The morning was cold and miserable, as Alice realized how little warmth the open ground of the forest floor provided. She looked at the remains of her attempts at lighting a fire, as well as the fish that had now been laying in the dirt for several hours, and sighed. The core of heat inside of her chest left over from her mana baptism thrummed with heat, warming up her chilled limbs, but it wasn't enough to completely drive away the cold. Today, she needed to do better. She hadn’t eaten in two or three days at this point, and she was starving.

If she didn’t find something to eat today, she was going to start becoming thinner and weaker, and it would be even harder to recover. Assuming the System didn’t somehow make her stats ‘work’ even without the calories to power her body, but she wasn’t going to bet on that when her stomach was clearly telling her something needed to happen soon. Fish and fire were a bust for now, so at this moment it was looking like she needed to find some random plants or something and then engage in desperation roulette. If she could even find some wild vegetables or berries, which, thus far, she hadn’t.

She began travelling up the river again, continuing her search for civilization while keeping an eye out for anything useful.

A few hours into her journey, she finally found something that might serve as food. A few berry bushes spread out from the river, with dull blue-green berries about half the diameter of her pinky finger ringing the branches.

Since she didn’t recognize the berries at all, she looked closely at and around the bush, trying to spot anything that might indicate whether or not the berries were edible. After a few minutes, she realized that the branches around her ankles were curiously devoid of berries. Maybe some small animal had been eating from this bush and had stripped the lower branches bare, but couldn’t reach the higher branches?

If the rabbits were eating the berries, it couldn’t be too bad even if it was a little poisonous, right?

Or maybe the lower branches just didn’t support berries.

Still, she had to take a risk somewhere if she wanted to avoid starving to death - Alice craved safety and security, but if she refused to take any risks she would just have to wait for starvation to kill her. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed one of the berries from a bush that reached about the height of her waist and then bit into it.

The flavor was somewhat odd – it tasted somewhere between a mixture of an apple and a blueberry, but it was much more tart than she was used to. She couldn’t tell if that was just the flavor of the berries, or if they were unripe, or what. Regardless, she had eaten one now. If this is poison, hopefully it’s a survivable amount, she thought, trying to clamp down the hunger pangs in her stomach as she sat down and waited. If a while passed and she didn’t feel any ill effects, she would consider the berries safe and eat more of them. One berry hopefully wouldn’t kill her even if they were toxic.

After a solid ten minutes passed, two notifications suddenly sprang into the air in front of her.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower +1

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 6

Alice blinked away the notifications and went back to concentrating on her body, trying to figure out if eating the berry had any ill-effects.

Finally, after the better part of an hour, she figured that at the very least, she wouldn’t die if she ate a bunch of the berries. Probably. Therefore, she began ravenously devouring the berries at a pace that would have alarmed most humans, resembling a vacuum cleaner that sucked up berries by the handful. She was hungry.

After eating almost all of the berries off of the first waist-high bush, the horrifying pain in her stomach was finally gone. Instead, she now felt uncomfortably full. Maybe she should have eaten a little less? Maybe she should have exercised a little more self-control instead… Was her [Willpower] below average or something?

She had no idea what an average human’s stats on this world would be, so she had no clue whether 121 [Willpower] was low or high. Come to think of it, how do stats even work? I mean, on its surface, strength seems to indicate how much physical force someone can exert. But what happens if, for example, I only trained my leg strength for a long period of time in a manner that would increase my leg strength? Would my arms stay at the same level of strength, or is each stat point distributed across its respective components evenly? I mean, there’s a lot of different muscles involved in something as simple as strength, and it seems ludicrous that by exercising only one of them all of my muscles would grow stronger.

That being said, I have no idea how the rules work here in the first place. Who knows? Also, what is the average for this world? I guess that based on my performance in gym class compared to the average student, the strength and endurance stat average for my classmates on Earth would probably be around 80 or 90, but that probably doesn’t mean much here. And I have no idea how the more 'mental' stats would look at all.

Alice shrugged, popping open her status screen again to take a peek, and realized that something she had never seen before was present.

Next to her [Survivor] class, the words ‘level 5 perk available’ had appeared. Frowning, she concentrated on the survivor class for a moment, and suddenly her status screen disappeared, before being replaced with a new set of floating words. Detailed within the words were five different ‘Perks,’ along with various requirements to learn them. Ah, that’s probably the difference between skills and levels, thought Alice absently. Levels granted perks, and skills probably didn’t? Although she hadn’t gotten a skill to level 5 ‘naturally’ yet, so perhaps Skills would normally offer perks every five levels as well, or English just didn't offer Perks for whatever reason.

