He’d just spent a few minutes clawing at dirt, and managed to form a rather considerable pile before touching it with the cube. Instantly, the pile reduced in size by just over half, and he noted that he now had a single bit of ‘dirt’ in his inventory.

Joey found it a ridiculous idea, but had to check regardless. To merely test it once as a way to ensure he hadn’t overthought this world. Taking the dirt from his inventory, it fell beside him as a pile, where he shovelled it back into the hole and waited to see what happened.

“So it’s only things I craft…” He’d gotten ahead of himself as he saw the soil beneath toss and turn until it seemed to compact itself back into the tough dirt he’d seen minutes ago. Things in this world naturally merged together , but how far did this go?

If he placed a bunch of logs down next to one another, would they bend, shrink, or thicken to attach to an adjacent piece?

At this point he’d have to test absolutely everything as a way to make sure what did and didn’t work. But that sounded horrible and exhausting. Without a better clue on what to do, he decided to set up the tree tap to collect some sap. As it came with a small cup which was attached to the tap itself, he only had to jam it into a tree for results. And given that it was about a foot long, he decided the oak tree to be best.

At the least, he didn’t recognise the trees around him and whether or not they gave sap. So this one did the job.

His chisel helped scrape out a deep hole, and from there hammered in the sharper end with his mallet. Once the thing was deeply lodged and showed no signs of removal, it only took ten or so minutes for a few drops to begin flowing out.

Was sap really that common in oak trees?

Almost definitely not.

He ignored any comments as the reality of this world still crumbled even as he distracted himself from the world literally merging back together. “Right, recipes! I should check those,” he over exaggerated his emotions as an attempt to hold in the confusion, simply wishing to know if this was actually real or if he’d suddenly wake up in a few moments. A thought he had rather often, even when he slept at night.

The recipe tree did show one new recipe though, but only from the tree tap he crafted.

“That’s certainly not a glue stick I’m familiar with. Do I really need charcoal, or are burnt sticks enough?” With a thought, he knew that the first fire he made beneath the oak tree had completely burnt out to leave ash and charcoal which he’d likely have to clean up, but this was a perfect chance to use that. The glue stick, as the recipe called it, was in fact just a stick covered in a mass of putty-like sap and charcoal mix.

He didn’t know how it worked, but some sort of adhesive would not be ignored right now. Not only because glue is useful, but because the ritual notes actually stranded the requirement of a leaf dress made ‘without any blood spilt’, a pointlessly vague statement until he remembered that animal fat could be rendered into glue.

While sewing leaves together is tough, gluing wasn’t impossible.

However, the sun had finally begun to set, and after adding whatever charcoal he could to his inventory, Joey returned to the safe confines of the slave quarters he called home. Interestingly, the oil lantern he’d lit hadn’t gone out after so many hours, but the room didn’t feel dangerously warm or contain fumes.

Its yellow flame was entirely safe, and he appreciated whatever the material was.

In fact, nothing stopped him from taking one of the lights in the passageway, surely nothing minded if he took…

“Yeah, how about we don’t do that Sal,” he said to the rock next to him in the room. He sat on the floor against the pile of straw-filled mattresses with a large log in his hands.

With the knife in hand, alongside the hammer and chisel on the floor to his left, tonight he’d try to get a totem made for this ritual. His skill in whittling could be described with a single word.

Shit. Or in a more verbose form, Utter shit.

With the notes on hand as a reference, he first roughly carved the base away to the totem’s diameter, and then got to work creating the wings. Detail could come last, and eventually he had a mostly straight cylinder with two wings. Although, if one looked from above they’d realise these wings weren’t even straight…

This alone took half an hour though, and he refused to give in. After another half hour, a shoddy version of the wings had been completed, and he’d begun shaping the overall core of the totem to look better.

Only one real step remained, which was the face he needed. This ritual specifically called for the face of an owl on the totem, and he did his best to copy over the watchful and stoic gaze of such a nocturnal creature. Just from the drawing he could see how its eyes pierced through the dark and hunted precisely.

The creator of these notes was a far better artist than he ever expected to be.

It took a little over an hour and a half, but he finally had something which kind of resembled the owl totem. And so he placed it on the floor to appreciate, and spoke of it to ease his mind. “It’s not too bad in the end, I got the proportions right, and the face isn’t lopsided. Wings could be a bit straighter though… And it looks like it’ll fall over. Fine. It’s garbage, but it’s an owl totem and that’s all I care about!”

He wasn’t shouting to the rock, of course, that would be insane. But he did feel the need to justify his own bad handiwork. Not that anyone could or would blame it after he at least gave it his all.

Once inside his inventory, he took a look to see if the totem received its own slot or was called some sort of generic woodwork. This at least partially proved whether or not all this hard work mattered.

