I sighed, a warm mist billowing out from my mouth before quickly dissipating into nothing, merging with the cold air that surrounded me.

  Winter was getting colder and colder still, and even daylight was getting chilly by now.

  I shivered lightly, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my pants.

  I was back to wearing boy’s clothing again, there wasn’t really much else I found that was suitable to wear outside during winter.

  The crisp crackling of a small fire simmered in front of me, providing only a small amount of protection from the chill.

  I sat myself down on the dirt of our ‘backyard’, staring into the fire as I rubbed my eyes, trying to fight off the morning sleepiness.

  A dented metal bucket hung above the fire, a thick, cloudy liquid bubbling inside of it, sending a small puff of steam and smoke trailing upwards.

  Luckily, there weren’t any strong smells emanating from it. I wasn’t roasting meat over an open grill and I didn’t have access to a bunch of spices or anything. I just threw some stuff together in a bucket and called it a day.

  Bits of bread that were tough to break down with just teeth that were about to go bad, dried, smoked meats and sausages that were left hanging in the open without protection, there were even a few vegetables I was sneaky enough to nick from random gardens while exploring the richer half of the city before winter reached its height.

  It was a tough batch of months, but after I found an anchor for my sanity in the form of my little sister, I was finally able to accomplish the goal I originally had when I found myself in this strange place; fully mapping out the city.

  That was all done and dusted now. All that remained was finding a way to use that information to live stably. That was still a bit of a complicated question and an open process, but I wasn’t left without clues to figure it out.

  There were some promising, strange things I had seen across the bridge that might have been able to help.

  Before I knew it, the sun had started to peek out from behind the horizon.

  I blinked, and suddenly the sky had gone from dark to blue.

  I had already been here for a while, huh?

  I groaned as I got up, taking the bucket off where it hung with another stick as to not burn myself, before putting out the fire with a spare bucket of water.

  It was strange how quickly things had changed. Just a few months ago, I wasn’t sure I would ever see a fire again, given that I was hopeless at starting them without modern technologies.

  That was one of the benefits of managing to extending my map outside of the slums all the way to the other part of town. I was lucky that we lived in what seemed to be a heavily populated, industrial city. It was simple enough to follow a few of the labourers during the morning to their work sites, and then grab a couple bits of coal without anyone noticing.

  From there, it was just a simple process of bashing my head against the wall for a couple of weeks straight until I figured it out.

  And by ‘figure it out’, I of course meant that I realised many people in the urban part of the city still used flint and steel and all I had to do was snatch some.

  I was still kind of shit at starting fires, sadly, but progress was progress, and I was now able to make some crap stew.

  The bucket cooled down enough for me to grab it by the handle.

  I took it inside and set it down on top of the dining table.

  …

  Huh. She was late.

  Normally, my sister was up already.

  Well, she did stay up rather late last night. This should have been an outcome I expected.

  I sighed, sitting down at the table, before deciding to doze off lightly.

  Maybe an hour passed before my sister finally got up.

  “G’morning, Sister…”

  I heard a mumble behind me, followed by a yawn.

  “Good morning to you too.”

  I grabbed two wooden bowls and spoons and filled them up with the slop.

  I smiled, placing the bowl of stew down where my sister usually sat. I then ruffled her messy bed hair as she sat down to eat.

  My sister blinked at the food in front of her.

  She frowned warily.

  “A-are you going to be gone today, too?”

  I squirmed a small bit.

  This little girl, really, she was a bit too smart for her own good.

  Really, what happened to the clueless child who would do nothing but blink up at me?

  She was maybe picking up reading a bit too fast.

  I sighed heavily, smiling wryly.

  “Yeah, probably…”

  It seemed like she had come to derive a pattern from what food she had in the morning.

  Whenever I went out of my way to make some big meal like this, she had come to recognise that it meant I would probably be busy for the rest of the day, and wouldn’t be back in time to make something for dinner.

  A small pang of guilt did strike my chest at that moment.

  “Sorry, I don’t think I’ll be back before night.”

