I, Armin Wright, hereby chronicle my great adventures in a new world.

This is day: 0.25.

I have just narrowly avoided drowning and am spluttering for air, while I weakly drag myself across the river embankment like a terminally ill snake.

My health is slowly dropping from the bleed effect caused by the egregious wound across my abdomen.

Oh, and I’m blind for the next five hours apparently.

At least my stamina fills up at a decent speed. From the looks of it, filling your stamina from zero to full would likely only take a couple of minutes. That, while useful info, is the least of my concerns though.

I lay on the bank for a while yet, simply catching my breath. As soon as my heart and breathing start calming down however, I become acutely aware of just how incredibly vulnerable I am. It is bad enough just being naked, but being naked and blind at the same time… I don’t think I’ve ever felt this exposed before.

Every little sound around me. A rustle of leaves or grass, a splosh of the water, or simply some insect or possibly creature related sound in the distance. Everything I was not able to hear before, now much more audibly clear having been deprived of my primary sense, now fills me with fear and only further fuels my feeling of vulnerability.

Let’s not even talk about the ordeal I just narrowly managed to survive. It was a harrowing thought just thinking about the fact that there could be any number of dangerous creatures around me some even at level 43 and I would have absolutely no idea. There could be a monster ten centimeters away from me ready to bite my face off and I would not know until it’s too late.

A sound that sounded really close, suddenly made me jump right out of my skin. Fuck this!

I activated my [Mana sense] immediately. Luckily the gift did not really drain much mana to keep it active. Now I at least had ‘vision’ for about a three meter radius around me. I use the word vision very loosely though. More like I could vaguely tell whether a given area was empty space or not empty space.

Mana did not directly correspond with whatever was in a given space after all. For instance both the water, rocks and air all had mana, with only small differences between them. Like with ‘air mana’, or I should say mana in the air, seemed to be able to flow slightly more freely. Point is, it was enough to have very crappy, very short range vision of my immediate surroundings. The closer it got to me however, the more clearly I could ‘see’.

Still. I was feeling very exposed and vulnerable. I decided I needed to hide out somewhere and recover first. My general weakness I was feeling (why was I feeling so weak anyway?) and the lack of options, let alone my lack of sight, meant that there were few good options available to me. The only thing I could think of was to try and climb a tree, hopefully keeping out of sight of and / or out of reach of some of the predators around here. Not counting things like level 43 caterpillars of course, but it would be better than nothing.

So without delay, I crawled over to the nearest tree that seemed like it might be even remotely climbable and began the arduous and painful process of ascending it. Climbing a tree with only vague vision was rather difficult turns out. Many cuts, scrapes and bruises later, as well as a considerable expenditure of stamina and I was about three meters up in the tree and resting on two or three sizable branches. I know I was about three meters up mostly because I could just barely make out the ground at the edge of my [Mana sense].

Temporarily kind of safe and now resting, I turned my focus inwards. My [Essence] had somehow dropped to 75 and my health, while still high, was definitely steadily declining. No doubt I needed to stop the bleeding or I would likely die, some quick math on my health and the bleed numbers told me as much.

But how. I do not know anything about medicine. I also doubted simply ‘apply pressure’ would stop the bleeding, it was a long wound after all, and I had no idea if such things actually worked like that when there was already such a thing as a bleeding ‘status effect’ to begin with. Let’s not even mention that I don’t feel like I would even have the physical strength left to keep the needed level of pressure up for any decent amount of time.

For that matter why the fuck was I feeling so weak anyway? Yes I’m wounded, but it had not been all that long. I could not have lost enough blood yet to be anemic already. Another look at my status revealed that my [Essence] had dropped to 61.

What?

It was steadily going down and I was steadily feeling weaker. Perhaps it is your overall ‘condition’ or something like that. I also noticed that I was shivering. I had been distracted with everything going on and the adrenaline of it all, but now that I thought about it, I realised that it was such an obvious thing. I just took a swim through some cold water and am now wet, while high up off the ground and naked outside, with a light breeze. The temperature in this world had already been a bit on the cold side to begin with, not to mention the fact that night would probably fall soon.

No. At this rate I was headed for a one way ticket to hypothermia and the eventual anemia was not going to be helping with that. Shit.

As time moved on and I still had no clue what to do, the intensity of the cold started to ramp up. The mana in the air around me changed quality somehow and I could swear that I could no longer feel the light of the sun on my skin anymore. Looks like sunset came sooner than I expected.

Both my Essence and surprisingly my health had started to drop faster, lending credence to the idea that Essence was related to your well being. Either way I needed to do something.

