How many seconds are there in eternity?
The night started like any other. Peaceful. Quiet. The only sounds in his room, shallow breathing and the faint whirring of a computer fan. He'd gotten a request to write about Warhammer so even though it was testing his patience a bit, fucking Horus Heresy thousand books of bullshit no one cares about, he said he'd fulfil the request and August was nothing if not a man of his word.
It didn't stay that way for long.
At 0100 sharp, a soft click of a lock opening downstairs reached his ears but didn't register, too absorbed in his current Plan to notice.
He sure noticed when the ninebanger arcing into his room went off though.
The surprise of a blinding light and ringing ears followed by the fast insertion would have been enough for most suspects. The black-clad officers in tactical gear normally would be out the door, target secured in just under a minute. Maybe a few in a pessimistic scenario where the suspect is aware enough to resist, which was not the case here, it should have been a milk run. August wasn't a normal man.
Seconds stretched into an eternity as his power reacted to the threat. Plans were made and discarded. avenues of approach assessed and found wanting as threats were noted as non-lethal. Time was/wasn't spent on determining appropriate force and the consequences of such.
His Plan was set, force and pressure applied with the grace of the student of thousands of masters in unarmed combat. Mathematical equations linked to biomechanics and the force needed to incapacitate without injury weren't strictly necessary, he did them anyway because why not? He had all the time in the world to simulate how to take down his opponents as if he were the Number Man.
August didn't have to move an inch as his Plan was put into Action.
Bodies folded. Flashlights flickered as ordnance hit the floor.
A cold chuckle echoed through the room before August cracked his neck and got to the real work.
In the following hours, centuries were spent learning how to break a man, how to read him like ink on paper, how to tell truth from lie. Belief from fact. Not a single drop of blood was spilled from the following interrogation, nor a bruise or other identifying mark. No need to leave a mess, even if it'd be cleaned up in a second, this farce was already a waste of his time he could spend doing literally anything else.
Information was catalogued and filed away for later when the immediate problem was solved. He was in a piss poor mood already, no need to fixate and make it worse.
He made a Plan, his body committed it to Action. The corpses were mulched into fertilizer spread across acres of farmland, much more of use to society as food than as people, in his opinion. Guns and equipment stripped into components and kept as insurance, the van they came in was disassembled, all of it to be separated and scrapped. The metals and plastics went in bins labelled "to be recycled".
Let it not be said that August doesn't do his part for the environment!
It didn't take long to find the men responsible. Directors. Policy makers. Corrupt officials with more money than sense. Before he Acted, he wanted to know why. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Why poke the bear? Most importantly, how did they find him? The plans he made ensured that conventional means would've had a hard time spotting the inconsistencies, at least, he thought that was the case.
Then again, he was taking refuge in audacity with a name like He Who Is August, even the morons in the CIA could see that link, August was fairly unique as far as names go. He hadn't really been trying to hide, didn't think he'd have to contend with this level of idiocy.
The key to finding him? He blew up on social media for his book. They found his discord. He made the simple mistake of using the same username on the online courses he took when he learned how to program. He wasn't trying very hard to hide.
A deeper dive was done. Evidence compiled, conclusion reached.
Initially, they thought August was a script kiddie committing tax fraud, abusing a loophole to sign himself up as an LLC without actually having a real business. The initial plan of action ended up being fairly simple, he was a man they tought they could control. Get the right leverage and the guy hacking into their shit would end up working for them. They'd flipped blackhats in the past, August was to be no different. The IRS got another three letter agency involved who dug into his life. A timeline was made and it wasn't making sense.
Months of investigation were spent coming to the wrong conclusion. "August" wasn't committing tax fraud, the LLC part was legit. The rest, well...
"August" was a ring of human trafficking cybercriminals committing modern day slavery as well as other unprovable unspeakable acts.
How else could you explain the the amount of time it'd take to write all those books in such a short frame of time, let alone the animations and voice acting, clearly the voices were different people. Hell, the screams and moans of pain so viscerally potent that even steely-eyed veterans would flinch, reminded too closely of past cases. Or what about the hidden messages of suffering in "his" work, the gory drawings of torture so vivid that it must have been based on a real life reference that caused one or two of the more faint hearted investigators to throw up.
These sick bastards were clearly marketing real people's suffering.
Not all of the spooks were idiots, most were just afraid, just guys trying to do their jobs finding themselves way out of their depth coming at an outside context problem from the wrong angle, office drones, data handlers, analysts, average Joes. Eventually, paperwork was flagged. The inconsistencies piled up, too many to escape notice. The timings didn't line up and they made their living spotting patterns.
