Let me tell you something about magical forests that nobody mentions in the brochure.
They are loud.
Not loud in the way cities are loud — car horns and construction and the neighbor who plays music at two in the morning. This was a different kind of loud. A living kind. Every tree creaked with the slow conversation of wood under pressure. Things moved in the undergrowth that were too large to be birds and too quiet to be anything I wanted to think about. Somewhere above me, something with wings let out a sound that was halfway between a screech and a laugh, which I personally found very unsettling.
I had been walking for approximately forty minutes.
I had already found three things that, according to every fantasy novel I had ever read, should have taken months of dangerous questing to locate.
The first was a vein of what appeared to be crystallized dragon bone running along the exposed root of an ancient tree. It glowed faintly blue-white in the dim forest light, humming at a frequency I could feel more than hear. I touched it and felt the Go in my chest respond immediately — a warm pull of recognition, like meeting something that spoke the same language.
I chipped off a piece with the staff, which had helpfully transformed into a geological pick the moment I thought about needing one. The fragment was dense and warm and felt almost alive in my palm.
"Huh," I said, and put it in my pack.
The second was a cluster of Ember Stones — deep red crystals growing directly from the forest floor like strange flowers, radiating heat that had nothing to do with the temperature around them. Perfect for high-energy applications. Explosive shells, heat-based propulsion, sustained combustion in wet conditions.
I collected a dozen without breaking a sweat.
The third was a pool of liquid silver growing from a crack in a mossy boulder, slow and thick as honey, catching the light in ways that regular silver simply did not. I had no name for it yet. I labeled it mentally as Moonmetal and stored a careful sample in an empty flask I found at the bottom of my pack, which I did not remember putting there and suspected the sage had something to do with.
By this point I had stopped being surprised and started taking notes.
Here is what I had established about the forest by midday:
One — it was enormous. The trees were ancient beyond reckoning, their canopies forming a ceiling so dense that the light that reached the forest floor arrived in scattered columns, gold and diffuse, like light through stained glass. The undergrowth was thick but navigable. The ground was soft with centuries of fallen leaves.
Two — it was genuinely, thoroughly infested with monsters.
I had counted eleven distinct species in forty minutes of walking. The Snappers from this morning were apparently the most common — territorial pack hunters, fast on flat ground, poor climbers. There were also things I was calling Thornbacks: slow, heavily armored creatures the size of large dogs that moved with the deliberate patience of something that had never needed to hurry. A family of what appeared to be deer, except their antlers were made of some dark crystalline material and their eyes were entirely black. Something enormous that I only glimpsed through the trees — a shadow the size of a house, moving without sound.
Three — none of them had attacked me since this morning.
This last point was the most interesting one.
I wasn't sure if it was the Go radiating from me in ways I couldn't perceive, or the lingering smell of the explosions from earlier, or simple chance. But as I walked, the forest seemed to adjust around me. The Snappers I passed watched me from a distance with their yellow eyes and did not approach. The Thornbacks ignored me entirely. Even the black-eyed deer turned to observe my passage and then went back to whatever deer do when not being watched.
The forest was not friendly. But it was, tentatively, curious.
I noted this and kept walking.
I found the location by early afternoon.
It announced itself the way good locations always do — not with a sign or a fanfare, but with a feeling. A rightness. An engineer's instinct that says here before the conscious mind has finished calculating why.
It was a natural clearing, roughly circular, maybe thirty meters across. A stream ran along the northern edge — clean, cold, fast-moving over smooth stones. The ground was elevated slightly above the surrounding forest, which meant drainage. Three massive trees formed a natural windbreak to the west. The eastern side opened toward a gap in the canopy that let in a long rectangle of clean afternoon light.
I stood in the middle of it and turned slowly, reading the space the way I had been trained to read a factory floor — load-bearing points, flow patterns, structural opportunities, potential failure modes.
"This'll do," I said.
I set my pack down, picked up the staff, and said — for the first time in this world, with intent — "Go Go."
The energy answered immediately.
It was different from the small experiments I had run earlier. Those had been tests — tentative, exploratory. This was a decision. The Go moved through me like current through a properly grounded circuit, purposeful and clean, and I felt it reach outward into the space around me, reading the materials available, cataloging the possibilities.
I thought about what I needed.
A foundation first. Elevated, stone-based, level. I pressed both hands flat against the ground and let the Go flow downward, feeling the soil, the bedrock beneath, the exact composition of what I was working with. The ground here was good — deep topsoil over solid granite, stable, well-drained.
I began to work.
I should explain how the Go actually functions when applied to construction, because it is considerably more interesting than simply willing things into existence.
It doesn't create matter. That, as far as I could tell, was beyond even what the sage had given me. What it does is direct — it reads existing materials, understands their properties at a level no human hand could match, and then reshapes, moves, combines, and refines them with a precision that would take conventional engineering months or years to achieve.
The granite beneath the clearing responded to my instruction by rising — slowly, deliberately — into a flat foundation platform, thirty centimeters above the original ground level. Perfectly level. I checked it three times with the staff, which had become a precision level without my asking.