So I turned my mana sense inwards and tried to move the mana inside my body, or more specifically circulate it. Uncertain of what else to try, I simply focused on circulating it faster and faster in the hopes of pulling off some kind of miracle and maybe even triggering healing or something.

This did not happen. What did happen however, was that I could start to feel the slightest bit of warmth inside my body. It was faint, but I was sure that it was caused by the circulating mana. Encouraged by the positive result I ramped up my efforts and circulated it faster and faster.

Soon however a new problem befell me. My body started aching and a quick check on my status revealed that this course of action was not only expending a little bit of mana but also starting to drop my health even faster. In short, I was damaging my body.

Not really having the health numbers left to be fucking around with this any further, I ceased it at once.

Still, I needed to deal with this situation or I would just as soon end up dead. The circulation of mana had started to heat up my body, so I felt like there was something to it. It got me thinking about how heat was normally generated. Molecular vibration.

I decided to try applying this principle instead, to the mana inside my body. No more circulating but rather moving the mana while remaining in place. Vibrating the mana. It was incredibly difficult at first even with just a small amount of mana, but I soon got the hang of it. It might be my imagination, but it seemed that mana was easier to control the closer it was to you, hence why your own internal mana pool was so useful and malleable- probably.

There’s also the fact that simply doing something with your mana even if it doesn’t leave your body, still seems to use up some of it as the ‘fuel’ for the action itself. Very strange.

Regardless, this course of action seemed to be the correct one, as without any new damage to my body, it started to warm up rather nicely. I kept it up for a while and kept an eye on my status. My Essence had mostly stopped going down, it was still dropping slowly, likely from the bleed status and the same could be said for my health. The drain on my mana was also rather negligable, but I decided to only warm myself up to the absolute minimum needed in order to reduce the mana drain all the same. Who knows how long I would have to keep this up.

Having bought myself a little bit of time, I unfortunately was not out of the woods yet. This incessant bleed status was still going to kill me before it finally runs out of steam. What to do. I already had one failed attempt at healing under my belt.

I simply sat there for a while pondering the problem while reveling in the comfort of the little bit of warmth I was providing my body with. Then inspiration hit me. What about solving the problem in a more conventional way (albeit by an outdated method), using unconventional means.

The flash of inspiration carried me to action before I even realised what I was actually doing. Good thing too, as if my rational brain had a fair chance to process this course of action before I enacted it, I probably would not have gone through with it.

I focused as hard as I could on the mana just at the outermost edge of the wound and pushed the vibration all at once to the absolute max that I could manage.

The sound of a sizzling barbecue and sickening smell of burnt flesh followed by one man's girlish scream, before he managed to muzzle it with his own arm. This was the chain of events that occurred directly before I started whimpering at the still ungodly searing pain on my stomach before I vowed that I would never do something so stupid again.

The resolve in this newly created vow to avoid future cauterisation, wavered considerably however, when I checked my status and noticed that my essence and health had stopped counting down and the bleed status had disappeared. I revelled in the realisation that for the first time I was actually going to survive this.

It was a long night. Uncomfortable up in the tree, constantly having to expend mental effort to keep myself warm and having my abdomen wracked with heated pain, suffice to say that by the time dawn broke, I had not gotten an ounce of sleep. Both my mana and health were at half. The former having dropped to it and the latter having risen to it. My essence wasn’t faring any better and I felt all the more sluggish and tired for it.

At least my vision had returned on cue without any lasting side effects, save for some still seriously burning eyeballs that I spent most of my time squinting through now. At least my mana would hopefully now start to slowly fill up, now that I wasn’t channeling it the whole bloody time for warmth.

A new problem has also arisen, I was thirsty and hungry as all heck. I had a lot of time to think throughout the night, you know, when I was supposed to be sleeping. I had arrived at some decisions about how to go about my survival.

Searching for other humans, heck even dwarves or elves would do, or any form of civilisation, was a high priority to be sure. But that could take who knows how long. My more immediate goal was certainly my more immediate survival needs. I needed food, water, clothing, and shelter. Shelter being for protection so that I could actually sleep and clothing for warmth for pretty much the same reason.

There was a river right here, so that seemed like the best idea for water at present. Who knows maybe I’ll be able to make some water with magic eventually. As for food. Two options, either forage some or hunt for some. Forage seemed more practical and safer for sure, but I would still likely need to defend myself regardless.

So first thing to do really, was make a weapon.

All throughout history, mankind had never been meant to engage in unarmed combat. We did not possess claws or teeth after all. No. We used tools and weapons. We survived through our ingenuity and resourcefulness. While I was certain that magic would have skewed that more than a little in this world, I still believed it would likely still be largely true.

