Deadworld Isekai

Surprisingly, Matt didn’t end up eating a lot of the crackers. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; he planned to sit down and kill as many of those little foil bags as it took to feel truly full. He wanted to gorge himself.

But the crackers ended up being surprisingly dense. They took a significant amount of effort to chew and a small amount of water to swallow. After hitting his stomach, they then seemed to expand and take up even more space. After one, he felt better. After two, he felt full. After cramming in the third, he felt outright bloated.

Oh, yeah, he thought. This is emergency food.

On Earth, he had heard about the emergency food placed on lifeboats, where they condensed as many calories as they could into bar-shaped pieces. This was food made by a world that was facing a catastrophe, so it made sense that the food was incredibly filling. Matt also guessed that [Eat Anything!] was working behind the scenes to amplify the value of the food even more.

As the calories seeped into his bloodstream, Matt discovered how much of his fatigue had been trumped by his desperation to find food. It turned out to be quite a lot. He barely managed to pull the lid shut on his food treasure box and get his pack off before falling asleep.

—

Matt checked his clock after waking up and found that he had slept close to ten hours. His stomach could have also told him that; he was famished again.

I guess one meal doesn’t fix days of not eating by itself, no matter how dense it is, he thought. Popping a few more of the crackers into his mouth, he sat down to take inventory of the contents of the box. At first glance, it was an awful lot of food. The bag he had taken out was relatively small, and the chest was huge.

But as he pulled the bags out to get an accurate count, he found that there were less of them than he thought. The bottom half of the box composed of jugs of water, cans of cooking fuel, and cans of what appeared to be an aerosol herbicide. For obvious reasons, he was much less interested in those and set them off to the side.

What was left were several dozen foil bags. Even that came with a wrinkle. As Matt sorted through the bags, some of them felt different in his hands. They all weighed about the same, but some were filled with some kind of powder as opposed to solid food. He opened one experimentally and was greeted by a mysterious ashy substance that he couldn't identify.

It didn't smell, stink, or have any clues to what it might be.

Matt dipped his finger in the bag, careful to only get a tiny amount of the substance stuck on his finger. He licked the smallest amount he could from his fingertip. And spent the next few minutes trying his best to avoid vomiting and wasting food. Somewhere in the cloud of nausea, Matt heard a system ding.

What even is this?

Some things are enough like food that [Eat Anything!] tries to digest it, and then immediately regrets it. This is that. It’s something that should be food but isn’t. It even confused a skill specifically designed to deal with weird and unusual food sources.

Reward: [Eat Anything!] skill experience.

Skill experience was a new one for Matt. [Eat Anything!] hadn’t advanced a level and the flavor text attached to it was unchanged, so he assumed it was just closer to leveling in general. The food itself was an even greater mystery, though. Who would package poison in the same bags they used for food?

Unless it WAS food, Matt thought.

It had been a long time since Gaians had packed this food away. If the box was any indication, their technology was a combination of both magic and conventional technology. There was no telling how they had preserved this food, but if some single element of that had failed, it made sense that he’d be left with a bag of hermetically sealed evil. The question now was, how many of those bags did he have?

Assuming that the storage failure was a pass-or-fail type of thing, Matt separated the ones that felt like solid food from the wholly weird ash ones. Luckily, the crackers didn't disintegrate when he squeezed them. In the end, he was left with a much less bountiful take than he had expected. About six bags had survived the potential eons to make it to his backpack. That took him down from months of rations to only days or weeks, depending on how far he could actually march on one of them. He immediately began to regret eating four of them like they were candy. Then, he thought back to how he felt earlier and decided that it was probably a good thing on balance. He had been through a lot.

He spent the rest of the day exploring the surrounding area. It turned out he was definitely in the ruins of a small village or military outpost, and he found signs of about two dozen fallen buildings. A careful search of each turned up nothing but dust and bricks. He found nothing more he could use.

He returned to the big building and chest to take a rest. Packing up again, he wrapped the remaining bags of food inside his tent tarp, protecting as well as he could from being crushed. The cooking fuel was a mystery to him.

Who eats crackers hot? Matt thought.

But he took some of it with him anyway. It was flammable if nothing else. It would have been useful in the fire-trap he used in the final battle with the Clownrats, and might prove useful in the future. He also packed what water he could. He’d drink the chest water before using his canteen again. There was no use wearing out the water stone any quicker than he had to.

