When he made it back to his room that evening, he first tried on the leaf skirt to ensure it fit tightly. And so long as he drew the string enough, this was no issue. Which only left the final matter for this ritual.

A dark, cloudy sky with heavy rain. Fortunately, the clouds had begun to roll in on his way home, and there was a good chance of rain sometime tonight…

But he was unsure if that would continue tomorrow. Additionally, he really needed to set up a checkpoint to store resources in, particularly closer to the oak tree. Just a small storage shed with multiple chests would be good enough.

“You know, I completely forgot to check the recipes I unlocked. Should do that before sleeping.” With the tree symbol glowing as confirmation, he looked at the new recipes which had appeared, nearing the halfway point on this tree as well. It was around here that branches started becoming far more common, and he wondered just what sort of things they’d require.

Just one longer branch, and two new recipes. The former was a sort of flat ‘V’ shape, taking up the central bottom space and two outer spaces for the middle row. He could play around with possible material in the future.

As for the actual recipes, he finally had some clothing in the form of a hemp shirt. It required 5 hemp fabric in the diagonal slots, with the top middle left empty. Hemp rope filled the other three. But the other, rather interestingly, were some bellows. Made with a combination of fabric, logs, rods, and a hollow stick, he absolutely needed this for the furnace to melt even basic metals.

But as night fell, he climbed into the bed and got some sleep. There was no need to be too hasty about all this stuff.

* * *

The next morning, he awoke to a sunny day.

That meant he’d have to leave the totem for another time, but simply shrugged it off, not seeing it as important due to a healthy suspicion over such notes.

But before leaving, he first placed the lantern in his cube and took it out to see if anything remained intact. Interestingly, there was no tube connected to the oil holder in this lantern either… In other words, it simply burned cleanly for days without losing even the smallest bit of fluid.

“I’d believe this was magic over that ritual any day, Sal. Seriously, what is this stuff?” While he had received its name in his inventory, the cube disappointed him by simply referring to it as an oil lantern.

However, what he had to remember was that placing it into his inventory actually snuffed out the flame. Which left him in the rather troublesome situation of lacking a fire until he remembered the tunnel lined with burning fixtures just outside.

A burning stick proved this concept rather easily, as he saw it enter the orb with all the other sticks, but when retrieved not a single one of them was lit. Although, the burnt one retained its charred marks. This was great information if his clothes ever caught on fire, and so, he just carried the lit lantern instead.

As the day prior, he checked on the tree and saw sap completely overflowing from the cup, dripping messily much to his dismay. The best idea he had was to jab part of a stick into the tap as a way to reduce sap flow, at least until he could acquire cups or bowls.

What about making clay pots and cooking them in the oven?

It wasn’t like he absolutely had to use the recipes for literally everything. The world allowed him to craft with his own two hands, and there was no reason to avoid that. In fact, it expected him to do so!

“I have clay and a usable oven… So might as well try. What’s the worst that could happen? I fuck up a pot and have to throw it out?” The situation was so minor that he frankly ignored even the possibility of danger.

One other thing was that whilst it appeared to have rained the night before, very little dirt felt wet. The sprinkling of dew on grass, leaves, and bark were in his eyes, the only memory of such an event. Therefore, he concluded that drying as a whole had been sped up in this world. The hemp stalks once more fully dried, even after the rain, and so began a third round of drying.

That settled all the menial business and allowed him to start doing the fun things!

This time, he hastily walked over to the mining pit he found. Strangely enough, a few wild boars had wandered in and sniffed around the bottom of the bit with little success. But now they appeared a bit stuck, that is until his appearance made some noise and sent them into a frenzy.

The three boars down below began to run up the sloped sides and easily escaped the pit, not to mention running well beyond his means until far away from what they perceived to be a predator. He never expected such cowardly wild beasts, but it made his life far easier. Combat wasn’t something he ever took seriously on Earth, and at best he knew how to swing a sword so he didn’t hurt himself in the process.

But even that was merely to test the couple swords he made during an apprenticeship at a forge over summer. Just 16 years of age, and still enamoured by building and craftsmanship in general, it took him 4 months of solid work to go from barely knowing how to prepare a billet to actually sanding and sharpening his own blade.

Of course, he made a sword using an assortment of modern instruments and forges, no part of him believed that merely some willpower and a hammer could reproduce that.

It certainly wouldn’t transform pig iron into high carbon steel.

With the lantern in hand, he once more descended into the pit and stared into the open tunnel with seemingly no end. There wasn’t anything to be scared of, he could clearly see the wooden supports used to keep the whole tunnel up, clearly this site had been developed by some people of reasonable intelligence. Given that, he just hoped this wasn’t a dry mine.