I had arrived at the conclusion that a combination of a spear and knife would be my best choices. Basically the hunters tools of choice. Both should be practical to craft due to their low level of tech requirements, or at least that was the plan.

The spear could be used for hunting by throwing it or for fighting and hopefully using its range to keep a predator out of claws reach. As for the knife, it could be used for all the obvious things you would use a knife for as well as close range emergency fighting.

Of course all this was me being totally out of my depth here, but it seemed like a solid enough plan. But first things first, I could at least do something about my thirst. Although it probably wasn’t very safe considering what had happened to my eyes, I took a chance on the river and scooped a drink of it up with my hands.

Sipping slowly on the water, very slowly, just in case it was harmful, nothing much seemed to happen. So I did this for a few more scoops, until I was satisfied that I had consumed the bare minimum that my body would need for the time being. The only effect I noticed aside from the funny, almost metallic taste of the water tingling my tongue, was the slight increase in my Essence stat that resulted.

With water out of the way, I turned my attention to finding a good stick for my spear. Turning to some of the more unusually shaped ‘trees’, I found that they tended to have almost perfectly straightened branches. Trying to break one of these branches off, I was also pleasantly realised that they were much sturdier than branches of trees from Earth.

Wait, Earth?

That was the world I was from. I had not been able to recall that earlier. Perhaps in time I would get my memory back after all.

I put the thoughts out of my head for the time being, I had more pressing concerns, namely survival.

Eventually I was able to pry off a suitably long and thick branch that I could make my spear from. I say spear, but the reality of it was such that it would be little more than a sharpened stick. Now to make said pointy end, you would have two possibilities. The first would be grinding it against a rock for hours on end until it reached a sharp point. The other was to carve it into a sharp point using a knife.

It would be a great time saving if I could do the latter, so for now I turned my attention to making a knife. The way to make a primitive knife, assuming my memory wasn’t failing me or that I wasn’t completely off the mark here, was to basically smash some rocks until you get something generally resembling a knife shape and then do the whole grindy thing until it was sharp. Of course this wasn’t my area of expertise and I could be way off base here, but it seemed like a good plan.

I began the process of picking up reasonably sized rocks and smashing them against other reasonable sized rocks. I realised that most of them were going to be too brittle for my purposes. After some trial and error, I found that a certain color tone of rock (those that were more of a mauve color) were a little less brittle and more suited to my purposes. It took a while, but I eventually had my crude knife shaped rock.

I began the process of grinding it down. It took yet another long while to get it closer to what I wanted, I quickly ran into a problem however. Once the blade was getting close to being something actually resembling a blade, it started to get too brittle for the grinding process and instead of sharpening further, it started chipping instead. It still wasn’t sharp enough to be even remotely useful as a knife, but I also couldn’t go any further.

I pondered the problem for a while, at one point even considering just going all in on the chipping and turning the thing into something akin to a hacksaw. That idea was scrapped though, as the knife as a whole would likely be too brittle for use like that. No, instead I decided to try something else.

I already knew that I could expel mana from my body and that said mana could affect things outside of me, why else would it have created a slight change in air currents that one time, unless the mana itself was moving the air particles.

So I tried placing my hand over the would be blade and pushing out my own mana, trying to direct it to grind against the edge of the knife in order to sharpen it. It was difficult to say the least, but it did actually seem to my mana sense, to be having an effect. The stone of the blade was definitely much harder to affect than a bunch of loose air particles, perhaps the density of it? Regardless, it was at least offset somewhat by the proximity of the operation, my hand was right against the blade after all.

It took a great deal of focus to operate the mana on such a focused scale, so after about an hour and a considerably depleted mana pool, it was finally done. My knife now had a blade that could be used for cutting, kind of. I also noticed that a fair amount of mana now resided in the edge of the blade itself, disproportionate to the rest of the knife’s natural mana density. This mana even seemed to have a different quality to it, although I could not quite tell how it differed, just that it did.

With my knife at the ready I started carving my spear. At first I was worried my knife would either be: not sharp enough or too weak and straight up crumble in my hand. But those fears turned out to be unfounded. In fact, the knife was sturdier and working far better than I could have expected it too. Maybe there was something to imbuing objects with mana? Definitely something to explore in future.

My spear was finally done, but I could hardly feel happy. Despite the fact that I now had decent tools for hunting and defending myself, my hand was really aching from all the work and in part from using the knife. Gripping it tightly the whole time, it was still little more than a hard and rough stone after all. Not to mention that I was even more hungry now.

I sat down on a rock facing the river, just to rest and let my stamina build back up. Plotting my next moves for going gathering / hunting. This place was still scary as hell, but I at least didn’t feel nearly as helpless now.