He organized everything in his pack, trying to arrange things so they’d ride easier as he walked. As he went to shoulder his pack, he paused and contemplated the bags of evil dust one more time. Instead of leaving them behind, he impulsively opened several of them, combined their contents into just one of the foil bags, and carefully tied the large bag shut with rope. He had no idea what it could be used for, but it didn’t make sense to turn down any resource at this point, no matter how weird.

—

As boring as it had been, Matt now missed the flat terrain. When he paused for rest, he’d pull his swollen feet out of his boots. The cool air greeted his toes that had battled against rock, uneven ground, and even the tops of the boots. Vitality seemed to do its best work when Matt was at rest, and hardly any when he was moving. Though his feet healed up completely every night, they were uncomfortable messes through the majority of every day.

For the most part, the terrain wasn’t much more dangerous in any significant sense. Matt had noticed a few small ravines and impassably steep rock walls, but he was mostly able to get around them as he went. It meant a number of small delays that would eventually add up, but with food and water at hand, Matt found he cared much, much less about traveling efficiency. To the extent he could, he tried to scout out likely locations where dungeons might be hiding, but had no luck finding any. For all he knew, every dungeon on the planet was buried under centuries of dust.

Without any real reason to keep careful track, Matt stopped counting the days. He’d walk, sleep, and occasionally stop to appreciate the view. Despite the lack of trees, the elevation sometimes provided vistas that weren’t entirely unpleasant to look at. All the while, he continued in the direction of the system compass. Whatever was at the end of that pointer was his only official purpose in this new life. He didn’t have any incredibly compelling reason to complete it, but he also had nothing better to do. He might as well.

And then something happened. As Matt crested a rise in the terrain, the system compass changed. The pointer itself stayed the same, but underneath it was a new and significant marking: 100,000W. Matt continued moving forward three or four feet, and saw the number drop to 99,999. It looked like whatever that W signified, it was something like an Earth yard or meter. If so, 100,000 of them would be approximately 60 or 70 Earth miles.

I can do 70 miles, Matt thought.

He still had plenty of food and water. As he started walking, the number started to go down. 80,000. He walked some more, 50,000. Somewhere over the last several days or weeks he had gotten used to being alone, and used to being in the quiet. He wasn’t really bored. He wasn’t really anything. He had zoned out on everything but travel.

On the last night before he arrived, he set up his tent. He didn’t have to, since there was no real weather on Gaia, and pulling down his hood made enough darkness that he could sleep. But he set it up anyway, ate some food, drank some water, and did the best he could to have a real rest like a real person from a real planet with night would. If things got weird, he wanted at least that one night.

Of course, there was always the possibility that the system had sent him on a wild goose chase and nothing was there at all. The reality might be that he was alone on a planet with nothing but enough food for a week or so, a canteen, and a hole in the ground full of terror clowns to entertain him. He tried not think about what he’d do if that was the case.

—

And then, with almost no fanfare at all, he was there. About 500 meters separated him from his goal. Unfortunately, those last 500 meters were up an absurdly steep grade, about as steep as he could walk without slipping down. He dutifully plodded up the hill, watching his step as he went. It would be a shame to break his neck now, without ever seeing what the pot of gold at the end of this spectacularly boring rainbow was.

He finally got to the top of the rise. He didn’t expect to see anything in particular, but he was still surprised when he saw what actually was there. In the distance, there was a perfectly normal log that looked as if it had just been felled from a perfectly normal tree. Sitting on it was a human form with its back to him, staring into a boring, ordinary wood fire.

As he walked closer, it became clear the human was a child, or at least exceptionally small. It was a girl, unless it was a boy with long hair. And it was wearing survivor’s garb, just like he was, unless there was a tailor who was particularly partial to making raincoats for outdoorsy ninjas.

Matt knew one thing for sure, he didn’t want whoever this was to get spooked and run away before he had a chance to talk to them. So, he walked very quietly and slowly, trying his best not to make any noise that might alert them to his presence.

Soon, he was just behind them, and slowly reached out his had to touch their shoulder and let them know he was there. If he had to, he’d grab them to keep them from escaping. He hoped he didn’t have to. Just before he made contact, the figure started speaking all on its own.

“Go away, dumbass. Nobody asked you to come here.”