He stepped into it, and saw that the passage as a whole was designed with a gentle slope, likely to make journeys back and forth a lot easier on the miners. But the lack of rails showed that whilst built securely, this was either a small and rarely used mine, or the civilisation lacked developed technology.

And given the lack of roads or other infrastructure in the past few days, he believed this to be the case. Of course, he ignored the workshop and golems in this analysis.

“Guess civil engineering did have its uses.” His voice echoed in the rock passage, and on occasion pits were dug into the walls, likely being parts of an ore vein which extended outwards a bit.

As he travelled deeper and further, he began to notice specks of orange in the walls, at first a guess thrown to iron oxide making things a bit red. But as he continued, those orange specks grew, and he began to realise what mine this was.

In fact, it was almost suspicious.

A copper vein right beside an open air coal mine? Although, it made sense the former was discovered as people needed fire, and coal burned pretty damn well. He didn’t doubt that logic, but rather how the two veins formed so close together.

Unless, of course, they had not naturally developed. Throwing conspiracies around wasn’t particularly useful, and he looked for some more exposed copper ore.

Now, of all the ores, the ones he absolutely knew most about were iron and copper, in that order. And what he did know is that this nearly pure metal ore should be unimaginably rare, and certainly not a massive vein randomly found next to a coal deposit.

Normally you’d expect to see impure versions like malachite, chalcopyrite, and like three other variations on the top of his head. Not to mention some forms which allowed for gemstones to form, but he didn’t care for such things as much. With the mine lacking any wildlife, he ignored the small bundles of native copper left in the wall and headed deeper in a straight line. Why bother with a tiny chunk when he could make a whole collection of copper tools straight away?

But in a way, he underestimated just how extensive this vein was, as at some point he found himself wrapping around on himself to stand below the path he just came from. Not only did it continue for quite a distance, but its depth amazed him as well. No reason the miners used supports when they’d dug so extensively. Just what had they needed so much copper for?

Finally, the native ores in the walls, ceiling, and floor grew so abundant that he saw at least a few clusters with every step, and he decided this would be a good place to start gathering such ore.

Rock compressed around the clusters quite intensely though, and that meant trying to find specific weak points which allowed him to carve out sections of rock, instead of just hammering away at the thing until it shattered.

His stone pickaxe simply wouldn’t survive if he did that. But he did find a method which seemed to work with moderate success.

First, his high strength and the pickaxe’s sharp point hit points of the wall until cracks appeared. Then, the stone chisel and flat head of his pick specifically focused on those cracks to eventually carve off the whole copper ore cluster in one go!

Then either his pickaxe or the chisel could be used to chip off most of the stone until a relatively pure cluster was acquired. Just the first cluster he acquired, a coral-like branching piece as large as his head, was equal to a whole unit of copper ore. With quite a bit of space between the parts which snaked off one another, it didn’t at all compare to the chunks shaped more like tightly clenched fists.

Still, under the lantern’s meagre light, he got to work mining out cluster after cluster. It must have taken about 5 to 10 minutes per, roughly timed with his unknown heartbeat.

Sometimes the clusters simply refused to come out, or he didn’t find any weak points in the rock around it. In these cases, he simply picked up the lantern and moved further down.

He eventually gathered 18 units of copper, and for now this felt like a good point to stop, not only because of the copper, but due to finding something of interest in the process.

It had been nearly impossible to see with his light, but whilst scouring the walls for a suitable starting point, he found a few fragments of stone with text on them. At first he grew excited with the possibility that the strange characters matched his tapestry, but only a few seconds of comparison revealed this wasn’t the case.

Nonetheless, language indeed meant civilization, and he carefully dug out the stone shards. It was here he realised they must have come from a larger object, with every piece about the same thickness of his hand but varying in size wildly. One piece was a sliver comparable to his fingers, but a real chunk actually just barely fit in the palm of his hand.

Furthermore, his inventory called such things, tablet fragments, leading him to be unsure if the tablet itself held any real value or it simply recorded some random information from a scribe.

However, if it were anything like the notes, he opted to keep hold of it as a safety measure. Perhaps they’d be necessary to a recipe in the future, or shown to whatever civilisation built these mines as proof of his allegiance?

“They could also be instructions for another magic ritual!” He joked to himself about the words which he couldn’t understand this time round. This at least proved that different languages existed in this world, although the weird squiggles might have just been one of the many languages he knew nothing about.

In total, he acquired 3 of these fragments and began the trek back home. In the process, he did his best to count the number of steps to exit the massive mine, and came to a number around 2500 steps. But he didn’t know how long that took to walk.

Outside, he saw the sun already setting and immediately set off for home. The rain clouds which had only sparsely populated the sky last night might have vanished, but in its place he saw an endless storm preparing to make its debut across the plains.

He felt it in his bones.

Tomorrow would be the day he crushed that whisper in his mind. Whether he won or lost didn’t matter.