“Ugh,” I groaned, squinting my eyes and looking away from the daylight above me. As my surroundings blurred and shifted back into the bush I now recalled that I had found and taken refuge inside the night before, I sat up and inhaled sharply. What was that? I wondered in a daze. I struggled to keep ahold of the memories of where I had just been. Vestiges of an unremembered experience floated about in my head, continuity that was implied but missing, and that fact alarmed me. How did I get there? How am I back here? My mind spun in circles briefly as I searched for answers.
The location that I had found myself in was one from my memories, I realized. The forest was one that I had been to many times. The deer itself was also from my memories, as were the feelings of following it. Mikkil was anomalous, I wasn't sure why he was there, but I knew for a fact that he was dead. I shot him myself, just not in that scenario, I thought, was that some kind of feedback from my working memory to long-term memory? Was it some kind of virtual space? I definitely don't have any identifiable wireless equipment. Perhaps a digital attack of some kind? The fact that I had unwillingly entered what appeared to be an inactive state in my body was a problem too.
As I gathered my stones and finished up my stone axe a thought passed through my mind and I winced. Don't tell me this body was made to accurately simulate sleep too, I said to myself, there's a point at which accuracy to the target species becomes more detrimental than beneficial. I hated to admit it to myself, but it made sense. Warbreed often dreamed as they slept, though they only slept every few days. As far as they were willing to tell, warbreed dreams were usually about either combat scenarios that they had experienced or combat scenarios they expected to experience. The dreams served the purpose of allowing them to further hone their skills by engaging in the biological equivalent of simulated combat.
Outside the bush my surroundings hadn't changed at all. I gripped my now complete and very sharp stone axe in my left hand as I searched around for something to use it on. I have no idea how long it's going to take to get to a road or some other landmark, I said to myself, I should make the essentials first. I headed out to the north again, passing by groups of scampering mammal-like creatures and swatting yet more mysterious flying insects until I found what I was looking for. A small creek flowed over some sediment, lined with tall reeds. Before I could do much else, I found myself compelled to drink from the flowing water, cooling my body and replenishing lost liquids. Using my stone axe, I chopped as many of the reeds out at the root as I could, stacking biological matter high behind me.
When I finished I looked up and saw that it had yet to reach midday. Bringing the considerable pile of harvested reeds over to a nearby tree for shade, I began the arduous task of removing the fibers from them. I had performed this task so many times in my life that no thought was required of me. My hands deftly pulled and stripped, removing the parts of the reeds that I wanted and discarding the rest as chaff. Ground insects began pilfering from my pile of waste, but when they reached the reeds I had yet to process I swatted them to warn them away from it. I killed a few as well, leaving their corpses nearby to dissuade the others.
Twist, reverse twist, twist, reverse twist... my mind played out the thoughts rhythmically as I began turning the large pile of fiber in front of me into cordage. As I worked my thoughts did not wander, instead they bled out into static save for the brief moments wherein I had to kill more insects for trying to pilfer from the useful parts of my harvest. I worked my way through around a quarter of the pile before looking up again, having produced a cord that appeared to be around ten meters in length. Using knotting skills I turned that cord into a crude netted bag and put the rest of the fibers in it for later use.
The feeling from my stomach was now familiar even if it was no less irritating than before. Hungry again? I sighed, checking my bars. The green bar was higher than it was the last time, just under one half. The purple bar had apparently replenished overnight somehow and was sitting past two-thirds. I don't understand this, I thought, last time I got hungry they were lower. Is there even a proper relation between these bars and my power level? With an odd-feeling mental gesture I willed the green bar into giving me more information, thinking that it was worth a try. To my surprise the bar split into dozens of separate bars, all at different levels. None of the new bars had any sort of segmentation, and a few of them were low. And of course none of them have any labels, I grunted.
After tying up the net containing the fibers securely with another small portion of the cordage I had created, I hung them from one of the tree branches nearest to the bush I was using for shelter. Using the remaining cordage which had been cut off by my stone axe, I started to tie up some simple snares. Never thought I'd be using these stupid warbreed tricks, I thought. Snares were effective at catching animals whose intelligence was at or below the 6th local energy-intellect minimum, and from what I had seen none of the animals in this forest exceeded that level. I suppose I should count myself lucky that this area is devoid of semi-sapients, I thought.