She turned her attention back to the five perks she could pick, and quickly discarded three of them as not useful enough to her to be worth picking up. Assuming these perks ‘worked’ in this world, her life and death could hinge on whether or not her perks were useful to her. She had to pick carefully.

Foraging

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

Gain knowledge of berries, vegetables, and roots, where edibles might be easily found in the wilds, and what natural foodstuffs are poisonous. Also increases comfort and knowledge regarding basic food preparation.

Primal instinct

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher, Perception higher than 100

Allows you to very slightly sense where danger lies in the world around you. Higher perception will increase the effectiveness of this skill. The more knowledge you have of the cause of a particular kind of danger, the more quickly and easily you will be able to detect danger in advance.

Primitive warmth

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

Grants you innate knowledge of how to construct crude tents and fires. Reduces the effect of cold weather on your body, allowing you to innately retain warmth as if the surroundings were 3 degrees Celsius warmer (this effect will not apply whenever the user’s body is in at or above comfortable heat).

Food Conversion

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

Your body converts food into energy more efficiently.

Forestwalking

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

While you are within a forested region, you navigate through the area slightly more easily, allowing you to move more quickly and keep track of your surroundings more effectively.

While {Food Conversion} actually seemed rather useful because it would require less food for her to gain the same amount of energy, the perk didn’t specify how much of an increase in energy extraction efficiency she would get, and she was hesitant to take a gamble on the skill. If it was a measly ten percent, for example, while it would help, it wouldn’t be that big of a difference, and she would definitely cry when she figured it out. Right before starving to death, probably.

Alice would have been willing to gamble on the perk if she had access to food security, especially because she was actually really interested to see if she could learn something else about the game system as a result of this. How exactly did this perk work? Did it change the physiology of her stomach or intestines or something, or did it just shrug away the laws of biology entirely and replace them with whatever laws of reality this world worked on? But ultimately, right now Alice definitely needed to prioritize her survival and safety over her curiosity.

Learning all of the various ways this dimension shrugged off the laws of physics was something she would have to put on the backburner for now, until she had food security and shelter.

After a while, she decided to, grudgingly, discard {Primal Instinct}. Even though it would definitely be useful to know what areas were dangerous beforehand, the words ‘very slightly’ meant that the effect was probably pretty minor. Back on Earth, her eyesight was a bit above average, but not particularly notable, meaning that in this world it might be average or below average, if her assumptions about stat growth on this world were correct.

Furthermore, she had absolutely no idea what dangers might lie in this world where an RPG system and magic existed. She doubted the perk would be particularly helpful right now.

Besides, right now she was in imminent danger of starving, freezing, or dying of disease. Right now the best chance of surviving might actually be ‘hope that the dangerous beasts and such are somewhere else.’ Besides, even if she got a vague feeling of danger, the odds of a random animal fighting her to the death in the wilderness weren’t actually that high, right? As far as she could tell, apart from the creepy dead zone she had first arrived in, the animals she had seen so far were herbivores.

So then, what was important? Food, or heat?

Alice really wished she could pick both. If she could, she would have a much better chance of surviving.

Alice eventually decided on food, because if she had more energy in her body, she would have more energy to make shelter and solve other problems. This would, eventually, loop back around to help deal with the effects of the freezing cold. If she hadn't been so hungry and tired yesterday, she might have had the stamina to keep trying to start a fire using sticks, rather than collapsing from exhaustion during the process and accomplishing nothing. Thus, food might eventually help her start a fire in a roundabout fashion.

Alice concentrated on the perk, and after a moment she felt a sort of… ding inside of her head, and then her status screen updated, removing the little ‘perk available’ notification. Now, the {Perks} category included {Foraging}.

Alice looked back at the berries she had been eating, and instead of the uneasiness she had felt before, she was replaced with a sort of… relaxed feeling. She had been expecting something more like an item menu in an RPG game, perhaps involving more floating text or something. Instead, when she looked at the berries, she now felt some sort of instinctive anticipation and comfort, as if she had already eaten the berries a hundred times and knew that they were safe already.

Curious, she glanced at the grass below her feet and concentrated on it, before getting a sort of… indistinct feeling of disgust, as if eating it would be pointless. She scanned the area around her, concentrating on various random objects, and began to get a better sense how exactly her perk worked. The most complex sensation her perk transmitted to her was when she saw some sort of tree - after concentrating on it, she got the feeling that there might be some sort of food on its branches. When she concentrated on the branches, she saw some sort of nut that she didn’t recognize on some of the branches, near the leaves, and had a vague urge to roast and then eat them, along with a mild feeling of caution towards the nut.

Perhaps it was poisonous if she didn’t roast it first? That was what she suspected her perk was trying to tell her. She also found a different kind of berry a minute or two away-unlike the first berries she had encountered, this one gave her the chills, and she felt a distinct sense of fear when she concentrated on the berries. She definitely felt like these were probably poisonous.