A call was made. "This guy is clearly up to something." And even if they can't find actionable evidence of his supposed crimes, they can find evidence of minor ones like hacking into a government database to forge paperwork. So they sent a SWAT team to grab the guy.
Which went well.
The disappointment outweighed the anger, as did the amusement. A rough chuckle escaped August as he experienced gutting open the spineless, grovelling fatass that ordered the black bag attempt.
August had long since reached his limit for bullshit. It was time to stop playing games and be an adult for once. He knew this day was coming, the day he'd have to put down the pen and pick up the sword, he just didn't think it'd be this soon.
Centuries, hell, millennia were spent learning about the machine that made up society. From the digital to paperback. Infiltrations that never were revealed how the systems of bureaucracy worked. How they didn't. The flaws and why they existed, why they should or shouldn't, how to benefit from the messy systems like those that implemented them did. Who the worst culprits of corruption were and how to manipulate them into dpoing what he wanted them to. Learning everything he could about the corruption gunking up the works, the cogs in the machine that crushed rather than turned. Blackmail, routines, families. What shoes they wore, what bus they took to work, what they usually had for dinner. How they acted. How they thought. Their lives were laid bare. Dissected. Analysed. Means, motive, opportunity.
He read up on how the laws worked in intricacy, what their spirit was and how they've been tarnished. How to bend them without breaking them. Not just how to program, but how to bring the digital world to its knees. August studied the economies of the world, geopolitics, geography, culture, history, warfare, logistics, trade, philosophy, the very foundations of civilisation. He learned about the rot benath society, the dregs that stole, lied and cheated everyone else out of their living.
He delved into the interconnected nature of the communities that made up humanity, experienced every walk of life, every kind of pain and pleasure, what it felt like to starve surrounded by the gluttonous, surviving as the homeless do, living off of the scraps left in dumpsters, fighting over his potential last meal with crackheads as if he were there breathing in the same fetid air with them. He was a billionaire, living the high life, fucking supermodels, jumping out of planes without a parachute, all the drugs and all the STDs.
He was there to witness the deaths of the lonely, sometimes even joining in just to see what it'd feel like to die. He was there in Mosul, Ukraine, Gaza, killing and dying on both sides of every conflict. August was there to bear witness to the deaths of millions, comforting them in their last moments, learning their stories, their lost hopes and dreams, fulfilling last wishes and helping them say goodbye.
He was there for every new birth, witnessed the joy of new couples getting married, officiating a few, he even got married himself, experienced love, raised children, divorce, losing custody of the kids to heartless bitches, sometimes he was the heartless bitch after a sex change, remarrying the loves of his lives, widowing, growing old. He lived life as a saint would, as an aesthetic monk, as a pacifist. Again and again and again.
'How many seconds are there in eternity?' The "man" once known as August quietly contemplated.
Sirens were heard approaching.
The brightest joys and the darkest horrors, the sins of humanity were his to bear the weight of, the joys were his to laugh through.
Van doors slammed open. Cordons were made.
Life and death became mundane. Saving the world was Monday, conquering it was Tuesday.
Cries for August to surrender himself into custody were made on a megaphone.
He sat and experienced Life in its fullest. The scars of Humanity broke him and remade him, shaping what was left of August into someone truly neutral to the world around him, the closest thing to an unbiased view of humanity one could achieve, by having every bias at once. Apathy, hate and a fierce love of being human all at once, a truly eldritch thought process. Too Human to be human.
The whirring of helicopter blades thundered closer.
August knew how to break the system that once constrained him, how to control it. Usurp it.
Officers stormed the building. August remained seated.
The world was his to shape. Like Quote ReplyReport Reactions:niave_thoughts, SIMPDESTROYER1, Bliblies and 76 others
Instantaneous Action - The Isekai (omake)
The view was spectacular. Truly, he'd never see anything like this back home. The winds in the air were fresh and hale, filled with the scent of petrichor from a recent rain. Like a perfectly complementary dish prepared by the most talented and experienced of chefs, this forest's unique scent of weeping flowers seeped their scents in the air, mixing beautifully with a side of petrichor that caused each breath to lighten his shoulders and filled him with a youthful vitality.
His view had taken him, from his perspective, eight hours to climb to. From the cliffside of the mountain he'd scaled, on a clear field with a sole tree hanging off this perch, August stared out over an endless verdant forest that he could only call enchanting.
On the air were flowers and peddles swept by the winds and taken into the forest by a distant clearing of vibrant blue and purple flowers, rare colors in nature, but seemingly not so here.
