As soon as I opened my eyes, I was met with an unfamiliar ceiling. This wasn’t my room inside the airplane… more like inside a tent.

For some reason, my eyes were wet. The dream… It was so vivid as if that had happened to me. A promise with Raymond… He probably had lingering regret that manifested in my subconsciousness… Alright, If there is a chance, I’ll look for your family and friends.

Speaking of which, if I remembered correctly, after Raymond fell down that hole, he fortuitously stumbled upon the airship. But because his body was gravely injured from being crushed beneath the weight of the rocks, he died soon out of blood loss.

That was when my consciousness transferred into his body, and it was Lunaria who came to my rescue, though the aftermath left me bedridden for nearly a month. It was undeniably a rough beginning to my new life in this unfamiliar world…

Remembering the awful experience, I tried to move my body but was met with severe pain. Right. I was injured after that attack from the tentacled abomination, and the ship crash-landed… As I lost consciousness before the crash landing happened, I didn’t know what happened after that. I hoped the ship was fine…

“Oh, right.” I glanced around the tent to find any sign of the figure that had taken me.

Nowhere. He wasn’t here. Unable to do much else, I began to think optimistically. At least I was still in one piece; I would have freaked out otherwise.

While I was deep in thought, the hooded green figure entered the tent. This time my vision wasn’t blurry, so I could finally see what he looked like.

What the freaking hell—!

He was actually a bipedal molluscoid with two protruding eyes that were like the eyes of a snail. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought of him as an alien that came to abduct for an experiment or something…

Since I couldn't discern his facial expressions, I was uncertain whether he was surprised by my awakening or not. But then he began speaking in a language that was completely foreign to me.

“### #####?”

I could hear his voice just fine, but no matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It seemed to be a language I’d never heard before that was different from the language used in Raymond’s village as well as the one that I found in the buildings. And it wasn’t just some gibberish nonsense like you often heard in dreams — it sounded like it had a real structure.

“Pardon? Who… are you?” I tried using the two different languages of this world that I knew.

He replied in his language, but this would go nowhere with me not understanding a single thing.

Finding that communicating verbally was nothing but a futile endeavor, he made sign language with his hands that only had three plump fingers each. Then, he gave me a bowl of green-colored soup that smelled weird.

“Is this… food?” Is he trying to poison me? I mean, what else can the green color be associated with?

He nodded his head at me and motioned me to gulp down the soup.

Thinking back on it, I would have died if his intention was to capture and eat, but it seemed that I was thinking negatively there. Giving him the benefit of the doubt appeared to be fair here. All right.

Gulping down a mouthful of saliva, I sipped the soup…

Fuck!

My throat felt like it was burning! It was indeed poison!

“Agh…!” I frantically held my throat, trying to force out the little thing I had sipped in but to no avail. “Cough, cough!”

The bastard who had poisoned me looked like he was laughing. I wasn’t certain, but what else would he do in this situation? No wonder parents always reminded their children not to accept food from strangers.

“Y-You…” I stared daggers at him.

And yet, he was holding another bowl of transparent liquid and forced the content into my mouth. I was powerless to resist because of the current condition of my body. This fucking bastard was indeed trying to kill me!

But then, the burning inside my throat subsided… and I felt much better. It was like everything that transpired just now was just an imagination.

“Oh…”

That transparent liquid was actually a detox.

Then, why did he feed me with poison first? Was he trying to coerce me not to do anything funny and to stay obedient? That appeared to be a sound answer. But most importantly, who is he, anyway?

I broke my train of thought and used [Identification] on him to answer all the sprawling questions piling up in my head.

???

[…]

Source Level: ???
Source Element(s): ???
Vocation(s): ???

Stats:

• STR: ???
• AGI: ???
• VIT: ???
• SRC: ???
• SPR: ???

Accumulation Points: ???

Huh? This was the second time that [Identification] resulted in a bunch of question marks.

For stats not to appear was weird. Perhaps he was much stronger than me, or there were certain conditions I hadn't fulfilled to access that information.

[…]

Species: ???
Sex: Male
Age: 43 years old
Height: 186 cm
Occupation: Spiritual hermit | ???

At the very least, some personal information that could be gauged easily was available.

I looked at him holding up his hands as if telling me to calm down. Maybe he didn’t know that the food he had given me was poison to me… but that was beside the point here. The thing was, I was totally powerless right now, so clutching on to any help available was the top priority. Even if I had to beg this sapient bipedal molluscoid…

And thus, three days passed in the blink of an eye.

It appeared that I suffered from light fractures and small cuts, but nothing serious befell me. Although, it was weird. If I was sent flying out of the airship and hit a hard surface, surviving was already a miracle in itself.

Furthermore, eating the same detox that he had given me accelerated my regeneration. Just what kind of thing was that?

