Chapter 24
I switched off the footage from Drone Clairvoyance that was playing in front of me.
Almost five days.
That's right, five days.
Now that I had a base, I decided to search through the forest and beyond it.
Drone Clairvoyance really came in handy here.
Koa and the others were here, but I still wanted information, so I needed to find people.
It can't be helped.
I began my search with one thought: Someone, please give me some information!
Excited, I operated Drone Clairvoyance at considerable speed.
I didn't know how fast it was going, but I thought it was pretty fast.
The shadows made it hard to see, but I could see faintly into the forest, so I shouldn't have missed anything.
I found plenty of things that looked like animals.
There were also places throughout the forest where the curse was especially dense.
But I couldn't find what I was looking for.
"There are no people."
That's right—there wasn't even a single sign of a person.
Because it was a forest, I had hoped to find a village or settlement.
Yet no people appeared in the footage at all.
To make matters worse, the forest footage just kept going.
There were no people, and I couldn't even get out of the forest.
With a bad feeling, I tried flying Drone Clairvoyance above the rocky mountain.
Up and up, as high as it could go.
It went too high for me to see any details, but there was forest in every direction as far as I could see.
I slowly turned Drone Clairvoyance in circles as I gradually lowered it.
I searched for roads or clearings in the forest, but couldn't find any.
I realized that I was in a huge forest.
And, though I didn't want to admit it, people were unlikely to be living in this forest.
There were still places I hadn't searched, so I decided to pin my hopes on them.
A single worry crossed my mind.
What if there were no people in this world?
I had never even considered it, but this was another world, unlike Earth.
...Could that be possible?
...No. There had to be people in the places I hadn't searched!
I had to keep searching without giving up.
I rolled around on the floor.
Some days are like that—especially today!
The smooth floor didn't hurt when I rolled around, and it felt good on my overheated head after all that thinking.
By the second day, dark clouds had already gathered over my search for people.
Starting on the third day, I tried modifying my home as I searched, hoping to change my mood.
The part of the first floor that caught my attention was gold-colored ore, unlike the silver ore.
I failed when I tried to process the ore.
It seemed that magic didn't pass through the ore well, so I removed all of it from the rocky mountain.
The moment I took it out, Chai freaked out for some reason.
I freaked out too, wondering if there was something behind the ore.
There was nothing, but what had that been about?
...
Processing the floor was difficult.
When I tried to process it with even the slightest image of making it slippery, the floor became frighteningly slick.
I thought I could skate on it, then writhed at the remembered pain of slipping, falling, and landing on my rear.
When I processed it so it wouldn't be slippery, it became rough instead, leaving me with a mediocre floor.
I'm not good at fine-tuning magic.
After somehow working hard at it, it became like the floor in an apartment building's entrance... I think.
It's a little slippery, but still within an acceptable range.
I made the walls with a brick pattern to keep the spiders out.
Rough bricks aren't a problem!
Next up, my pride and joy!
Stairs from the first floor to the fourth.
I turned the upward slope from the first floor to the third into stairs.
Since there was already something there to work with, it was surprisingly easy.
The section from the third floor to the fourth was more like digging a hole than processing.
I cut out a square chunk of rock just under a meter on a side and teleported it into the third-floor room.
I cut away the rock beneath my feet, creating steps.
Working on the stairs seemed to have honed my teleportation technique.
I could now move to any place I wanted; even somewhere a little farther away was no problem.
This was useful for butchering, too.
I could light a fire and teleport the internal organs and blood vessels into it.
This was a wonderful development.
I didn't have to see all sorts of things.
But if teleportation failed...
A rock might teleport into the fire and ruin the meat I was roasting.
I would freak out when, just as I was about to start making the stairs, I found internal organs sitting on a rock.
That led to a few minor disasters.
Identifying the target as either internal organs or rock before teleporting solved the problem.
It seemed that teleportation on its own let previously used magic affect the result.
A pile of blood vessels on a rock is pure chaos.