1-3 Checking Status And The System

It seemed I’d slept like a rock last night.

But my head wasn’t clear when I woke up.

Maybe I got a little too cocky and drank too much.

…Yeah, this ceiling had wood grain instead of the stark white ceiling of my usual apartment.

The so-called “unknown ceiling.”

When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t grasp the situation right away.

Where was I?

Ah—right, I’d come camping.

And yeah, I’d been inside the bungalow.

Somehow nature made me feel liberated, and then I overdid it.

Or maybe it was stress-drinking.

When I got up and stepped outside, I was in what looked like a clearing inside a dense forest.

Ah… I remembered.

I’d ended up somewhere weird, pulled away from the campground.

So waking up didn’t really help anything.

Since I wasn’t hungry at all—probably because I’d eaten and drank plenty last night—I took a quick leak and decided to go back to sleep.

But I couldn’t drift off, so while lying there I opened that status screen again.

First off, the PC skill was insane.

Whoa.

What the hell is that!?

I opened “PC,” went to the “Connection” tab, did the normal connection steps—and it actually connected.

Then I even logged into the game I always played.

That was ridiculous.

I didn’t understand the mechanism, but in terms of knowledge access, this was absurd.

“All-Attribute Magic” was basically just a bonus.

I couldn’t even use magic in the first place.

That kind of thing was a fake skill.

Like a smartphone with zero apps installed.

Where was the Magic App Store?

I couldn’t even do basic “magic,” after all.

I was clumsy with my hands.

And besides, everything else was the usual standard stuff like appraisal.

This felt rushed—like there hadn’t been time, so everything else got cut.

Even the PC skill was basically just a copy of a real computer’s contents.

Now that I thought about it, when I’d fallen asleep at the campground, I’d dreamed I was doing something like building a PC system.

Maybe I’d been making this.

Though it probably wasn’t me who was making it…

Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I gave up on the second nap and sat up.

Maybe I just wanted to play games.

Because, you know—internet.

Next I tapped MAP.

The same map site I always used online popped up, and it worked normally.

Most of the PC functions were probably just “the exact image” of the software—or rather, the sites—I always used.

When I zoomed all the way out and looked at the world map, it definitely wasn’t the Earth map I knew.

“Well, now… So this means I’m not standing on the usual Planet Terra… some other planet somewhere in another world? Or am I just—literally—out in the far reaches of the universe from my original world!?”

It looked like I was somewhere on a continent in this incomprehensible world.

At least there was breathable air, and for that one point alone, I thanked God.

“Thank goodness it’s not a deserted island… I don’t want to play Robinson Crusoe in a place like this. Even if I’ve loved that story since I was a kid.”

At least in terms of supplies, I felt more blessed than he was.

I didn’t need to scavenge a shipwreck.

I wouldn’t run out of drinking water.

I also had medicine far better than anything from that era, and I had plenty of various “the best of all medicines,” too.

When I checked the nearest town, it looked pretty far away.

So this strange world did have towns—thankfully.

And it looked like a fairly big town.

Not just some little village.

My dad’s hometown was still, even now, a magnificent backwoods place where the next house was hundreds of meters to over a kilometer away.

On my father’s side, my ancestors had been proud, full-on villagers for generations.

Though… it wasn’t a village anymore—it had become a city.

The old village office had been merged and turned into a branch office of the city hall.

Still, behind that hometown was the same ancestral mountain where generations slept in their graves, and the surrounding area was nothing but vast rice fields and farmland.

The usual feature worked too—the one where you click a point on the map and it shows photos.

And when I pulled up images of the town, I got to see a whole lot of unbelievable stuff.

I went silent.

The image list made me hesitate to go there at all.

What stood out was how many “armed and dangerous-looking people” there were.

Who were these guys?

And they weren’t carrying guns.

They had swords and spears.

Some were even wearing something like armor.

I pulled myself together and checked the Radar function.

Apparently this identified and displayed “enemies.”

What was this—a video game!?

Well, it was just a PC setting, I guess.

By default, enemies were shown as red dots.

The higher the threat, the bigger the dot—and the more violently it flashed.

Allies were green, and everyone else was yellow for neutral.

It also said that if I had a weapon, I could “launch” it from the Item Box toward a red dot.

“Whoa. Seriously?”

You could even set an alarm at night.

And as an application of that, you could set it as an alarm clock too.

That was the most useful feature of all.

I couldn’t even properly use my phone’s alarm function.

Also—what was this “Enchantment” function tied to the Item Box?

