Stagnant Water of Apocalypse

Chapter 22: D - 14

Until now, what I knew about the portal was limited to the fact that it could be summoned for an indefinite amount of time. That's why, in order to deepen my understanding of it, I was currently conducting various experiments with it. The first thing I wanted to know was what would happen if I put an object on the portal and closed it.

"Close the portal." As I said that, the pipe in the middle of the portal was pushed out to my side rather than being cut in half. I also tried it several more times with a chunk of meat and many other things. The results were all the same, they were all pushed out. In the end, I conclude that the same thing would also happen to living things.

"I can't use it as a weapon." I sighed before moving on towards the next experiment. The next experiment was about analyzing where it would materialize once It was summoned. I called the portal while doing so many different poses. After many many tries, I concluded that the position the portal would appear in was constant. It was always 1m away from my body.

Even when I was lying down facing the floor, the portal would open vertically on the ground.

"If I open it in a narrow space, it will materialize in the wall." The portal opened in the wall won't allow anyone other than me to enter. With this, it was possible to open an invisible portal on the wall and escape, making whoever chasing me hit the wall.

"The sound is..." There's no difficulty to hear sounds from the other side of the portal when I was inside. However, when I was outside, I couldn't hear the sounds from inside the portal.

So, to sum it up, "This portal is a 90-inch CCTV with a dimensional leap function."

I was still unaware whether the portal could be destroyed or not. However, with the newly acquired invisibility effect, it should be okay as long as I don't mess around too much.

"I thought the levels existed just to open the Shop and Auction House..." However, I'm not complaining at all about the newly added feature. The game Survival Life had no system such as unique skill, but now that it exists, everyone's chance of survival should be slightly higher.

I closed the portal and looked around.

"...this place is too narrow." It was the conclusion I came to after stocking up on supplies for several days straight. Even though I already made a basement, those feelings still remain. Maybe it's because I bought too much canned food...

"Now, I have no choice but to put the supply outside." The problem was, by doing so, I would put myself in danger. Those foods would undoubtedly become something which would lure all the inhabitants of the forest to come. Even if the passing animals weren't interested with the supplies, the monsters who saw it would certainly come either because of curiousity or pure greed.

How to fix it, I wonder...

"In the end, there's no other option than building a shelter." However, it was too high of a hurdle for me to create a shelter which was capable of withstanding the power of medium-sized monsters such as orcs. My head started to throb just by thinking about a way to get them away from my cave.

"They can't break through the barbed wire easily though."

Thankfully, I'd never seen such medium-sized monsters around the vicinity of the cave. At most, there were only goblins and kobolds or carnivorous animals such as wolves around.

I took out my hand-drawn map of the forest and noted down the ecology of each monster I know based on the footage I got from operating the drones from the past few days.

"And I also need to find out whether there are only low-level monsters such as goblins and kobolds around here, or are there other monsters stronger than them." Perhaps, the territory of the stronger monsters were in the forest beyond the valley just like the owlbear. If that's really the case, then it all would've become simpler...