I woke up in a field. Nothing particularly special about it, but there were woods behind me, and a mountain ahead, and I was completely naked. It was a warm day out, at least. The grass was scratchy against my skin, so I got up quickly and brushed myself off.

The goddess hadn’t lied about letting me keep my body. I’d worked out a lot while I was locked-up, but I’d also eaten ramen every night for years at a time, so I could generously be described as looking like an athlete in the off-season, the very off-season. Maybe retired. Even if I’d been in much better shape, I still needed clothes, not to mention food and shelter. And water. That was a big one. Steve from Minecraft may not have ever needed to drink anything other than potions and the occasional bucket of milk, but I was already thirsty.

As I took in the environment, a flash of light alerted me to something out of place. The sun’s rays had reflected off of a block of black glass. Dirt and overhanging grass partially obscured the obsidian block, its edge raised about an inch out of the soil. It was perfectly square. Within the obsidian, something glowed. Faint light, a barely discernible core, but enough to highlight the lettering carved into the stone.

“You are not alone.”

That was nice of someone. At the very least, I was not the first person to be transported into this world. It left open the question of how long this stone had been here, and whether whoever had left it was still around. Why hadn’t they built anything else? Was there a settlement nearby? Did this person check the area periodically, or have some way of knowing when there was a new arrival?

I didn’t want to lose track of this point, and there was a lone tree nearby that would serve as a general marker, but I wasn’t going to just sit around and wait on the off chance that there was someone friendly in the area who would come to pick me up.

The sun was just over the mountains, which meant they were due east or due west, depending on whether I’d woken up in the morning or the afternoon. Whichever it was, I walked directly toward it so I would be able to use its position to find my way back.

I felt like I was walking for a long time. The landscape wasn’t fantastical. It could have been any temperate region on earth. All the plants looked familiar, though overgrown; grasses and shrubs and scattered trees. The world looked healthy and vibrant, so at least I hadn’t transmigrated into the middle of a harsh winter. I came upon a thin stream and squatted beside it to cup some water in my hands and have a drink. It was shallow, but clear, and it tasted better than a lot of the tap water I’d had over the years, so that was something. If I was going to get sick from drinking foreign water, I might as well get it over with.

Isekai stories were also gamelit stories, at least in anime, and Mizu had brought up the subject of video games herself, so I checked for signs of a System.

"Menu," I said. "Options. Status …uh…access log?"

Nothing. I had recently read Full Murder Hobo by Dakota Krout, and the main character in that book had gone years without being able to access his System because he didn’t know he had one. For lack of the right word, he’d been stuck grinding low level mobs for half a lifetime before he figured out what to say to summon his screens. That was not something I wanted to experience. So where were my screens?

I tried a few more phrases, all to no effect, and had a good look around. Most of the grass was short, but there were patches here and there that were knee high. Not that I wanted to try making pants out of grass, just the thought of the ensuing chafe made me shudder, but the first thing I always did in Minecraft was smack a few pieces of grass around to collect seeds and then use those seeds to cut down trees. You don’t need to do that, you can chop down trees with your hands, but I liked the aesthetic. Now that I thought about it, Minecraft was a pretty weird game. But if I had powers from the game, I needed to harvest something.

I walked over to the grass, took a deep breath, and grabbed a handful. Still scratchy, still grass, and when I pulled it up, all I had to show for it were a few measly stalks. This didn’t seem like a superpower at all.

"Mizu? Goddess? Any help here?"

There was no response. My first hour in a new world, and I was naked and alone and didn’t seem to have any special powers. Feeling a little silly, I tried swiping my hand repeatedly at the grass like the avatar in the game would do. It looked like I was a cat batting a toy—a chubby, naked, human cat—but I didn’t know what else to try. Something about it actually felt kind of right, and I kept at it for about ten seconds, just taking out my frustrations on the tall grass.

There was no warning. The grass patch ripped up all at once, leaving behind a patch of bare earth, and a small green coin about the size of a quarter appeared in my palm. It was cool, kind of woody, and engraved with a character in a complicated pattern that reminded me of Celtic knots.