Within the forest stood trees that towered and twisted overhead. He could not recognize their genus, but their barks popped with saturated browns that left his muse obsessing over their unique patterns. Their leaves and canopies were less tropical in bend, and more like a hardy oak standing tall and ancient, giving the forest a sense of gravitas. A forest that this species had dominated for hundreds of thousands of years, with such dominion being uncontested, such that these towering tyrants imposed their authority over the domain they'd claimed for so long.
He did not recognize these trees, nor any plants within this area, largely due to the fact that this was not his world.
This was not Earth.
Staring up over the forest and the hills, the clearings of cheerful flowers, and the marvelous sights that he could see on other sloped hills or short mountains, August watched as a lumbering island floated through the air.
Its bottom was a rocky and stoney thing, tough and with sheer faces of some impenetrable bedrock that was smoothed by thousands of years of wind and air erosion in some places, and in other areas, rough and blocky like it was fresh from being ripped from the earth and still bore those jagged wounds. Up, past this layer of stone and hardy sediment that balked at gravity's potent pull, this island was covered by a layer of soil and sediment that was topped by trees and foliage. Like a gentle weeping, a light spray of water drifted off from a stream of similar edifices, forming a mobile waterfall that lightly misted the surrounding forest as it drifted to the winds.
Far to his sight on some distant peak of some short mountain that so populated this hilly environment, he spotted a flying figure that with a squint he made out to be a creature he could only call a dragon. Its wings were larger, its bulk thin and whimsical as it made loops out of its lengthy body; the creature was dancing in the sky so far away he shouldn't have the ability to see it, but so large it was that his eyes casually watched its grace from miles away.
In his memories of hiking this place, August had spotted -but not stopped to gawk- many creatures most mystical and fantastical; mountain lions with tongues of flames swirling around their furs or within their throaty mouths. Squirrels that were flying through the air on mounds of cloud. A deer whose silver gaze and silver fur professed a sense of majesty and sacred might.
On and on these creatures appeared, and as did others of a more fantastical bent.
A towering figure with two heads, larger than he was tall by four or five times, this creature was an Ettin. Pale of skin but covered in wooden bark armor and mud-skins, holding aloft a tree-sized club, the creature dully stared up into the towering canopy as he walked past it.
Similar to the stalking figures of goblins, these green, savage-looking creatures blended seamlessly into their foliage surroundings, wielding primitive equipment and hunting tools as they seemed to have followed the path of the Ettin. Like scavengers following a larger and more powerful predator, they scavenged the ruins and wreckage the creature made in its jaunt around the forest.
It came without mention that, after all he'd seen —of distant dragons flying in the sky, to floating islands, towering giants, and skulking goblins, not to mention the mystical flora and fauna within this region —August came to the immediate conclusion that he'd been isekai'd.
Some might question whether that was not preemptive or a too quick conclusion, skipping over possibilities of being drugged or similar rationalities. August, however, was all too aware of the strangeness of this situation, having since he'd woken up in the lower forests been dealing with his supernatural oddities.
He called it Instantaneous Action. In the context of the setting, this would be his cheat, although he'd initially called it his superpower.
August's attention on the marvelous view of his new world was halted, or more accurately, paused, as with a sudden instinct, he forced himself into an Action Without a Plan.
Time paused around him, the world stilled, and August lifted himself from where he was sitting to turn around. There, he witnessed a leaping mountain lion with its jaws fully distended and a roiling flame building up in the back of its throat. The creature was frozen in the air mid-leap, the tense musculature and influential figure of the creature a still-frame image captured in time.
The pouncing mountain lion was circled by the cognizant man who inspected the creature, a frown on his face as he pulled from his cargo pants a switch blade. Finding himself before its neck, he jolted his arm up and the steel blade cut through into the creature's jugular; then with a sawing motion, he made the wound worse and finally twisted the blade again. Then he paused and thought for a moment before deciding to skin the creature in its frozen state.
He worked for two hours, nearly three as he slowly and methodically removed its tense skin from its muscle; a familiar work for a man who's been hunting, and one who was referencing his phone while he worked.
His phone was a queer thing that had followed him into this world. It only worked while he was within an Action, which was what he referred to as this time-stopped state, where he could manipulate the world as if it were. An Action only lasted for a maximum of twenty-four hours of subjective stopped time before he was forced to create a new Plan of Action.
There was no cooldown to creating an Action; it simply depended on how fast he could plan one.
