First Expedition (01)

When our slave Chunshik finally made it back, he was given a choice between a bed carved from stone and a makeshift pallet of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠leaves and dried hay — and he went with the latter.

The next day I sent Elena out to find the lumber we were short on, but every tree in the vicinity had already been felled. There was no more timber to be had.

Never expected that particular problem to bite us.

It wasn't that our village zone had no trees at all, but most of the ones left standing had been kept deliberately — either to hide our traps or to give us cover for ambushes — so we couldn't carelessly start cutting them down.

We'd somehow scraped together the houses and the basic facilities, but the list of structures we'd need going forward was only going to grow, and that meant wood — and before long, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠iron and every other kind of resource besides.

"Maybe I should head outside and look for materials myself..."

We had houses and basic amenities now, sure, but developing this village any further would take more technology and more materials.

"No one lives out their whole life self-sufficient in one spot."

This was never a game that ended with you holing up in your base, feeding yourselves, and calling it a day.

Most players were happy enough doing exactly that — nurturing and running their own little village — but if you wanted to see the ending, there was a mountain of things to do.

The whole point of the game was either to conquer the world or to build an intercontinental escape portal.

The former meant war with the other factions, and that meant weapons, resources, and troops in proportion. The latter meant combing through magic ruins in search of a spatial-travel magic circle, crafting a mana reactor, and then activating the circle to get off this hell of a continent.

Either way, the game never ended with you turtling up inside your village, which made scouting the surroundings non-negotiable.

Early on you ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠were too busy throwing the village together and clawing your way through survival, and only once you had some breathing room could you push outward, expand your influence, and move on to the next chapter of the game.

In the actual game, the obvious play would have been... to leave me — the mayor, the builder — in the village and send out Elena, our combat monster.

The problem was that this might be the game's world, but it didn't run the way the game did.

If this were a game, I wouldn't be Jin down here busting my back; I'd be some godlike presence floating in the sky, driving these two around like pieces on a board. And yet here I was, wearing Jin's shoes, working myself ragged.

If I delegated the recon to Elena, she'd circle the area diligently and tell me what was out there, but that could never match seeing it with my own eyes.

That left two paths to choose from.

One was to empty the village completely — all three of us heading out to scout the area together.

Whatever happened, we could handle it safely, and even if someone got injured or knocked out, there'd be someone to help.

But if an intruder slipped into the village while we were gone — or even just some animal wandered in and started wrecking the facilities — there would be no one to stop it.

With a bit of bad luck, everything we'd sweated to build could end up handed over to some stranger, gift-wrapped. Someone had to stay and guard the place. Chunshik still couldn't be trusted, and keeping the village defended meant tying Elena down with it.

Which left exactly one option: I went out alone.

"And if my hunch is right, there'll even be a reward in it..."

The first time you put together an expedition and send a resident out beyond the village gates, the game hands out a simple mission along with the most useful reward for that resident.

I'd always planned to venture out myself once we were on our feet, but now that the moment had actually come, a faint prickle of anxiety was creeping up on me.

"Elena."

I knocked on her door, and from inside came a flat "Mm" — as good as a come-in.

I opened the door of her private room to find Elena sprawled across the bed, rolling back and forth on it. Hard as a stone bed might be, apparently the fact that it was a five-star piece was enough to win her over.

Well, to be fair, even to my eye the thing looked fairly upscale — the surface polished smooth, the headboard carved with the Ten Symbols of Longevity, the old emblems of long life. It was a fine bed, honestly.

I could never sleep on something like that, though. Give me a plain three-star wooden bed any day.

"I'm stepping outside the village for a while. Keep the place in order with Chunshik."

Nod, nod.

And so I ran through a list of precautions for Elena as she lay rolling around on the stone bed I'd given her.

If raiders came, don't just charge in — count their numbers first. Never take on two or more in a head-on fight. Drag any enemies into the newly laid ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠trap zone and let the ground do the killing. And so on.

Then, worried that a long absence from the slave pen might erode his slave-spirit, I went and topped up his fear reserves in advance.

"Hiiiiek! I'll do a good job, Chief!"

I hadn't said a single word yet.

Besides, the bloodshot in my eyes had long since healed. Was he really that terrified just from looking at my face?

It's not like I walk around with a [Terrifying Presence] trait or anything.

An expedition beyond the walls required provisions.

So I got up early in the morning, woke Chunshik, and put him to work.

I could have handled the cooking myself well enough — simple dishes, anyway — but my Cooking stat was a 2 while Chunshik's was a 3, and the rations I wanted demanded a Cooking stat of at least 3.

Fwoosh.

"You... really mean to eat this?"

"Yep."

We pounded and crushed the wild sorghum gathered nearby, ground down what little wheat grain we had left into flour, and kneaded it all together with water.

Then, instead of loading the mash into the cauldron to bake a bread that would hold its moisture, we threw every last berry we had into the mix and set the loaves straight over Chunshik's flame.

Sizzle, sizzle...

Moisture hissed away, the surface browned, the insides cooked through — and I had Chunshik exercise painstaking control of the fire until the loaves were baked bone-dry, without a drop of moisture left inside.

Before long, I had in hand a batch of baked biscuits that had abandoned every pretense of taste and nutrition to go all-in on shelf life.

Calling them biscuits might be generous. It was grain flour kneaded with water, studded with berries, and roasted over a fire, and that was all.

When I try it, the flame control defeats me and the whole batch comes out as pure charcoal...

I'd attempted these once before and mass-produced nothing but lumps of charcoal, so watching Chunshik knock them out with absurd ease gave me a small crisis of faith.

