Deadworld Isekai

After a day or so of walking, Matt was starting to learn new things.

His first lesson was in how easy it was to become very, very sore after spending nearly every waking moment walking in a calorie-deprived state. Every muscle in his legs whined at him, begging him for food. The rest of his body wasn't much better either. It felt like his back was on the verge of going out, and all the little stabilizer muscles in his abdomen that made walking possible were making their displeasure known.

The second lesson was that a diet consisting of illusory berries and occasional sips of water was not something to take lightly. He now knew the rare treat of being both half-starved and over-fed. What time he didn't spend on walking or sleeping was wasted on struggling with the digestive aftermath of gorging on several pounds of mysterious berries. It wasn't a great time.

The first two lessons were of the same type. The third was different. It was air quality. Matt's elevated vitality was the only thing getting him through the sheer amount of exercise and rough digestion he was subjecting himself to. As he walked, he also started noticing something that he hadn't previously realized: the air quality of Gaia was shit. It was LA-on-a-smog-warning-day bad.

At first, there was no way Matt would have noticed this. He had been so very sick before his Isekai journey that the ability to take an unlabored breath was novel. However, with his vitality bumped up, he was finally able to take deep, productive breaths that went beyond even that. His lungs felt strong for the first time in what felt like forever. Despite the dusty, ashy air, it was a literal breath of fresh air. It was air in the corniest, puniest way possible, but at least he wasn't wheezing.

With the general filthiness of the air, he wasn't particularly surprised when a mountain range suddenly loomed in front of him. He had been walking for approximately three days already. The mountain was massive, and there was no way that it could have snuck on him without the dust blocking his vision and the fact that Gaia didn't seem to spin around its twin suns. With no dawn or sunset to highlight the terrain, there was no way Matt could have seen the mountains before now.

Despite how big the mountains were, it wasn't as if Matt was particularly close to them. At best, he was a couple of days away from what he made out as the base of the mountain. Unfortunately, when he looked at his system compass, he realized that it was pointing straight at the mountain range where he'd have to climb uphill. After a groan, he got back to the walk.

One of the tricky things about mountains is that you never really know when you're at the base of one. From a local perspective, it was just a series of increasingly steep steps. All but unnoticeable until every step screamed agony. After a couple of days, Matt estimated that he had made it to the base of the mountain.

He was also at the beginnings of serious trouble related to food. When the system had first teleported Matt to Gaia, it had been kind enough to start him in a well-fed state. Over the course of the next few days, Matt had become increasingly hungry to what he believed was starvation. His efforts with the berries had temporarily reversed that trend, but now the meager nutrition he had found in them was long gone.

The additional strain of the journey had taught him that starvation had different levels. He was wrong to call what he went through before as starvation. Yes, he was very hungry back then, but it wasn't anything like now. Before, he had been able to plod along at a reasonable pace. Now, he found himself having to stop more and more often to recover from dizziness, unsteadiness, and general weakness. As time passed, this only got worse. He was taking a few steps, sitting down, and supporting himself on one of the tent poles like a staff.

He then learned one final lesson. When you collapse from hunger, you don't get a lot of advance warning.

—

Matt woke up at the bottom of an incline with blood in his hair. He reached up to his head to feel out the wound, but his vitality stat had already done the work to close it up. That meant he had been out for at least several minutes. Even with his enhanced vitality, it would have still taken a fair amount of time to heal from a scrape that produced that much blood.

As cool as it was to wake up with injuries already healed, vitality didn't do anything to help Matt's hunger or any of its follow-on effects. It was still hard to get up, let alone walk around. But he had to get up. Examining his surroundings, Matt saw that the now-healed wound on his head had been caused by a brick. More specifically, it had been caused by one of many bricks in the area. It took a while before the alarm bells in his head subsided. Only then did he grasp the significance of where he was.

Holy shit, an actual ruin.

There were hundreds of bricks around, some of them still assembled into parts of honest-to-god walls. Matt was either looking at the remains of one very-large building, or a small compound of multiple buildings packed together. As quick as he could, Matt shambled around to take a better look.

Bricks were a sign of civilization. Matt's knowledge of the original Gaians started and stopped with the words, “garden planet.” The fact that they were at least past the mud-and-leaves stage of civilization was a good sign. Not a great sign, since bricks weren't that hard to make, but as he picked through the wreckage, he also found little bits and pieces of metal. His advanced-society estimates of Gaians soared. But it wasn't until he was almost done combing through the ruins when he found evidence that categorized Gaians as an advanced civilization.