According to the description, it seemed like I could imbue items stored inside with skills or magic.

Right now, what I could do was “Enhancement” and “Item Box,” maybe?

If so, I could make an enhanced sword, or a magic bag with expanded capacity.

Too bad I didn’t have a sword.

Enhanced shovel? Enhanced machete?

Maybe I could enhance an axe, too.

I was sitting here sipping coffee and messing around with this, but based on the MAP images earlier, things didn’t look great.

The town was full of people armed with swords and spears, and if you looked closely, there were beings that didn’t seem fully human.

People with a bit of a beastly element.

And there were fantasy-looking types as well.

There were wagons—no cars—and the roads were cobblestone.

The buildings looked like stone construction, too.

Yeah. This was bad.

This didn’t look like a safe place at all.

At minimum, I hoped they had proper toilets.

From what I could see, flush toilets didn’t seem likely.

So, for now, I tried imbuing enhancement into a weapon.

Come to think of it, I still hadn’t tested “Physical Enhancement.”

If I did it right, maybe I could raise my combat capability.

Looking at the Physical Enhancement help, it said I could activate it just by willing it.

It seemed to consume MP to increase strength and reinforce the body.

Since I didn’t understand it yet, I tapped Physical Enhancement in the skills list.

Something activated immediately, and strength surged through my body.

It felt like power flowed in from somewhere and a motor kicked on.

I thought I heard a humming motor sound as an auditory hallucination.

According to the description, my body became tougher, and my strength increased.

Right now it was Lv1.

Where was the “club” you always started with?

Maybe I’d go look for one later.

Just some stick that looked usable.

With terrain this sketchy, I might need a walking staff.

I was old enough for that, after all.

Lately, among older people, it was trendy to walk or hike with ski-pole-like sticks in both hands.

A branch from a broadleaf tree seemed harder and better than one from a conifer.

A “club” was very useful: strip the bark, use that as tinder, then burn the rest as firewood.

Still, for a beat-up old guy, being enhanced might actually feel worse.

I didn’t want it to be like a desperate, body-damaging adrenaline burst.

For now, under the Item Box section, I created an inventory for Enchantment.

It was a dedicated workspace you could use inside the Item Box.

It seemed “the guy inside me” called files meant for holding liquids like water or gasoline—or files used for enchantment and enhancement—an “inventory.”

Since I couldn’t increase the number of drives any further, these files served as pseudo-partitions, or like an atelier where work got done.

Normal files were for bundling and organizing items.

If the number of files grew, I’d make parent folders for normal files and inventories and organize them that way.

Especially for the atelier files—I planned to make files with state preservation and time-stop disabled, so I had to be careful not to mix them up.

If I messed up and tossed food into a “non-time-stopped” file and forgot, it would rot.

Like taking something out of the fridge and leaving it out.

Into that atelier inventory’s “Enchantment-only file,” I first put the hunting knife and tried applying enhancement.

With the same “right-click” feel, there was an Enchantment option in the list.

When I tapped it, I got a list of things to imbue, and from that I tapped Physical Enhancement.

The enhancement completed immediately.

It seemed items could be enhanced just like my body.

I tried cutting firewood with it, and it split cleanly in half.

Firewood wasn’t supposed to split that easily.

A camping peg-hammer could have substituted for it easily—which made it a dangerous object.

With that, you could beat a human to death without much trouble.

It felt harder than mediocre tropical lumber like lauan.

The knife felt much sturdier.

Using leverage, I pressed it sideways against the ground and tried bending it with all my strength, but it didn’t budge.

The help said that once I got used to it, I’d be able to do this just by willing it, too.

After all, this “PC” probably wasn’t a physical object—it was a system existing only in my mind.

I was glad it worked exactly as planned.

Once you imbued an object, it seemed to stay enhanced.

Maybe it did something at the molecular or atomic level.

No idea.

This place might be operating beyond normal physics anyway.

I tried it on the shovel too—using the enhanced one, even hard ground got dug up cleanly, crunch-crunch.

I’d have to be careful not to dig into my own foot.

There weren’t any hospitals here.

How strong was Physical Enhancement, really?

I wasn’t about to test it by pushing my own body too hard.

But now I had Physical Enhancement on my body, and enhanced weapons too.

Did that make me feel a bit safer?

I didn’t really want to go to town, but I couldn’t stay here forever.

Spending the rest of my life in the mountains would be too much, even for a recluse like me with high tolerance for loneliness.

Even until now, at minimum I’d still gone shopping and gone out for a little entertainment.