Five

There it was, stretching out before me in either direction, a simple path of packed dirt roughly twenty feet across, presumably making it a road of some kind. It wasn’t straight, but wound lazily back and forth into the distance, disappearing through the coverage of the plant life.

Nudging some of the hard dirt with my toe, I admired the sheer precision of the edge, and how smooth and level the surface was for as far as I could see. It looked very meticulously laid out, with some fairly decent craftsmanship. The dirt itself was packed tightly enough that it didn’t crumble at my touch.

Strange, right? A road out in the Bushlands, the middle of nowhere as far as I knew it, and a high-quality road at that. This dirt path was of better make, and better maintained, than a lot of roads I had been on in my life. It didn’t look very traveled though, since my foot left a slight impression in the dirt and I couldn’t see any other footprints or wheel marks.

It was either relatively new or relatively remote, and both possibilities brought their own concerns. If it was new, that meant I would find something in either direction I traveled; I would find either construction crews or a town. If it was a remote, rarely used road, it would be a bigger gamble in either direction.

I threw my spear over my shoulder and decided left was better than right, because the Spooky Forest was potentially somewhere off to my right, classified as Westish. I had come to the road nearly perpendicular, so it stood to reason that Spooky Forest was over there somewhere, and since my survival instincts told me Spooky Forest was a no-go, I was going the opposite direction.

As I walked, I found myself really wondering about what kind of intelligence I was going to find. It was the first time I had given serious thought to other people here, as most of my time was only spent struggling with the concept of survival and everything that went with that

Were they going to be good or bad? Were they even going to be human? This was a reality obviously set apart from the norm, so it probably wouldn’t be crazy to expect some anthropomorphism or some shit. Catgirls, in my fantasy world? I decided to shelf that particular line of thought and move on to more important things. There could be sentient blocks of concrete for all I knew, so it wouldn’t do me any good to get ahead of myself and build false hopes.

The main issue I could immediately think of when it came to finding other people in this strange place, would be the level of hostility and danger I could realistically expect. That seemed to be a priority to figure out because survival is king, after all.

How would I judge such a thing as danger level when interacting with other sentient species? With limited knowledge, it would have to come down to my own interpretive expectancy of the realities of the intelligence and morality of whatever living thing I encounter. A beast is most likely to attack, a beastman is more likely to reason but probably still fairly aggressive, and a full human is most likely to reason first before enacting violence, barring other variables.

At least I hoped so. So many things could be so very different. There could be lizardmen, spirits, angels and demons, undead, or even things I couldn’t imagine. I had to expect that I had no baseline for anything besides maybe some generous generalizations. Some very, very tentative and open-minded assumptions.

A big variable that I had to consider was the level of technology in any society I encountered. The more advanced technologically and culturally, the less likely they would rip my spine out and use it as a trophy. The more primitive a society, the fewer consequences things like murder and theft had, and the easier it was to get away with it.

Morality-based restraint was something that generally only applied in best-case scenarios. Most restraints from doing something bad lay nearly entirely on societies and their enforcement of a moral code; any bad thing the majority of people would do is more common amongst those who would not be held accountable for their immorality. Vice versa, kindness and altruism are more common in societies that punish immoral acts. I think that’s simply human nature. Or Catgirl nature. Or whatever.

I have faith in people, but I’m not stupid and gullible. You can call me cynical or jaded, but I call myself a realist. An incredibly paranoid realist. I was going to do my best not to get taken advantage of, so I was focused on removing naivety and ignorance as factors in my survival. Caution is a good thing to have an abundance of.

That entire moral debate within myself only took an hour or so, and I was actually kind of surprised by that. I had basically already decided to expect trouble, and I was steeling my resolve to protect myself from whatever hostility might be thrown at me.

Which, brought another question and moral debate. Would I kill something sentient if they meant me harm? Could I kill a man if he had a gun pointed at me? I didn’t actually have an answer to that. I had felt my own tight grip on morality loosen when I accepted the need to kill the hogs for my own survival, but how far would that change really reach? I feel like answering “it depends on the situation” is a bit too wishy-washy to rely on in a life or death situation.

I could only find out the true answer if I were faced with that situation. The most I could do in the meantime was to do my best to avoid being put in a situation like that in the first place through wariness, knowledge, and wit. I decided not to think about it anymore, and just kept moving my legs.