Unfortunately, reality proved far worse. As not only did it tell him ‘Owl totem’, but it gained a kindly suffix of ‘Shoddy quality’

Owl totem – Shoddy quality

He left the space straight away and grabbed a hold of the notes besides his body to read every line one by one. Finally, it reached the sentence he dreaded, and held a hand against his head as though to massage a headache away. This was utter hell.

“Requires a poorly made totem at least. Anything less will not invoke a response from nature. Why don’t you just kill me… But not really. I don’t need to go through that again.” In fear that something truly had set this all up, he didn’t want them to actually kill him for fun.

One time was enough, if possible he never wanted to die again.

But this still came with an issue. What could he do with the totem now?

Supposedly only a poor quality one could be used for the ritual, and he didn’t for a second doubt the cube understood how the paper referred to totems. It was capable of separating a rock simply because he named it! But that meant he could either burn the thing or just throw it into the crafting grid and see if anything happened…

Burning it was more of a waste though, and required way more effort on his part, so he opted to just use the box as a garbage can. An infinite garbage can where he never had to worry about where the rubbish went.

Hopefully, it wasn’t actually a mostly infinite garbage can.

The shoddy totem vanished and he was about to leave with a new log when the recipe tree began to glow. “No way. No fucking way.” The recipe beside the glue stick was on a slightly longer branch than the tiny nub which held wood panels below… And it only held three items in the top left corner.

But now the recipe box told him ‘Three owl totems – shoddy quality remaining’. He couldn’t have been more thankful for the recipe, but he came to realise something.

This was a set up! Right? It had to be and he’d prove it!

Still the earliest parts of the night, he pulled out three logs roughly the same size as the first and got to work carving and whittling as fast as he could. Any semblance of quality could be screwed, he only cared about checking this.

Proving that something was manipulating him, and perhaps that none of this was real.

The pain and suffering would lessen by so much in that case!

For the next three hours, even as he began to feel the mental drain of the past day, he refused to sleep and focused entirely on carving, constantly switching back and forth between the notes and tools. He chipped away, cut off, and gently engrained without any other considerations.

Just to prove it. Because he’d had enough of not knowing. There was stability in his shitty life on Earth, stability in knowing he lived in reality. But here?

Where everyone he loved had died?

Did it look like it never ate away at him? Because it absolutely fucking did. Every little recipe just helped hide it though, his curiosity pushing him forward because he needed something to cling onto.

But for not even a moment had he answered what side of the cliff he hung from… And obviously, there could only be one right answer.

In an exhausted state, he looked at three shoddy owl statues in his inventory and copied the unknown recipe. All three statues in the top left corner, and with a tap he saw that the recipe had been accepted…

And out it came. “A poor quality totem. Of course it did!” Spite filled his voice and he noticed the glowing button beside him. On impulse he tapped it, and frowned momentarily when he caught sight of the new point of light, one on the very tip of the branch and connected to the totem recipe he just completed.

So why did this one also allow him to merge three of an item in the same configuration? Was this a new type of totem, or merely an improvement to this one?

“No, this all has to be within the cube’s… expectations. Would it have still been owl totems if the pages I found referenced another type of totem? Why am I fighting this even… do I really want this to be rea– What do I want?”

For the first time in the past two days, what he assumed to be an amazing adventure combined with a horrific tragedy, the question of his desires came up for once.

What he wanted… Well that wasn’t too hard to answer.

What he wanted was to just screw around and make things. Isn’t that what he loved to do? Isn’t that what he spent the last two days loving?

Was it too cruel of him to just want to stay cooped up in this new world, or game, or dream, or whatever the fuck it was… Just to get what he wanted. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent half his time on Earth avoiding any semblance of his father. But in that world, he had bills and rent to pay to pay, a job to follow through for 8 hours a day, and little to no say in his career.

Suppose just for a moment, this was real. The tapestry also saved his whole family, granted them five lives, and a box no different from his…

“Why do I have to save them? This isn’t my job!” He shouted at himself, criticising his needless mindset.

He looked at the stone he’d funnily been treating as a pet this past day, and couldn’t help but just accept reality. These past couple days had been the happiest in years.

And he didn’t ever want to give them up. His family could wait, and he prayed for their survival, but that was the end of it. No part of him believed that they were stressed and thought about finding him all the time either. As a tension in his chest loosened, he took a deep breath and finally relaxed. But for some reason, he felt as though a void remained in its place. Whether of family or guilt, he did not know.

But, at the very least, he accepted one thing.

Whether this was fake or real didn’t matter, he just wanted to do what he enjoyed most.

Building as much as humanly possible.

With a futuristic crafting box’s help that is.