A Plan of Action was what he referred to as the more advanced, or perhaps safer, usage of his Instantaneous Actions. Right now, August is performing an Action Without a Plan. This meant that he was fully aware of his actions, felt every sensation of his working, and was effectively living within a state of stasis for however long he decided to remain within this state.
The key difference between an Action Without a Plan and one with a plan lies in the latter, where August's ego is left behind. This was a very needed feature, if August was ever planning to use his power for the length of time and level of bullshit he was cooking up in his head.
Upon learning that he had this power, August sought to see its limitations; situation be damned, he had a shiny new toy, and it was his best bet at getting out of what he saw as a survival situation at the time.
August had thus decided to experiment with his power, and in doing so, he had agreed to read Wikipedia from his phone, at the time having only checked his phone within an Action.
For some odd reason, entirely unexplainable to him, his phone disconnected from Earth's internet services while not within an Action and was entirely non-functional in real-time. However, it worked as if fully powered and was connected to the internet back home on Earth within his Time Stopped Action.
In his discovery and initial investigation of his unique powers, August created a Plan, reading Wikipedia for three hours, to test out his powers. He read every word with a slavish devotion, driven by his plan to not only absorb the words but also grasp their content. This led to his Egoless body within that time-stopped state, allowing him to conduct follow-up research when he hadn't yet reached August's desired level of knowledge.
Waking up from that fever-dream, suddenly having a ton of trivia knowledge loaded in his brain, August found that he remembered everything. From every thought or whimsical nuance of opinion that he had regarding a new bit of information or stimulus, to a photographic recollection of anything he looked at while within a Time Stopped state of being.
Effectively, he had perfect memory of anything and everything that occurred within an Action.
He expected himself to be hungry after three hours of reading and created a plan to hunt for some food. He gathered some twigs and made a fire rather easily, discovering something new about his powers.
If he could theoretically do it, no matter how unlikely it was, August could do it as an Action.
A backflip? Possible, but he'd never trained to do one. But in an Action? He could do dozens of backflips over and over again. Making a fire was a similar thing; he'd never done it before, but the man in the Action had done it to perfection.
August lost this feature in an Action Without a Plan, but so long as he made a plan that was theoretically possible, then he could do that Action to the letter of that plan.
He'd thus hunted for something to eat, and found his first anomalous creature, and had the sudden realization that he might not be in Kansas anymore. Deciding not to eat the Cloud-Riding Squirrels, August went for a while without food, canceling his Plan, and deciding to read more on his phone about what he should do.
He spent hours watching YouTube Videos and reading survival guides, but surprisingly, he found himself neither hungry nor tired after fourteen hours of research.
Thus, he'd decided to create a Plan to the max, reading and researching survival tips and tricks over the next twenty-four hours. In doing this, he discovered his maximum amount of time allotted to him within a single plan, that being twenty-four hours. Furthermore, he found the fact that the moment he dropped out of a Plan, he could start a new one without issue.
August, in his research and studies, found that no matter what he did in this situation, he was fucked.
August was alone within an entirely alien environment that he wasn't adapted to; anything he ate could have some form of bacteria or parasite that his gut or immune system wasn't capable of fighting. Which meant every meal that he ate was a risky business of potentially eating something that'd take him to the grave.
Thankfully, with his Actions, August was more than capable of working around these issues and resolved to try his best. In this, his first meal was a slain Cloud-Riding Squirrel, and the method he'd chosen to cook it was a charcoal roast, practically burning the entire thing to kill off any potential bacteria or parasites.
Hunting, cooking, preparing, and then eating the squirrel had him realize that perhaps he wasn't so fucked after all, as his obsessive attention to detail about the sanitary conditions of his food led to preparing it taking an extreme amount of time. With his power, he was entirely capable of hunting and preparing anything within real-time seconds, even the more time-intensive cooking activities.
Furthermore, August ate the entire squirrel, which wasn't the size of the small rodents back home but more so the size of a beaver or larger mammalian rodent. This included the eyes, offal, and other safe bits of meat, while also properly preparing and safely eating other organs that were more suspect, like the liver.
While not usually an offal eater, he found himself entirely okay with eating even the most suspect of meats so long as he properly cooked them to remove any possibility of food poisoning, sickness, disease, infection, or parasitism. August's lack of Ego within his Plans of Action meant that if he planned it and could do it, he'd do it regardless of how unappealing the action potentially was.
Which was what he was doing to this Fire-Spewing Mountain Lion.
