In the world of Terra, people could generally come to accept an outsider girl living on her own in the mountains bordered by a public but controlled forest.

  Especially people of the Empire.

  An empire built upon cultural absorption through mutual recognition, understanding, and eventually cooperation.

  Outsiders had their own cultures, needs, and values. Even the most domineering cultures on the planet were forced to accept that, whether they wanted to or not.

  To the Empire, every dungeon with intelligent life was another neighbor.

  And every neighbor was a possible new territory of the Empire.

  They had such an optimistic view of things that some other countries sharing their world found it sickening, like too much sugar.

  Nevertheless, while their approach didn't work everywhere, it had worked. It had worked a lot, enough to make them into one of the world's major powers.

  But while most dungeons were wild, some outright hellscapes of danger threatening ruin on the world if they weren't pushed back, and while the exceptions were seldom very large or powerful...

  There were exceptions.

  Exceptional exceptions.

  ***

  My experiments with soil continued at a slow pace.

  I discovered that radishes could grow from Terran soil even if it was in a pot made from Lost clay, though since Red Forest clay was far better, I naturally favored using it despite the added trouble of bringing more of it home.

  You can't take anything for granted in a new world, and I couldn't exactly remember all the old worlds I'd been in prior... but its properties seemed almost at the edge of supernatural.

  It was hard to say that it was supernaturally durable. It could have just been supernaturally forgiving when it came to being baked into pottery. Perhaps it was just the world's best beginner clay, and had no usefulness at an industrial scale.

  After all, I had to hand carve my own wheel, a process that took a couple weeks of slow effort in between all my other chores. My pottery workshop wasn't even up to the standards of a primitive, pre-industrial professional.

  But since it was so high quality, it gave me another project after the wheel was done.

  I made my own forge and smeltery.

  The irony that I splurged on a heavy duty shovel to do so, as well as a hammer to actually work with the metal, wasn't lost on me, but I thought it'd eventually be worth it in the end.

  I experimented with making my own charcoal from Lost wood. I found that I could crush mana shards to get a shorter but hotter flame out of them.

  I wanted to make a proper oven for baking someday, but that was a lot of work for rugged adults, and I was a skinny little girl, so I didn't have any ambitions of making one anytime soon. Even my forging setup was pretty small and minimalistic.

  My new tiny factory had only a single purpose.

  Perhaps if I weren't neighbors with a technologically enlightened society, that might be nails, but I could get more nails than I knew what to do with by hunting for mana, selling the mana, and then buying the nails.

  What I needed was a bit more of a specialty item.

  I made arrowheads.

  Cheap and narrow arrowheads from tin.

  First, I carved out the shape with wood, and used that to create a dozen or so clay molds.

  Once I cleaned those up, I melted down all the tins I'd been saving. Now that I was eating better, I'd been buying even more lately, things like soups or canned meats and vegetables.

  Then I made myself a bunch of arrowheads.

  I'd been using blackened sticks carved to pretend at being arrows, but now I finally made the real thing.

  These were engineered to use pressure to keep the wood stuck to the arrowhead, and if it ever came loose, I could always hammer it back into place a bit to prolong its life, or simply melt it back down and reforge it altogether.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  I experimented with various designs. Although I could just buy fletching materials, that cut into my profit, and was therefore a last resort.

  Using leaves or plastics worked well enough in lieu of proper feathers to control the arrow's lift. I added careful grooves into the arrows so they'd have a bit of spin, and experimented with different lengths.

  Eventually, I had an upgraded weapon.

  It was hard to say if it was any better against the Red Forest denizens, but though they still needed maintenance between each use between the leaves breaking off and the metal needing to be resharpened, they seemed a bit more durable at least.

  None of these arrows were iron, of course, so they were only a bit more durable. Shafts still broke, arrowheads dulled with every shot and frequently cracked or broke on impact, but it was an improvement.

  ***

  My experiments with gardening continued too. Eventually, I got to eat the early successes, cooking up some radishes, but they only served to prove that farming was physically possible.

  I'd yet to manage making it something that could sustain me.

  Attempts to improve the local soil by adding a bit of charcoal didn't work.

  Compost made solely from local materials also didn't result in anything usable.

