No IDE
In which our protagonist realizes that the world is not in fact well documented, and considers his life choices.
The smoke was real, and that was, in a small way, the worst thing about it. It was easy, in the first three days, to pretend he was alone. Smoke meant people. People meant either help or the worst day of his new life, and he had already had a few of those.
He walked toward it anyway. Because out here, alone, in a forest full of glowing predators and toxic mushrooms, he was going to die within a month. The math was clear. He needed civilization, even if civilization came with bandits and corrupt lords.
Survival in a world without documentation was, Kenji decided, exactly like working at a company that had never heard of Confluence. You had to read the source code, the source code was terrible, and there was no one to ask.
The Compiler's detect_mana was, against the odds, useful. Most plants had a faint mana signature. Animals had stronger ones. The big predators, the ones his survival instincts told him to avoid, glowed like small suns on his internal HUD. By the end of the first week he had built a mental file he called WORLD.md, because of course he did. It was not a literal file. It was the way a developer keeps a running model of an unfamiliar system, in his head, by pretending he has written it down somewhere he could pretend was external.
The blue mushrooms were a lesson.
On day six, he had picked a handful of beautiful blue mushrooms because they looked like the kind of thing a JRPG protagonist would eat for a stat boost. He had raised one to his mouth when the Compiler chimed.
[Warning: toxic_amanita detected. Mana signature: poison. Ingestion probability of fatality: 94%.]
Kenji had thrown the mushrooms so hard that one of them landed in a stream and was carried away. He sat down heavily and laughed for about five minutes. This was, he thought, going to be a long life.
The rule, he would come to understand later, was simple: this world was full of footguns. Most of them were disguised as helpful things. The mushrooms had looked helpful. The red berries, two days later, would also look helpful. By the time he reached a town, the pattern would not have stopped at food. It would, in fact, have accelerated. Every friendly surface would prove to be a trap until he had proof otherwise, and even then he would be skeptical.
But that was later. That afternoon, he caught a rabbit by waiting until it walked into a hollow log, then sitting on the entrance for an hour while the rabbit inside got bored enough to chew through the wood. He ate it raw, because he had not figured out fire yet, and the taste was so awful that he spent twenty minutes seriously considering the blue mushrooms.
He did not eat the blue mushrooms. He had learned that lesson.
On day nine, the smoke became more than a smudge.
It rose in a thin grey line above the trees, maybe two kilometers to the east. Kenji stared at it for a long time. Smoke meant fire. Fire meant people. He walked.
Halfway there, the Compiler did something it had never done before.
[New Function Available]
- thermal_awareness (mana cost: low, range: 50m)
[Skill acquired through repeated use of detect_mana]
Kenji blinked. The function had not been there before. It had appeared because he had walked toward smoke, because he had thought about fire, because he had imagined a use case. He had not cast anything. He had imagined a spell that would help him, and the world had agreed it was a real one.
The Compiler did not have a tutorial. It had a way of handing you the right tool the moment you needed it, on the condition that you could first describe the tool. Skills unlocked by having ideas. He would spend the rest of his life in this world testing the rule, and the rule would spend the rest of his life here teaching him how far it could be bent.
He thought, very carefully, into the part of his mind that held the index: I will need this more than I know.
The Compiler pulsed in what he chose to interpret as agreement.
He kept walking. The smoke got closer. Through the trees, he started to see shapes: the dark bulk of a wagon, the flicker of orange flame, the small moving silhouettes of people. With the new function, the Compiler gave him more than just a mana signature. It gave him a temperature gradient. There was a fire at the center, two living bodies to the left, three to the right, and something else further back, something large and warm that was probably a draft animal.
"Four people, two animals, one campfire, no mana signatures except the ambient kind," Kenji muttered to himself, in the whisper-quiet voice he had developed in the forest. "Could be merchants. Could be bandits. Either way, more interesting than another week of roots."
He took a step forward.
A branch snapped under his foot.
The three silhouettes on the right spun around, and suddenly there were three swords pointed in his direction. The points of the blades were very steady. The hands holding them were, he noticed with the part of his brain that never quite shut up, professional. Not shaking. Not posturing. Pointed.
"Show yourself!" a voice called out, deep and rough. "Hands up, or we shoot!"
Kenji raised his hands, walked into the clearing, and thought: "Please be friendly. Please be friendly. Please be friendly."
Three swords pointed at Kenji, and the only question was whether the people on the other end of them were merchants or bandits. The thermal_awareness skill had just unlocked itself in the Compiler's index, prompted by his sudden need to assess the people in front of him. He would need it. He would need it very soon, and for a reason that had nothing to do with whether these strangers were friend or foe, and everything to do with the temperature of a stream that was, at this moment, somewhere up the road, behaving in a way that the smoke above the trees was only beginning to hint at.