Skinning the beast in its entirety, the still floating creature was rendered down into cuts of meat that were then skewered on shaven pieces of wood cut by his pocket knife. He built a fire on the cliff ledge, roasting pieces of meat into char and consuming them one by one. He didn't eat the offal as he didn't trust himself with this Action Without a Plan to not fuck up and cook the organs incorrectly, but charring the meat of the predator was more than in his capabilities.
It was an unappetizing meal, one that joined many others and left him more than full and somewhat bloated. He'd overeaten today and had gotten a bit lost in the fact that he'd only spent a real-time of a few hours within this new situation.
Despite not having an Ego within his Plans of action, which would allow him to perform dull, tedious, or unappealing actions for hours on end, he still somewhat felt the effects of time pressing against him. Memories were memories, after all, and while to the world around him no time was passing at all, days had passed for him within seconds.
Dropping out of his Action Within a Plan, August watched as the creature flew through the air, twitching as its meatless skeleton flopped into the grass, entirely still. August hadn't removed the brain, so the animal was likely experiencing its last few moments of life entirely removed from its body, existing without eyes, senses, skin, flesh, tendons.
The only thing that remained of the creature was some amount of its blood in its skull that hadn't leaked out, its brain, and its bones.
He wondered what it felt like in its dying moments. Pain? A lack of it?
He'd admit to being fascinated by the brutality of what he'd just inflicted on the creature. Call him a psychopath for such a brutal kill in keeping the brain intact, but his current existence reminded him so much of playing VR. The world was a Sandbox for him to explore, and it wasn't uncommon for those Sandbox experiences to incorporate a plethora of gory violence.
With a mental flex of will, he planned, and when he next came to awareness of Ego, he was standing at the shore of a stream; his hands clean and his pocket knife rubbed dry from the water. He didn't want it to become rusty after some mild maintenance and the rather heavy-duty usage he'd been putting on the blade.
He didn't exactly have blade oil on him right now.
With a wondering thought, he tapped his chin, then winced as he removed his hands from his face. He couldn't risk getting sick and was trying to teach himself habits to prevent getting sick; putting one's hands on their face was a distinct cause.
He didn't mind it when he had a pharmacy around the corner and medical care for the low cost of the rat game people called capitalism, but now he needed to rely on himself, and only himself. He couldn't risk getting sick and being unable to care for himself, even with his powers.
With a twitch of his mouth, trying to remove the itch that spawned, August sighed. Appearing elsewhere in the forest, somewhere high up and after several hours of hiking, he inspected the lay of the land, noting areas in his memories where he'd seen the flight of dangerous beasts like what he thought were dragons but could potentially be something else entirely.
They were too distant for him to make out more distinct features beyond a silhouette. Judging by the common existence of greenskinned hook-nosed ugly-as-sin tribal goblins, he'd put a wager that those silhouettes were tried and true fire-breathing Dragons.
With a small yawn, August planned and slept in the warm sun, leaning against a dry boulder. He woke up and made a Plan that involved doing some yoga and intense stretching. Deciding that if he was going to do this survivalist shit, he might as well start taking care of his body, and flexibility was king in that respect.
Rested, still not feeling hungry, August stewed on what he should do in this context.
He was likely in Fantasy Land, and his next step should be to find civilization.
Problem: He didn't have any fancy languages beamed into his skull. If people here suddenly started speaking in English, despite this world being another fucking world, then he'd just jump off a cliff because he was living in a simulation at that point.
Learning a language was pretty straightforward with his powers; just download Duolingo, listen to the green owl for a few weeks, and bam, language mastery of every language in the human lexicon.
Problem: If there were a society in this world, then they wouldn't have their entire lexicon in an easily understandable and digestible format like Duolingo. With enough examples of the written word, August was confident in perhaps reverse engineering the text and becoming literate, but not fluent.
He needed to hear and speak a language, which Duolingo and all the videos in the world on his phone could provide for him, but this world likely didn't have phones or anything of the sort that could help him there.
That meant that within any sort of society not developed to an era where they were capable of recording audio, he wasn't going to be able to cheat his way into understanding the language. Sure, one might think that he could just bring another person into his little time-warp Action, but that wasn't how it worked.
Anything that was quote-on-quote 'sapient' was locked from being incorporated into his Actions. He could affect them, but they were locked in time and space. It was an odd function of his Actions, but depending on his Plan, certain things were in effect.
For example, August needed light to see, and thus light and photons moved as usual. He needed air to breathe, and therefore, within a certain radius around himself, air currents moved naturally. The stream in front of him, while cleaning his blade it was rushing and moving naturally. Still, the fish and organisms were locked in space, entirely unaffected by the kinetic energy being imparted on their forms until time started again when he ended his Action.
