Deadworld Isekai

Matt was very proud of his jerry-rigged water reclamation device. Apparently, the system agreed, at least to some extent. As soon as more than a few drops of water had accreted into his canteen, it quantified exactly how much agreed.

Achievement: And now a drop to drink

You have obtained drinkable water from an unlikely, inaccessible source in a situation where failure would have meant death.

Rewards: +5 Class exp, +1 WIS

Achievement: Ape with a stick

Like a bonobo cooking itself lunch, you have used an improvised tool in an unconventional way to survive.

Rewards: Access to the system clock, +1 WIS

Five experience wasn’t enough to push him to the next level and two points of wisdom probably wasn’t going to be make-or-break to his survival. He certainly didn’t feel noticeably smarter, if that was even what wisdom did. But it was nice to be acknowledged for his hard work.

The other reward, the system clock, was a welcome addition. The clock was unintuitive and without a concept of day or night, Matt had no way of understanding what timescale it functioned on. He would have to observe over a longer period of time to understand what was happening. But, a second on the clock seemed to be as long as an Earth second, which meant that he now had at least a rudimentary way of telling time.

After packing away his loot, Matt now had time in another sense. It was going to take a while for the canteen to fill enough to give him a meaningful drink. His immediate concerns were past, which was nice, but it also gave him an opportunity to think about something he had been avoiding up to that point. Specifically, the implications of some very worrying system notifications that he had brushed away earlier.

“System, are your notifications always accurate?”

System notifications are always accurate unless an error message is displayed or one of a few rare skills interfere with your cognition. Otherwise, they are trustworthy and accurate.

The fact that the system was accurate did not bring Matt any joy. He hadn't doubted the validity of the system, enough though it seemed to be on the fritz. But, if the system was right, that meant something pretty terrible. The notifications had said that he was alone on this planet.

Matt had hoped that the wasteland he was in was an isolated area, but the notification claimed he was the last living sentient being on the planet. So, he was alone, and probably permanently.

With that long-term horror came a shorter-term concern. Whatever wiped out all the life had done a thorough job, according to the system wiping everything out right down to single-celled organisms. Matt's time on earth was spent mostly eating things that were recently-dead and not decades-dead. If there were no plants or animals to eat, he was going to starve.

“System, how could this happen? Was this a mistake, or some kind of trick?”

The system didn’t answer. Matt might have been imagining it, but his “bad manager covering their ass” intuitions had been ringing for a while. If he wasn’t mistaken, the messages from the system had been getting more casual the longer it was with him - like it was trying to buddy up, or make friends, or something. He didn’t trust that at all. In his experience, friends were friends most of the time but managers were only friends when it helped them.

My best bet is to hydrate as well as I can, then walk as far as the canteen will get me. If I’m really lucky, this civilization might end up having been really good at canning food. If not, there’s no use dragging things out, Matt thought.

After an hour or so, Matt was able to get a drink of water. It was lukewarm and tasted like he was licking a rock. It was objectively among the least appealing drinks he had ever taken. But given how thirsty he was, it tasted like heaven. It tasted like life.

Using his newfound moistness, Matt motivated himself to test out the effects of his new stats. As a middle-schooler, he had learned to juggle poorly. He found he could still juggle rocks pretty poorly, but slightly better than he expected. The difference was much more pronounced when he pulled out the survival dagger. With zero knife fighting experience, he was suddenly able to slash, stab, and parry. Not only that, he somehow knew that his motions were efficient, though they still had room for improvement. Despite his very specific memories of not knowing how to knife-fight a few hours ago, his muscles behaved as if he had specific, repeated training in doing so.

After testing [Eat Anything!] to confirm that he couldn’t consume dirt - he couldn’t - all that was left was to sleep so he’d be ready to travel once the canteen was full. A bunch of the tent parts were tied up in the still, but Matt was still able to use the canvas itself to block out the omnipresent light of the sun. Before laying down, he drank every drop of water the canteen had accumulated. Hopefully, it would be full by the morning.

The water didn’t do much for his hunger, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. Doing his best to ignore the pain in his stomach, he went to sleep.