  My sister hung her head with a downcast look on her face.

  “I-it’s okay…”

  She tried to smile, mustering whatever small bit of strength and confidence she was capable of.

  It wasn’t much, to be honest. Even if she was much smarter and was a lot more excitable and lively than when we first met, she was still inherently an incredibly timid person.

  “I-I know you’re doing your best for us. I-I’ll be fine alone, I promise.”

  I chuckled weakly.

  “This stew should be good for a while… You remember what we practiced last week, right? Starting a fire?”

  She nodded meekly.

  “Great. If you need to heat it up, you know where to find the flint and steel. Remember all the safety things I taught you?”

  Another nod.

  “T-too little is always better than too much… Always have the water before you start… it’s better to be too early than too late.”

  I reached out to ruffle her hair.

  “Great. You’re doing good.”

  “U-um…”

  She caught my hand with both of her hands, not letting me retract it from her scalp.

  A blush crept onto her cheeks as she lowered her head in embarrassment.

  “W-when you come back tonight, c-can we read more about the Boy in White?”

  I just laughed.

  “Sure, sure thing.”

  It was cute how much the girl fell in love with the outlandish, magical stories of that fictional hero.

  But I was not going to fault her for it.

  It was nice that she had something to dream and fantasize about.

  If it kept her full of hope, dreaming of a better tomorrow and filling her with the want to reach it, then it was good enough for me.

  I finished the rest of my bowl quickly, hoping to get an early start to the day.

  “W-wait!” my sister yelped.

  She got up on her tiny legs, her eyes wide with panic.

  She stumbled around the table, grabbing my empty bowl and spoon before quickly heaping more stew back into it.

  A second bowl of stew was thrust into my hands.

  “I-if you’re going to be gone for the rest of the day… you won’t be able to eat, right?”

  She bit her lip, worried.

  “You should eat more then, Sister… y-you’ll need a lot of energy.”

  I shoved away the small voice at the back of my mind telling me I had to refuse, that I was being greedy.

  Instead, I warmly accepted the bowl along with her wishes of health and safety.

  “Thank you.”

  I hugged her briefly, making sure not to spill any food on the floor, before sitting back down at the desk and enjoying a quiet breakfast with her.

  By the time we finished eating, the sun had fully risen into the sky, and the city had started to wake.

  People were beginning to get on with their day, commuting across the city to get to work.

  I didn’t have much more time to waste sadly, so I bid a hasty farewell to my sister and hopped out of the small hole in the alley, starting on a hasty journey across the city.

  For a small moment in time, I was left with nothing but my thoughts.

  It was a fairly common occurrence, these days.

  At first, my mind would rush to my sister, like it always did during those first few minutes we were separated each day.

  What if something happened to her?

  What if someone found out where we were living?

  What if she ran out of food?

  What if she wanted to explore without me and got lost?

  What if she got sick?

  I couldn’t help but be wracked with nervousness throughout the day, perpetually terrified over uncontrollable circumstances that were unlikely to ever take a turn for the worse.

  This kind of worry…

  Was this what parents felt like with children?

  Was this what my parents felt like with me?

  How hard was it for them to just leave me alone at school the first time I went to kindergarten?

  God, just how much anxiety and lost sleep did I cause my parents as a child?

  I hope I would get to apologise to them, tell them that I finally understood it all.

  Oh…

  Right.

  I couldn’t.

  I wasn’t on Earth anymore.

  That place called ‘home’ didn’t exist.

  I wasn’t in the past, either.

  I couldn’t even hold onto the vague hope that maybe I would be able to meet my parents’ ancestors and stay with distant relatives or something.

  I had come back to this thought a lot in recent weeks, ever since I came to that terrifying realisation when I first opened that book.

  Some part of me refused to let it sink in fully. It kept fighting back, hoping that there was maybe a way to restore those burned bridges.

  My thoughts would sometimes just randomly stray.

  I would catch myself thinking in Mandarin, brushing up on my skills, hoping that maybe I could finally muster up the courage to actually speak to my parents in the language that made them comfortable.