An interesting thing was that the creatures were unaffected by the theoretical 'build-up' of kinetic energy that was applied to their forms. Still, when August applied the physical harm, the protections of time-stop ceased and allowed them to manipulate their bodies.
It all depended on his Plan, determining what was static and affected by the Time Stop, and what was dynamic and moving. In some way, he wondered if the planet was turning, moving through space, and further wondered if he was affecting things on a universal scale, but that started giving him headaches, and so he stopped caring.
He knew that he was affecting the ocean, wind, and weather currents, though; that was cause and effect.
He wondered what a weather station would pick up from his antics.
Shrugging at the inane thoughts and mechanics of his powers that baffled him, August started to think about his direction.
Without a means of communication, reliable or otherwise, August didn't truly see him desperately needing civilization right at the moment. Hell, that might be a poor choice, as then he'd be introduced to a micro-environment with biologically similar entities that might be sick and carry potentially hazardous bacteria or viruses.
August was constantly stressing about airborne viruses and wondering if he was infected, despite not feeling any symptoms at the moment. Every bit of offness that he felt was causing him undue stress and panic.
I'm going to make some crude medicines," August decided, pulling up his phone and starting to research how to obtain an online Pharmacy Doctorate.
Seeing that he was still technically a person back on Earth, August accessed his bank account and used his debit card inside his wallet to purchase access to all manner of acclaimed online resources like Jstor, PubMed, and even more .edu websites that he started to trawl for the correct qualifications of becoming a pharmacist.
Sitting on a boulder, August trawled through his phone at a blazing pace, his eyes devouring information as they captured an entire page of information before his thumb swiped and continued to consume and memorize nuanced details of the sciences that he desired. Biochemistry, biology, mathematics, chemistry, medical theses, research documentation, Wikipedia scrolls, and the accumulated knowledge of human understanding of anything related to germs, viruses, phages, bacteria, and other infectious mediums.
It became dark, and then light again, and he briefly vanished from his rock to hunt and cook something, exercise, and stretch, before he returned to his thinking boulder and continued to devour information. As he learned and made plans that turned seconds into days, August diverted his research into other topics that were more short-term.
From bio-science and medical research to more industrial and technologically focused research, August sought to identify specific materials, memorizing all manner of details and subtle signs of certain geological resources that might be crucial to his upcoming plans.
From the means and methods to make glass, to highly detailed videos on how to weave cloth, or the blueprints and patent systems for all manner of industrial machines and technologies. August memorized their inner workings before he vanished from his rock once more.
A stone hatchet was crafted from a branch, and a shelter was crafted within one subjective day; quality and made from watching primitive survival videos. Not the fake ones, but the real original ones that weren't made using industrial vehicles.
With a small shelter made within a clearing of the forest, August vanished once more and scouted his location. He located thirteen tribes of goblins within the immediate area, and between one moment of life and the next, all four hundred and thirty-seven goblins started choking on their blood and died on the spot: a clear slit mark on their throats proclaiming their ends.
Returning to his base camp, August refined his tool selection, creating a twine loom for twisting plant fibers into sturdy ropes. He continued to upgrade his base-camp built within a meadow field of flowers, the land there soft, with the flowers hewn away to make space for a foundation of stones. A primitive structure that was his home rapidly transformed; baskets made from dry fibers and sticks were woven and stored within a corner, then, in the blink of an eye, they were filled with clay.
Clay that was turned into soft sun-dried bricks was then assembled into a kiln, which produced fired shingles.
Numerous branch frames stretched the hides and skins of various exotic animals; their organs were used to process and break down the fats on the hides, making them smooth and soft. Within hardly a minute of real-time, they were processed and taken down, more strewn up, always included within a plan to have them break down naturally as he worked and zipped to-and-fro.
Hides were used for his bedding, and he kept hunting to supply his tanneries, which he relocated after growing tired of the smell, the physical labor of running, and the processing of hides, then into processed leathers.
Several iterations of furnaces were built and constructed throughout the forest; one a simple bloomery, another a blast furnace, and soon he was ranging out into the mountains, covered in dust as he retrieved massive packs of ore sourced throughout the hills. Rocks were smelted down and melted off, with August skipping the Bronze Age and instead working directly with iron. Tin was too rare and hard to find within the area, but he'd already found numerous sources of iron, the lands rich in the resource, which made the choice simple.