Then the back of my right hand burned. I dropped the coin, but it wasn’t the coin's fault. My hand was being branded. I dunked it in the stream, but the water did nothing to ease the feeling of getting a rough tattoo with a staple at warp speed. A symbol was forming on my skin, kind of flowy and epic-looking. I wouldn’t have turned it down on principle, but having it just appear in such a painful fashion was more than a little alarming.

Then it happened.

System activation is complete.

Hello, William. Welcome to Plana.

Class Assignment: Survivor

Level 1

Advancement: 1%

Survivors are a versatile addition to any party of heroes. This class specializes in material collection and item crafting, as well as secondary support and utility functions. A jack of all trades well suited to filling in the gaps when more capable heroes are not available.

New Skill Unlocked

Miner: 1

Advancement: 1%

Ideal for gathering resources, from woodland herbs to the elusive meta-materials, this skill is the foundation of a Survivor’s toolset.

You can view your Status Screen at any time by tapping your elder sign.

"Thanks, Mizu!" I shouted at the sky. This was it. Even better than being reincarnated, I had reincarnated with a System. The words were floating in the air above my hand, circumscribed by a semi-transparent blue box, like I’d always imagined they would be. That line about “more capable heroes” bothered me. It seemed like she had interpreted my request for Minecraft in the context of a pre-existing framework that designated me as a Survivor. If Mizu had just told me what the options were to begin with, we wouldn’t have had to dance around the issue with a conversation about what superpowers were and were not available. I’d relegated myself to a support class, a generalist, like a Druid, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Still, a System was a System, and I was more inclined to be grateful than complain.

The box vanished a second after I was done reading, so I tapped my tattoo, which was still a little sore, and the blue screen returned, displaying a menu.

Status Skills Journal

"Status," I said, and nothing happened, so I poked the screen. It wasn’t solid, but it responded to my touch, highlighting the word before flashing to a new display. As many tabletop RPGs as I’d played, I felt I was prepared for whatever statistical arrangement this System was about to throw at me. Would it be the standard set of physical and mental attributes, or something more obscure? Luck or no luck? Was I going to spend points to improve myself, or was I going to have to actually train? Hit points and mana? Was there mana in this world? Lord of the Rings had magic, but it was really squishy, mechanically speaking. Had Gandalf ever worried about his mana pool while he was throwing flaming pine cones at orcs? I doubted it.

Status

Name: William

System Type: Survivor

Level: 1

Advancement: 2%

Might: F

Speed: F

Presence: F-

Return to Main

That was it? Using only three attributes was extremely reductive. Might probably translated to both strength and constitution, and Speed was a stand in for dexterity or agility. Presence had to be something like charisma in Dungeons and Dragons, and there were no mental stats at all. Wisdom? Intelligence Willpower? Actually, that was a bit of a relief. Having my mind quantified and potentially altered by the System as I advanced could have been problematic in a lot of ways. I could guess that F was a standard score for average humans. There were a lot of stories and shows that used letter grades for attributes. My presence was subpar, an F-, but without more information, I was just making assumptions.

The Skills screen was even less helpful.

Skills

Miner: 1

Advancement: 2%

Return to Main

What kind of System was this? I checked "Journal" next, but it was just a blank page.

"Captain’s log," I said, and the words appeared on my screen as if they were being typed. That had been meant as a joke, but apparently, this screen would record anything I said while it was active. Might as well knock out the first entry.

"Day 1. I am stranded in an unfamiliar world, naked and afraid. My heart is full of hope, but my testicles hang low with worry. I’ll keep you posted."

After I’d made the entry, my screen flashed, donged like a doorbell, and a new tab appeared at the top of the Journal screen.

“Quests,” I read.

The tab activated, and a single short notice appeared.

Journal Quests

Kevin

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Objective: Kevin.

Reward: Your geas will be lifted.