The ‘poisonous’ feeling she had towards the nuts were fairly mild, which probably meant minimal effects. Perhaps it might result in some flu-like symptoms or vomiting, or other problems that were unpleasant but surviveable. Could her perk ‘test’ cooked food? If so, it was actually a pretty good poison detector…

She moved back to the original berry bushes and then gathered several fistfuls, rolling up her pajama front and making a sort of bowl to help her carry the berries. She checked the sky, and found that the sun was approaching its peak – it was probably a little before noon? She turned to the fallen sticks near her, and began thinking. What she needed right now was the ability to store more food, and she had plenty of branches to work with. What she wanted to try to do right now was weave a crude basket.

She decided what she probably needed to try was to create two layers to the basket-one sort of ‘bottom’ composed of harder branches, and then a circle of branches around it. As for the handle…she’d get to that later. Maybe.

She climbed up one of the trees in the area and began tearing off thinner, still-living branches, making sure to collect the nuts she had noticed earlier as well. Then, she dropped both to the ground below, tossing them into a somewhat rough and unkempt pile. After she had enough material to work with, she climbed back down and got to work.

First, she stripped off all the miscellaneous twigs and leaves from the branches. Afterwards, she tried to weave the somewhat straight bottom of her basket out of the branches. Her hands felt unwieldy and her fingers were clumsy, but she persisted, trying to assemble a somewhat stable ‘floor’ of branches.

The bottom of the basket fell apart.

Alice tried to weave the branches together.

The basket fell apart.

Alice tried to weave the bottom of the basket together, and the basket once again fell apart, but this time Alice got another point in woodworking out of it.

If at first she didn’t succeed, she could just grind her way to being proficient! Assuming it happened in a reasonable timeframe, at least. And that there weren't any hidden components of how the System worked that might pop out and screw her over.

The next time she was trying to weave together the bottom of the basket, she noticed a definite difference-her fingers felt slightly more nimble and dexterous, and she felt as though she had a better grasp of exactly how she needed to weave the branches together to make a basket. She looked at her previous clumsy attempts at weaving a basket, in which she had tried to simply weave together a square of branches to make a somewhat solid base, and felt that something seemed off. However, she couldn’t quite pinpoint what it might be, so she tried again.

Five more failures later, she gained a point in dexterity.

Seven tries after that, she gained her first point in weaving. She began trying to twist the branches into a more circular pattern, feeling that perhaps her idea of making a square was wrong from the very beginning.

Sixteen more tries afterwards, Alice finally had the beginning of a more regular sort of… bowl shape. It was quite possibly the ugliest thing Alice had ever seen, but the sides were tilted in a way that would at the very least let her store about a third of a meal’s worth of berries.

In all, her attempts had taken her around three hours of work, but now she could continue to follow the river while having at least a few light rations. She ate another meal of berries, and then began storing some berries in her makeshift container.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 7

Alice stored her berries and started working on another campfire. This time, without hunger gnawing away at her thoughts, she realized kindling would probably help quite a bit with her attempts to make a fire. After nearly twenty-five minutes of rubbing sticks together, Alice finally managed to light a campfire, and was rewarded with warmth and another survivor level.

For dinner, she roasted the nuts by dumping them into fire and using a wet stick to roll them away when they no longer felt poisonous. Afterwards, she let the nut cool down a bit before peeling off the outer shell and then eating the nutty flesh inside, doing her best to ignore the slightly-too-warm shells as they stung her fingers. The nuts were oddly spicy, and a nice change of pace from the berries she had been eating all day.

To finish it all off, she walked over to the stream and greedily swallowed down several mouthfuls of water. She wished she had the ability to boil the water, but her shoddy bowl-thing definitely wasn’t watertight. Or fireproof. For now, she would just have to put up with it and hope for the best.

Finally, she began thinking about constructing a shelter to sleep in for the night. She thought it was still three or four hours away from darkness, at least based on the time the sun had set yesterday, but her sense of time in a world without clocks was hazy. In addition, sleeping next to a food source didn’t seem like a bad idea, because it would allow her to immediately eat breakfast and restock on her food supply before she set off to continue following the river in the morning.

After a moment, however, she frowned, realizing that other animals probably also fed off of the berries in this area, especially if her suspicion about the lower berries being missing due to being eaten was correct. Even though only herbivores would directly consume the berries, where herbivores went, carnivores would naturally follow. Probably.