  Other times, I wondered what new games my best friend would be playing. He was always out there looking for something interesting to explore, some new system that he just dive into endlessly. It didn’t even necessarily have to be good or enjoyable, it was alright if it was just thought-provoking enough to talk about.

  I missed those days.

  On some nights, I would close my eyes, and I would see myself back there. I was an adult man again, travelling to some other country I hadn’t been to before.

  And then I would open my eyes.

  And it would hit me.

  I would never see them again, not my friends or my parents. I was somewhere else, somewhen else…

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Someone else.

  I was a little girl now, impoverished, struggling to just get by.

  I had to throw all of that aside.

  Keeping my mind off the matter of my gender and identity wasn’t just a matter of focusing on surviving first anymore. It wasn’t even about struggling between the memory of the boy I used to be and the person I was to my sister.

  It became a way to distract myself from the truth that I was alone, stranded.

  For now, I was a ‘sister’, not a ‘brother’.

  I had to be.

  If I let myself be conflicted over that fact, I would only find hurt and regret. I would show my sister needless tears and cause her avoidable worry.

  I could not let the implication of what it meant to truly be living in another world settle in fully. I didn’t know what it would do to me.

  Right, speaking of which…

  I hopped across the bridge that separated the town into two halves, and quickly turned sharply to the right to make my way towards the commercial part of town.

  There were a few strange things that came along with living in a different world, with its own unique culture and history.

  While many of the jobs I had seen people performing were familiar to me – even if the level of technological progress was a bit all over the place – there were more than a few things that baffled me.

  For every normal profession, like a baker, factory worker, seamstress or farmer, there would just be someone on the streets selling… crystals?

  Not jewellery, just… crystals.

  Was it a scam, or something? Like snake oil?

  It really weirded me out. They kept going on about supernatural properties and stuff. And for some reason, they kept insisting that the crystals didn’t come from… well, caves, but they were instead naturally harvested from…

  Animals?

  At least that’s what I think they were talking about… I couldn’t say for certain, given that none of the names of the fauna rang a bell. But that was to be expected, I couldn’t expect that our biospheres would match one to one across different planets.

  I mean, these people would probably freak the fuck out if they knew what a ‘platypus’ was.

  As I made my way further and further into the city, the clothes of the people around me started to change. Slowly at first, and then all at once.

  But, unlike what one would normally expect, it didn’t become a tide of people wearing work clothes and uniforms.

  No, it was far stranger than that.

  Instead, the amount of weapons in my vicinity multiplied rapidly. Instead of there just being a singular spear or two supplied to the city guard I sometimes saw standing around corners, every other person started to have a sword or dagger attached to their hip.

  My ears became filled with the clattering of armour.

  Sometimes a shadow would fly overhead, but instead of seeing a bird, I would be greeted with the sight of an individual in light leather armour and a shady cloak parkour over rooftops.

  The signature noisy hollering of a street market filled my ears, and as I looked around, I saw armed individuals carrying massive… things in their arms, dried blood sometimes splattered over their flashy clothes and armour.

  Tusks that bent into irregular shapes, massive sheets of scaled hide, skeletons and bones that looked terrifying beyond belief. A couple of people would unload bags of crystals onto random stores that littered the streets, like the local blacksmith or apothecary.

  I had come to gather that this place was called the ‘Adventurer’s Guild’, a district of business that dealt with the eponymous ‘Adventurers’.

  They were a group of freelance… sellswords? Explorers? Hunters?

  None of those words felt exactly right. ‘Sellsword’ was probably the closest word I had from my world, but these weren’t exactly soldiers.

  They didn’t find themselves being bought into armies to fight other human beings.

  Rather, they were just independent contractors who did odd-jobs for the benefit of the city.

  It just so happened that most of the time, those odd-jobs happened to also be incredibly dangerous, involving going out into the wilderness where the local fauna would attack, requiring most of them to be combat-trained and armed.

  Local fauna that, going by the remains I had seen being sold on the street, might as well have just been fucking dinosaurs for all I knew.

