Chương 12: Chapter 11: The Next Journey

As usual I woke with a sharp breath, my heart pounding against my ribs. For a few seconds, the sound of crying still lingered in my ears before fading into silence.

"... Again." I sat up slowly, wiping the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. My shirt clung uncomfortably to my skin, and judging by the dampness beneath me, the bedsheets hadn't escaped either. The nightmare hadn't changed. It never did. At least I didn't have to spend the rest of the night sleeping in soaked sheets. I stripped the bed, bundled everything into my arms and carried it downstairs before tossing the load into the washing machine.

The familiar click of the door locking, 35ml of lye and the drum began to turn at the press of a button Modern technology sure is convenient. It's quite funny honestly. A month ago I wouldn't have given a washing machine a second thought. Now it ranked surprisingly high on my list of things I hoped would never stop working. But realistically, I would run out of detergent pretty soon at this rate. The coffee machine joined it a few minutes later I don't know if I could really replace coffee.

But the smell alone was enough to lift my mood a little. Cup in hand, I stepped outside onto the porch. Morning had only just begun. The cool air carried the scent of damp grass, and the distant mountains stood as motionless as ever beneath the pale sky and the first sun. The forest, meanwhile, looked exactly as it always did during day time. Quiet. Still. As though it had never moved. I took a sip of coffee before heading back inside. There wasn't much point staring at it, it wouldn't move before sunset.

After breakfast, I spread my notebook across the dining table. The map had grown considerably over the past week. What had started as little more than my house surrounded by question marks now contained recognizable landmarks. The meadow. The stream. The rocky outcrop. Even the routes I'd taken were becoming easier to distinguish now that I'd retraced them a few times. The moving forest didn't really help there to be clear, But I was learning to deal with it.

I sharpened my pencil and carefully adjusted a few distances, erasing one line before drawing it again a little farther north. The more I looked at it, the more obvious its flaws became. Everything beyond my explored routes remained blank. Still... Every expedition made the empty spaces a little smaller. It wasn't much, but each day was synonym of progress. Satisfied, I closed the notebook and turned my attention to something I'd been thinking about since yesterday. Fishing.

The stream I'd found was clear enough that fish seemed almost inevitable. The problem was catching them. Typing survival fishing methods into a search bar felt strangely surreal under the circumstances. Thousands of results appeared after a long time. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. Fishing rods. Hand lines. Fish baskets. Funnel traps. Gill nets. Fish weirs. Spears. Some methods looked almost primitive. Others were surprisingly clever.

Most survival guides recommended passive traps whenever possible. Build one correctly, leave it in the water, and let time do the work. That sounded far more appealing than spending hours waiting for a fish to bite. Unfortunately... The first guide wanted flexible branches. The second recommended vines. The third required young saplings. I opened another page. More branches. Another. More vines. Another. Wooden stakes. I leaned back in my chair.

Every solution assumed I could simply walk into the forest and gather whatever I needed. For anyone else, that probably wasn't much of an obstacle. For me... I glanced toward the window. The tree line stood quietly in the distance. It looked harmless. It had looked harmless yesterday too. I thought about walking just a few meters inside. Only enough to collect a handful of branches. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Then I remembered watching the forest move. Not branches swaying in the wind. The forest itself.

I closed the browser tab. No. Not yet. Maybe one day. Today just wasn't that day. Instead, I started looking specifically for traps that could be built with whatever I already had. That narrowed the list considerably. One method caught my attention almost immediately. A simple funnel trap made from a plastic container. Cut off the top, flip it around, pierce a few holes around the edge, tie the two pieces together, add a few stones for weight, then leave it submerged with some bait inside. Crude.

But it didn't require a single branch. Another guide described weaving reeds into a basket trap. It looked like more work, but potentially far more effective. Reeds... I couldn't remember seeing any along the stream, though I'd never actually looked for them. If they grew near the water, I could probably gather them without stepping into the forest. That was worth checking. I grabbed my notebook and added a short reminder beneath the list I'd already started: Look for reeds near the stream.

Find a suitable plastic container for a funnel trap. Neither idea guaranteed I'd catch anything. But for the first time since I'd started researching, I had a couple of options that didn't involve walking beneath those trees. Having finished my research, I returned to the map. My pencil hovered over the page as I considered everything I'd learned during the last few days. Yet again, the forest probably held answers. It also likely held dangers I still couldn't understand or face.

The mountains, on the other hand, offered something equally valuable. Perspective. If I could reach higher ground, I might finally see what lay beyond the endless sea of trees. Another lake. More rivers. Smoke. Roads. Ruins. Anything. Even confirming there was nothing would still be information. I looked at the route I'd taken a couple days ago when I went on my first exploration mission. There was still plenty of daylight left when I'd returned even tho I hadn't taken the straightest path.

I could probably push farther if I left earlier in the morning and took fewer unnecessary breaks. I wrote a short checklist beneath the map. Next expedition: Leave shortly after breakfast. Two bottles of water. Lunch. Extra notebook. Binoculars if I could finally find them. First-aid kit. As usual, stay clear of the forest. The last point didn't really need writing down. I wasn't likely to forget it. Still... Seeing it there somehow made the decision feel firmer. The rest of the afternoon passed quietly.

I reread a few sections of the survival guides, trying to select an appropriate sacrificial container, then spent another hour refining my map. Outside, nothing unusual happened. No distant roars. No strange lights. No moving trees. Just birds singing somewhere beyond the meadow and the occasional breeze brushing against the windows. I was grateful for the last few mostly uneventful day.

By evening, the washing machine and the dryer had long since finished its work, and climbing into freshly made sheets later would be one less thing to think about. Dinner was simple. Pasta and monster meat. Again. I was starting to understand why people stranded in survival situations became so obsessed with variety. You could have enough food. That didn't stop you from getting tired of eating the same thing. Soon after putting my plate into the dish washer, I glanced at my computer.

The download queue for the anime Bill had suggested had continued crawling forward one painfully slow episode at a time. Five episodes had finished. The sixth still had hours to go. Good enough. I leaned back on the sofa while Yato claimed his usual spot beside me and started the first episode. For a very short while I was in the mood. The music. The jokes. The familiar rhythm of animated conversations. It almost felt like an ordinary evening. Then the story truly began. Another ordinary guy.

Another impossible world. Another life turned upside down overnight. Except his confusion didn't last very long. He found people. Answers. Purpose. The world bent itself around him as though he'd always been meant to arrive there. I couldn't help smiling. Not because it reminded me of my situation. Because it reminded me how different my situation actually was. Nobody had greeted me. Nobody had explained anything. There hadn't been a mysterious goddess waiting to hand me a cheat skill. Just a forest.

My usual house. My lazy cat. And far too many questions. When the second episode ended, the room fell silent. The only sounds were the faint hum of the refrigerator and Yato's steady purring beside me. I turned off the computer. Despite everything, I was looking forward to tomorrow. Not because I expected answers. I'd stopped expecting those. But every expedition taught me something. Every new landmark brought me some sort of satisfaction. Every careful decision improved my chances of surviving the next day.

Maybe that was enough. For now, adapting was the best thing I could attempt to do.