New World, New Purpose

Kai opened his eyes wide as he sucked in a huge, audible breath, as if he had been holding his breath to a breaking point. The breath he took in felt heavy, as if it sat in his lungs with weight that made him feel uncomfortably like drowning.

He found himself lying flat on his back, staring straight up ahead at an unending ceiling of branches and leaves. It took him a lot longer than it should have to realize this was a forest. Probably a side effect of living in a dirty, broken down concrete jungle most of his life.

With a grunt, he sat up, leaves rustling and falling off his back. The moment he made a movement, he felt nausea assault him in acute waves, blurring his vision and tilting the world around him every which way like getting tossed and turned in a roller coaster.

Almost on instinct now, he willed himself to heal.

[Host condition is stable and fully healed. The nausea the host feels now is the result of a temporary mental adjustment to a new environment. Restoration cannot be utilized to counteract this.]

When had the system ever talked like this? But more importantly, Kai had to deal with suffering through this feeling. He kept himself from falling face forwards on the leave littered forest floor with both his hands, holding back an urge to dry heave.

His senses felt…sharper. Uncomfortably so. He could feel so very clearly the outlines of the leaves as they pressed against his palms, their crisp, dry outlines cracking as he pressed his fingers together.

Sounds of the forest – the breeze, some faint birdsong, the rustling of falling leaves - started to mesh in his ear in an unholy mixture of distorted warbles and high-pitched rings.

His vision blurred more even as the colors around him, the greens and browns of nature, became much, much more vibrant, almost to the point of hurting his eyes.

Then almost as soon as it hit him, the wave of nausea and whatever the hell it was that hit his senses was gone, leaving him staring down at patches of leaves broken up by his balled-up fists, dirt caked under his fingernails. Tentatively, he started to stand.

As if to answer him, the system spoke in his head: [Host condition stable]

Right, the thing seemed a lot chattier. Again, he tried to communicate with it.

"Hello? You listening to me?"

[Inquiry registered. To answer: host's thoughts and vocalizations directed to the system are always heard.]

"Yeah?" Kai squinted his eyes as he looked up and around him, seeing trees towering high up in great big pillars, completely covering the sun and sky above in a thickly leaved and branched canopy. "Then why didn't you talk to me like this before?"

[Host's compatibility to the system was too low. Now that a compatibility of 'Level 1' has been reached, communication methods become more complex.]

"Gotcha. Then you know where this is?" asked Kai. He had little idea of what compatibility or levels meant, but he wanted to try and move on to more productive questions.

[Inquiry registered. To answer: negative. Though the system holds knowledge inherent to itself and exclusive to the host, that does not mean it is all knowing. Suggestion: host should explore with survival in mind.]

"I see you're just about as much help as you were before," sighed Kai as he first checked up on himself, then his surroundings. He felt largely fine, doing the whole finger moving and toe wriggling thing doctors recommended without much issue.

His surroundings, though, were a whole another thing. He did not recognize any forest like this. There were some nature reserves up on Northside of the city, and though he had never been to them, he knew they did not look like this.

It was obvious. The trees here were enormous, probably three to four times thicker trunk wise than any tree he had ever seen in his life, and they stretched up so high that it actually got difficult to tell where they even ended.

Oh yeah, and there was also a patch of glowing blue mushrooms popping their bioluminescent heads up nearby if it was not clear already that this was not a place he knew.

Obviously wherever the portal had spat him out was no normal place, and he had an instinctive understanding that maybe he was not even on the same planet.

The moment he sucked in the air here, his body knew he was in a wholly foreign environment. Somewhere alien, somewhere people did not belong. He could not feel any threats to him yet, but he had a distinct gut feeling of not belonging, like a nail sticking out waiting to be hammered down into oblivion.

Gotta survive, Kai immediately thought to himself as he started to move, taking a slow and steady pace with his eyes and ears open wide. He made sure to take occasional cover behind one of the many tree trunks, trying to assess if that thing from the apartment or any more threats were with him.

That was when he realized adrenaline was still in his body, keeping his head focused solely on survival mode.

He tried to hang onto that feeling for as long as he could. But soon enough, as he meandered through the forest for the better part of half an hour seeing nothing but the same vegetation and trees and the occasional strangely glowing plant or mushroom, the adrenaline dimmed, and his thoughts started to detach from survival.

He stopped, leaning on a tree trunk. Not because he was tired, but because his thoughts were starting to wander. To his mother's death. At the image of her with her throat ripped and torn and spurting blood so red and –

With a grimace, he grit his teeth hard, hard enough where he almost felt like he was going to crack them, and he shoved those images away. Instead, he willed his mind to go elsewhere.

To that disgusting thing and the amount of hate and rage he had felt for it, how those emotions flared up even more as he stabbed into the thing's eye and made it suffer.

In a strange but comforting way, thinking about the hate made him feel warm. It focused his mind.

Yeah, he had to survive, he thought as he balled up his fists. He had to survive at all costs, no matter what, because that thing might still be alive.

Another face had popped into the apartment right before Kai was tossed here, and though he did not get a clear glimpse of it, he knew that it had stabbed the thing straight through. But even if the thing was dead from that, something had still sent it based on how it spoke.

Until every single person associated with that thing suffered, he would never let himself die, never let his mind get off track, never let himself give up.