He was in the last section that he could search, which was either an inner courtyard or a great room. That was when his foot hit metal. It wasn't a small piece of metal like what he had been finding, but a great big metal chunk that clunked when he stubbed the hell out of his toes on it. Thankfully, his toes had long gone numb from his march. Matt quickly brushed the dust off and found that he was dealing with what appeared to be a fairly large lid. Promisingly, there was a similar size chest attached to the lid.

The chest was entirely buried, and Matt looked at the task ahead of him with despair.

It took him hours of brushing away dirt and chipping at hardened clay before it was loose. For the worst parts, he used moisture from the water stone to loosen and break the chest from the surrounding dirt. Using all of his strength, he managed to hoist the thing out. Under the Gaian sun, he found something about twice as large as a military footlocker and infinitely more bizarre.

The metal wasn’t rusted at all. Whatever this was made of, it wasn’t made with beauty in mind. As boxes went, it was ugly in the sort of minimalist military sense Matt associated with video game ammo boxes. But it was somehow completely undamaged. Whatever decades, centuries, or millennia had passed since this planet’s downfall had not touched it. Or, for that matter, the electronics hooked to it, which looked like a video touchpad.

It took a while to find the button that turned the touchpad on. It wasn't on the edge like all the earth boxes. Instead, some maniac had designed the button on the back of the touchpad, and Matt's fingers barely found it. When he pushed in, the screen sprang to life.

CalicaCorp Military Comms Pad V. 6.7

Booting…

“Hey, system. Why is this pad in English? That doesn’t even make sense.”

A few of the most common local languages are automatically translated. This is considered part of the basic transmigration package, and automatically converts any communications in those languages to the language best known to the transmigrator.

Please note that additional languages can be learned through classes dedicated to translation or through the traditional routes of study and practice.

Well, that’s convenient, Matt thought. Like at home, the computers that Gaians used for government applications were slow as hell, and it took minutes that felt like eternities for the damn thing to get up and running. When it finally finished, the wait was worth it.

Warning: This chest contains emergency relief supplies meant for use against the growth scourge. Open only when intended for immediate use. Unsealing the chest will dispel all storage enchantments.

That was promising, and even more promising was the glowing handprint that immediately lit up on the box next to the display. Matt didn’t hesitate. He plopped his hand on it immediately.

Unable to get an accurate scan. Please clean both the scanner and the user’s hand.

Frustrated, Matt wasted some water cutting some of the thick dust off his right hand, and retried the scanner.

Error. User not found in database. Scanning user for individual metrics.

Sarthia Prime Citizen established.

Gaia Universal Citizen status established.

Opening authority granted. Supplies are to be used in accordance with the Sarthia catastrophe relief efforts and Gaia unified government growth scourge resistance initiative goals. Failure to comply with these restrictions will result in punishment to the full extent of the law.

Open Chest?

Well, not much risk there. The touchpad displayed a set of yes/no buttons, and Matt quickly selected yes. It shut down to a black screen again. After a few seconds, the box clicked and hissed as the mechanism holding it closed released. The touchpad suddenly opened and began to flash as it displayed a warning message.

Enchantments will now be dispelled. Please close your eyes and cover your ears in 3… 2…

Matt was momentarily caught off guard and failed to do either of these things. He quickly regretted that as the entire box exploded in a sudden, massive pop of light and sound. It was like he had set off a flash bang inches from his face. Temporarily robbed of both his sight and equilibrium, he stumbled back into the dirt and hoped that vitality would restore his eardrums before his sudden nausea caught up with him.

When his sight finally came back, he found himself sitting next to a relatively large chest packed with foil bags. Foil packages that, somehow, looked untouched by time. Each was marked with a large “ERR” that he desperately hoped meant something besides error. He grabbed one and spent a few moments fruitlessly trying to rip it open with his hands and teeth before remembering that for the first time in his life, he was carrying a belt knife.

The knife easily defeated the defenses of the bag. Matt turned it over and shook it out inside the chest, revealing several dozen small crackers. Plain, nondescript, gray-white crackers without a speck of visible salt or any indication they were meant to be enjoyed as food. He immediately popped one in his mouth. It wasn’t delicious. It hardly had flavor at all. But it was food. Actual non-hologram food meant to be eaten by real people with real mouths.

His body set off a bunch of internal, celebratory signals to his brain, and for a while Matt lived in a world of pure cracker-driven joy. He was eating.