With a Magic stat of 2 he couldn't hurl any fancy gouts of flame, but he could steer the fire he did have well enough — and that was precisely the trick this job required.

My equipment: a battered longbow, and seven arrows.

Just in case something went wrong, I packed herbs into my pouch and made myself a satchel out of bear hide.

Thus laden with three days' worth of rations, I stepped out of the village, exchanged a morning farewell with Elena as she headed off to clear new fields, and set off downstream along the river.

"Haah..."

The air felt different from here on.

The information on Elena and Chunshik that, until now, I could summon at a thought simply wouldn't come.

I had left the zone I'd designated as the village, and with it, I'd apparently lost my abilities as mayor.

"So from here on out, even if I'm staring down a crisis, no warning pops up..."

Inside the village, the system would flag every threat that approached or appeared nearby and explain it to me one by one. From now on, there'd be none of that — my own eyes and judgment, or nothing.

Thanks to the mayor's bonus I could still sense which direction the village lay without a map, but this was unfamiliar ground and forests had a way of swallowing travelers, so I moved carefully along the riverbank.

Along the way I marked several spots that looked promising for resources — and then, far in the distance, I saw it: the ruins of another village.

It looked like it had been built right on the riverbank like ours, and even from this distance I could make out a great waterwheel still turning on the current and the broken line of a palisade. It had the look of a settlement far larger and grander than our village — or my old hometown.

There it was — the early-game quest, right on schedule.

It was steering me into the ruins, and of course a place like that was bound to have occupants: bandits, maybe, or slavers, or the left-behind dregs of the demon army.

Judging by the difficulty curve, demon remnants I had no hope of handling were almost certainly out of the question at this stage — but in this game, "almost certainly" was never "certainly."

If it's enemies from this point in the timeline... wolves, other man-eating beasts, maybe goblins or kobolds — the weak stuff.

I crept up to the edge of the village and took stock of the interior.

Between the collapsed buildings, wild wolves were clawing at the earth and slipping in and out of doorways, searching for something.

Looking for something to eat, maybe?

And "food," in this context, included human corpses.

Some of them, naturally, would be happy to first turn a living human like me into a corpse for easier dining — or skip the courtesy and eat me alive.

They're not tainted by demonic energy, at least.

If those eyes had been burning with baleful fire, the pack would be demon-tainted — enemies my current armament could never hope to handle. Ordinary wolves, though? Manageable.

Scattered around the village outskirts, almost considerately, lay a spray of coins and a few farm implements.

Villagers who'd tried to run, most likely, dropping what they carried as their escape failed.

If this pittance was all they'd thought to grab, they needn't have bothered running in the first place.

If only I had the time to spare...

I could have thrown together makeshift traps from the stones nearby and lured the wolves into them, but I didn't feel the need to bother.

Fwish.

Having fixed the surrounding terrain firmly in my mind, I moved toward the river.

Then, feet planted in the shallows, I drew the longbow, took aim at a wolf roaming the village, and loosed.

Twang!

"Yipe!"

The arrow slammed into the wolf's back, and the impact sent it skidding, tumbling across the ground.

It didn't die on the spot, but the shaft had struck about the worst spot it could have; even if the animal lived, it would never walk on four legs again.

"Yipe! Yiiipe!"

Only when the wounded wolf began to shriek did the others finally register that I existed.

"Awooooo!"

Enraged that one of their own had been struck, the wolves came leaping into the river and charging straight at me — and I released the chill I'd been holding ready in my hands.

"Yipe!"

It cost less mana than conjuring ice outright, but to wolves soaked to the bone in river water, it was the breath of death itself, freezing their bodies solid in real time.

My power still couldn't freeze the river itself, but their faces and hides iced over, their sight whited out, and the current simply carried them away.

Swept downstream with frozen faces, most of them would drown; even the lucky ones would need a very long time to come to their senses and find their way back.

"Yipe! Yiiipe!"

The wolf I'd hit in the flank tried to drag itself off on its hind legs, but from a distance I put one more arrow into it and called it done.

"Yiiipe... yipe..."

Thud.

It still wasn't dead, though — so I pressed one more straight through its head.

No completion notice arrived, which told me six wolves weren't the whole story: something else was lurking in these ruins.

More to the point — what exactly were these wolves digging for?

The entrance of a building that looked like a mage's guild, or something built to the same purpose, was littered with wolf tracks and drifting tufts of fur.

They hadn't simply fed here; fur smeared across every corner and wolf drool left here and there said they'd rummaged through the interior and gone around sniffing at things.

Reading the trails the pack had left behind, none of it matched the movements of wild animals foraging for food.

Which means these wolves were trained by someone — or they're being directed by a leader with its sights on something else entirely...

Crunch... crunch... crack.

At the sound of splintering bone and something being torn apart, I snatched up my bow and stepped back outside.

"Grrrrr... grrrrrrr..."

On the far side of the ruins, a single dog — one nearly the size of a calf — was gnawing away at something.

Every time its jaws tore into the corpse of a human dressed in black, black-and-green mana came streaming out of the body and was sucked down the beast's gullet.

The drool dripping from its mouth ran with that same mingled black and green, and its body — wasted to little more than skin stretched over visible ribs — was as ravenous as ever.

A monster that fed on mana.

Which made it a monster famous for devouring the one thing that carried mana: mages.

"...Hah..."

The threat still lingering in these ruins was a Hell Hound.

"Grrrr......"

And of course — of all possible timing — because I'd used magic to shake off the wolves, the beast had caught the scent of my frost spell and was now closing in on my position.

Damn it all... is this difficulty curve for real?