Chapter 1 A Patch of Dirt

[Welcome to the Aethelgard Survival Realm!

[Novice Zone population: 100,000 Players. Deployment complete.

[Stockpile! Level up! Create! Stand against natural disasters and fight for every chance at survival. Gather resources and forge your path to godhood!

[Player deployment confirmed. Loading Novice Protection... Starter Tools delivered. Please collect!

[Novice Protection duration: 15 days.]

*****

Chloe Bennett opened her eyes to a wall of floating text and a translucent screen that looked straight out of a video game. The chat feed was already scrolling faster than she could read.

AutumnBreeze: [WHAT IS GOING ON? Where even am I?]

SkyDragon: [Does anybody have food? I'm dying here! Trading's open! I got 3 Wooden Logs, will trade for any food!]

TinyTurnip: [Lmao good luck with that. Food's worth its weight in gold. Three Wooden logs for a meal? Keep dreaming buddy.]

Chloe skimmed the Trading Post chat and pieced together the situation pretty quickly.

She remembered dying. A Titan Motors truck had caught her right in its blind spot, and that was it. The fact that she was breathing at all was nothing short of a miracle.

She looked around. Her feet stood on a 6x6 ft patch of cracked, bone-dry earth. A fishing rod lay next to her, and a beaten-up Starter Chest sat nearby. Weeds and pebbles littered the rest of the ground.

Beyond the edges of that tiny plot, there was nothing but pitch-black void stretching in every direction. The whole thing felt like standing on a raft adrift in an ocean of darkness.

A massive sun blazed overhead, flooding the bright blue sky with punishing light.

The heat was brutal. Sweat drenched Chloe within minutes, her mouth went bone-dry, and a dull gnaw of hunger was already creeping in.

If nothing else, Chloe was a survivor. She loved being alive and fully intended to keep it that way.

Whatever this place was, she wasn't about to waste time asking questions. She took a breath, accepted the situation, and started taking stock of what she had.

One thing was clear from the Survival Guide. Food, water, and upgrade materials were non-negotiable if she wanted to stay alive in this world.

Her eyes landed on the dusty chest sitting in the dirt.

[Open Starter Chest?]

[Yes, No]

Chloe tapped [Yes] without hesitation.

The haul wasn't bad. She got one Bottled Water, two Wooden Logs, and a hoe.

'A hoe?' Chloe frowned. She picked it up and gave it a bounce in her hand. The thing had real heft to it. A description popped up on the System Panel right away.

[Basic Hoe. Description: Can be used to till soil.]

Two practice swings confirmed it. That thing was solid.

The whole 6x6 ft plot wasn't much bigger than a queen-size bed. Three grown men lying side by side could fill the entire thing.

She dug in anyway. The sun hammered down without mercy, and sweat poured off her in sheets. Between the scorching heat and the labor, her throat was burning raw within minutes.

The heat was brutal, easily over 95°F. After all the digging, Chloe's vision started to swim, and the system slapped her with an "Extreme Dehydration" debuff.

Every instinct told her to chug the whole bottle, but she forced herself to take only a few careful sips. That alone pulled her back from the edge.

The plot was small, at least. Clearing the whole thing took no time at all.

[Acquired: Pebbles x3

[Acquired: Plant Fibers x6]

Everything Chloe dug up dissolved into raw data and slotted straight into her inventory. She shook her head in quiet amazement at how the system worked.

She pulled up her System Panel. The layout was clean and straightforward, with four tabs along the bottom. [Trading Post, Leaderboard, Map, Quests].

Her avatar icon sat in the top-left corner. She tapped it, and her personal stats fanned out across the screen.

[Player: Chloe Bennett (ID changeable once. Not yet modified.)

[Territory Level: LV0, Barren Wasteland

[Health: 150

[Strength: 1

[Charisma: 2

[Agility: 1

[Magic: 7

[Endurance: 1

[Energy: 5

[Luck: 4

[Personal Talent: Sorceress's Boon (Skill Level:?)

[Sorceress's Boon: Spend Talent Points to modify any single item, granting it unique traits based on the number of points invested. (No Cooldown)

[Note: A minimum of 5 Talent Points is required to grant an item magical properties.

[Current Talent Points: 1]

Chloe had played her share of MMOs before, so the whole skill-and-talent system wasn't completely foreign to her.

She pulled up the Trading Post and skimmed through other players' messages to get a feel for what each stat actually meant.

Strength was raw physical power. Hers sat embarrassingly low. Most players had started with a three or four, which explained why every swing of that hoe felt like dragging a boulder.

Endurance governed how long she could sustain any given activity. Health was her HP bar. Simple enough.

Chloe wasn't much of a gamer, but even she could tell her build was wildly lopsided. In a survival game like this, Strength and Endurance were king.

Compared to the stat screens other players were posting in chat, her combat ability was bottom-tier trash.

As for her territory level, that just referred to the patch of dirt under her feet. What leveling it up would actually do, she had no clue.

Chloe glanced around and noticed the fishing rod she hadn't touched yet. She picked it up, and a system window popped open.

[Starter Rustic Outland Fishing Rod

[Trait: Can only catch creatures or items from the Novice Zone.

[Durability: N/A. Durability refreshes after Novice Protection ends. Trait will be removed.

[The joy of fishing knows no bounds! Who knows what you'll reel in from another world? Maybe a Slime... or maybe an Energy Core!]

The so-called fishing rod was about as bare-bones as they came. Just a bendy stick with some line wrapped around it and a small reel on the side. Nothing else. No bobber. No bait.

'Can this thing actually catch anything?' Chloe frowned. Then again, she'd already come back from the dead and was staring at a floating game screen. A magic fishing rod that worked without water wasn't the strangest thing happening right now.

With no other way to gather resources, she was going to fish whether it made sense or not.

She was still trying to figure out where to cast a line with no water in sight when the system apparently lost patience. A prompt blinked onto her screen.

[Fish? Yes, No]

Chloe tapped [Yes].

The rod gave a soft whip through the air, and before she could process what was happening, the line sailed past the edge of her 6x6 ft plot and plunged straight into the void below.

The line seemed to go on forever, sinking deeper and deeper into the blackness with no end in sight.

Five minutes crawled by without a single tug. Chloe pulled up the Trading Post to kill time while she waited.

The sun was relentless, and with nothing to hide under, she pressed herself into the corner of her plot to shrink her body out of the worst of the heat.

A player count glowed in the top-right corner of the Trading Post. The number that had started at 100,000 had already shed over a hundred people without anyone noticing.

Current survivors: 99,841.

SweetiePie: [Any of you bros got a weapon? Give me one and I'll send you my private spicy pics from Nexus Network. I'm a huge influencer, no cap!]

TinyTurnip: [Ha, you wish! What's anyone gonna do with pics right now?]

AutumnBreeze: [Fellow survivors! You can fish for food! Seriously, go try it!]