Chapter 2: Lessons about the Overworld

My newfound abilities are… intriguing, to say the least. As far as I can tell, it uses none of the mana I'm used to feeling, ever since I first discovered my potential in my second life. Yet it also seems to have arbitrary limits or strange effects that I can't make sense of. For instance, something as mundane as picking up a clump of grass becomes a herculean effort not to just turn them all into seeds (if I manage to get anything at all), or if the grass is low enough, a full cubic meter of dirt. It takes a lot of effort just to pick up the grass, and again, too low to the ground? I also pick up the dirt the grass is stuck on.

Aside from that, I discovered yet another quirk to my existence. As if I didn't need any more torment in my life. My attempt to store the newly collected seeds in one of my pockets instead made them disappear, instead of going into my pockets. Yet I still felt the seeds on my person, so when I made a slight movement to find them and take them out, they re-appeared in my hand. So, on top of altering reality itself and creating matter out of nothing,which is not scientifically or magically possible, I have some sort of pocket dimension as, what, inventory space?

And what did I gain from all this, in terms of survival? Some wood and some unknown seeds, probably just grass seeds. And absolutely no food. Oh, and I split a tree in half horizontally, and it hasn't decided to fall down and crush me. That too. Well, I'm not one to leave a job incomplete, so I took down the rest of the tree. And now the leaves are the only thing remaining. Now, do they… deconstruct? Yeah, that's what I'll go with. Do they deconstruct like the wood does, or like grass?

Before I could answer that, a patch of the leaves withered away, dropping a bright red object on the top of my head. I half-muttered some curse before I looked down at what hit me.

An apple. Food.

I hastily picked it up, pushing out the thoughts of my mind and bit into the apple. The flavor was unnaturally sweet, reminding me more of the apples from the 21st century rather than what I'd expect from (assumedly) Prehistoric America. Infact, I don't think the Empire had this good of an apple. This world keeps getting stranger and stranger. An oak tree that produces strangely sweet and pure red apples, somehow. As I bite further and further down onto the apple, I notice something else strange about it. There's no seeds. The core is solid fruit, all the way through.

Before I knew it, the apple was gone. Completely. Not a trace of it left, and I was moderately satisfied.

With food done, I looked up towards the sky, and saw the sun approaching the western horizon. Daylight is waning, and yet… I feel as awake as I was in the void, or when I first arrived. Might as well add "never needs to sleep" to the list of quirks that this body has.

How long did I spend in the void? It didn't feel all that long, but with the increasing amount of violations to the laws of reality that this body, and likely this world, creates, I could very well have been in there for years. It'd certainly explain the matured body…

Regardless, the sun began to slip below the horizon, and the moon rose from behind the trees. Getting food may not be as difficult now thanks to the oak tree apples, but my chances of finding an animal is scarce. What would I even hunt with? I don't have any tools, and all I have are some wooden planks and some seeds.

Wooden planks can be used to-

Ah. Right. The ability to bend reality to my will, to some unknown extent. Truly, the market applications for such abilities, even just one of them, would be astronomically beneficial. But there is no market here, so for now I have to make do with simple survival.

Apparently, I can only use what I can describe as a 2x2 grid to construct things without any aid, but that is not sufficient for most tool construction. Using four cubic meters of the wooden planks I have gathered, and presumably destroying most of it in the process (because of course my abilities let me destroy matter as well as create it) and creating a table meant to expand upon my construction ability. Instead of the 2x2 grid I seem to have built into my… soul? Body? The table has a 3x3 grid, which is apparently enough to construct various structures and tools that I somehow didn't know about before.

For some reason four tools immediately came to mind. Obviously, a shovel, as it is the first step I can take towards modern civilization, and an axe to bring down more trees. It seems my ability also knows of the configuration for a pickaxe and a hoe. Yet, when I prodded for a spear, nothing came up.

That… simply doesn't make sense. Wouldn't the method be very similar to what I just did with the tools? Ah, but the most obvious answer is already taken by the shovel, and yet… Wouldn't two sticks diagonally placed, with a cubic meter (what a waste of matter) of plank at the end-

New construction method identified: Spear.

…Oh. It is that simple, huh? That… changes things. The more and more I understand these abilities, the closer I am to understanding what exactly I am. Someone more irrational would consider themselves a god with these abilities, but I know better, based on my own rational logic and that I am definitely not some knock-off Being X.

Now armed and equipped, I stepped away from the table a bit more confident in my own chances of survival. Only to smell something I am all too familiar with. A corpse.

Turning around to the source of the smell, I just barely notice a green figure lunging at me, giving me enough time with my mental enhancements to move out of the way. The figure slammed into a nearby tree with a wet noise, leaving blood on the tree as it settled on the ground.