After sitting there for a while, letting my thoughts run around in circles, I found that my current primary problem, that is to say, food, had just resolved itself. There were fish in the water. Not many mind you, possibly owed to the fast moving nature of the water, I couldn’t really be sure, but fish all the same. Why had I not noticed this before?

Watching the water more intently now, every now and then a fish would come swimming past. After focusing on a few of them and ‘identifying’ them, I found most to be around level 10. Not a low number, but not unbearably high either. I think?

Regardless, fish seemed like a great target for me, since I doubted their ability to attack me outside of water, and I had a spear! So I followed along the river for a bit, until I found a rock outcrop that gave me a decent enough vantage point over the side of the river and then waited.

Multiple times a fish that was close enough came past. I stabbed with my spear, with all my might and lo and behold- I completely missed. This sad scene repeated itself for the next several fish that came by.

Over time I got better at it. A good couple hours passed and I could now fairly consistently strike the fish. Problem was, I was only injuring them, not killing them and definitely not impaling them. It seemed like the level 10-ish fish were simply too strong. Despair was starting to sink in, along with the fatigue and aching of my entire body. I was not used to this level of exertion after all. On the up side, at least my stomach wound had mostly healed up and my health would soon top off. The Essence stat on the other hand, was not looking so hot.

I struck at another fish and sighed when once more all I succeeded in doing was injuring it. I was seriously about to reconsider this approach when I received a notification:

Congratulations, you have slain ‘Tendon fish’ - level 11

I summarily ignored all further notifications and started running downstream all at once. I was not about to let my meal get away from me. It did not take long before I finally spotted the dead fish being carried away by the river. Catching up to it, I was not really sure what to do. I couldn’t run after it forever. It certainly did not seem like the river was going to be slowing down anytime soon.

It seemed that I would have no choice but to jump in after it at this rate. But that river was carrying it along at quite a speed, It would likely flow away from me easily if I missed. I was realistically only going to get one chance at this. To say that I was stressed out about the prospect, would be an understatement.

Nevertheless there was no other choice. Do what needed to be done.

Once I felt I had the right distance in front of the fish’s path, I threw my weapons to the ground, turned ninety degrees and jumped into the water, in an attempt to intercept the fish. With a splosh, I had timed it correctly and could feel the fish more or less in my arms. I quickly closed my eyes as I was submerged, did not want a repeat of last time.

Unfortunately I did not account for the rough change in currents as I broke the water’s surface and could feel the fish slipping out of my grasp. Panicking, I quickly opened my eyes to the burning water, in order to see where the fish was. It was just in front of me. The combination of the slower undercurrents and the disturbance created by my belly flop had caused the flow of water to waiver for a moment and that was all that was needed to momentarily suspend the fish within my reach and keep it there for just a few moments. I fumbled after it like a crazy monkey, somehow managing to snatch back my prize.

I also shut my eyes again as soon as I had a grip on it. The exposure to the water should have been much shorter this time, hopefully enough to save my sight. I proceeded to swim to the shore with my eyes closed.

Upon hauling myself onto the river bank, I finally noticed a new system message:

Your eyes have suffered some damage resulting in blindness:

Status: Blinded

Duration: 30 minutes

Ah come on!

Not as bad as last time though, not even close. So for now, I flopped over onto my back and hugged the fish to my chest like some kind of long lost lover.

In the meantime, while I waited for my vision to be restored, I used the body heating technique to warm up and dry off. When that was done, I used the crude vision my Mana sense provided me, to retrace my steps upstream, to where I had discarded my weapons.

Once my vision finally returned I took stock of the fish for the first time. It was silver, with circular blue patterns on its body and of course a rather nasting looking spear wound. I also took a look at my status. Turns out the notifications I had ignored basically pointed out that I had levelled up from killing the fish (maybe because it was level 11?) and received 5 skill points to distribute. However that could wait, after all, I was currently famished and very eager to reap the fruits of my labour and fill my tummy.

I quickly gathered up some small rocks into a ring and filled it with a bunch of small sticks and some dried out leaves. This was my best guess at how you start a campfire. Admittedly you probably didn’t normally then proceed to light it with magic, but hey, when in Rome…

It was a bit more difficult generating heat outside of my body, but soon I had a nice little fire going regardless. I used the knife to scrape off the scales, partly helped by the flowing river water, since I doubted it would be very pleasant eating the fish with them. Then proceeded to skewer the fish with my spear and roast it over the fire. As far as the job of cooking the fish went, I don’t think I have ever focused on anything so intently in my entire life to date. The smells from these efforts was both a gift and a curse for me while I waited.