  Honestly, in hindsight, I was probably really lucky I never made it out of the city by myself. If I managed to make it out of the city only to be confronted with a fucking tyrannosaurus rex or something like that, I would…

  Well, I’d probably just die.

  Anyways, this strange new place was my destination for the day.

  I wasn’t trying to steal anything.

  God, no. I wasn’t a fucking moron.

  I knew better than to steal from people who were armed to the teeth and seemingly liked to wrestle with apex predators that were wiped to extinction in my previous life.

  I sighed, keeping my head down as I made my way through the busy streets.

  I did stand out a bit, being a little girl who skulked around in boy’s clothes and all that, but no one hassled me too much about it. I kept myself clean enough and wore good enough clothes to not be that out of place among the commonfolk.

  If anything, I felt oddly more accepted here than I did back in the slums.

  There were way more women among the adventurers than I was expecting, all as scarily dressed – sometimes it was scary in the opposite direction, were some of those ladies really comfortable wearing that little? Was that safe? – and armed as their male counterparts. They looked at me with… understanding? Pity? It felt like they thought I was there because I was in my rebellious years or something and had come because I wanted to be one of them.

  I guess they didn’t discriminate much by gender for this job?

  Maybe it was normal to grow up as a tomboy or something in this world and dream of being an adventurer when you got older.

  Maybe my sister would want to become one. It seemed like a decent way to live out that fantasy of heroism.

  I brushed off the uncomfortable gazes, slowly coming to a stop at a particularly crowded building.

  It was loud. Louder than even the gangsters were when they ran amok unchecked.

  I could vaguely make out the insides of the building, seeing what looked a bit like a tavern, filled with rowdy young men and women gathered around stools and tables, drinking and eating in broad daylight.

  This was the ‘Guildhouse’, I believe it was called; the central hub where these strange freelancers all gathered in to find work for the day.

  Inside the building, against one of the walls, there would a big communal board with all sorts of job listings for them to take, each differing in difficulty and reward.

  From what I understood, they used a simple ranking system to determine which jobs were safe for individuals to take.

  A D-rank Adventurer could only take mundane jobs, comprising mostly of community labour, a C-rank Adventurer would be asked to cull some of the troublesome wildlife populations, and a B-rank Adventurer would be tasked with gathering materials from either the apex predators directly or the habitats in which they lived.

  Beyond that, I wasn’t really sure. A-ranks and above seemed to be incredibly rare, and their listings even rarer. I imagined that the existence of an A-rank listing was nothing less than an emergency that put the entire city at stake, and S-ranks were probably reserved for matters of national concern.

  I didn’t really know, and I didn’t really care. I would be lucky if I never had to figure it out.

  But the guildhouse wasn’t what I was here for. It just happened to be next to what I was actually there for.

  Around the guildhouse, which sat at the heart of the district, was a core shopping street, filled with stores that sold essential supplies for the adventurers’ daily lives.

  Blacksmiths that sold armour and weapons, apothecaries peddling medicines and tonics, and… uh… jewellers and bookstores?

  I… didn’t really get those last two.

  Maybe adventurers had a lot of disposable income? A lot of them did wear some of that fancy jewellery.

  It just seemed a bit strange that what were very recognisably and undeniably necessities were crammed right next to luxuries like that.

  Anyways, these stores didn’t just sell goods.

  Many of them were also places to find specific job requests. Stores in the central hub would skip the middleman of the Guild and instead just put their listings up right beside their storefront.

  Please go delve into this cave and bring me back this precious metal and I’ll give you money plus a discount, go kill this beast and give me its hide or tusk and I’ll fashion it into something usable for a bit cheaper than I normally would – that sort of thing.

  There was one of these that I was particularly interested in.

  One of the apothecaries had a simple D-rank request listed. Go out to some nearby forest or whatever and gather some herb or something. I didn’t really recognise what it was they needed to gather, but the note of there being a forest nearby piqued my interest.

