As Adam walked along the long trail, he kept an eye on the shadows cast by the sun. By observing them, he could roughly estimate the time. He had been walking for nearly five hours, and there was still no sign of Ardacia City. Doubts began to creep in; he started to wonder if the sign had been truthful or misleading.
But the rather uneventful walk will stop being boring and start being... dangerous soon.
As Adam kept on walking, he noticed that the biome was gradually changing. It was no longer open meadows, but a forest of sorts. It wasn't yet dense enough to warrant a retreat, so Adam kept on pushing through.
As he kept on walking, however, the forest kept on getting denser and denser. The smell of various plants, trees and flowers flooded Adam's nose and he sensed that he needed to be quicker on his feet to get out of there as soon as possible. Otherwise... he might be in danger.
But simply walking quickly did not solve Adam's problems, as within a few minutes, he "sensed" something once again for the first time ever.
A vague feeling lingers—one that seems to arise with no clear source of stimuli. Yet it is undeniably present: a sense of being watched. The unsettling intuition suggests something exists beyond our sight, smell, or hearing—a presence in our blind spot, just observing... waiting... for something.
Adam, originally an AI, had never experienced this feeling before, but he sensed that he was in imminent danger. He remained calm and decided against making any sudden movements, pretending not to notice the unsettling sensation while staying on guard.
Then, he heard a subtle shuffling noise in the bushes followed by the crack of a twig under pressure. It was confirmed: something was watching him, and it posed a threat.
Adam calculated his next moves. He could either run or fight whatever was lurking nearby with the stick in his hand. Running seemed impossible in the dense forest, so he gripped the stick tightly and halted his progress.
He kept his gaze fixed on the ground, waiting for the creature to reveal itself so he could strike it down.
And sure enough, within seconds of Adam stopping, something lunged at him from the back.
With superhuman precision and reflexes, Adam swung his entire body around and, within a fraction of a second, figured out where to strike the "creature" he saw.
The wooden stick made violent contact with the creature's head, and green liquid flew from the impact.
With one swift strike, the creature lay dead on the ground. But for Adam, what he was experiencing was stranger than the death of the creature itself.
Before him was a bizarre, ugly, short humanoid being with green skin and blood. Curious, Adam knelt down to inspect the corpse. This was not human, nor was it any animal recorded in his database. It was something entirely new—something that no human throughout history had ever witnessed... except perhaps in works of fiction.
This creature looked exactly like a goblin. No, it was a goblin. Was Adam somehow transported to a fantasy world? It would explain the vacuum injuries he had seen on the three human corpses earlier. If someone had used magic, they could theoretically create a vacuum effect targeting just the lungs...
But seriously? Magic? Was he really going to discard the laws of physics and science in favor of a theory about magic?
The evidence he had encountered so far seemed to support that theory...
One thing was certain: Adam was no longer on Earth. He had begun to suspect this when he noticed the sun moving more slowly than usual, but he had initially attributed it to errors in his calculations. Yet it turned out his calculations were indeed correct. He truly was not on Earth anymore.
If magic were to turn out to be real, Adam felt the need to understand everything about it. It represented a new source of power and energy—something that defied the laws of physics that humans on Earth had developed over thousands of years. He needed to grasp the laws that governed magic and how it actually functioned. Could it be possible to use magic to return to Earth? Or perhaps to bypass the laws of thermodynamics? There was certainly a possibility.
Adam rose back up and started walking towards the so-called "Arcadia City" once more.