With all inconvenient thoughts put aside, I found myself losing track of time more easily than I had just wandering through the endless randomness of the Bushlands. The road was an endless, unchanging movement in a single, focused direction. It gave me tunnel vision, and I slipped into a routine of walking, practicing magic, and feeding the slimes at night. When I ran low on food, I slipped off the road and hunted a hog. When I ran out of water, I refilled my now multiple water flasks at the little dirt fountains that were inevitably near every hog I found.

The sun passed overhead and ticked away the days for who even knows how long. I had always had trouble keeping track of time, especially when I was focused on repetitious tasks that just ate away at the hours; so it felt like days or weeks or even months, depending on which day I asked myself the question “How long have I been walking?”

It was an unreasonably long amount of time, but it didn’t actually feel like it was time wasted. I was getting pretty good at magic. I had streamlined some of my “killing spells” in my endless repetition of hunting for food, and I was getting much faster at using them instinctively. Mana felt very natural to me at this point, after having used it so consistently for so long. It was a major part of my survival and I nurtured it with something nearing obsession.

As a part of this obsession, I spent nearly every waking moment manipulating it in one way or another, even if it was just keeping a tight grip on it inside of me while I went about my other chores and projects. Have you ever seen those people who hold themselves just an inch above their chairs when they’re sitting, to exercise while they weren’t actually moving? It was kind of similar to that. The magic muscle was strained every moment I could manage, and using that muscle eventually became as easy as breathing.

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Another thing I got even better at was my leatherwork. I had an excess of materials for trial and error, and I used magic even more productively than ever. The seams of my newest batch of clothes were almost invisible now. Having magic to act as a power tool basically gave me access to a mentally controlled sewing machine, and now I had quality and precision, I obtained comfort as well as protection.

Simple clothes that looked like they were made by someone who knew what they were doing, and they were pretty damn durable too. I had taken a few whacks from hogs as I tried out a variety of things against them, and the leather from their hides deflected most attacks that I accidentally let through.

My outfit reminded me of old trappers of the Pacific Northwest America, Lewis and Clark era, who just wore animal skins and lived in isolation in the wilderness. I didn’t have a raccoon for a hat though, just a round piece of leather with the center pulled up and looped around with more leather to be able to slide it over my head and make it stay put. I was very much looking forward to wearing some normal cotton clothes or something, but I was still fairly comfortable in my leathers, so there was no rush.

My backpack had also evolved into a wood braced frame lined with leather and many pockets were sewn into it. I tried to mimic the towering camping backpacks I had seen in my previous life, and it worked out pretty well. I had space, a lot of space, and nearly all of it was stuffed full of excess leather and choice pieces of bone and horn, along with my little slime companions.

The slimes hadn’t changed much more that I could tell, all three only growing maybe an inch in size. They all had their own specially made pockets on the back of my bag, made from strips of leather as a sort of cage, just so they could breathe and see while I walked. It was like poking holes in the lid of a jar of worms, and so far they hadn’t tried to escape any container I put them into, so I spoiled them a bit.

My little amigos had stopped trying to eat me, which tickled my pet-like fascination with them to no end. When I plopped food down in front of them, they eagerly devoured it. Holding them or playing with them, hungry or fully fed, had zero consequence that I could tell, so I did it often. I even fell asleep with them in my arms a couple of times, and never had a dissolving problem. They apparently had become familiar with me and no longer saw me as food.

The amiga though, Meat, was a different story. She didn’t try to eat me anymore, and seemed as docile and familiarized with me as the other two. She was, however, a little scary when faced with any other living thing.

I had been using her after hunting to help me clean up the corpses and materials when I was done harvesting them. Once, when I had taken one of those rare hits from my own carelessness during experimentation, the hog had knocked me down. I’m pretty sure I clipped it in the neck with the tip of my spear as I fell, but it couldn’t have been more than a scratch, just enough to make it bleed. Meat escaped her sack when I fell across it and unintentionally unwound the drawstring holding it closed.

It turns out that slimes are way more predatory after you feed them raw meat, they seem to develop a real aggressive instinct. While Meat seemed perfectly docile around me, as soon as she “sensed” wounded prey near her she actually leaped on it and started feeding on it.

