I was definitely faster. The events of the previous night should have had me passing out from exhaustion, but getting out of the shed had given me a second wind, and apart from my arm, I actually felt healthier than when I had first spawned in the new world. I’ve done a good bit of hiking, and I know I can keep a little over a three miles an hour pace up and down hills for an extended period. I know what that feels like, and I knew I was going faster. What had been my quickest pace before the upgrade now felt more like an amble. My fast walk was at the speed of a reasonable jog.

With a backpack full of coins and a few of my tools, I set off in search of humanity. Following the stream was my best guess. Even if I hadn’t seen the riders headed in that direction, a water source is as important for towns as it is for individuals. Though it had come at the cost of a bite wound, the zombie that attacked me the night before had provided me with enough leather to craft myself a pair of pants. They were the same unappealing color and texture as the boots, but I felt like a new man.

The stream eventually linked up with an actual river, which was an enormous relief. More water, the potential for fish, and an increased chance of someone having settled nearby. The river was twenty feet wide, as well as deep and fast-moving enough that I couldn’t see the bottom except along the edges.

The landscape had changed little otherwise, patches of trees amid the grassland and some rolling hills. The mountains were long behind me. If the journey took longer than a day, I knew I could craft a shelter sufficient to last me through the night. Food was still an issue, and I hadn’t come across any more berries, but I wasn’t in danger of starving in a few days. As long as I had water, hunger would stay a nuisance for a long time before it became a health risk. Along the way, I harvested some tall grass and a couple of trees in my path.

The sun was at its peak when the riders found me.

The man and the girl were back, and they had brought friends. The new people were all riding ponies, and I realized the girl had not been a child. She was a young woman who happened to be very short, but there was nothing childish in her expression or the way she held herself . Except for the first man, these were little people; halflings or hobbits or whatever they called themselves in this setting. The guys on the ponies weren’t much bigger than the girl, and it made me wonder why she was the only one of them riding a full-sized horse.

The man pulled up first. He was blonde, with a well-trimmed beard and the face of a chad. Square jaw, hunter’s eyes, everything. His breastplate didn’t look new, but it was well cared for, and he had a sword at his hip. Except for the girl, the little folk all carried spears.

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s Will. Nice to meet you.”

My words caused a stir in the group, and those that had spears leveled them in my direction. The man turned to the girl and said something that sounded vaguely german. She replied to him in a different language before addressing me in English.

“Man of Dargoth,” she said, “what brings you to the Free Kingdoms?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” I said. “I’m new here, and I’m camping where you saw me the other day. I don’t have a lot of supplies. Is there a town around here, because I could really use some help?”

They glanced at each other again.

“Are you alone?” the chad said, thankfully switching to English.

“Yeah,” I said. How much did the people here know about transmigrators? The message carved into an obsidian block was enough to tell me I was not the first. But that didn’t mean that people thought it was a good thing, or that others like me hadn’t caused serious trouble in the past.

“Where did you come from?”

“I’m not sure how to answer that.”

The man frowned and said something to the woman in the German-sounding language.

She watched me, her gaze traveling in a way that had me sucking in my stomach before settling on my elder sign. Her eyes were gray. They widened.

“Is that the mark of the Dark Lord on your hand?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“What do you mean? You speak Kevinian, and you bear his mark. Where did you come from, if not Dargoth?”

Kevinian? That had to be a coincidence.

“It’s complicated,” I said. They might think I was lying or crazy, but I didn’t have enough information about this world to lie convincingly, and half answers were just going to make them more suspicious. “I didn’t choose to get this mark, and I don’t know what or where Dargoth is. I’ve never been anywhere but here.”

At least not in this life.

“No one lives here,” she said. “If you wish to be treated as a friend, you are going to have to be honest with us. If you are a man of Dargoth, that is one thing, but if you continue to evade our questions, we will be forced to assume you are an enemy.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I get that. What happened was, I died in another world, had a conversation with a goddess, and got reincarnated here. This mark appeared on my hand after I woke up.”

There was a lengthy pause. I got the impression that this woman was the only one who completely understood what I was saying. The man just looked confused, and the other little folk were alert, but they weren’t reacting to my statements as I made them.

“What did she look like?”

That wasn’t the response I had been expecting.

“Who?”

“The goddess,” she said, her gaze intense, “what did the goddess look like?”

“Young. Beautiful. She had blue hair.”

Her lips thinned, and she stared me in the face like she was trying to read the truth there. There were freckles over the bridge of her nose. Very cute.