Return to Main

Kevin? That was a name, not a quest. Was I supposed to kill him? Find his lost cat? As Mizu’s geas was solely a mechanic meant to ensure I completed the task she had given me, lifting it as a reward was like saying that my reward was not having to do the thing I would have already done. My memory of our meeting was clear, including the part where I had asked her to forget my death, which I had. I knew it had been something awful, though I did remember being at Subway on the night when I must have died. What a crappy place to end your existence. She had said I would need to fix something for her, and Kevin was apparently that thing. Fine, I’d figure it out the specifics as I went.

I tapped off the screen. There wasn’t a clear path for me to follow here, as I had started in the wilderness and every direction looked equally uninhabited. Mountains, fields, forests. I could be anywhere. Having a source of water was important, so I started experimenting with my System before traveling any further from my point of origin.

First, I collected more grass. It was pretty easy to do, but time consuming. It took about ten seconds to convert a square foot of grass into a coin. I hoped I would get faster soon, as a few minutes of batting my hand at the stalks was enough to steal some of the novelty from the experience.

I mean, it was awesome. I was magic, but I was also collecting grass at a rate significantly below that of the average lawnmower. It wasn’t exactly My Hero Academia out here. Another problem quickly presented itself. Though I was converting the grass into neat little coins, I didn’t seem to have an inventory. I was clearing patches with one hand and passing the coins into the other.

Once I got to where my handful of grass coins were getting awkward to carry, I sat down by the little streamlet to do some basic math.

My advancement in Miner was up to fifty-six percent. Every square foot of grass I collected was getting me about two percent closer to a second rank of the skill, which made for a pretty convenient goal post. So I set down my coins at the edge of the water and worked for about ten minutes to get there. It only took that long because not all grass seemed to be convertible to coin form. If it was too short, I could still clear a patch, but the stalks just shredded.

So the grass had to be relatively mature for the Miner skill to function. That meant a bit of walking as I went from tall patch to tall patch until I had enough.

There was a little chime to notify when I hit the second rank, but I still had to activate the screen manually. That was probably for the best, since I wouldn’t want the thing popping up all the time when there were other people around.

That was assuming there were other people here. Plana was supposed to be like Middle Earth, so presumably, there would be humanoids around somewhere. But I was getting the feeling that Mizu had omitted an awful lot of relevant information during our conversation, and may even have deliberately misled me. That could have been simple paranoia, but the entire situation was sketchy. The goddess had appeared to me in a form that I was familiar with. Had that actually been what she looked like, and how she talked, or was what I had interacted with actually some kind of avatar pieced together using fragments of my own thoughts?

Had dying given me a true glimpse of what was going on behind the curtain of existence, or had I merely seen the curtain behind the curtain?

Existential unease aside, the marker at my point of origin was a sure sign that there was someone else like me around, or had been. It could have been a hundred years old.

“You are not alone.”

It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something. Had Kevin left the marker? As soon as I had the System figured out a little better, and some decent supplies, I could go looking for him. Maybe he wasn’t the bad guy, he might be the mentor who would open my eyes to what I was supposed to be doing here.

I was halfway to level two, so at least there was an obvious correlation between using my skill and leveling up. This was significant information. In Dungeons and Dragons and most everything like it, if you wanted to increase your level, you needed to kill stuff. The older versions gave you experience from getting gold as well, but they dropped that mechanic after the second edition. In some games, and most gamelit novels, you could also get experience from quest rewards. But I hadn’t been issued any quests apart from a one word dead end. Thankfully, it looked like I could advance simply by using my abilities, no murder necessary. That was a relief.

My little blue screen stubbornly refused to give me any useful information about the System itself, but when I checked the journal, there was a now an additional tab labeled "Notifications."

Journal Quests Notifications

Achievement: Hoarder (1)

You have collected fifty coins of a single type. Your dedication has unlocked the Materials log tab. Continue to gather resources, and if your pockets begin to bulge, you may now merge the coins for convenience.

Return to Main

Pockets. I wish. Pondering over the message, I gathered all of my coins into a pile. Merging them sounded convenient, but it would have been even more convenient if the notification had explained how the trick was done. Picking up two coins and trying to squish them together did nothing. I tried stacking them neatly. There were over fifty of them to play with, so the sheer number of combinations was daunting. Tower, pyramid, square, none of them worked.