—

There wasn’t much packing to do in the morning. The canteen was filled, and Matt took a couple long draws off it before dismantling the still. He packed everything into his pack and set off in the direction of the system compass.

Having access to the system clock was a mixed bag, emotionally. Before, it had been distressing to walk endlessly without any way of gauging the passage of time. Now, he could calculate down to the second how long he had walked. An hour in, it had gotten boring. After five hours of walking, he felt numb. Ten hours in, he was nearly despairing. He was exhausted and starving, endlessly plodding through identical terrain.

It really was identical, too. There were no hills in the distance that he could see through the dusty haze in the air, and no visible dips downwards either. It was like someone had come in and flattened everything with a bulldozer. His walk remained the same, so exactly the same, that he almost thought he was dreaming when the ground under his feet suddenly gave way, and he fell three or four yards down into a pit.

Matt was saved from shattering his unprepared legs by the fact that the pit wasn’t exactly straight down. Instead, its sides hugged against him as he scraped his way to the bottom. He was saved from the worst the rough hard-packed red dirt could dish by the survivor's garb, but the slide still left an angry red welt on his skin. Once he recovered from the shock, he was almost glad for the variety the pain and surprise bought to his day. Any change was welcome at this point.

The weird double suns never appeared exactly overhead. Matt could always see them without tilting his head during his walk, and had been slightly happy about the fact that the suns weren't directly beaming down on him. Unfortunately, that also meant that the bottom of the pit wasn't well illuminated.

Matt pulled his torch from his bag to try to figure out exactly what could have created a hole like this. It had sprung up on him, and it was possible that he had walked by hundreds of similar pitfalls, or none at all. The light of his torch revealed the hole was about six feet across, and the wall nearest to him wasn’t particularly interesting. It was the same weird burned-red as the surface, only vertical instead of horizontal.

The opposite wall, however, was interesting as hell. Mostly because it wasn’t a wall at all, but a door. A big metal double-door like Matt had only seen in pictures, ornately carved with geometric shapes and set in an arched frame. Each door had a handle in the form of a ring hanging from a tiger-like animal’s mouth.

It looked like he could just yank it open and walk right in. Matt considered for a moment whether he should do this, but only for a moment. He knew that anything was better than walking until he died of hunger.

He pulled with a silent prayer, Please, please just be a really fancy alien convenience store. I bet alien junk food would last forever.

Matt half-expected for the doors to be rusted shut or even glued shut by accumulated dust. To his surprise, the door slid open like it had been recently greased. Inside was a small rectangular room made of the same metal as the door, nondescript in almost every way. Matt could imagine the room as a big closet or a featureless elevator. The only interesting aspect stood out like a sore thumb. In the middle of the room was a black, waist-high plinth of stone with an inset hand-print design on its domed top.

“System, any comments on what this is before I go get myself accidentally killed?”

The system was silent, just as Matt expected. The system always stayed quiet for important things. On a whim, he opened up his minimap to find it did display an icon for his location, the first he had seen. But that the icon was the same shape and color as the door itself. Maybe that was significant to the planet’s former natives, but it was no help to him.

Matt stepped across the room and put his hand on the plinth. He knew he was going to do it eventually anyway. There was no use waiting.

And then a system window opened automatically. That was weird. Besides the “welcome to Gaia” message, system windows had never opened unless he prompted them to do so in some way. The window was also not the normal color. Where normal windows were blue, this was a sort of dull purple.

Dungeon entry request registered. Verifying dungeon readiness….

Error: Dungeon Challenge Population 0. Checking Dungeon Creation Resources.

Solar energy status: At Capacity. Utilizing energy.

Dungeon Challenge Population: 30. Teleportation lock set. Teleporting dungeon challenger momentarily.

Reading the text, Matt immediately panicked, “Wait, a dungeon? No! I’m at level 1. System! Dungeon system! I don’t want to go. I’ll stay here, okay? I’ll just…”

Matt wasn’t able to finish his sentence. Suddenly disappearing tended to have that effect on people.