“We need to discuss this with the mayor,” she said. “Go back to your camp and do not come this way again until we return.”

“Wait,” I said. “Do you believe me? Has this happened before?”

“I don’t know whether or not you are telling the truth,” she said. “You claim to be a hero sent by the goddess, and that is not something words alone will prove. If you stay where we found you, we will meet again soon. But you cannot return with us. If you come to Erihseht without permission, we will treat you as an invader.”

“I promise not to follow you,” I said. “But do you have any food you could spare, or medicine? I’m injured.”

“Injured how?”

I’d covered the bite on my arm with a grass wrap, and when I pulled it back, the stalks stuck to my skin in a way that made me wince. It looked even worse than the last time I’d checked. Inflammation was spreading to my wrist and up my forearm, and the edges of the teeth marks were turning black. My depleted heart bar had remained in place since the night before, though unlike my screens, that was something only I could see.

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The woman spoke to the man, who seemed to disagree with her. After a short back and forth, he produced a small pouch from his saddlebags and tossed it to me. It was full of biscuits. He looked annoyed.

“We will bring you something for that wound. Keep it clean. It looks infected.”

“Thank you,” I said, and with a word from the man, the riders began turning away.

“Wait. What’s your name?”

The woman paused, as if debating whether to answer.

“Esmelda,” she said, and they trotted away.

It could have gone worse. I’d told them the truth, and no one had tried to kill me. It seemed like they knew about Mizu and people from other worlds. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a hero, but if that was their take on the situation, it would be all the better for me once they were satisfied that I wasn’t lying.

My journey back to base was slower than the trip out. A fever was brewing, and my injured arm was leaden. If they had medicine that would help, great. If not, I would either get over it or die and be reborn.

I’d buried the zombie beside the others, and on my return, I noticed that the original grave had a clutch of small white mushrooms growing out of it. Probably best not to eat those. I wanted to give myself more room in my shelter so I could bring in the worktable and use it at night. Rather than using wood to build it out, I dug down.

Digging graves had shown me how easy it would be to clear out a basement. A few taps to the soil with my wooden shovel was enough to harvest one cubic foot of dirt, creating a hole with dimensions that were disturbingly exact. The original shelter quickly became nothing more than a cover for a dirt staircase down into an underground room. I was a little worried about the potential of collapse, so once I had the space cleared out, I put log poles in each corner and reinforced the ceiling with planks. I’d also lowered the firepit so there was no upper level to the shelter.

The bite on my arm was sore and gross, and the process left me exhausted. I cleaned it in the stream as well and left it unbandaged. Fresh air was supposed to be good for the healing process. I’m pretty sure I heard that somewhere.

Some fish would have been nice, but the stream wasn’t deep enough for anything meaningful to have been swimming through it. My belly grumbled at me after a long day of supernatural labor, but I could afford to lose some weight. The biscuits the man had tossed me were dry and hard and tasteless. Eating them involved a lot of chewing and called for extra water, but I felt full after downing only one, and saved the rest.

The firepit was now at the center of my new basement, and the aboveground portion of the shelter was high enough to give the smoke somewhere to go even if the air flow still wasn’t perfect.

Pulling the lever of the worktable with nothing in the crafting grid caused it to convert into a medallion three inches in diameter, even larger than the resource tokens. It made me realize I’d never tried harvesting my tools, so I did the same thing to my sword, which resulted in a similar medallion, engraved with a simple image representing what it was. After a little practice, I found I could slap the sword medallion from one hand to the other, causing it to manifest already in my grip.

It still wasn’t exactly an inventory, but it was the next best thing.

After a long day and no sleep the night before, the thought of having a nap before monsters started appearing out of the shadows was very appealing. I drank water until I felt full, hoping that if nothing else, the need to urinate would wake me before my fire burnt itself out, though I’d also expanded the pit and stacked it with extra logs to ensure a more reliable burn.

When I shut my eyes, I consciously forced myself to relax, trying to get to that fuzzy place where you can rest without going fully asleep. The nap zone. Not that I would have minded going all the way unconscious. I just didn’t think it was in the cards, but I was sicker than I had thought, and hours passed in an instant soon after I lay down.

As with the night before, I could hear the shamblers gathering outside my walls. Now that I had the crafting table inside, I could do something more productive than just keeping watch on the fire. While my supply of resources was far from infinite, I had enough logs and sticks to spare that I felt comfortable experimenting a little.

