Chapter 4: Chapter 4

Alice slept poorly - she was used to sleeping in a silent bedroom, and now that she was farther away from the area with broken mana the occasional shuffling sounds and animal calls at night woke her up. Thankfully, nothing decided to attack her in the night. Alice fully woke up, groggy and irritated, when the sunlight started creeping through the holes in the top of her… magnificent and amazing tent that she had constructed. Yes. That was definitely an accurate title for it. Some may look at the fact that there were several holes in the grass coating she had used to make the tent, or the fact that it was just a pile of sticks and grass stuck together in some vague semblance of a shelter, but Alice chose to be proud of her excellent and magnificent work.

She shivered and rubbed her arms, but she was much less cold than she had been yesterday. The fire burning somewhat near the shelter at night had helped with warmth, even though it had gone out sometime during the night. I should be able to improve my tent construction after a few more tries, she thought as she studied her makeshift tent. Then, she began thinking of how annoying it had been to construct her shelter. While the weaving process had gotten easier as she gained both skills and {Skills} related to tent-construction, it had still taken her quite a while to construct the tent. Perhaps there was some way to carry it with her so that she didn’t have to reconstruct one from scratch?

She began looking at the edges, trying to figure out a viable way to carry away some parts of it, and eventually, she realized that taking the frame of heavier branches she had stabbed into the ground to hold up the woven grass was impractical. In order to make it into a shape that wouldn’t be too awkward to carry, she would basically have to undo all of her work anyway.

However, the sort of… blanket-like outer shell of grass could be taken with her if she was careful. Therefore, she clumsily deconstructed the outer layer of grass and folded it up into a sort of blanket-shape, then placed it underneath the berries in her bowl.

Fear me, for I am Alice, queen of terrible craftsmanship and grassy… blanket things. She winced. Everything she had built so far on this world really did look atrocious… Yeah, I’m just going to avoid thinking about it. At least I haven’t starved or died of cold yet. That’s probably a miracle already, considering the fact that my first interaction with mana nearly caused me to die of mana poisoning, my immune system is underequipped for this planet, and the fact that I haven’t eaten much except for a whole lot of berries and a few nuts recently.

Not to mention how spectacularly poorly-equipped I am to deal with wilderness survival even back on Earth, much less in a foreign dimension. On top of the fact that my digestive tract probably shouldn’t be able to process the food in this dimension, and yet somehow it seems to be doing all right. Somehow, I'm still mostly fine.

She went back to the berry bushes and restocked her food supply, eating all of the berries she had picked yesterday and refilling the bowl with fresher ones. Then, she finally began travelling again, following the stream and hoping to find civilization somewhere.

A few hours passed uneventfully as Alice slowly followed the stream, but she began to get more and more nervous as she looked at the sky. It was getting darker and darker as a heavy blanket of clouds approached, gradually obscuring the sunlight and promising to shroud the world in heavy rain soon. Once again, it dawned on Alice how truly far away from civilization she was. At home, a bit of rain didn’t mean much to her at all – she would be inside for most of the day, either in school or at home, and the rain was just a nice sound effect that sometimes left puddles of water outside of the house.

However, right now, she was dressed in pajamas, had little food security, and shelter that was, at best, flimsy. Suddenly, a burst of freezing rain had changed from ‘interesting but basically unimportant’ to a life threatening occurrence. She glanced at her grass blanket and quickly decided that it wasn’t going to keep the rain off of her very well. Then, she looked around, hoping to find a cave or something. There must be something somewhere nearby that could help keep her safe… right? She began focusing on finding a better shelter as she trudged along the river.

Perhaps an hour later, it didn’t start raining. Instead, white little flakes began to drift down from the sky, fluttering lazily in the wind as they began to smother the earth, choking away the last remnants of warmth and replacing it with hues of grey and white. Alice, both feeling the ever-dropping temperature and her lack of thick clothing more than ever before, looked at the sky, dumbfounded. Was it nearly winter? Seriously? Of all the seasons she could have arrived at, she had arrived here right at the start of winter?