The thing let out a low growl as I took a better look at it. A human corpse, turned green and rotten, with tattered clothes, that somehow was able to move about after death. Another thing to add to the list of irrational oddities in this world.

The zombie, for lack of a better word, began to stand up, and twisted its head to face an empty eye socket at me. Well, assuming the fiction of my first world is correct, this thing will want to eat me, so logically the next step would be to kill it. Something I have far too much experience with.

I thrust the wooden spear into the zombified remains, pinning its shoulder to the tree. It let out some foul noise and tried to scratch out at me, but I moved out of the way. Seeing little reason to keep it dangerous and active, I moved to eliminate the threat with a single crushing foot.

One boot covered in gore later, the corpse returned to its naturally unmoving state. I removed the spear from the body, jerking back enough for the arrow to soar right by my head.

Shit! That wasn't from a cor- I thought before my eyes widened at the person who had shot at me… or the bones of them.

Logically speaking, a skeleton is neither scary, nor should it be able to walk around on two legs, stay together, and shoot a bow.

So what the fuck is this?! I mentally cried as I ducked down to avoid the second arrow from the skeletal archer. Definitely not in Prehistoric America, then. Probably.

I sprinted towards the skeleton, dodging another arrow that it had pulled from.. Somewhere. As it began to rack another arrow, I drove the spear into its skull, detaching it from the rest of the skeleton, and slammed into the bones before me.

Predictably, the skeleton shattered apart, several of the bones just falling apart due to brittleness of age. The bow snapped apart as it hit the ground, but I likely wouldn't have been able to use it much.

Just when I thought I was safe, growling filled the woods. The sound of a bow stretching followed suit.

"Curse you, Being X!"

"Fünf…"

The face of the walking corpse suddenly became bisected by my spear after I threw it at the fourth undead creature in the past quarter-hour.

"Sechs…"

My shovel appeared in my hand as I tumbled into the skeleton, followed by a mad swing at another corpse.

"Sieben…FUCK!"

I went for my spear buried in the zombie's face, only to curse out as an arrow slammed into my shoulder. Pain went through my body, and the sudden impact caused my arm to jerk and snap apart the spear I was reaching for.

"I just made that!" I yelled out to no-one in particular, swinging my shovel at the nearest shambling figure and cleaving it in two. There were still quite a few undead monsters around, and even though I could barely put up more than a mental enhancement, my mana felt surprisingly low, even though I didn't even use it that much.

Avoiding another flurry of arrows, I made my way through the woods, fighting a retreat back towards the shore. I had to cleave through a few more undead monsters, but at this point I was running entirely off of adrenaline. I felt my legs begin to slow once I broke through the treeline, and not just because another arrow slammed into my calf (which earned that skeleton an axe to the skull), but also because I felt extremely fatigued.

Just a lit- Agh!

A bite tore through my arm, cutting through the uniform like butter. For undead, those teeth are sharp. I ripped away my arm from the rotting creature, taking the mouth of the thing with me, and tried to press on.

I can get out of here, I have to. It's the only logi-

Sizz….

"What now-"

BOOM!

I was suddenly thrown out across the shore, tumbling in the sand along with some assorted gore that I wasn't entirely sure was all from the undead I was trying to stage a fighting retreat against. I couldn't move at all, likely from whatever exploded. What the hell could that have even been? I felt no mana from it- Did I? There… might've been something…

My vision began to blur, some dim part of my mind registering the sand becoming red with blood. Light blossomed from below what I could observe while stuck on my side on the ground, and the shadows of the undead and the trees began to creep back towards the forest. I know what this is.

Death.

Again.

Dammit, Being X! I didn't even get to do anything yet!

…Logically, I should wake up in yet another life. Yet… that's not going to happen, is it?

Damn, I'm getting tired…

"...the tail end of the Dark Era was truly a harsh world to be in. Monsters were still an extreme threat, many of the Villagers were helpless against the Illager menaces, and many of our modern luxuries were not yet invented. It was this world that she came into, and it was this world that she defeated. Many times she had fallen, like so many others who had tried to restore the lost kingdoms of old, but only she was capable of returning, like those who now live with mere fragments of their power. Whether it was due to her own sheer will, the blessings that her kind have, or the past she had before she came to us, she never failed to strive for excellence."

"It is this refusal to back down from becoming the best one truly can be that has shaped the Reich of today. Even now, she still strives for the very best in all she does. We can only hope to follow in her footsteps."

The Dawn of the Silver Era, by Urie Nozymas of Azumagin

194th Year of the Silver Era