It took a while longer to get everyone up to speed, but nothing like that first stretch of confusion.
What I had not expected was that some people, once they understood the situation, simply decided they did not want any part of it.
Once the panic was gone and everything had been laid out in front of them, a few people chose to stay in the field and accept whatever happened next. They did not argue. They did not break down. They just... opted out.
Thankfully, it was only a handful of them.
The rest of us figured out the compass well enough and started walking north.
Not long after, people began noticing other things. Joint pain had dulled. Arthritis, back problems, old injuries, all of it seemed muted to the point of being manageable, even without medication or therapy. It was the same kind of strange generosity everything else had had so far.
That thought kept bothering me.
Why is any of this fair?
Fair has never really been the default for anything. Not life, not people, not the world. So the fact that this place seemed determined to smooth the rough edges off everything should have felt comforting.
Instead, it made me suspicious.
Maybe that was a very human reaction.
As we left the plains behind and moved into the woods, the calm started wearing thinner. Worries piled up. People cried. Conversations turned toward grandkids, pets, husbands, wives, kids, friends. I could not exactly judge them for it when I already missed my mom and my brother.
"Are you missing family?" I ask Sheral, the older woman from before.
"No," she says with a shrug. "Most of my family doesn't bother talking to me."
"Oh. Sorry."
It was not exactly impossible to believe. We had talked a bit after the walk started. She had been a nurse for forty years, smoked heavily, and the last thing she remembered was falling asleep in her recliner with a beer in hand.
"Don't be," she says. "Blood ain't shit."
"I don't know," I say. "It helps keep you alive."
It is a terrible joke, and my hands and jaw are still jittering with stress when I say it. Sheral gives me an odd look, but thankfully lets it pass.
"Were you in college," she asks, "or working?"
"No. I'm in, or I guess was, my third year for physics."
Saying it out loud makes something twist in my chest. Three years of work, and for what? Not that I had exactly been thriving. I was scraping by with C's most semesters. Still, it had been my life. Or it was.
"That's a good thing to study," she says. "With all this going on, maybe it'll be useful."
"Yeah," I mumble.
I have no idea how physics would help here. I barely understood half of it in a classroom. I could not imagine it being worth much in a world with goblins or magic.
The walk only lasted about an hour, but it felt longer. There was crying the whole way, and the kind of fear nobody could really fix with a few reassuring words.
Part of me kept expecting more features from the system too. A chat function, maybe. Something for long-distance communication. But then again, if we could just talk normally, maybe that was asking too much.
By the time we reached town, things somehow felt even grimmer.
A guard stood outside a barricade of rough wooden stakes. Several bodies hung limp from the sharpened points, rotted enough that even from a distance they were obviously zombies.
"Greetings, adventurers!" the guard called.
His tone was cheerful in a way that felt practiced, almost rehearsed.
"Hi," one of the men near the front of the group called back. "Is this the village we were supposed to go to?"
"Yes! You've made it. Congratulations!"
The more he spoke, the more obvious it became that something about him was off. Not wrong, exactly. Just not human. Or maybe not human in the way we were.
Still, before I could think too hard about it, a blue window appeared in front of my face.
[Quest Complete!]
[Walk to the Village]
[Reward: 1 Starter Item]
Below that was a list of choices. Swords. Spears. Bows. Even a wand.
The wand caught my eye immediately, and my hand hovered over it before I clicked.
A second window opened beside it.
[Nitwit Wand]
[Consumes 10 Mana per Shot]
[Requires 10 Intelligence]
That killed my excitement a little.
My mana was only sixty. That meant six shots total, assuming it did not have some other drawback. Six uses of a weapon I did not understand was not exactly reassuring, especially when there were very real zombies hanging on spikes a few feet away.
Magic was tempting, but sadly being alive sounded better.
So, like generations of human beings before me, I chose the sharp stick.
A spear gave me reach, and more importantly, I already knew how to point one in the general direction of danger. Looking around, there did not seem to be any single favorite among the group. At least one person picked each option.
I did not summon mine, though. I sent it straight to my inventory.
"Hiding something special, Tero?" Sheral asks, sounding mock-accusatory despite the smile on her face.
"No. I picked a spear."
"Really?" she says. "After all that talk about magic, you picked a spear?"
Unfortunately, she was referring to an earlier rant of mine about magic, the occult, and supernatural stuff in general, all of which I had apparently felt very strongly about while still under the pleasant mental blanket of the fields.
"Well, mana's still an unknown," I say. "A sharp stick feels a lot more reliable. What about you?"
"A wand," she says, laughing.
"Of course. You just had to steal my thunder."
"Oh, you didn't have any thunder to start with, boy."
She punches my arm with about as much force as you would expect from someone her age. Honestly, a wand made sense for her.
Then she gives me a sideways look.
"You seem to know more than most people here," she says, "even if you keep saying you don't. So what's the next step?"
"Well," I say, ignoring the accusation completely, "if this works anything like I think it does, there's probably someone around here about to give us something to do."
"A quest?"
"A quest" I say