This is definitely not a village. I had landed in a snow bank, in one direction the snow rose to be about the height of my head, and in the opposite it fell down to only a few centimeters underneath the tall trees there. I must have been sent into the simulation at the edge of a clearing in a forest.

I struggled my way out of the snow and into the shelter of the trees. My robe was wet from where my body heat had melted the snow I was in, and it had already started to freeze. And I was lacking shoes, which became obviously necessary as I stood on the sharp edge of a tree root. This was a terrible start.

I could sense that Chantelle was around 10 kilometers away at an angle into the forest. My Chosen Person Sense was also giving me an indication of what she was feeling, which was safe and warm but also strongly startled. There was no way that I was going to be able to walk 10 kilometers as I was now. I struggled to make it 10 meters. So long as she is safe I need to work on my own situation.

I started to shake from the cold, full body shivers, and my hands and feet had already gone numb. Matter manipulation could manipulate heat, but everything around me was pretty well frozen already. I will die in a matter of minutes if I don't figure something out, and the cold is affecting my thinking.

I stumbled over to a fallen tree. My shaking was getting less severe, and I was starting to feel warm and sleepy, which couldn't be a good sign. I could sense my body heat getting less and less.

Wait, I could sense my body heat. I tried to focus that sense and push the heat into a focused point on a sheltered part of the tree I was resting against. The spot on the tree got hot, but my body heat was falling more rapidly. It was getting harder and harder to resist falling asleep, everything dimming as my whole world shrank down to a small piece of bark in front of my face.

I almost didn't recognise it when it caught fire. My sluggish thoughts took a moment before I started pulling heat from the fire and warming my body directly, pushing it into the blood at my core.

It took a few minutes of carefully managing the fire before I started to warm back up to what I felt were safe levels. I found the most efficient way of burning the wood was to keep it at embers, pull heat into myself to warm me, and then push heat into a focused point next to the embers to grow them. I could feel my hands and feet again, and I could move my hands where before they were stuck clenched into fists. I'd come scarily close to dying, and this didn't feel like a simulation, a game. Interface referred to these simulations as lives, and I can see why, they just feel real.

I was still losing a lot of heat to the below freezing temperatures, but I was keeping ahead of it by selectively burning the fallen tree when a small disaster happened. The snow on top of the log was melted by the heat I was generating, and it got past a tipping point and flooded the embers I was making. After the embers were out the water froze into ice nearly immediately. But I understood the process now and managed to get a new patch of embers started before my body heat fell too far.

I ate some snow to get a drink of water, and pushed a little extra heat into my teeth when they got chilled. I'm not sure what I will do for food, but I'm not at all hungry for the moment.

The next problem I need to solve is a self-sustaining heat source. Working with the embers is fine, and it definitely saved my life, but I have to pay constant attention to it. Building a fire might be the way to go, but everything is covered in snow. I might be able to set a tree on fire, but I would have to be careful not to start a forest fire. And I wasn't sure how far I could pull heat from or push heat to.

Until now I had been right next to my embers, cycling the heat through me and then back into the log. I took a few steps back and I could still easily sense the heat. Pulling on the heat I got much less energy, and pushing energy back into the log as heat did much less. Moving back and testing how much I could pull I stopped getting any energy from the embers when I was at around three meters away from them.

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I needed to make more progress, and it felt as though Matter Manipulation offered a lot of options, but cycling energy to and from embers and keeping myself warm wasn't leaving me any chance to try the options out. I would need to take some risks.

I walked over to the edge of the clearing, the snow getting deeper as I went, and picked out a tree. There weren't any trees that didn't touch other trees, they were all large with trunks a meter thick or more.

Standing next to my tree I put my hand on its trunk and pushed heat into it. There was some resistance to the energy, which I took to be from the tree being a living thing.

After a few moments, and enough energy from my heat to bring me close to being dangerously cold again, the tree bark caught fire. I pulled some of the heat to warm myself again, using the rest to accelerate the fire. I was forced to step back as the fire suddenly took off, racing up the trunk and into the branches. The snow on the branches melted and then evaporated, not slowing the fire at all.

My tree's branches were touching the branches from three other trees, and if they go up like this tree is then I will be in trouble.

I started sweating as I pulled the heat from the fire through me, dumping it around me anywhere I could into the air, snow, and ground. The fire slowed down, but it was still inching its way out towards the other trees.

The amount of energy I was getting from the burning tree was much more than I was expecting. What else could I do with my Matter Manipulation power... Expand a substance by duplicating it, no. Moving heat, no, I'm already doing that. Pushing things... that could work. I already knew I could focus heat to a point, if I could do the same with pushing but narrow it to make a blade...

I pushed out with my power against the tree. It felt similar to pushing heat, and I could pull heat for energy and push force with that energy at the same time. I pulled more heat from the fire pushing the tree hard enough for it to make groaning noises.

I narrowed my focus, trying to push a line of force through the trunk. With a snapping sound a jagged cut went straight through the meter thick trunk. I pushed with a broad amount of force against the whole tree, pushing it into the clearing and away from the other trees. It sank into the snow, though with the snow being at my head height in the clearing I couldn't see most of the tree. And from what I could see, the fire was still burning.

Pulling the heat from the fire I could reach I pushed against the snow around me and found it was very easy to move compared to the tree. Shoving the snow to the sides to uncover the ground, I found dirt and dead grass.

I worked my way out along the burning tree, pushing the snow to clear a two meter path, compressing it into walls. By the time I was done I was covered in mud and I had a rough area around the tree forty meters long by ten meters wide. The top of the tree had made it about halfway into the clearing from what I could see of the trees on the other side. I compacted down the snow in one of my snow walls to make some stairs up. From there I could see that the clearing I had started next to was roughly rectangular, eighty meters by one hundred meters. With two meters of loosely packed snow over the whole area, from what I could tell. That is a lot of snow.

I cut off a chunk of burning trunk from my tree to use as an energy source and pushed it the few meters over to the next tree.

Redistributing the heat from the burning log so that it burnt faster and hotter, I pulled in all of its heat and pushed it into a force blade to cut through the meter thick trunk of the new tree. It snapped through and I pushed the whole tree into the clearing as well. A squirt of clear oil sprayed out from the cut trunk and when it hit the fire of my burning chunk of tree trunk it caught fire itself.

That explained why the tree went up in flames so quickly, it's filled with flammable oil. As cold as it was it would make sense for the trees to be using oil instead of water, water freezes solid in seconds here. And it makes them a much better fuel source for me.

I probably could push the snow out of the entire clearing and into the forest, but I didn't want to, there was a much simpler way. Testing it with my new tree heat source, I set it on fire and used it's intense heat to melt the snow in a large area around it. It took a lot of energy, the snow first turning to water and then to steam, causing a growing fog bank. But there wasn't any shortage of the trees.

Next up, some sort of shelter.