Chapter 6: Not Everyone Survived the Morning

[Regional Channel  -  Sector 666, Hollowbriar Forest]

[9,983 / 10,000]

Serayne’s gaze locked onto the counter, ignoring the messages scrolling below for a moment. Not long ago, it had displayed a full ten thousand. Now, seventeen people were gone.

She didn't know what had happened to them, but finding a comforting explanation for a dwindling headcount was hard in a world whose welcome message had consisted almost entirely of dire warnings.

Setting the bread aside, she felt the satisfaction of her morning haul give way to darker thoughts - especially when she remembered her own nighttime descent for the crate and those eyes gleaming in the brush.

A single morning… and that grace period of theirs is still active.

Until now, danger had taken the shape of shadows in the woods, cryptic prompts, and grim possibilities she preferred not to linger on. The counter above the chat laid it bare with brutal simplicity.

Seventeen people hadn't even had the chance to start their new lives properly, yet only a short while ago she had been laughing as she bounced off the walls of her cabin, as if the mere ability to float meant everything else had ceased to be a problem.

Swiping her finger across the screen, she returned to the feed, reading more carefully this time and tuning out the posts that offered nothing beyond curses or boasts.

[I’m starving. Did anyone find a crate? Can someone spare even a bite of food?]

[Go outside and look instead of sitting on the channel all morning. Crates actually exist.]

[Online begging made it all the way to Elyndra.]

[My shelter is in a tree, like thirty meters off the ground! How am I supposed to get down?!]

[Check for vines. You can climb down using them on mine, just be careful - not all of them hold.]

[There are wolves in the forest, I saw a pack together. Watch where you step.]

[So that’s probably what was prowling under my entrance last night. I thought it was some magical monstrosity.]

Serayne glanced toward the door, wondering for a second whether the nocturnal shapes she had seen really had been wolves. Still, she wasn't about to consider a pair of glowing eyes in the pitch black as positive identification.

Even if they looked familiar, she had no clue how native beasts differed from Asterra’s wildlife, and a label thrown around by a stranger in chat clarified very little.

The next post, however, banished thoughts of predators and drew her closer to the console.

[Don't drink water from the stream. I had some this morning and now I can't leave my makeshift toilet.]

[What? Why?]

[The water’s crystal clear though.]

[You have a toilet? How the hell do you already have a toilet?]

Serayne straightened up on instinct. While she had been subsisting on bottled drinks from the crates, she had toyed with the idea of heading down to the stream to wash up and rinse out her clothes.

The sight of clean water shimmering in the sunlight had been one of the morning's brighter discoveries. Glancing down at her soiled sleeve, she frowned, wondering if she had to scrap that plan as well.

Right, but what's actually wrong with it?

She scrolled down, trying to find an answer, but the chat had already derailed in that inevitable direction whenever someone brought up stomach trouble.

[I found a supply crate.]

[Congrats, but where did you get a toilet?]

[Crate had bread, water, and wet wipes. You can figure out the rest.]

[If you had a bottle, why drink from the stream?]

[Because I found the bottle afterward!]

[Will you trade the bread for two units of materials?]

[I'll sell you the crate after I'm done using it if you ask me again.]

Serayne let out an exasperated breath through her nose, unsure whether she was more annoyed by the sheer chaos or the fact that the most vital detail was still missing amid the chatter.

Only when someone asked about the water again did the afflicted woman share something that actually mattered.

[I checked my status when I started feeling sick. Got a warning about excessive mana saturation in the body.]

[So there’s too much of it in the water?]

[I drank some too and I'm totally fine.]

[Maybe it depends on the amount or your stats?]

[How should I know? I'm not a researcher, I'm sitting on a crate regretting all my life choices, leave me alone for a minute!]

[On the supply throne.]

[Someone finally put the full kit to use.]

The next few posts were mostly jokes, so Serayne paused the feed and reread the warning about physiological status, trying to separate hard facts from speculation.

