"Come on, man, you've gotta make your damn choice."
Theo spoke out into the dirt just a few inches off his face.
He then gritted his teeth and clasped his hands into fists, staring at the two slightly contradicting prompts of his now slightly upgraded system.
[Forest Outskirts - Safe Zone - Within Range of Oilrat (level 147) patrol route!]
[Threat level - No threats detected]
'Is the outside safe from threats, or is it all just a bait, noob-trap of sorts?'
The fact that nothing came to attack Theo thus far meant nothing. The threat level of his threat detection ability meant nothing.
After all, he was but a level-one human, lacking even something as simple as the most basic weapon. And from what the other prompt told him - this whole area was well within the range of the oilrat's patrol route.
That, on its own, would make Theo slightly curious at most, if not for the number that the system conveniently displayed for him right after the potential threat's name - one hundred and forty-seven.
'I guess that explains the snicker part,' Theo thought, easily recalling all the different titles heralded by the man name-dropped by the system to describe the type of area he was in.
Games that were incredibly popular as they went against the grain of treating the players like idiots and guiding them everywhere by hand. Games… that were known to be inherently difficult and unforgiving!
And yet…
'No matter how much I cower in fear and hope for the best… it's not going to change anything,' Theo thought, balling himself down in the limited space of his hole. Yet, even squeezing down and assuming a fetal position didn't give him any sort of confidence or comfort.
On one hand, all he wanted to do was just curl up like he just did, close his eyes, and hope he would find himself right back in his comfy bed…
"Or do I actually want it?"
It struck Theo like a hammer.
Or, to make it more circumstance-specific - like the front bumper of a speeding truck.
"Assuming I would actually wake up, what would come next?" he asked himself, surfing through what little details of his daily life he could recall from his time back on Earth.
As a child, all he did was wake up, go to school, return, do his homework, play outside for a bit, maybe play some games, read some novels…
And then, he would rinse and repeat this process ad infinitum.
School prepared him for college.
College prepared him for university.
The university prepared him for work…
All of those trapped him in the endless boredom of the unending studying, labor, work. And as his age grew, so did his ability to endure more.
An increase that his teachers, later professors, and finally bosses were more than happy to exploit, leaving him with nothing but a few hours in a day to just… boot some stupid game up and try to forget about his miserable life for the short few hours before he would tire of the game's gameplay loop.
It was a comfortable life, where he could get meat or crops directly from a shop's shelf as opposed to hunting for it or growing it with his own hands.
Hundreds of years of progress put into effect by his ancestors pretty much eliminated all of the ancient hardships of human life… only to effectively replace it with the endless monotony of a boring, pointless life.
And now that he finally had the chance to do the one thing that he always liked to do… was he just going to give up because of some potential danger lurking in the darkness of the forest's depths?
"Hell no!"
Gritting his teeth even harder than before, Theo unballed himself before stretching out as far as he could within the limited space of his hiding hole.
'Thousands of my ancestors died trying to create a better tomorrow for themselves and their offspring. Hiding away when I have such an insanely overpowered tool at hand… How cowardly would that be of me?!'
Firing himself up, Theo pulled out his shovel before digging it into the suspended block of ground above his head.
'If I die, I will likely lose this system. Who knows if I will even be able to reincarnate again? But… You miss all the shots you don't fire. And how is it having this system and not using it any different from not having it in the first place?!'
Squinting his eyes as the progress bar of his digging quickly completed, Theo swung his shovel again, only to then slam its stone blade into the ground around the height of his chest as soon as the daylight filled the insides of his hole.
'Let's go!'
Daring not to waste another second, Theo quickly confirmed the threat status of the area hadn't changed, before using the handle of his shovel as a foothold as he climbed up out of the hole.
"Now, for the test…"
Rather than hugging the ground and reaching with his hand into the hole to pick up the shovel, Theo simply reached out in its direction and stood still for a moment…
[Shovel recovered]
Rather than appearing back in his hand, the shovel vanished into thin air, its presence now replaced by the system prompt appearing before Theo's eyes along with the same old miniature appearing within his inventory.
'So this works,' Theo took a note before turning around as he summoned his axe instead.
Even though wood was but the starter resource, he still needed quite a lot of it, be it to craft sticks for tools or maybe torches, planks for a crafting bench and potential furniture, or even as something to fire the furnace up with once he got his hands on it.
'Normally, you would just rush through the wooden tools to get to the stone ones, turning trees into nothing more than a source of early-game fuel and maybe building blocks,' Theo thought, recalling what he could about the game his system was quite obviously clowning on.
Still, while the task of searching for stone still hung over his head… contrary to the process of gathering wood, it didn't seem to be all that dangerous.
After all, what were the chances of encountering some insanely powerful monster near the rocky layer of the underground?
'Don't let your thoughts wander off,' Theo thought, quickly moving to the nearest tree while making sure to keep track of his hole at all times. He then gripped his axe… and took a swing.
Thump.
The dull edge of his stone tool barely made a dent in the tree's trunk. Yet, as if to prove just how magical Theo's tool was, cracks then started to appear around the area he struck… only to vanish about two seconds after he pulled the axe's blade away.
"The progress bar… Why didn't it appear?" Theo muttered to himself, puzzled by yet another discrepancy between what he expected and what he found out.
Yet, rather than wasting time thinking about it while he was out in the open, Theo clenched his hand over the handle of his axe, pulled it back… and then swung again.