To his astonishment, they ran right past him.

Ignoring the platform entirely, as if he didn't exist.

They barreled toward the village.

Within minutes, the sound of clashes rang out.

Roars.

Howls.

The sound of bodies slamming into earth and stone.

Timothy blinked, stunned, machete still at the ready.

He watched more and more creatures spawn from the puddles.

Infinite, it seemed.

They kept charging the village, wave after wave.

Not one attacked him.

Even later, when he stepped down from the platform to test their awareness of his presence, not a single creature turned his way.

He remained alert the entire night.

But they never came for him.

There was no interaction between him and the water-spawned creatures.

In many ways, they resembled automated zombies, mindless, goal-oriented, devoid of recognition.

Timothy was tempted, more than once, to provoke them… maybe test if they'd notice him.

But with their sheer numbers, his confidence waned.

Even the thought of initiating combat seemed foolish.

Survival would come down to one option which was running

As the night drew to a close, the surviving water creatures gradually slithered back into the puddles that had birthed them dragging along the bodies of any Darvani who had fallen.

Timothy watched the entire ordeal from his platform, unease twisting in his gut.

The encounter had been brutal, ruthless even.

What kind of sin had these people committed to deserve a punishment so raw, so cyclical?

But he didn't ask.

He simply noted it all and slumped back down to recover what little sleep he could salvage.

---

Over the days and nights that followed, Timothy's shelter-building efforts progressed, but not without setbacks.

The edges of his platform began to crumble under repeated stress and weathering.

In response, he introduced logs of wood to reinforce the rock boundaries, using them to square the platform and brace its structure.

He sourced the wood during the day from the forest's edge, careful never to stray too deep.

By the third day, he'd become something of a wilderness carpenter, his machete proving invaluable in felling trees and shaping wood into interlocking joints.

No nails.

No adhesive.

Just instinct and improvisation.

On the fourth day, Timothy borrowed an idea from the Darvani themselves: using dried leaves and strips of bark to bind the wooden components.

It wasn't perfect, far from a fortress but the shelter began to take shape, slowly evolving into something semi-functional.

Then came the fifth day and with it, disaster.

Timothy discovered that due to the softness of the terrain beneath, the rain had gradually carved a depression under the platform. A shallow basin had formed from the eroded soil.

That night, the rain returned.

And with it… the monsters.

The newly formed puddle beneath his platform had become a spawning ground.

Timothy woke to the sound of wet slapping and squelching as water-born replicas clawed their way from the depression under him.

His platform, now nearly a meter tall, collapsed in seconds. The creatures swarmed through it like it was paper.

It had stood in their path and was thus removed.

They bulldozed through what he'd built and stormed the village with primal fury.

On the sixth day, Timothy sat among the wreckage, unwilling to start again.

His stones lay scattered, his wood was shattered and waterlogged, and his hard-earned progress had been reduced to a makeshift altar of debris.

It stung.

The simplest knowledge, to build a foundation first, had slipped past him in his desperation to survive.

But even with that knowledge now fresh in mind, he questioned whether a foundation would've made any difference in this cursed world.

The very ground fought against permanence.

His gaze drifted to the Darvani village, a place of strange, stoic architecture.

Their shelters stood tall, dry, resilient and he couldn't help but wonder what he was missing.

How had they waterproofed their homes?

He hadn't even made a roof yet.

Maybe that was the key.

If he could just keep the water from touching the ground below his shelter, he could prevent the puddles from forming entirely.

It was something to try… assuming he had the energy left to care.

The only thing that had survived the destruction was the heavy wooden staff given to him by the Darvani leader.

Untouched and Stubborn.

Now even heavier from absorbing the rainfall.

Timothy didn't give it much thought.

He simply lay down atop what remained of the platform, fatigue dragging him into sleep.

---

Meanwhile, inside the village…

The Darvani had noticed something strange.

Timothy, this outsider was immune to the attacks.

The water-born beasts never even glanced in his direction.

