At 11:40 on a Tuesday night, I was repairing a hip joint when my living room wall unzipped.
I want to be clear about the order of events, because I have gone over them many times since. First, I was doing something sensible. The doll on my workbench was a 110cm Parabox doll, a secondhand auction find, and her left hip had a crack that would have shattered the first time anyone posed her. I had the joint clamped, a lump of epoxy putty warming in my fingers, and a mug of tea going cold beside the lamp. Second, the lamp flickered. Third, the wall opened.
It did not look like magic. It looked like a seam: a vertical line of white light about the height of a door, spreading apart with a soft ripping sound, like someone opening a very large bag of rice. Beyond it, I could see trees.
I am forty-three years old. I work in accounts receivable at a mid-sized logistics firm. I have a bad left knee, a low opinion of exercise, and an apartment where every flat surface holds a doll, a figure, or a half-finished puppet. My coworkers think my hobby is "a bit much." Once I arranged eleven dolls into a tea party on my bookshelf, with tiny porcelain cups and a tablecloth I stitched myself, and I left it up for a whole year because nobody was bothering it and it looked happy.
None of this prepared me for the seam. What it did prepare me for was reaching out to save the doll.
That is the real reason I am here. The air began to pull, the lamp tipped, the workbench started sliding toward the light, and my first thought was not for myself. It was: her hip isn't set yet. I grabbed her. I grabbed my tool roll, because it was next to her. I grabbed the spool of armature wire, because it rolled into my hand. Then the floor went away.
Falling through a wall into a forest takes about two seconds, and I screamed for most of them.
I landed on my back in wet moss. Above me, enormous dark trees knitted together into a ceiling, with thin gray morning light pushing through the gaps. My body, still living in Tuesday night, found this rude. The air smelled of rot and pine and something colder underneath. Behind me the seam closed with a zipping noise, and where my living room should have been there was only more forest.
I lay there for a while. The doll was still in my left hand, the tool roll was under my arm, and the wire spool was digging into my ribs. I checked the doll first. The putty had come a little undone. Her hip was intact, if not yet cured, and her painted expression was exactly as serene as it had been on the bench.
"Well," I told her, "we've left the apartment."
My voice sounded very small. Nothing answered. Then the air in front of my face lit up with pale blue letters.
REGISTRY A new life has been entered into the world. Name: Mochizuki Kenji Race: Human Level: 1 Class: None HP 12 / 12 MP 0 / 0 VIT 5 END 4 STR 4 DEX 7 INT 9 ATT 0 Deeds recorded: Repaired a doll (in progress).
I read it twice. Then I sat up and read it a third time, because I work in accounts receivable, and when numbers appear in front of me, I check them.
The numbers were bad. A strength of 4 explained a great deal about my life. But the line at the bottom caught my eye, because the Registry had noticed what I was doing before I fell. It had written down the doll.
I tried touching the letters, and a second panel unfolded, polite and terrible in its clarity.
Levels 1 to 9: Classless. At Level 10, a class will be offered according to your deeds. Most beings do not reach Level 10.
"Most beings," I said aloud, "do not reach Level 10?"
The letters did not change.
"What do you mean, most beings do not reach Level 10?!" My voice cracked and bounced off the trunks. "Hello? Can you hear me? Is somebody there?"
Nothing.
"Most is not a number. Most could be fifty-one percent. Most could be ninety-nine. Which is it? What happens to them? Do they get to Level 9 and stop, or do they not make it to Level 2?" I waved a hand through the panel. The letters rippled like a reflection in a pond and re-formed exactly as before. "Hello? Registry? System? Whoever is in charge of this? I would like to speak with someone in charge!"
I tried the things one tries. I said "status," and "help," and "menu," and, with a growing sense of foolishness, "please." I poked each line with a finger. I read the panel a fourth time in case it had changed its mind. It had not. It hung there, patient and pale and perfectly silent, like a notice pinned to a wall.
This page reproduces the author's published chapter without consent, and the official posting is where readers can support their work.
I decided it must be a recording. Perhaps the help desk was closed for the night.
The forest, to its credit, did not argue.
I took inventory in the thin gray light, because it seemed like the kind of thing a person in my position should do. My tool roll held four carving knives, a pin vise, three files, a pair of fine pliers, a hobby saw, and a small tin of putty. I had the spool of wire. I had a large black hoodie, sweatpants, and one slipper. I had no food, no water, no lighter, and no idea where anything was.
