are we not alone here?’