Iron was heated within the blast furnace, fueled by potent coke fuels and clever air-flow designs that had the material reach its melting point rapidly. It was poured into a crucible, the slag was removed with a wooden ladle, and then the molten iron was poured into a cast. With him working rapidly, cutting off plans to put the molten iron into stasis while he heated up more, his expertise in abusing his 'cheat' ability allowed him to cast an entire anvil, horn and all.
A hammer head was cast next, then more tools joined it, forged against the anvil. These tools included tongs, a proper slag remover, a pickax, a proper hatchet, a file, a saw, and more besides.
Within a field of flowers that August tended to, he rapidly advanced. Seconds skipped by, and they turned into minutes, which turned into hours, causing a subjective time of years and decades to skip by.
August raised hanging gardens that bloomed with flowers and fresh plant growth, that framed the dying and rising glow of forged lanterns that burned rendered tallow as fuel. His hovel rapidly evolved into a home.
From a hovel from the first minute, within the hour, the floors were shaped stone, with August working granite tiles with a chisel and the patience and temperament of a master mason. These tiles were heated by the soft burn of his forge that fed warm air throughout the building. A chimney of brick with a façade of masterfully worked granite allowed smoke from the hearth and his iron stove to rise and escape the building.
There was no draft from his expert joinery and craftsmanship of the walls. The cobble, brick, and granite building features a subtle frontier highlight and is enhanced with master's touches.
Humble, yet refined and masterfully crafted, with a solid foundation and no unevenness to be found; everything seemed to have been crafted and built by someone with a micrometer, yet August had yet to invent such a thing and had been going off by feel within his plan.
Piles of expertly cultivated flowers framed his home inside of planters and hanging gardens, joined by a garden of plants that August cultivated to inspect their potential as natural medicines. A forge joined into this frontiersman's home, not quite a manor, but very close. The forge was awash with tools and forged bobbles, with nails by the bucketful, the buckets themselves held by reinforced iron rings riveted into their planks.
The forge held three separate anvils, two of which were beaten monstrosities; yet to be melted down and salvaged, while the third was seeing the beginning of its twilight days, soon to bow out and retire. Dozens of hammers lined the walls, from ballpeen to practical sledge-hammers; some made from copper, others matted with rawhide, and some with lead faces and or cores.
Files, precision tooling, tongs, vice-grips, twisting hand-crafted machinery, fastener screws made from dices, with internal and external threads joining with hand-machined equipment or tools.
These miraculous inventions of industry and craftsmanship were made from drill bits forged from a material that August could only claim to be some fantastical fantasy material. It easily parted through coke blast-forge chromium-steel, with trace elements of vanadium to make a hardened stainless-steel alloy.
Handcrafted machinery, from gear-ratio 'hand-cranked' - read: spun by attaching a pulley of twine to the driving rod as a rip-cord - lathes, to a steam-engine prototype that churned a drive-pulley experiment and proof-of-concept as August tested the machine and had yet to integrate it into his compact set-up practically.
From this small home and foundry, August possessed his laboratory; more so a Victorian nightmare as he captured Cloud-Riding Squirrels, ignored their unusual abilities, and started to go through clinical trials on their bodies. Through these tests and gruesome experiments, August identified three separate molds and fungal treatments with anti-bacterial properties. He cultivated and investigated the potential of powdering these specific anti-bacterial compounds for medicinal use.
A lightbulb powered by a lead battery lit his laboratory and assisted him in working with his primitive microscope; the lenses allowed him to see microbial organisms and watch as bacteria and viruses were destroyed when using these herbal remedies.
Herbal remedies that were outperforming anything mentioned on the internet; even lab-born cures and drugs, some of these plants were fucking vicious against bacteria and viruses, making poultices and draughts from them and feeding them to diseased squirrels, making them right as rain the next day.
With such profound success, August tentatively proceeded to start vaccination trials on himself; infecting himself and coming down with what was, in effect, a slight cold. By using his prescribed treatments and analyzing his blood, August was able to cure himself of the light cold within a few real-time seconds, then gradually developed vaccinations based on his blood.
Within a real-time day, August had explored much of the forest and even stepped into foreign environments in search of more and more remedies and herbal medicines; of which he began to identify unique organelles within their cellular structure -present in his own as well- that were entirely alien and produced effects that could only be described as anomalous.
Some of these effects were wholeheartedly hostile and dangerous, with many of these plants acting as potent poisons, but a poison could just as well be turned into a powerful cure, depending on the dosage; cures that he started to record as his home kept transforming.
The expansion of his home upgraded from a simple one-story cottage to a more refined and spacious two-story complex with multiple bedrooms, integrated ventilation, a boiler, a coal-fired generator located within the forge, a battery bank, and incorporated copper-pipe plumbing, including a septic tank.
