It had been a month since I was so kindly escorted out of the village. I’d fallen into a routine since then. Walk during the day, sleep inside my bubble at night. Somehow, even after a month of continuous walking in one direction, I still hadn’t reached the edge of the forest.

I had tried climbing up tall trees and scouting ahead countless times, but all I’d ever seen were more trees.

Well sure, the elves had said the forest was big, but damn, was that an enormous understatement! Did the forest cover the entire world or something? What a boring world! I mean, forests were cool and all, but you needed some variety in life!

To not go insane from wandering through mostly the same scenery for a month, I either chatted with my only companion -- who wasn’t very talkative -- or I made it a habit to store any and all interesting plants, rocks, and sticks I came across. I figured some of them had to be useful for something down the line. The fact that they were cluttering my bubble was irrelevant.

On that note, with all the stuff I had acquired, I had also been exploring my ability a bit more. Since I could perfectly feel everything inside my bubble, I’d learned to instantly tell apart sweet berries from sour ones as I stored them. Pretty cool.

But it didn’t stop there. Oh no. I could do so much more with this. Even though I didn’t have much practice yet, I could sort of tell apart poisonous plants from healing ones.

Sort of. I wouldn’t bet my life on it just yet.

Also, with all the bottles and herbs I had borrowed from the village alchemist, combined with the stuff I’d found around the forest, I began experimenting. This whole fantasy adventure was already a ripoff with my non-existent magic capability and a constantly repeating scenery, so I decided to try and create some potions at least.

And I succeeded!

But… Once again, I couldn’t quite tell what they would do. When stored inside my pocket dimension, I could sorta kinda maybe guess, but there was no way to tell for sure without testing them. Would they be a magical cure-all? Or would they make me explode? Who knew? It was like Russian roulette.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t up to the task of testing the effects, and Chad had already blocked off his mouth with stone in advance. Tch.

That left me with experimenting on giving this candy to random innocents populating the forest. For some reason though, they all either ran away or wanted to eat me instead of the potions. Dang. Maybe some sunglasses, a thick coat, and an unmarked van would help me with my trustworthiness. Too bad I didn’t have any of those.

Putting that aside, another aspect of my ability concerned the pocket dimension itself. I’d learned how to drive my bubble around the void space. Sure, the maximum speed was about one centimeter per day, but hey… progress. I was well on my way to one of the neighboring bubbles to figure out what they even were, since they didn’t seem to have anything inside them. I would start with the green one, since it seemed way more welcoming than the other colors.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I decided I had enough. At this point, I felt like I was far enough from the village that they would have to specifically come after me to find me. And even if they did, I would just phase out of existence and chill in my own little bubble.

No, if this forest was really infinite, then before winter came slapping me in the face, I needed to settle down somewhere. The bubble was a no go, too uncomfortable to be there. I would probably go insane if I were to spend an entire season inside. I needed a home in the real world.

But where the heck could I even live? I couldn’t just build a house with my bare hands. Sure, I could in theory use my ability to store trees and then attempt to dispense only plank-shaped chunks of them to get the stuff I needed to build something. But even my best attempts resulted in something that would sooner be called modern art than building materials. The theory was solid, but my precision was terrible. And I doubted I would be able to perfect the plank shape by the time winter came to 1v1 me, much less build a functioning house. Heck, I didn’t even have any nails or similar things to hold it together!

That left me with finding a cave, a hollow tree, or making one myself by carving it out with my ability. The last option sounded cool on paper, but it was by far the worst one. As I’d mentioned, my precision with storing only parts of an object was terrible. So when I’d tried to carve myself out a treehouse, I ended up with a spiky deathtrap, instead of a cozy home. Not to mention all the holes I’d accidentally created. Upon trying to smooth it out, I created even more holes… and then the tree collapsed on itself.

I either needed a bigger tree, or something like the side of a mountain. If everything failed, I could use the true and tried strategy of digging straight down and covering the top. But spending an entire winter like that would probably lead to me going insane as well.

Luckily for me, the month of walking hadn’t been all for naught. I finally found something I could use. It was something between a hill and a mountain, all made of stone. Big enough to hopefully not collapse even if I messed up carving it.

“Hmm… hmm?”

As I walked around the thing to gauge it, I found something very peculiar that probably didn’t belong on a natural hill.

“Hello there… giant gate.”

Bummer. This perfectly sized mountain-hill was already taken, it seemed. Although, there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Only a rusty old gate wedged into the side of the hill.

I looked to the left… then to the right… then back at the gate, and then I shrugged.

“Finders, keepers.”

I wouldn’t say no to free real estate.

I walked up to the gate, touched it, and stored it away into my bubble. Much easier than trying to carve something out.

Beyond the gate was… not a cave. It looked more like a temple. A perfectly rectangular corridor with markings on the walls. It looked ancient.

“Hellooooo…?” I spoke into the darkness.

After receiving no response other than the echo of my own voice, I shrugged again, and went inside.

I immediately realized that whoever had made this probably hadn’t paid the electricity bills in a few hundred years. A few steps in and it was already too dark to see anything.

“Hmm…”

After pondering for a few seconds, I picked up some sticks and tried the whole rubbing to make a fire thing. The previous life me would probably fail miserably, but elf me had actually learned this back in the village. It still took a good while before even the tiniest traces of smoke began to appear, but after some time, I was left with a stick on fire and a burning spot in the grass which I stomped on to extinguish it. After all, if the entire world was covered in trees, even a tiny flame could lead to the end of the world. I didn’t want to prove the dumb elven legends true! I wasn’t going to destroy the world!

With my new potential weapon of mass destruction on hand, I entered the temple again, making sure to close the door behind me. Or rather, put the gate back into its place.

Now I finally started to feel that adventure-in-a-fantasy-world vibe. Exploring an old temple with markings on the walls in a long-forgotten language, and then possibly finding ruins of an ancient civilization with tons of loot in it? Heck yes, sign me up!

Still, what weird markings the walls had. It almost seemed like rows of text in different languages. One row had pictures, one had some squiggles, one had different type of squiggles, another one had--

I froze.

Wait.

Wasn’t this supposed to be another world? Why was this in English?

BottledChaos

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