  If there really was a forest nearby, and it did have herbs and other fruits or vegetable ready to pick, that would do wonders for our livelihood. And given that it was a 'D-rank' request, the place was unlikely to be populated by anything dangerous.

  So I picked out a spot and just… waited.

  I kept myself relatively out of view and just stared at the apothecary, waiting for some ragtag group to pick up the request so they could guide me over there.

  The next few hours were extraordinarily boring.

  I hoped my sister was doing fine. Hopefully nothing burned down while I was gone. It would be a really bad time for that, and we didn’t have anywhere else to go considering I had turned all the other houses on the street into wrecks.

  I had gone through the safety stuff a bunch of times with her already, but I still couldn’t help but be anxious. I didn’t know if I’d ever stop being anxious, to be honest.

  Eventually, my patience was rewarded, and a singular, relatively ordinary adventurer dressed in light leather gear with a bow and dagger picked up the request and set off.

  I made sure to stay a long way behind him, never looking at him directly, only keeping track of him by having him stay in the corners of my vision.

  It was a tedious trek through the outskirts of the city.

  It was actually really annoying. The man took all the largest, most obvious roads and travelled incredibly inefficiently. He wasted hours of time walking through the city through routes I was confident I could shortcut down to maybe several dozen minutes at most.

  But eventually, long, long after midday had passed, we did arrive, and I could finally break off from trailing him.

  And much to my pleasure, there indeed was a large, lush, green forest right outside the city’s limits.

  It was hard to contain my excitement.

  I almost couldn’t believe it was real, if I was being honest.

  I had spent all those months, maybe even years – I still honestly couldn’t tell how long I had spent in the madness of starvation – dreaming of finding a life outside of the city, finally running away from the cruel reality of poverty and homelessness, dreaming of a life lived out in the wilderness, almost like the one I used to live when I would travel overseas.

  After all that time spent yearning for it, after I almost gave up on it – no, after I did give up on it, surrendering myself to living within the city’s limits for the sake of my sister, after all of the struggles exploring the city, renovating our home, and scavenging for food…

  After all of that, here I was, the natural breeze brushing against my skin, the cold winter winds carrying over the faint smell of distant leaves.

  It was like God was out there, watching over me, rewarding me for all of my struggles, giving me a moment of reprieve right before the worst of winter would strike.

  I was not going to squander this moment.

  I took off the second-hand shoes I was wearing.

  The soft, familiar prick of slightly wet leaves of grass spread across my feet.

  I curled my toes, letting the gentle touch of nature tickle me back.

  I laughed.

  I ran out into the woods, reaching into my pockets to take a modest sack I had folded in before I left.

  I grabbed whatever I could find and recognised was safe, stuffing it inside.

  It was hard, and it took several hours, given that it was winter, but even a meagre yield would've brought me some of the greatest joy I would have felt since I opened my eyes to this new world.

  There were nuts and mushrooms, from oysters to turkey tails.

  Dandelions and mint leaves sprung up, leaping at me with their vibrant colour, standing out from the grey atmosphere of winter.

  The calls of birds migrating through the seasons led me to trees and bushes bearing fruit, filled with hawthorns, berries, rosehips and more.

  For a scant few hours until the sun went down, I forgot about it all. All of my troubles and worries. All of the scarred memories of the past, threatening to consume me at every waking moment, all of the struggles of the present, as my stomach began to gurgle and groan, calling out for food, and all of the worries and anxieties of the future, ready to frighten me any day.

  I did eventually have to leave the forest behind.

  It would be a long walk back to my home, taking over an hour even for me. I had told my sister I would get back before she fell asleep, in time to read her more tales of the Calybcor Kingdom.

  I found my shoes again and hopped back in them, jogging jauntily back towards the familiar city.

  I didn’t remember much about my journey back, to be honest. I just remember being happy and content for once, the time flying by. I didn’t even remember being bothered by the usual nightly commute of people going back home after a day of work.

  All of those troubles just fell to the side.

  I shoved my sack full of foraged goods through the hole in the alley and pushed myself through a second later, almost forgetting to cover it up behind me in my excitement.

