I woke up the next day and turned on my phone. I checked the stopwatch that I had started two days ago. The days in this world were approximately the same length as the ones in my old world. I could already tell because my mana regeneration rate was also a type of clock, but I felt like double checking anyway.

My mana was already almost full again. My new mana regeneration rate was crazy.

I walked over to the center of the nest, where a tall trunk pierced through. If this was going to be my stronghold, I might as well make it livable.

I erected a room that leaned on the side of the tree. All I needed to do was take a seed out and command it to grow into wood of a certain shape. I created another room next to the first and connected them with a door.

I tried to make the wood stronger and a window popped up.

New Cultivator skill unlocked : Improve!

Experience required for next level has not been reached! Improve stays at level one!

I smiled. It was smooth sailing from here on out. I improved the wood until it was stronger than steel.

Improve has reached level two!

Improve has reached level three!

I kept track of the difference each level made.

I also planted another large Twentytacle Trap in front of my new house and outfitted it with spikes. I had both of them spread their spiked tentacles menacingly to ward off intruders. Anytime anything got close, I would have the tentacles swish about randomly. As I expected, nothing wanted to get closer to the two behemoths.

Twentytacale Trap has reached level six!

I was testing my abilities when I found that Improve also let me upgrade the level of my plants, up to the maximum level that I had already achieved.

The first Twentytacle Trap I had planted in my new home had been planted when I only had it at level one. By spending some mana, I could improve it to level six. The levels didn’t increase its size. They increased its durability and strength. The vines became harder to break, and the force they could exert increased as well.

Things were looking up for me. My leg had healed. The creatures that could once kill me were nothing before my traps. Tomorrow, I could plant an even larger and powerful Twentytacle trap.

-

The sun slowly set. I watched it slowly disappear into the horizon. Everything was looking up for me… but something felt wrong.

As I went to sleep, the last of the panic from my scramble to survive fell away. I remembered my old home. My parents. My friends. My school life.

My physics teacher. My notebook. The star wars movies. My neighbor’s dog, who would never stop barking. My computer. My messy room. The clothes strewn across its floor. My favorite ruler. My red sweater.

A crushing weight fell upon me. Was everything gone? Was I alone in this vast hellscape, filled with terrifying creatures? Was I going to be alone until I died?

I had never understood why people committed suicide, or had suicidal thoughts. I heard it was because they were in a bad place in life, where their tunnel vision didn’t let them see any options outside their situation.

Now I understood how they felt when they reached for the cyanide pill, or the gun in the gunbox, or the rope in the garage.

I quietly took a step out of my house to look into the night sky.

I had heard rumors about the beauty of the night sky, and how most of the stars weren’t visible anymore because of light pollution. I remembered when Brian told me about his trip to the middle of a desert to watch the stars.

He had told me of its ethereal beauty. He told me about the huge differences in the amount of visible stars in the desert compared to the ones I could see from my apartment. He told me it was something he could gaze at for hours without getting bored.

Now I knew what he meant. I could see stars from my old apartment, so I thought the sky he was describing was just more of the same stars. I was both right and wrong. It was true, it was just dots in the sky, but the stars came together to form something more.

A single stroke of the paintbrush is just a line. Three and you get a letter. Ten for a stick figure. A hundred for a simple painting. What about a couple thousand, or ten thousand?

What did this all mean? Nobody knew, at least I certainly didn’t. All I knew was that it was indescribably beautiful.

Tears flowed down my cheeks. What was I crying for?

The night sky? My old world? Loneliness? Self pity? My lack of courage?

Guilt that I wanted to kill myself?

What a stupid question. I was crying because of none of these things, but also all these things. There was no single reason I was crying. Each of those reasons was a stroke of the paintbrush.

In hindsight, my emotions were completely irrational. Brian and the rest of my physics class had all gotten the same message screens as I did. They were probably transported to this world as well. I had also only explored a tiny portion of this world, it was perfectly possible that there were other humans on this planet.

Emotions superseded logic though, and I was also suffering from that tunnel vision.

I woke up the next day with that cloud of homesickness still floating above me, but the worst of the storm had passed. I was never going to feel that hopeless again.