Worldheart had mentioned that even ambient air was steeped in mana, so its presence in the water wasn't particularly shocking. But clearly, breathing ambient air and chugging mana-dense fluids didn't produce the same physiological effects.

Maybe that's why they gave us food from Asterra…

So we wouldn't start day one eating something our bodies can't process yet.

She couldn't be certain if that was the reason, and a single secondhand account hardly explained the workings of an entire ecosystem, but the warning was concrete enough that she had no desire to test it herself.

Washing remained a separate dilemma - no one had mentioned whether mere skin contact triggered a similar reaction. For now, she decided to put off a full bath rather than mistake an absence of warnings for a guarantee of safety.

Looking toward the crate of beverages, she felt far more grateful for the bottled tea than when she had first unpacked it.

She was just about to return to her food when a barrage of curses lit up the feed - so lengthy and creative that Serayne found herself reading in reluctant awe, wondering how much bile one had to stockpile to dedicate that much effort to flaming a single person.

The author’s portrait showed hair wrapped in a bandana, short horns, and a dark crimson mark across the right side of her face. Yet instead of explaining what had happened, her next few posts focused entirely on wishing an unwholesome death upon someone.

Only under pressure from other users did she finally drop a name - one Serayne recognized from the previous night's chat about tools.

[Watch out for Jamera Bellmont! That scammer promised to trade tools with me, took my pickaxe, and never handed over her axe!]

Serayne paused mid-chew. She remembered the woman with low Spirit who intended to stick to logging, and the willing pickaxe owner.

At the time, their exchange had seemed like one of the few sensible arrangements on the channel. Now, it had ended just as so many unsecured promises do.

So the axe stayed with its owner, and the pickaxe found a new home…

Splendid cooperation…

She didn't know how they had handled the trade, but if one had handed over her tool first on pure good faith, she had created an opportunity someone was all too eager to seize.

Serayne thought of the power-of-attorney documents she had signed for Yvera, and slowly lowered the bread from her lips, losing any appetite for feeling superior over someone else's gullibility.

Before Jamera could reply - if she intended to at all - another user jumped into the fray.

[Asara Senn calling someone a scammer? Is this the same Asara who did time two years ago for extortion?]

[Look who’s talking, Nalia Voss. What happened, smuggling stopped paying the bills so you turned into the moral police?]

[At least I don't have to bolt from the logging camp every time an inspector shows up, Wendra.]

[Look at all the familiar faces! Funny, I didn't spot you yesterday.]

[Shut it, Bira. You still owe me money.]

[You planning to collect here too, Capra? With what, a scary glare?]

The thread devolved immediately. Users began calling out names, dredging up old grievances, and airing dirty laundry Serayne had definitely not anticipated during a quiet meal.

One brought up hijacked shipments, another forged paperwork, while a third threatened to track down someone's shelter. Scattered in between were comments from bystanders openly entertained by the drama.

[What kind of sector is this? A forest or a criminal convention?]

[Worldheart probably wanted to see what happens when you lock all these people in one pen.]

[I just wanted to gather some wood, and now I'm reading that half my neighbors have criminal records.]

[Taking note of your faces. If I run into any of you, it won't be pretty.]

[Then come find me. Crawl through the console if you're so tough.]

[Asterra had universal laws for a reason, and you lot still act like everything belongs to you!]

[The laws stayed on Asterra. Out here, watch your pickaxe.]

Serayne pinched the bridge of her nose, briefly wishing the freeze-frame button could also freeze people’s urge to type such nonsense.

She couldn't tell how many accusations were true, how many were petty payback, and how many were spun on the spot. Yet the sheer number of people recognizing one another and the casual ease with which past crimes were discussed was more than enough to stoke an uneasy tension.

Theft, extortion, smuggling, fraud, poaching, arson, and forged documents cropped up so often that Hollowbriar Forest began to look like a dumping ground for an especially foul criminal registry.

Judging strictly by the loudest voices in the chat, it felt as though every other person in the sector had something on their conscience they wouldn't want an honest neighbor hearing about.

Wonderful… Wolves on one side, and wolves in the skin of women on the other.