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I ended up creating five snares, which I set up in areas that appeared to have small animal footprints. It took a few tries to get the first snare set properly because of just how springy the local plants were, but once that hurdle had been cleared the remaining snares were easy. I wasn't sure what the animals subsisted on, so I just grabbed some random berries and seeds from the nearby plants for bait. I tried eating the berries, but my mouth warned me instantly that they were inedible. The seeds were edible but not particularly nutritious. Heading back to the bush, I pulled out some more of the fibers and worked on cordage while I waited for some unfortunate animals to become my dinner.
A few hours later my stomach was bothering me enough that I found it almost impossible to continue weaving the plant fibers into anything useful. My hands were shaking so badly that my fingers kept slipping from the cord as I worked it. I tried to configure myself so that I wouldn't sweat, but as was becoming the norm I had no option to do so. Looking up at the quarter of the fibers that still remained unprocessed, I sighed and got to my feet. Tying the remainder of the cord around my chest I set out to check the snares.
Not a single animal? I asked nobody in particular. It took quite a large amount of will to keep from groaning in exasperation. As my hunger nagged on me further I figured out the problem: the smaller ground mammals were most likely nocturnal. I hadn't seen any of them during the day except in the morning, and those skittered away and hid at the sight of me. It was possible that I had left some kind of chemical marker on the snares which was spooking them, but I found it less likely than a simple mismatch of active hours. Well, I could eat more seeds, I suggested to myself, and as if to answer my stomach sent a new wave of hunger over me.
The seeds were not filling and a pain to find in any significant amount. After another hour of ripping pods off of trees and opening them up I had only gathered a handful of seeds, and by the time I consumed them they barely sated me at all. Damn it, what else did creators eat? I thought angrily, racking my brain for answers. My eyes fell upon a nearby root with a bulge in the center of it, and it prompted a memory of another foodstuff. I scrambled over to the plant and ripped it out of the ground, finding that it had a chain of small tubers along its root structure. I tore off the bottom one and, after doing the minimum to clean it off, popped it into my mouth. While it was not as good as the fruit, my mouth certainly didn't disagree with the nutritional content.
The sun went down a few more degrees as I went on a pogrom against the tuber plants, tearing them up with reckless abandon and consuming them. Once my stomach started giving me damage warnings I stopped eating but continued extracting the plants, storing them between the layers of cord across my chest for later usage. When I noticed that it was finally getting dark I headed back in the direction of the bush I had rested in. I tied up the plants and hung them from another tree branch, then sat down and took some moments to allow my digestive system to calm down. Looking around and thinking, I spotted a stick which would make a good handle for my axe. I'll get up and grab it in a few minutes, I said to myself.
Figuring out how to attach my stone axe to a handle was tricky since I didn't have the ability to create a good drill for making holes in stone. I hadn’t made the handle of the axe with mounting in mind either, which made trying to embed it into the handle a poor idea in its current state. Looking over to the other battered piece of flint, I set about the arduous task of reshaping the handhold so that it would fit a handle. While doing that I also broke off a longer, thinner piece of flint to use for drilling the wood, and by the time true nightfall was upon me I had successfully attached the axe to the handle. It wasn't perfectly secure, but it would provide me with much greater leverage than I had had before and allow better use of my energy stores.
I stood up to go back inside the bush since the wind was beginning to cool me, and found myself bent over very quickly with damage warnings exploding from my lower body. What's happening to me? I thought frantically as I checked myself. There was no blood spilling from me, so I knew I hadn't been shot or struck. A pressure felt like it was building inside my stomach, and working on pure instinct I stumbled away from the bush and into the forest. I have to get this out of me, NOW, I thought.
I found the spot where I had voided the waste mass from the fruit I had consumed. My crippled nose could still detect the chemical warnings from the matter on the ground telling me not to get too close, but at the moment the feeling in my gut was dominant. Squatting down, a great unpleasantness occurred beneath me and my body groaned out as if in pain before I could stop it. After the process had finished I felt as though I had been drained of half of my battery power, and several parts of me were raw from contact with what appeared to be a weak acid. Stumbling back to the bush, I doubled over once more and my body heaved, pushing out more wet chunks of biological matter from my mouth onto the ground along with whatever manner of acid was used in my stomach. I mentally noted that the total time the matter had been inside me meant that I did extract some energy from it, then pushed my way into the bush and collapsed.
Mercifully, there was no dream.