The carriage started moving again with us girls in the back. Mary and Hela were both staring at me. It was already beginning to get dark before Mary addressed the acting incident. 

“I have many questions, but I know the answers would be troublesome,” she said. “Instead, I will start with this one. You aren’t human, are you?”

I gaped at Mary. Why wouldn’t I be human? I came from Earth, and the only people there were humans. Clearly, I was also a human. This didn’t seem part of the acting routine. Instead, she seemed genuine. 

“I am a human,” I said. 

“That’s not true. You can’t be. No human could master mana usage like that. A court wizard might have been able to use your spell, but they wouldn’t make it look easy.” Mary came close to my face and looked into my eyes. “You don’t have to lie. I also—”

“I am not lying, and you don’t need to be so close, Mary.” Her eyes had changed colors briefly while she had been in my face. I wondered if it was some lie detector magic. 

“Actually—never mind, I can see you are telling your truth or what you believe,” she said. 

“Is that all?” 

“Yeah, I don’t have any more questions.”

“Well, I do,” Hela said. She grabbed onto my hands, which were pressed against my lap. She leaned in even closer than Mary. “You said you came from the forest, right?”

“Yes.”

“Which forest did you come from? The elves would have heard about you if you came from one of theirs.”

“I came from a forest across that big salty lake.” I produced a hologram for them to see, mapping the places I had been. To the northwest was where we came from, Startour Port, and across the lake was the forest I had been in. 

“Eerie,” Mary said. “That is not a lake. That’s Titan’s Gulp, the largest ocean in the world. You see this?” She asked and pointed to the coast of Startour Port. 

“Yes, what about it?”

“That is Startour Gulf, and nobody ventures far out towards the Demon Continent because of the seas beyond that gulf. Titan’s Gulp is home to massive water dragons and even a legendary serpent. Are you sure you crossed it?”

“I am positive. They might not have noticed me because of my invisibility magic.” 

“Invisibility magic?” Hela asked.

“If you truly lived in that forest, there is no way you could be human. That forest tends to reject most—even many demons,” Mary said. “Just who are you, Miss Witchhat?”

The only thing I remembered about my previous life was my death—overworkage. I never even remembered my name. 

“Just who am I?” I asked to the sky, clutching my fist. 

I had only been in a new world for a few weeks, but the cave life wasn’t so bad. Random bits of information attacked me that I hardly questioned. It felt so natural to know the effects of plants by simply looking at them. Grasping the idea behind spells became even more effortless. 

Expanding my house based on faint memories of a previous life seemed like the most natural thing to do. Video games and reading were something of import to the previous me. And the new me found joy in collecting, so I expanded that cave domain. 

Building on it at the beginning was slow. I’d collect pieces of wood from the trees nearby. I’d collect plants used to make potions in the future. I noticed early on that putting magic into my eyes made the entire world brighter—not in the wrong way. The colors became more detailed as everything was painted by mana. I’d see little whisps moving from plant to plant, sucking up magical energy. Many would even hover around me for a snack. 

In the early days, that’s all I would do. One of the first things I did next was develop my magical radar to avoid all the harmful monsters. It automatically told me which ones were dangerous by a red blip or a green blip. Those days saw me leaving only meters out of the cave for some vitamin D, most likely. But also something else.

I didn’t start to get more adventurous until years after that. I felled whole trees to build furniture for my expanding house—a blank canvas. I built a library after I began documenting every spell. I became even more greedy. I would go even further out to collect the droppings or skins of dead monsters. I collected and stored anything that would be useful to me all away. 

On the outside and inside, I had changed drastically from the girl I once was. I went from a city girl playing games with dreams of becoming a witch to an actual one, but I was still me at the core. 

Even after all those memories in the forest, mostly forgotten from my long life, one thing never changed. Actually, two things always stayed the same. I was still clumsy and cowardly. I never leveled up in this life or the last one. I went from a corporate slave to a slave of a cave. What’s worse is that in this life, I had all the time in the world, and I knew that deep down.

But still, even if I didn’t know who I was. I had a name now. And I had made my first friends. That’s right, I am—

“Eerie von Witchhat,” I said to Mary and Hela with a smile. “And my goal is to be the best actor this world has ever seen!” 

“We are not an acting troupe!” Mary said. However, beneath it all, I saw her smile as well. She was just like me in a way. 

The carriage stopped along the side of the road as it became dark. The two men were the first to descend. 

“More importantly, Eerie,” Hela said. “Seriously, who are you? I never seen—"

“Didn’t you hear?” Mary asked. “She is Eerie.”