She made quick work of it too, bless her little slimy soul. She showed an evolved predatory instinct and went straight for the bloody jugular. Within just the time it took me to recover and stand back up, any skin the hog had that was touching Meat was completely gone. Another few seconds and most of the muscle was gone. The hog, rolling around in the dirt trying to dislodge the slime, went from screaming, to gurgling, to quiet thrashing. Meat had efficiently dissolved the entire throat of the hog within thirty seconds, and the hog died shortly afterward.

When I walked up to her, I couldn’t really tell what she was doing as she was just sort of pulsating. It wasn’t until I saw the little red spiderweb of veins being pulled into her pink pudding layer and rapidly dissolving into the surrounding tissue(?) that I realized she was sucking out its blood.

I had been using her to clean up the blood when I was bleeding them out manually. Removing the blood makes the meat taste better and last longer, and I had no purpose for the blood, so I just let her have it. It was always one of the first steps in my process of butchering.

She had killed the hog, dissolved the area around the artery in its neck, and sucked out its blood. As I watched, she finished up and detached herself from the corpse, and lazily crawled back over to me before becoming passive. She sat there like a hunting dog at her master's feet.

This had floored me. Meat ate meat, yet she showed restraint and stopped eating as soon as the hog was done and her job of blood-letting was complete. It was like I had accidentally trained a slime. The possibilities that arose from such a thing were incredibly interesting.

This was the first moment where I consciously decided that I was attached to these goobers. The slimes elevated from amusing diversion to full-blown pets that I could have a give-and-take relationship with.

For the first time in what could have easily been months of living in complete isolation, I actually had something of a companion that seemed to recognize me and accept the benefits of coexistence. I was thrilled.

I tried many different methods of training, to teach them tricks, analyzed their behavior, and tried to find personality quirks. I tried anything I could think of, and it was a marvelous way to pass the time as we traveled.

Bone and Meal were quite lazy when compared to Meat. Meal didn’t seem to care one way or another about anything that wasn’t the cooked meat I fed him. It was like domestication in that way had rendered him completely dependant and apathetic. Well, base slimes already seemed pretty apathetic, but Meal just took it even further. Meal just lived at his own pace, having an acute case of cloud envy. I treated him like a lap dog, a comfort creature.

After throwing Bone at a hog, I found he would defend himself if a hog stepped on him when it tried to reach me, but that was about as far as his aggression went. The way Bone defended himself was interesting, though. At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at it, Bone just sort of blew itself up like a pufferfish, a ball of spikes. The hog’s legs were skewered and it was rendered mostly immobile while I finished it off. Bone then ignored the corpse and climbed back into his pocket on my pack.

Meat spent a lot of time as near to me as possible, she even had a spot on my shoulder that I would let her perch as I headed ever-eastward. After a short while of feeding her excess little bits of meat as I was carving up corpses, she picked up the habit of hopping down to suck out the blood from the corpse and then climbing back up onto my shoulder when she was done. There she would perch and wait for me to feed her choice bits of meat and such.

I would press the bits against her surface with my fingers until they just slipped right through the membrane. I even tried letting my fingers stay within her interior just as a test of safety, and I never once felt a tingling of her eating me. The blood and meat coating my fingers were removed as surely as if a dog had just licked my hand clean. Even in her interior she could differentiate and choose what to dissolve.

Gaining a hunting dog, a guard dog, and a lap dog, I felt fairly comfortable with my lot in life. My little slimes were amazing creatures, and I was so grateful to have them. My quality of life felt pretty good in general, considering.

And so I walked like that for another unknown length of time. My beard was full, my hair was getting long enough that I took the time to carve a comb out of a branch, and I used some leather strips for a hair tie to keep it out of my face.

Traveling from sunup to sundown also no longer exhausted me. I could just keep walking until I wanted to sleep, without my legs hurting. I seemed to just be more physically fit in general, even the heftiness of my pack diminished over time. I didn’t notice any real changes to my physique beyond appearing not quite so soft as I had when I arrived, but apparently, all the exercise was good for me.

Things were looking up. My mood was at an all-time high. My natural pessimism rarely reared its ugly head, and the silver lining was never easier to spot. I even took to humming at times as I traveled the ol’ dusty trail.

Naturally, when you stop expecting the worst is when the universe itself decides to step in and give a fairly harsh reminder of the truth: No matter where you go, life plays out roughly the same, and you can’t escape the ugly, dark, cruel reality of it.

That harsh reality was going to be shoved right into my face as soon as I approached the end of the Bushlands and discovered my very first humans in this world.