  I ran through the quiet street, rushing to my house, ignoring the growing aches and sores in my calves and feet.

  “I’m home!” I shouted, unable to hold my voice in like I usually did.

  “...”

  Silence greeted me.

  That was strange.

  I blinked, the quietness bringing me down from my high.

  I stepped through the door, and warily peeked across the rooms and corridors.

  Everything seemed fine. Nothing was damaged – not more than it was before, anyways – and everything was exactly where I left it.

  I looked behind me, back outside.

  The patch of dirt was extremely dry. There were no familiar tell-tale spots of wetness, a sign that usually told me my sister had cleaned herself.

  Did she forget to bathe? Maybe she was still outside for some reason, exploring the neighbourhood or playing in one of the houses?

  No, I didn’t have to think there was something wrong just yet…

  I slowly stepped through the house, leaving the sack on the kitchen counter.

  “Sister?” I called out again.

  But this time, the excitement had almost entirely drained from my voice. All that was left behind was a small wariness.

  “...”

  Again, silence was the only answer I received.

  My heart thumped.

  I looked towards the bucket of stew on the table.

  It had not diminished past where we had left it in the morning.

  Panic began to creep in. It was slow at first, but the longer I went without a response, the more that frightful ache started to spread.

  My breath became shaky.

  No, no, maybe I was getting ahead of myself.

  I-I worried a lot over nothing before.

  There were still plenty of explanations that didn’t involve something bad happening.

  Maybe she had just fallen asleep early.

  I exhaled, trying to calm the rapidly growing pain in my chest.

  Yeah, that was probably all it was.

  It was a shame, since she was so excited to read more tonight, but what could I do? It was all harmless anyways, I would just read to her tomorrow to make up for it.

  I forced a smile onto my face, unable to fully kill the unease inside of me, and walked on shaky feet towards the bedroom.

  The silence started to unnerve me, highlighting the burning muscles along my feet and legs.

  I grew anxious as I placed my hand on the bedroom door.

  I sucked in a deep breath, and pushed it open.

  “Sister?” I peeked in.

  And I let out a sigh of relief.

  There she was, sleeping on the bed.

  I chuckled softly, feeling weak all of a sudden.

  See? It was nothing in the end, she was just sleeping.

  I moved towards the curled up figure underneath the sheets.

  “I was scared for a second when you didn’t respond,” I laughed to myself about it, not really expecting a response from her sleeping body.

  I reached out to brush her messy hair away from her cheek.

  And then suddenly, something bit at my hand.

  A scalding heat struck me where my fingers met her cheek.

  And immediately, just like that, all that calmness and relaxation left my body.

  Why was her cheek so hot?

  My jaw started to tighten. I felt myself go breathless. My mind sped into overdrive, clogging my thoughts with a thousand worries at once.

  Jittery hands scuttled across the body on the blankets, landing on her wrist and necks.

  …

  Why was her pulse so weak?

  That- that couldn’t be right.

  S-she was fine just this morning. No, she got up a lot later than usual, b-but that-... that should have been fine, right? She was okay throughout breakfast.

  Panic flooded my nerves, and before I could gather my thoughts, my fingers had already reached for the far side of her body, pulling her towards me and turning her over, revealing her face to me.

  And I instantly felt my heart sink inside of my chest when I realised what I was looking at.

  My sister was sick, terribly so.

  Just like that, after I processed that simple fact, I felt it all collapse on top of me.

  Everything; the fleeting happiness I had just felt, my anxieties over our future, my worries of how we were going to live through tomorrow, and the countless, infinitely heavy memories of the past.

  My worst nightmares had come to life, and I was lost.

  If she was cold, I could give her more clothes to warm her up.

  If she was hungry, then I could always find her more food to eat.

  But she was sick.

  For the first time ever, I had absolutely no idea what I could do to fix what was in front of me.

  Daily updates probably won’t last much longer, since next chapter is the last bit in the opening leg of the story. I just wanted to get the foundation out as fast as possible.

  I’ll probably still upload at least every other day, but I don’t know about an exact schedule.