The trees at the forest edge provided timber, but not the way logging works. The Go identified which trees were already dying, already compromised, and separated the usable material from what should be left to return to the soil. What remained was seasoned hardwood, dense and straight, that the staff-as-saw shaped into planks of exact and consistent dimension.
The stream provided water for the mortar I mixed from crushed granite and a binding compound I found myself understanding intuitively — a grey-white clay deposit just below the stream bank that, when combined with water and compressed Go energy, dried harder than concrete in under an hour.
I worked through the afternoon without stopping, which was only possible because I wasn't getting tired.
That was the other thing about unlimited Go. Fatigue, as I was discovering, was largely an energy problem. And energy was the one thing I had in endless supply.
By the time the oversized sun began its descent toward the treeline, I had a foundation, four walls, a roof, a door, two windows with wooden shutters, and a stone fireplace in the northeast corner that vented through a clay chimney.
I stood outside and looked at it.
It was not beautiful. It was solid, functional, and built to a standard that would have satisfied a structural engineer — which was exactly what I had been. The walls were thick enough to stop anything short of a siege weapon. The roof had a thirty-degree pitch designed to shed rain and snow efficiently. The door was hung on iron hinges I had shaped from a deposit of raw iron ore I found six meters from the clearing, and it closed with a latch mechanism that would have looked perfectly at home in a European farmhouse circa 1400.
Inside, it smelled like fresh-cut wood and clean stone and the particular mineral tang of new mortar.
I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and ate the last of the food I had woken up with — two rice balls and a small piece of dried fish that I strongly suspected the sage had also placed in my pack, because I certainly hadn't packed them — and I listened to the forest settle into its evening sounds.
Something large moved past the clearing. I heard it more than saw it — a soft rhythm of enormous footfalls, deliberate and unhurried. Through the window I caught a glimpse of the house-sized shadow I had seen earlier. It passed without pausing, without investigating, and faded back into the dark between the trees.
I let out a slow breath.
Tomorrow, I thought, I start on the workshop.
But first — because a man alone in a monster forest with unlimited magical energy and a shape-shifting staff should always have a contingency plan — I spent the last hour of daylight on something else entirely.
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my new house with a piece of dragon bone in my lap, a handful of crushed Ember Stones in a clay dish beside me, and the flask of Moonmetal sitting open on the windowsill where I could see it catch the fading light.
I thought about a mechanism.
I thought about it carefully, completely, the way I had always designed things — starting with the function, working backward to the form. What did I need? Something light enough to carry. Reliable in adverse conditions. Simple enough to maintain with available materials. Effective at range against targets with unknown levels of physical resilience.
The Go moved through my hands and into the dragon bone as I worked, reading the material's properties with the same thoroughness I had applied to the granite that morning. Dragon bone was, it turned out, extraordinarily responsive to Go energy — it absorbed it, stored it, and under the right conditions, amplified it. The density was remarkable. It would machine cleanly. It would hold tolerances that steel struggled to maintain.
I worked for forty-seven minutes.
When I was done, I held it up and turned it slowly in the last light coming through the window.
It was not a Kalashnikov. Not exactly. The mechanism was adapted to available materials and the specific properties of Go-infused ammunition. The barrel was dragon bone, smooth and perfectly bored. The action was Moonmetal, which turned out to have a natural springback property that made it ideal for cycling mechanisms. The stock was hardwood, shaped to fit my shoulder with the unconscious ergonomic precision of someone who had spent fifteen years understanding how humans interact with machinery.
I loaded it with a single round — a small cylinder of compressed Ember Stone wrapped in a Moonmetal casing, packed with enough concentrated Go energy to release on impact — and walked to the door.
Outside, a dead tree stood at the edge of the clearing, already leaning, held up by nothing but stubbornness and the vines tangled through its branches. I had been meaning to clear it anyway.
I raised the weapon, settled my breathing, and fired.
The sound was wrong for a gunshot — lower, with a resonance that the dragon bone barrel added to it, a note that seemed to travel through the ground as much as the air. The Ember round crossed the thirty meters in a flat trajectory and hit the dead tree dead center.
The tree didn't fall. It ceased. A column of red-gold fire replaced it briefly, and then there was a clean circle of scorched earth where a two-meter-wide obstacle had been a moment before.
I lowered the weapon.
Behind me, from somewhere in the dark forest, something made a sound. Low, startled, uncertain. Not a threat. More like the sound a person makes when they witness something they have absolutely no framework to process.
I turned and looked into the trees. Yellow eyes watched me from the dark — the Snappers, keeping their distance, their pack instincts clearly in conflict with their curiosity.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'll cook something tomorrow. You'll feel better about all of this once you've eaten."
The yellow eyes blinked.
I went inside and closed the door.
Day one in Valdris Forest: foundation laid, shelter built, first weapon completed.
The forest is watching me. I'm watching it back.
Tomorrow I build the workshop. After that — we'll see.
Actually, now that I think about it, I have no idea what "we'll see" even means here. There's no we. It's just me.
...For now.
— End of Chapter 2 —
Next Chapter : A look at the world beyond the trees. Two empires at war. A forest nobody dares enter. And a rumor, spreading slowly from the northern frontier, about something strange happening in the heart of Valdris.