If lighting a fire was considered the bare minimum, maybe there was cold storage technology powered by cooling magic that existed in this world too. However, I hadn’t seen anything like a fridge in the cabin. The vegetables I’d found were either dried or freshly harvested, and the meat was smoked or cured. I could’ve been wrong; maybe cooling magic didn’t exist, or there was a possibility that those items were a luxury, so they wouldn’t be found out here in the middle of nowhere.
The water had come to a boil, so I added some diced cured pork, root vegetables, and soybeans. I kept the mixture on the heat while stirring it with a wooden ladle.
As the stew bubbled away, I returned to my thoughts. I could earn money through smithing, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sell my products right away. And without an immediate source of income, I’d have to figure out a way to get more provisions before mine ran out. I needed water, ingredients, and seasonings, of which salt was particularly important since it could also be used as a preservative.
Before any of that though, I needed to find out more about my surroundings. I didn’t even know if I’d woken up in the morning or afternoon. There may have been geographical data that came with the installation process, but even if I had a map, I wouldn’t know where to start looking.
Where was this forest? How big was it, and what kind of place was it? Where was the nearest town? There were a whole slew of questions that needed answering if I was going to live here for several more decades.
I also wanted to know how frequently people passed through this forest—well, what I meant to say was, I wanted to know if this place was actually well-traveled.
The cabin was set up with the intention that customers would come here to shop. Of course, I had no idea when they would start coming, and it would look suspicious if I were to say that I’d been living alone in the forest this whole time. Especially if people passed frequently through these woods—how was I meant to explain the fact that this cabin had appeared out of the blue? I’d have to ask around if I ever made it into a town. My list of to-dos was growing long, though I suppose that was a natural consequence of moving to a new place.
The food finished cooking, and it smelled like stew at least. I took out a wooden bowl and spoon from the shelf and dished some out. I took a sip. It tasted exactly like what you’d expect a broth of cured pork, root vegetables, and soybeans to taste like—completely ordinary—but it wasn’t half bad. At any rate, my cooking was edible, so I could avoid a slow death by starvation. I had no problems with eating the same thing every day, at least for a while. Once I got sick of the taste, I’d figure something else out.
The sun was still high in the sky even after my meal. By my guess, it was no later than mid-afternoon, but it was hard to tell with all the trees surrounding the cabin. My body was also telling me that it wasn’t going to get dark anytime soon. Since I felt alert and energetic, I decided to go out and explore again.
I was wearing a shirt and pants made of hemp fabric and a leather vest, like the stereotypical garb of an RPG villager. Though I didn’t expect to run into anyone given how isolated this cabin was, if I did, I’d fit right in with these clothes. I carried a hunting knife with me that I’d found in the cabin and then set off, locking the door behind me.
I headed into the forest. Since there was plenty of sun and the trees were spaced out, it was still sunny underneath the canopy. “Even if it’s light out now, I should still make sure to head back early,” I said to myself as I carved an X into a nearby tree trunk to mark my path.
The first order of business was finding water. I thought I could search for two or three hours before getting tired, and if I hadn’t located any by then, I’d come back.
The cabin receded quickly behind me, but from the implanted data, I still had a sense of where it was, unlike when I first woke up and couldn’t navigate at all. It had taken some time for the downloaded info and experiences to sync up with my muscle memory.
I assumed that it was probably going to be the same with blacksmithing. I had no previous experience from my former life, so I had to rely solely on the data that came with the installation to this new life; that data had to be read in as I smithed. I knew that the discrepancy between the knowledge base and my physical memory would disappear over time. In any case, I wasn’t particularly worried.
As I walked, new bits of info about the flora and fauna and sense memory were gradually coming to me. Even so, I was still marking the tree trunks as I went, on the off chance that my new knowledge would desert me at an inopportune time, leaving me stranded in the forest. I was also pocketing herbs I came across that had medicinal effects, like fever reducers or antiseptics, since I hadn’t found any in the cabin. Judging from the abundance of useful herbs here, this world was looking like a pretty good place to live.
I’d been wandering for an hour or so when I finally found my precious water source. I heard the sound of running water and rushed toward it, emerging on the shores of a lake. Upstream, I could see the mouth of the river that fed into it. This lake was so wide that the opposite shore disappeared beyond the horizon.