After a few minutes of searching, she hadn’t even found any stones larger than a small boulder in the area around her, much less a place that a cave could be hiding. Furthermore, since she was looking for a place to find cover from the snow, she had been forced to leave the river behind. She didn't think that the gentle slope of the river could provide the cave she needed right now. While she still remembered the direction she had come from after leaving the river behind, without sticking to the river her chances of finding human civilization were even lower than before, but some trades simply had to be made.

The snow began to pile higher and higher, and after another half hour of walking, her bare feet were beginning to sink into a thin layer of snow with every step. Am I going to die like this? She wondered. She had already feared dying many times in the past few days, ever since arriving in this world, but this was one of the first times death felt so… stifling. She had almost died when she was dealing with mana poisoning, almost gotten mauled by a strange animal, and almost starved to death. Now, she was at risk of freezing to death.

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She trudged through the snow, plagued by lonely thoughts as she wondered if perhaps someone would stumble across her corpse one day and wonder who she had been. Minutes ticked by while she searched for shelter and the temperature dropped, the stifling feeling of inevitability warring with increasing desperation as she tried to find some way to stay alive.

Finally, as her shivering was growing more and more uncontrollable, she stumbled across a ‘cave.’ It was really more like a rocky overhang with a sort of sideways bowl-shaped indentation in the stone around it, but it at least offered enough protection from the snow drifting down from above that she was somewhat sheltered from the cold. She set down her bowl of berries, pulled out the sheet of grass she had used to create a crude tent the day before, and wrapped it around herself as a blanket.

It was wholly holey, but at this point anything helped, and she didn’t even have any sticks to set up anything more complicated at the moment. Then, she began rubbing her limbs together, trying to get some warmth back into her fingers and toes in particular. If she truly lost the ability to feel her limbs for an extended period of time, frostbite might take away a finger or toe forever, and she desperately wanted to avoid that.

As the minutes continued to tick by, she grew colder and colder, and the specter of death seemed to loom ever closer. Her fingers and toes still had some feeling in them, but she felt cold and increasingly sleepy. She looked over at her basket of berries and grabbed a few half-frozen berries to nibble on. Finally, she realized that this wasn’t a sustainable method of survival – even if it was desperate, she needed to go back out into the cold to grab some tree branches, hopefully dry ones, and get some sort of fire started. Otherwise, she would definitely die here.

She stepped out of the cave, trying to work her way through the biting cold as it penetrated into her veins. The snow had stopped falling, but the carpet of snow on the ground already reached up to her ankles. She might have found it beautiful, if she were at home and waiting for Christmas to come, but right now it seemed to blot out the color in the world, dyeing the world monotone shades of white and grey.

The sky was still cloudy and overcast, but she guessed it was probably sometime between midday and evening, judging by how much light trickled through the clouds. Quickly, she grabbed some cold branches from the area around her and shook the snow off, looking at the still-green-for-some-reason leaves on the branches and wondering if they would catch flame.

For several minutes, she grabbed branches and dragged them back towards her cave, trying to ignore the sinking feeling as her feet started to go numb. Then, desperately, she began rubbing sticks together with some tinder, hoping for a fire. A stick snapped, cutting her palm. She gritted her teeth and kept going, knowing that failure wasn’t an option. As her limbs shook with exhaustion and the specter of death stalked her, she rubbed sticks together over and over, hoping for a miracle.

Finally, a spark caught, and she leapt up and danced with joy. The tiny little ember of fire spread to the other mostly-dry branches, and soon, a cheery little blaze was steadily burning in her cave. She stuck out her hands and feet, trying to warm them up a bit and occasionally nibbling on a few berries. Within another hour, she could feel all of her toes and fingers again, thankfully, which meant that she should at least be able to avoid frostbite. Warmer and more comfortable, she fell asleep.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 11

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