I also had the doll. She was far too big for any pocket, and I could not think where else to put her, so I set her upright against the root of a fallen tree and pressed the joint closed with my thumb until the putty took. When it clicked into place, something small and warm moved in my chest, so quietly that I almost missed it. It was the same feeling I get every time a repair holds. It felt out of place in a forest.
"There," I said to her. "Good as new."
A branch cracked somewhere in the trees, a long way off but not long enough. I left the doll propped against the root so the putty could dry, pulled the hood of my big black hoodie up over my head, and crouched beside her with the carving knife in my fist. I counted my breaths. I thought about the tea party on my bookshelf, eleven guests sitting very still, waiting for a host who was not coming back. Then I decided that crouching was not a plan, and that the first item on any plan was water.
I did not get far. Within a few minutes I had worked out three things. I was thirsty. I was hungry. And there was something small and wet moving through the ferns.
It was the size of a beach ball and the color of old window glass, a quivering blue blob dragging itself across the moss. When I focused on it, a tag appeared above it in the same pale letters.
Slime Lv. 1
A slime. Level 1. The same level as me.
I am not proud of what happened next. I will say only that I stood up, my knee made a sound, and the slime turned toward me with the unhurried confidence of something that has never been told no. It lunged. I swung. The carving knife passed through its jelly body like a spoon through pudding and accomplished nothing at all. Then it was on my forearm, and my sleeve began to hiss.
It hurt. It hurt a great deal. Through the pain I noticed a darker spot floating in the center of the blob, a pinkish nodule the size of a walnut, and I did what I would do with any object whose joint I wanted to open: I looked for the weak point and went in with the pliers.
The core came out with a wet pop. The slime collapsed into a puddle, and the puddle sank into the moss and vanished.
I sat down hard. My arm was red and raw. My heart was trying to leave my body. The letters appeared once more.
Deed recorded: First kill.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a slime.
Experience gained: 5 XP (Slime, Lv. 1)
First-kill bonus: +45 XP
First-time-defeat bonus (Slime): +50 XP
Total: 100 XP
LEVEL UP. Level 2.
HP 14 / 14
I read the panel twice, because I check numbers. The slime itself had been worth five points. The Registry had added forty-five for my first kill and fifty for my first slime, which came to exactly one hundred, which was exactly what I needed. Beginners, it seemed, were graded on a generous curve. I had a feeling the generosity would not last.
Then I laughed, a thin, cracked, middle-aged laugh, because I was alive and sitting in a forest and I had just leveled up by murdering a puddle with a pair of pliers.
I was still laughing when I heard the clatter.
It came from beyond a screen of thick trunks, a dry, rattling sound, like someone shaking a bag of knucklebones. It was slow and steady, and it was getting closer. I stopped laughing. I snatched the doll off her root, because I could not leave her, crawled to the nearest trunk, and looked around it.
In a gap between the trees, a figure was walking. It was a skeleton in a rusted breastplate, tall as a doorway, pacing through the ferns with a notched sword dragging from one hand. Pale light moved in its eye sockets. It was not searching for anything. It was only walking.
A tag hung above its skull.
Skeleton Lv. 56 Class: None
Level 56. I turned the number over in my head.
Fifty-six sounded large, but I had no way to know how large. The only other number I had was the slime, and the slime had been a 1. For all I knew, this world's scale ran to a thousand, and fifty-six was a mid-ranking clerk. Or it ran to sixty, and I was looking at a god. I had nothing to measure it against.
I could say this much: a Level 1 had very nearly dissolved my arm. So I stayed behind the trunk with the doll held against my chest, and I felt wary, though not frightened. It was the same feeling I get at work when a client with a reputation for disputing invoices walks into the lobby. Interesting. Possibly troublesome. Best observed from a distance.
"Let's see what you do," I whispered.
The skeleton took another step, and the forest changed.
I cannot call it a sound or a smell or a pressure, though it was a little of all three. It rolled out from the skeleton in a slow, heavy wave, and when it reached me, the air turned to wet cement. My lungs locked. I opened my mouth and nothing went in. My heart slammed against my ribs, my hands shook so badly that the doll slid against my chest, and cold sweat broke out across my whole body all at once. My stomach heaved. Sour bile flooded my mouth, and I swallowed it, and it came back up, and I swallowed it again, choking on my own throat.
The skeleton never looked at me. It did not need to. It simply kept walking, and wherever it walked, the world seemed to bend away from it.
I tried to crawl backward. My arms folded under me. The moss rushed up to meet my face. Somewhere far above me, a rattle of bones went on and on, growing louder or fainter, I could not tell which. The last thing I felt was the doll's small hard shoulder pressed against my chin.
Then darkness.