After wracking my brain for every recipe I could remember from the game, I started with making some wood slabs. Three wood blocks along the bottom line of the crafting grid produced six slabs. A slab was really just half a block, and I made enough of them to cover my dirt steps so they wouldn’t lose their shape when I walked up and down. A single wood plank placed at the center of the grid converted into a small button, a small rectangular prism with a round portion that could be depressed. It was a tremendous loss of raw material, considering the differences in their size, and I had no idea how I was going to use it yet, but it was one more potential tool in my crafting belt, nonetheless.

Fences and fence gates were resource intensive, and I couldn’t remember the placements they required exactly, so I put off making them for now. One thing I really wanted was a chest, and that was one recipe I knew by heart.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Chest, Basic]

This chest, though simple in design, is perfect for storing your hard-earned loot, mysterious artifacts, or that collection of embarrassing leather you’ve been hoarding. It doesn’t come with a lock, so be sure to keep it in a safe place. Treasure attracts thieves like eyeballs attract Endermen.

“Disturbing, as always, System,” I said. The chest was a cube two feet in each dimension, with wooden hinges that opened and shut as smoothly as well-oiled brass. It has an agreeable smell, resiny, and I placed it beside the worktable. I’d wondered what would happen when I crafted large items, but rather than appearing fully manifested, it had come into being already in medallion form, suggesting I wouldn’t have to worry about my table shattering under the weight of a furnace if I ever got the material to make one.

After placing the chest, I stepped back to get a good look at it and immediately felt woozy. My knees trembled, and I placed my hand on the worktable to steady myself. My heart was suddenly racing, and I stood there taking deep, slow breaths until it calmed back down. That wasn’t a good sign. My arm didn’t feel like it was on fire anymore, it felt numb, and the area around the bite was both swollen and bruised. My health bar had dropped by half a heart.

I needed to rest, but I wanted to try one more thing.

The recipe for a sword was one stick in the bottom center, and two wood blocks above it. I tried it without the top wood block, which, as far as I knew, correlated to no item in the game, but I was hoping for a miracle.

The result was a wooden dagger. It looked exactly like the sword, a straight blade with a simple, cross pommel, except in miniature. Once again, the System had given me something that did not exist in the game whose mechanics it mimicked so closely. There had to be other formulas to discover, but that would involve running through a lot of materials. For now, I was satisfied with having a dagger.

The individual logs took a couple of hours to burn down to cinders. It was a rough average, but I needed to sleep if I was going to make it anywhere in this world. I checked on the fire, and built a little pyramid out of logs to ensure it would keep going, watched it for a while, and decided that wasn’t enough. There was always a chance it would burn out, or simply dim enough to create shadows deep enough for a zombie to spawn within.

In a corner of the basement opposite the worktable, I constructed a tiny shelter within the shelter, a box that I would have to crawl inside. A sleeping coffin. I made it longer than it needed to be, but not long enough for two people to fit inside. With an offset plank sticking out past the opening, I could affix a block along the plank in such a way that there was a gap large enough for air to pass, but nothing could reach inside.

As cramped as it was, sealing myself inside of it was oddly comforting. Once again, I passed out shortly after closing my eyes. I freed myself the next morning and shuffled around in a daze, coughing and retching, unable to move my infected arm without severe pain. Rinsing it was an ordeal.

image [https://i.imgur.com/RQxA2w0.png[/img]

It wasn't killing me fast, but it was definitely killing me. I considered heading to the forest for some more resource collection, and then didn’t even try. Maybe the little people would come back with some medicine, but I was too exhausted to work, and didn’t care about finding food. Halfway through a biscuit, I spit it out. My mouth and throat were too dry to eat no matter how much water I drank, and I wasn’t even hungry, so I laid down again.

Hours later, I felt even worse. My joints ached, and my entire body felt filled with lead. The elder sign on my hand was warm. I could have written that off as being part of the fever, but it was also glowing. A faint green light glimmered along the lines of the tattoo, and my status screen had nothing to say about it.

I shuffled around the shelter, organizing my coins and prepping the fire, though the night was still a long way off. With the way I was stumbling around, someone could have mistaken me for a shambler. Nausea doubled me over, and I vomited up the meager contents of my stomach.

Cleaning up the mess seemed to take forever, and before I knew it, darkness was approaching again. There had been no visit from the little folk. Hot and cold. I couldn't think. Everything hurt. Zombie bites were fatal. What a surprise.

Monsters were outside again. My eyes got heavier and heavier. At least it was warm.

The next thing I knew, I was back at my point of origin.