It has been a week since I got to this world. I am worn out by the constant trials of survival. I might be surviving, but I am certainly not thriving. What I miss the most is a knife, and just about every other survival tool. Most survivalist tend to at least get a knife to start off with. My best tool at the moment is a sharp rock. Due to the signs of oxidization it looks ferrous. Analyze confirms it, it is an iron mineral. Unfortunately I don't have a furnace to melt this into something useful like a knife.

I tried tying it to a stick to make a primitive axe, but it kept falling off. Need to work on my crafting. At the moment I am no better off than a caveman, worse actually, at least they had flint weapons and fire. Pathetic! I tried making fire by rubbing a couple of sticks together but it is surprisingly difficult to get a fire that way. If I could make small bow I could speed up the spinning, but I don't have a string fine enough. I tried using tears from my t-shirt, but the strings kept breaking. Cheap material.

I survive on berries and fruit for the most part. My foraging is regularly interrupted by the alert skill, followed by a scramble for the nearest tree. I need better weapons than sticks and stones. So far the animals I am coming across are only small and medium sized. Medium sized being the size of a small dog or big cat. The most common one is the forest rat, a huge aggressive rodent that charges at me. I managed to knock one to the ground once with a stick and pummeled it to death, but it took so much out of me that I was gasping afterwards.

As I am walking along the river reviewing my week long struggle, the alert kicks off. Somehow I know it is more serious this time. I climb the nearest tree in record time. The level 3 tree climbing skill seems to be a life saver. Looking down I see three forest rats. Apparently these guys sometimes hunt in packs. No way I can fight them all. I can wait them out in the tree, but I getting pretty fed up with the constant running and hiding.

What if I drop some rocks on them. Summoning a rock from my storage I throw it at one of the rats, it dodges. None of the rats seem deterred by the projectile. Then how about every rock in my storage. Not bothering to throw them one at a time, I instantly summon all the rocks I got in my storage. A barrage of rocks cover the rats and form a small rock mound under the tree. I guess I am a bit of a hoarder.

Three more huge rat bodies added to my storage. I don't have a fire to roast them, and I have no desire to eat them raw, so for now they stay in storage. After my success with the rock barrage I proceed down the river looking for bigger rocks. Finding a big rock stuck in some dirt I try to store it. Nothing happens! Maybe it is part of the bedrock. Well at least I didn't store the planet. That infinity sign must be lying to me. I don't really have a problem with that. I give the rock a hard nudge with my foot, it moves and gets stored. I guess to store items they need to be loose.

Besides learning the limitations of my storage, of which there aren't that many, I spend most of my time learning to use my Analysis skill. It gives me some details, but most of the time, I have to do a bit of experimentation, observation and contemplation before it is useful. For example, when I first analyzed my iron mineral rock, it just said "Rock", but after I studied it and speculated that it might be iron ore, the description changed to "Rock with iron minerals". As I thought about how it could be melted to produce iron, it provided me with a short description of smelting to create iron. There is nothing in the description that I did not know already but it does seem to organize my prior knowledge.

Using my analyze skill I kept looking for useful rocks along the banks of my small river. I could still wade across it, but the water would now be up to my neck at the deepest parts. It has been getting deeper and wider. The terrain is getting more open and rocky as well. I would rather not run out of trees to climb, as they are still my main sense of security. Just as I contemplate my reduced escape options the forest opens up with a rocky decline stretching on for a few hundred meters and a big expanse of water beyond.

Rushing down the sloop I reach into the water and taste it. Salty! I have found the end of the river and the ocean. Still, this is not my primary goal. Looking up and down the coast, I can see no traces of civilization. There is only a rocky landscape separating the sea from the forest wilderness. What now? My best hope for finding a settlement had been to follow the river to its end. Should I go right or should I go left.

The last few days after figuring out my stone barrage from a tree top technique, I had also been seeing more of the sky due to the opening up of the terrain. Considering the movement of the sun, with a lot of assumptions, I had figured out that the river was heading southwest. If I changed direction to the right of where I had exited the forest, I would be going roughly north. Left was a bit different as the coastline was clearly curved, and I would be going about southeast. With nothing else to go on I decided on southeast. Zigzagging didn't seem like a bad idea.

Staying near the tree line I continue my walk for the next few days, my direction steadily going more and more east until I finally see an inlet and the coast line curving back out southwest. Rushing forward to the inlet hoping for a sign of civilization, I eventually find something in the forest just beyond the inlet.