But for all that abnormality, he was still flightless.

And until a chicken learns to fly, it remains a land-bound creature… easily caged.

On the seventh day, Timothy awoke early in the morning not to battle cries or rain or monsters but to the grumbling emptiness of his own stomach.

It was a hollow, pressing ache that had been building slowly, day after day.

Somehow, he had survived a full week on nothing but sleep, willpower, and the occasional sip of water.

But now, the illusion of endurance was over.

His body demanded nourishment urgently.

He'd watched the Darvani eat, devouring the corpses of night creatures.

Not the waterborne ones, but something else.

Something worse.

Massive creatures hunted in the depths of the forest, in complete darkness, dragged back by Darvani in swarms, without torchlight or hesitation.

Each time Timothy considered joining the hunt, his confidence crumbled.

The size and ferocity of their prey alone unsettled him, not to mention the terrifying fact that these monsters were accustomed to the dark.

He, on the other hand, was barely surviving the edges of the wild with daylight as his only ally.

He hated to admit it, but somewhere in this foreign world, fear had taken root in him.

It wasn't irrational fear, it was a deeply embedded caution born from seeing just how insignificant he was in this world.

How effortlessly he could be crushed by any creature here.

How utterly out of place he felt.

At times like this, he missed the things he used to take for granted.

The structured rhythm of daily quests.

The familiar terrain of dungeon corridors.

The "home advantage."

And the people?

Oddly enough, it wasn't any guildmate or friend he longed for, but his termites… and his sister.

Just then, he remembered something he had forgotten.

The tarantula is back home.

The one that required daily feeding.

And here he was.

Stranded in a godforsaken World Shard with a quest he didn't even understand, much less believe he could complete.

If he stayed here too long, Anna might go rogue, Gray might be discovered and everything he had fought to secure would collapse.

He opened his system interface.

To his surprise and relief, Anna and Gray were still there, his evolution ongoing.

He checked his inventory and saw that the prepared meals for her were still intact.

Without hesitation, he scattered a few units onto the earth and began to make a fire.

It wasn't easy.

His first few attempts were pathetic.

But eventually, using dry bark, stone friction, and sheer hunger-driven desperation, he got the fire going.

That night, Timothy tasted his first meal in a week.

Monster meat.

It was… awful.

The taste bordered on putrid.

But it filled his stomach, and that was all that mattered.

By the time the seventh day ended, Timothy had eaten enough to reclaim some of his stamina.

He had officially survived his first week in the wastelands of this fractured world.

The night passed as usual, haunted by the emergence of water-spawned Darvani and the muffled sounds of combat in the village.

---

On the eighth day, he was awoken the same way he had been more than once: with stones.

Pebbles struck his chest, his face, his ribs.

He grunted and sat up groggily, blinking into the soft golden glow of early morning sun.

In his half-conscious daze, he lost balance and stumbled from what little remained of his collapsed platform.

He hadn't rebuilt it.

Motivation was a scarce currency now.

His only goals had become eating and enduring.

Survival had replaced ambition.

It had only been a week.

But to him, it felt like a month, maybe longer.

When he looked up, he saw the Darvani guards.

Watching.

Not laughing.

Not mocking.

Just waiting.

He understood.

This wasn't harassment, it was a summoning.

So Timothy dusted himself off and trudged toward the village gates.

One of the guards silently gestured, then turned and led him through the settlement, past familiar structures, beneath the ever-burning flame at the village's heart, and finally to the tent he could never forget.

The chief's tent.

Inside, the air was heavy and Tense.

The usual guards stood at their posts, their postures tall and motionless.

Other Darvani warriors flanked the space, observing him with unreadable gazes.

But Timothy?

He didn't care.

He'd seen worse.

Timothy hadn't expected to be summoned again so soon and certainly not for this reason.

If anything, he'd assumed they had written him off entirely.

After all, he hadn't proven himself strong or useful.

He'd only survived through sheer luck, stubbornness, and an instinct for hiding