"Merge," I said, tentatively at first, but pretty soon I was shouting at the coins, then singing, and finally I just got frustrated. I have a bit of a temper, which I have learned to keep thoroughly bottled up. But I was alone, reincarnated in an alien wilderness—what was the point of holding it in? I snatched a handful of the coins and snapped my arm forward. They vanished amid the grass.

Okay, so the point of bottling that impulse would have been to avoid losing my coins. Feeling like a fool, I got up and wandered in the direction of the toss. I didn’t find the coins I had thrown, but I noticed a tall patch that I knew hadn’t been there before, because I had cleared the area in the process of amassing my collection. I smacked the stalks until they converted back into a coin. That took about half the time it would have before my Miner skill had hit rank two, which was a major jump for a single advancement. Each coin’s worth of grass now only took me five seconds to collect. If the progression kept up like that, I would clear fields in no time.

Even better, when the big patch was gone, I saw that not all the coins had reverted to plant matter when I threw them. There was a single large coin on the ground, about the size of a half dollar. A token. I picked it up and returned to the spot beside the stream where I was keeping the rest of my hoard.

How many had converted? The token had the same greenish brown color and curvy symbols as the others. The major difference was its size. I mowed the surrounding area in a five by five square and kicked away the shredded plant matter to expose the soil beneath. Standing at the center of the square, I threw the token down at my feet. I half expected to have grass as high as my head jump up around me, but the token broke up into a pile of nine coins.

Neat.

I picked them all up again, threw them down together, and got the token. After repeating the process for a minute, I grabbed a tenth coin and tried dropping them all together. The result was one token and one mid-sized patch of grass. When I tried the same thing with eight, one of them converted to grass and the others remained coins. Nine coins equaled one token, and I could otherwise only convert only one at a time. That was cool and useful, but it didn’t get me pants. The problem was, even if I had known how to weave grass, I wouldn’t have wanted to wear it. It would have been worse than being naked.

The sun had risen, which told me that the mountain range was to the east. Having water was nice, but I was getting hungry. I needed to expand my skill set. I ended up with four large coins and a few leftover originals, and I carried them over with me to the nearest tree. It was a spindly gray thing standing all on its lonesome, and I tried doing the cat’s paw things with my hand on it to see what would happen.

Slowly, cracks formed in the wood. Their appearance startled me to where I stopped what I was doing, and the cracks faded away over the course of the next few seconds.

“Okay,” I said. “No need to be alarmed.”

This was essentially how the game worked. Anything you tried to mine would crack apart and drop a corresponding resource, unless you used the wrong tool, in which case it would drop nothing. But you could harvest wood by hand. The tree was maybe fifteen feet high, and not thick around the middle. It had a round, leafy crown, and few branches below that. It was leaning slightly to one side, so I moved around behind it to avoid having it fall on me if this worked the way I thought it would.

Patting a spot on its trunk at face level, I watched the cracks develop. They began as tiny fractures, quickly developing into fissures that I could have stuck a finger inside. The wood creaked and popped, and after a minute or so, a chunk of its trunk vanished.

In Minecraft, trees you started harvesting would float in midair with nothing to support them. Gravity was extremely selective, presumably because it had been easier to program that way. On Plana, however, gravity seemed to know what it was about.

The trunk had been more than a foot thick, but my skill cut all the way through, instantly replacing that chunk of wood with empty air, and rewarding me with a coin. The part of the tree that was above that point dropped without preamble. I jumped back, and thankfully, it crashed down in the opposite direction.

Ding.

Fantastic.

My new coin was dark brown, with a rough grain and what looked like a cylinder etched into its center. I threw it to the ground.

There was a quiet pop as a log came into existence before me. It was perfectly cylindrical, one foot in length, and six inches in diameter. This was progress, my first building material. I picked up the log with both hands and used it to start bapping the bottom end of the fallen tree. It was an awkward tool, but the cracking process seemed to go slightly faster, and I continued to use the log to work my way up the tree. It was absurdly satisfying to watch the tree disappear, piece by piece, and become a resource in my hands.