I walked outside the tent after sleeping for the night. Now I’d almost recovered thoroughly; there was no need to trouble him further. Outside was a small creek, and the tent was situated in a shallow cave. Strangely, the surroundings were void of the red fog that had become my backdrop for three months.

“You… awake?” the molluscoid, Spitzek was his name, asked while in the middle of grinding on a stone bowl.

“Mm. Thank you for taking care of me.”

After a few days of listening to his language — as there was nothing else to do — I was able to understand and even speak his language. Normally, this would be an impossible feat, but it was the same as how I understood the words written inside the tallest skyscraper before.

“This is the normal language spoken in ‘Crimson Fogland,’ made by combining various languages and local dialects, and we called it ‘Fogland,’” was what he said.

It appeared that the land encroached with red fog all around was known as “Crimson Fogland,” and we were located within it.

But there was this one concern I had in the back of my mind these past few days, so I spoke to him. “Um, can you do me a favor?”

“Speak, young lad.”

“I want to go to the place where you found me.” I had to check on the condition of the airplane as well as to go get my stuff. Of course, I wanted to know whether Lunaria was safe or not.

He suddenly stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “You want… to go there? I can… bring you there.”

Spitzek grabbed the strange staff on his side and began walking, tracing the creek downstream. Quickly, I followed in his steps. This was the first time for me to go to other places other than a few steps away from the tent. Beyond that, I found myself in an unfamiliar landscape, surrounded by an abundance of strange and familiar plant life. The lush forest looked like it had been partly altered by an alien biosphere… This place appeared to be somewhere safe from the reach of the red fog, but there was no guarantee it would remain untouched for long.

Not even five minutes passed, and a breathtaking natural pond came into view at the creek’s end. Above it was my airship, or at least what had remained… Well, it was in good condition, however, as if it had been intentionally crash-landed here to dampen the impact. Lunaria must be the one who was responsible for that when I lost consciousness.

Since I didn’t want to tell anyone about Lunaria, I asked him to give me some private time alone. Can’t say what he will do when he finds out.

“Sure… Anytime.” He didn’t seem to mind — as far as I could tell — and turned around to leave this place.

Having said that, I rummaged through the metal and wood debris. Since she was a digitized mind, she wouldn’t be dead… Or was she already dead?

At that moment, I caught a glimpse of something creeping behind me and hastily turned on my hills only to find a floating spherical drone.

“It’s you, Lunaria!” I exclaimed, holding the drone. “Thank goodness that you’re safe. No, wait… This is just the drone.”

“Yup, it is me. You see, I put a part of my consciousness inside this thing,” she replied, her mini hologram projection being projected by the drone.

“So, what happened after I was unconscious? Did you land the airship here, or…?”

“Uh-huh. The tornado that swept the airship was going toward the intended destination… No, it’s tilted a bit southward, but you know my point. Honestly, it’s a miracle that the red fog is sparse around this area.”

“Figures…” I heaved a sigh of relief. “Hmm, you didn’t try to stop me from getting abducted, though?”

“My bad, but I had to temporarily shut down the system until the solar energy was enough to start the system, which was only a day ago. It was all ‘cause of overdriving the engine.”

“Oh.” I inspected the ship that had its balloon punctured and deflated a bit despite being a rigid structure. “Do you think this airship can be up and flying again?”

When that sentence left my mouth, I was notified of a new mission.

Mission: One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

Your airship has become a hunk of junk. You better find someone capable to repair it soon, or else… No one can say what other inhabitants around this area will do once they find this.

Difficulty: C-

Time Limit: 30 days

Reward: Repaired airship, a new companion

Failure: Losing the airship, possibly an information leak that will lead to death

Huh? It appeared the second I said it… Why the heck does failure always lead to death?! And isn’t the jump in difficulty a bit too sudden? To top it all off, I can’t even refuse since it means failure…

“Nope. Unless there’s someone capable of fixing this thing up. I’m looking at you, but you don’t possess the capabilities, so to speak…” That hurts, you know…

“Aw, shuck. Guess we ought to look at the bright side. Didn’t we survive that abomination?”

“Hmph. Because of whom do you think it was?” She crossed her arms like a smug girl in spite of the flat expression.

“Well, you, of course.”

“I require more praise.”

“O great Lunaria, it is all thanks to your contributions that we survived this journey,” I uttered my praise; nothing to lose in doing that.

“My, it’s good that you understand that. By the way, what happened to you after you got abducted? I’ve been looking for you all day; it’s not an exaggeration to say that I was worried sick.”

“Well…” I started talking about the sapient molluscoid, Spitzek, then how he helped me back on my feet.

“The Fogland people…”

“You know something?”

She didn’t answer. Whenever I asked about the apocalypse in this world, she always avoided the topic or stayed silent, more often than not. It was as if something was holding her back from answering…

“Forget it. Asking you is like asking a wall.”