She wasn't about to paint all ten thousand arrivals as criminals over a single chat argument, but it was clear that dangerous neighbors were far more numerous than she would have liked.

For a brief moment, she thought of the two workers who had tried to help her outside the clinic, but she recognized neither among the passing profile icons. With such a massive population dropped in, there was no reason to assume they had even landed in her sector.

Finishing the bread and eating the apple, she gathered up the wrappers, resolving for now to keep the location of her Hearthhold and every detail about her physical condition entirely to herself.

After a short rest, Serayne activated Featherstep again and drifted out to the ledge, determined to test Gathering more thoroughly since the morning cast had yielded only twenty units of vines.

She picked another section clinging to the trunk, leaving herself a convenient line of handholds, and watched the severed batch tumble between the roots as the skill triggered.

Descending, collecting the material, and hauling it back took far longer than casting the spell itself, but when she laid the harvest on the panel, the readout matched her previous attempt exactly.

[Vines +20]

Frowning at the display, she decided to test the effect on another material rather than assume every harvest would behave identically.

Checking her remaining mana, she stepped back outside and directed Gathering at the timber of the colossal tree - its sheer scale making it hard to imagine a single cast leaving any real impression.

The spell cleaved off a small chunk of wood, leaving what looked like a shallow graze on the bark. Serayne watched the fragments fall, noting that compared to the tree’s colossal girth, it truly was nothing more than a scratch.

She carried the pieces back in smaller loads to keep from overloading her arms, and upon depositing them onto the console, another notification popped up.

[Wood +20]

She conducted her final trial on a boulder resting near the base of the trunk, first verifying that her remaining mana would cover the return trip.

This too yielded twenty units. After hauling the last fragments up, she collapsed onto the straw pallet, rubbing her sore palms as she pieced the results together.

Twenty mana for twenty units… At least for these basic materials, the return is consistent.

She didn't know whether material quality or tougher terrain would alter the yield, but testing three resource types and repeating the vine harvest gave her a foundation for rough estimates.

At a recovery rate of roughly one mana point per minute, amassing the required twenty-five hundred wood, five hundred vines, and one hundred stone meant over fifty hours of pure mana regeneration just to cover the spell costs - before factoring in movement, hauling, and the inevitable breaks forced by exhaustion.

Looking down at her arms, she sighed. Hauling cargo was proving far more grueling than magically shearing it off in chunks.

So even if I do everything right, I'm not knocking this out in a single productive afternoon.

Other people could burn through their mana, grab an axe, a pickaxe, or even a clumsy sword, and keep working. For her, hitting zero mana meant losing her ability to move.

Nor could she count on her mana replenishing while hovering, since her observations showed that passive regeneration only broke even with Featherstep’s upkeep rather than building a surplus.

She had to rest with her Talent toggled off. That meant retreating to her pallet before the gauge neared empty, accepting that for periods of time, she would be pinned in one spot once more.

She didn't like that thought one bit.

Glancing at the console, the prospect of spending another hour reading threats, bickering, and digestive horror stories held little appeal. Instead of opening the chat, she reached into her pocket for the notebook scavenged from the ruin.

The brown binding crinkled softly beneath her fingertips. Serayne ran her thumb over Avelra Myr’s embossed name, wondering what alchemy actually entailed in this world.

At least I'll have something to do while my mana regenerates…

Then there was the matter of the ten E-rank monster cores, which she couldn't contemplate with anything resembling the calm she had for timber or stone.

The name alone suggested that sooner or later, she would have to harvest something from a dangerous beast. Serayne had no reliable offensive capabilities, let alone the combat experience needed to engage a foe with any confidence.

Remembering the prowling silhouettes beneath the branches, her fingers tightened around the notebook. She forced them to relax. For now, she didn't have to decide whether she would hunt the cores herself, barter for them, or stumble upon them some other way.

First, she needed mana, rest, and knowledge - the last of which was in painfully short supply.

Leaning back, she rested the notebook on her lap and carefully opened the cover.