  Yet, compost that mixed Terran and local materials did seem to work. It seemed to actually be alive. It was too early to tell if the local materials contributed at all, or if I just had created a diluted and thus less useful fertilizer.

  The real question was whether I could use that mix to continue making more, or if it would eventually run out of life-sustaining materials and become as barren as the Lost-only compost.

  If it was the latter case, it's possible that farming out here was simply unsustainable, as I'd been warned so long ago.

  But I didn't trust such warnings, because there were definitely things about this world that only I seemed to know, like that there was once a whole civilization here.

  Thanks to Kazzim's teachings, I even had a rough lay of the land, albeit as it was an unknown number of millennia prior, back when his people could still flourish on the surface, and filtered through the admittedly questionable memory of a man who'd lived far, far longer than he ought to have.

  If I ever had sufficient Skills or other capabilities to do so, I wanted to someday explore it all.

  So, it was possible they just hadn't figured out how to grow things here.

  It was even very likely that they had no real incentive to even try.

  While waiting for my home made fertilizer to be ready for further experimentation, I continued slowly living.

  I earned money by hunting. My new arrows seemed serviceable enough.

  I tried various other ways of getting seeds to grow in Lost soil, but nothing worked. It was basically barren.

  And I gradually made more pottery with the Red earth. That was a slow process, since I could only carry about a pound or two out with me each trip.

  I wasn't very talkative, as was my usual state.

  Suon and even Van occasionally checked in, and the dungeon regulars sometimes spoke up too, but nobody had any real demands for me.

  'Although... didn't they say the government would want to check my living conditions?'

  It had been weeks, and yet that still hadn't come up.

  ***

  By the way, you're probably wondering what mana is in this world.

  I was too.

  To be honest, it'd probably take me hundreds or thousands of years struggling to figure it all out, but luckily, this world had already done the work for me.

  It's pretty much just an energy form, though it seems to be outside the boundary of space. A mana crystal isn't crystalized mana, it's just matter that's specialized in trapping it.

  Every dungeon captures it differently.

  Terrans, humans or otherwise, simply carry it throughout their bodies, as if it were heavy metal poisoning. They don't collect it in a single place.

  But they're the odd ones.

  Most dungeon life forms have organs specifically designed to capture it, and for some reason, crystalline structures work the best.

  Not all mana crystals double as fuel for fire.

  Actually, that's where the whole industry around mana crystals gets complex. Some dungeons have general-purpose mana crystals that just act as energy storage. Other dungeons grow more special-purpose crystals, which can be used in very specific ways.

  Unfortunately, most that have such special-purpose crystals tend to be higher ranked. Some theorize that they serve as crystalizations of Skills rather than just mana, but each dungeon is so different that new wild dungeons pretty much break existing theories all the time.

  Actually, I might have been hasty to call Terra a technologically enlightened world, because although it behaves as one, in truth, they haven't reached the stage where they've become self-reflective toward their material and energy sciences.

  Though they have entered an informational era and have achieved energy technologies such that human labor is slowly becoming obsolete outside of services and specializations.

  So, I'll continue calling it one.

  It's not their fault they haven't.

  As people study mana and begin to push human understanding closer to the truth, those same people unlock Skills that allow them to achieve better results than knowledge alone could provide.

  Basically, the cutting edge of technology is developed by Skills.

  It's not all of technology.

  Unskilled understanding eventually catches up, step by clumsy step. People can't rely too much on Skills, since they're ultimately tied to individuals, and there's no way to guarantee their development, so a lot of energy goes towards reverse engineering the seeming impossibilities created by the elite.

  But again, those at the cutting edge generally gain Skills, seemly to reward their efforts, and in the process foil humanity's collective growth.

  If every Skill disappeared overnight, the world would probably stagnate for decades simply trying to catch up, and the rate of growth would seem medieval in comparison.

  But also, wild dungeons would probably slowly overwhelm the world anyway.

  'They're a bit overly reliant on Skills, aren't they.'

  Of course, speculating about Skills disappearing is like speculating about the sun vanishing or gravity suddenly turning off. It's basically a scientific impossibility, although...

  It's not like they know where Skills come from to begin with, so... aren't they a bit presumptive there?

  They're not even a universal constant. I'd never heard of them before.