The leaves were also harvestable. They got stripped away in clumps, and if they were too spread out, they would simply shred, the same as the grass that wasn’t sufficiently matured. The branches gave me sticks. I checked my screens to see what the ding had been about, and found a third tab added to the journal.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials

[Grass]

It's grass.

[Birch Leaves]

You've just embarked on the illustrious path of forestry and foliage! Your first harvest of birch leaves will be forever logged in the annals of your personal history. These leaves, fluttering with the whispers of the wild, might just be your ticket to crafting something wondrous or brewing a potion that even the elixirs of old would envy. Just kidding. Leaves are useless.

[Birch Log]

The birch wood, with its smooth, silvery bark and sturdy form, awaits your crafting expertise. Will it become part of a shelter, a part of a mighty vessel, or perhaps the handle of a legendary weapon? The choice, brave survivor, lies in your hands.

[Stick]

The most important item.

Return to Main

True fact about the sticks. The grand list of everything I had collected thus far was unimpressive. Also, who was writing these descriptions? The System voice was wildly inconsistent. Was there a team of celestial bureaucrats out there working on filling out System notes who didn't talk to each other, or just one lazy angel?

Were leaves useless? In the game, they were a semi-transparent building material. The coins were smoother than those that represented the logs, and marked with a generic teardrop with a stem. When dropped, instead of appearing in a lifeless pile, they did something impossible

The leaves were floating above the ground, motionless, like I had taken a picture of them in mid fall. It was unmistakably a one cubic foot block, though not a solid one. When I touched them, they still felt like leaves, and a little pressure was all it took to shift them around. Sticking my arm through the block caused it to collapse.

This really was Minecraft, albeit heavily modded. Very heavily.

In the game, there were only a handful of items you could craft without a crafting table. A player’s inventory included a miniature crafting grid, two by two, in which you could place materials to convert them into goods. But I didn’t have an inventory, and my status screens did not contain a crafting grid.

Well, coins could be converted into tokens by throwing the right amount, what if other conversion were possible as well? While I hadn’t memorized every formula in the game, you would have to be a truly inexperienced player not to know how to make wood blocks.

I walked back over to the clear spot beside the stream and sorted out all the coins I’d collected so far. There were ten logs, eight sticks, and a bunch of leaves. Harvesting sticks was not a one-for-one conversion. Some branches had given me nothing, presumably because they weren’t the right thickness or length. Twigs were no good.

I picked up four logs, shook them up in my hands like I was about to roll dice, and tossed them on the ground.

Plip.

The coins stayed coins, and at first, I thought I was going to be stuck without a crafting table until I actually built one. On closer inspection, however, the coins had turned a lighter shade, more tan than brown, and the symbol engraved on them had gone from a cylinder to a cube. Also, one of them had disappeared. Four had become three.

Houston, we have blocks.

A wood block was exactly what it sounded like and didn’t even come with a notification. The bark was all gone, and it had a smooth reddish brown finish. Blocks placed in the game stuck in place, but I could move these around. It felt like they weighed about forty pounds. They were almost exactly the same size and weight as the box of liquid sweetener we used in the drink machine at work.

You made a crafting table out of planks, not blocks. One wood block converted to four planks. But here, I didn’t have a crafting grid. I wouldn’t have been able to use the blocks at all if they automatically morphed into planks when I dropped them. But what if I used two?

After re-harvesting the blocks, I once again shook up coins in my hands like a gambler hoping for elevens.

The pair of coins hit the dirt, bounced, and split into eight new coins. Such casual defiance of the law of conservation of matter and energy was, at this point, unremarkable.

Upon conversion, the planks, surprisingly, were not just blocks with a different skin. They were actual five foot long planks that could have been newly delivered from a lumberyard. They smelled kind of nice, resiny, fresh birch wood.

The moment of truth was approaching. I picked a nice flat spot right beside the water. Four wood planks equaled one crafting table, assuming the formula had translated like everything else.

I held up my hand, holding the coins, and took a deep breath. The sun was high overhead, its warmth prickling across my exposed skin. Pants. Please let there be a way to craft pants.

The coins hit the dirt, and a table sprang into existence in front of me.