After some thinking, she grabbed a burning branch to carry with her and ensure fire-starting would be easier later on, and then continued heading downstream a bit, moving far enough away from the berry bushes that she could move back to them easily, but ensuring animals wouldn’t directly stumble onto her while she was asleep. She quickly re-kindled her fire, placing some stones around the fire since she remembered that was supposed to help ensure you didn't burn down half the forest or yourself in the night, and then began trying to figure out how to build a basic shelter.

“I really wish I had the warmth perk right now,” Alice muttered as she looked at her surroundings, remembering that the Perk granted some sort of basic knowledge on constructing survival shelters. Honestly, she had no clue how to construct a shelter out of sticks. If she had animal hides, she figured she could have at least done something that reasonably resembled a shelter, but she had nothing of the sort.

And even if she managed to catch an animal, she didn’t know how to actually treat the hides afterwards to make them usable. All she knew about the process was that ‘treating’ hides was something people did and seemed to involve throwing the hides into vats of chemicals. She had no real understanding at all of the process beyond that.

“Hmm… I probably can’t construct anything useful out of the sticks in the surroundings, I don’t have logs or any way to acquire them, I don’t have anything I could tie around sticks and then stretch between support beams of some sort.” Alice thought about the problem for a while, but she still had no easy way to resolve the challenge she now faced – not freezing to death. Last night she had been so cold that she had woken up much earlier than she meant to, and when she had woken up her limbs were cold and numb.

While she hadn’t quite entered frostbite territory, she had no idea how long that would continue. She had no idea what this planet’s seasons looked like, but it was pretty unlikely for a planet to actually not have seasons. At least, assuming this world had seasons, which may or may not be correct, but Alice figured that at very least there was no harm in being prepared for if winter happened to be coming. If there were no other humans around, she needed to be prepared for colder and colder weather alone on this planet. That meant, ultimately, she needed shelter.

She looked around, hoping to find some sort of… mat-like foliage in the area around her, but there was no such luck. If she had found something, she might have been able to get away with just building something far easier, but that obviously wouldn’t work. Therefore, she needed to figure out some other way of building a shelter.

She needed some sort of frame, some way to cover it up, and maybe a bit of luck. Alice looked around again, and then realized that she was an idiot. The grass in the area around her reached close to her knees when she was standing up in some places. As long as she wove the long grass together, wouldn’t that perfectly cover a frame? If she could build some sort of frame out of sticks or wood or something, she could probably cover it with some sort of grass mat and it would at least keep some of the wind off of her and keep some of the warmth in. It would be good enough for now.

The only problem was that she had no clue how to weave grass together. And she somehow doubted the grass would be as easy to work with as the branches.

Putting someone from the modern era into the stone age was really way too depressing, wasn’t it? Alice really wanted to return to modern society and sit inside a warm, insulated house again. Thinking of how well they kept the cold out and kept warmth in made Alice long for sturdy walls. Alas, life was cruel.

Sighing, Alice got to work by plucking out a solid ten or twenty stalks of grass and then basically randomly trying to shove them together. She had no idea what she was doing, but she had a weaving skill, right? She would get it to level up if she tried enough.

However, less than a minute into her routine of trying to layer grass together, she realized that it would be much easier if she just used a stalk of grass to tie together other stalks of grass and then interconnected them… somehow. Possibly by tying together more stalks of grass. She didn’t think she would naturally come up with that idea on her own, so…

What the heck, survivor class? That was barely helpful! She grumbled at her class, but still did her best to figure out how to make her ‘extremely useful’ insight a reality.

She bunched a handful of grass together and then used some of the thicker stalks of grass to tie them into a bundle. Then she grabbed another handful of grass and did the same, over and over again…

After a bit, she got the second level of the weaving skill and her fingers started to feel a bit more nimble. She continued her boring and monotonous task, weaving together bundles of grass over and over again with an occasional break to grab a few more branches to chuck into the fire.

Two hours later, when she was at the fifth level of weaving, she felt a small change in the way the skill aided her. Before, each level of weaving would increase the dexterity of her fingers when weaving, but they weren’t yet strictly helping her weave so much as making her less clumsy. However, at the fifth level, she felt like her understanding of weaving itself grew a bit - she started to understand more about what made for a more stable knot of grass stalks. She had… mastered a skill that seemed mostly pointless but was surprisingly useful right now! Hooray!

After a great deal more tiring and boring labor, she managed to put together a very, very crude shelter. The sun had already begun to set, and her shelter still wasn’t particularly well put together or stable, but it would do for the night. After all, it had already been three hours.

Three hours of staring at grass and trying to weave it into a wall for a shelter. It was, quite possibly, one of the most tedious things she had done to date. At least it looked like it would retain some warmth and keep the wind off of her. At this point, that was all she was really asking for. Tired and exhausted, she crawled into her crude tent and went to sleep, hoping tomorrow would be better than the last few days had been.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 9