While he was still using wood and charcoal for his cooking, and needed to heat up his boiler by hand, he'd constructed a crude air-conditioning unit. 'Crude' not so much in function so much in design, in that it lacked the usage of a mundane refrigerant gas like R12 or R134A and instead utilized an odd crystal he'd found while spelunking that was always 'cold'.
This crystal was used to cool down the circulating chill water piping that the fans ran warm air over, warming the chill water and cooling down the air as it circulated through the space.
While keeping with a level of primitive crudeness as expected from his limitations of certain vital resources, and in no-way was he capable of supporting an industrial complex and revolution on his lonesome; August was able to run one or two industries by himself.
These industries included a paper-manufacturing plant, a printing press, and expansive gardens and greenhouses that supported thousands of unique plants and lifeforms that he individually cultivated, tracked, bred, cross-bred, and used to produce tonics, draughts, and pills.
The latter industry was effectively his own pharmacy and pharmaceutical company, with him owning a traditional barn-house that was home to hundreds of captured animals; from the Fire-Belching Mountain Lions, to the Storm-Blooded Equines, or the Silver-Graced Bucks and Deer; even Goblins and their evolved cousins, The Hobgoblin. August experimented on the local fauna with an obsessive degree of curiosity and scholarly interest.
Injecting them with pharmaceuticals and testing drugs; taking urine, blood, and stool samples while also performing vivisections and dissections on individuals that were suffering from particularly unique or devastating disease. All of it was recorded, and all of it was studied.
Every hour was a new age of progress and advancement in all of those mentioned industries.
The paper-production was always ramping up, with new engines and means of providing power to the machines that produced massive spools of paper; to the automatic cutting, separation, or pressing of paper into perfect A4 squares.
Then the next hour would be the publishing house's means of printing books by the hundreds, with all of these buildings functioning near constantly within August's plans, meaning there was always a production backlog of products; yet for some reason August was constantly increasing production.
For as the day winded down and the sun set, August would devote his time to book production. Within cellars and in attics, and eventually an attached library to August's home, he stockpiled hundreds of books, scrolls, and tablets of his findings in health and medicine.
Then, as the third day dawned, August paused to sip on some freshly boiled water. The man was the picture of health, and if one had shown the August of today, to the August of yesterday; he'd wonder why they'd photoshopped him into a model.
With a subtle build of taunt muscle, a healthy but limiting amount of fat on his body that poorly hid his good genetic grace of highly detailed abdominal muscles; August was a lean, but rather bulky young man. With a pair of glasses that he'd made, the circular accessory and his slick-backed hair, his appearance gave him a scholarly persona that both paired and clashed with his physical stature of six-foot three with broad-shoulders and forearms that were larger than some men's biceps, and biceps that were ready to curl hundreds of pounds.
A physique that came from cutting down hundreds of massive trees and processing them into lumber, or spending hundreds of hours in dark mines, lifting coal, iron, and other minerals out from the caves and mineshafts he'd staffed and excavated.
His dress was that of what he'd worn coming to this world: a pair of well-cared-for and hide-patched cargo pants, paired with a black muscle shirt of nylon fiber that was worn under a large baggy blue T-Shirt that had the golden lettering of NAVY imprinted on the front by the pectoral muscle. Flush to his body after August had put on fifty to seventy kilograms of muscle and lost forty pounds of fat, the shirt was paired with a coat that had a lining of wool and a black cotton outer layer.
He'd had to alter the jacket to allow space for his ballooning biceps.
Putting down his cup, August got up from his plush leather reclining chair, standing up to look through the window and inspect the quiet and silent factory buildings. The softly lit roads, lined with hanging lanterns and cobbled paths, led to his various greenhouses that stretched around the buildings, winding throughout his territory. At the edges of the forest, he could spot the flayed remains of goblins that had discovered his small piece of paradise.
Finishing his water, August took from his pocket his phone. The anomalous piece of technology turned on as he entered a Plan, his eyes dulling of any trace of emotion as his fingers tapped onto a website. One that he'd created and was paying to host, August's fingers danced over the screen, using subscription services to customize his website as he lacked a computer to get into the weeds of website design.
His phone would have to do, as he created August's Isekai Adventure Log, a blog that he then linked to various social media platforms. Instagram and YouTube were his chosen sites that he'd plague with his presence, as he already had them installed and set up on his phone. Even if he wasn't too big on social media, essentially just using the two apps to watch reels and videos, August still felt like he should document his journey in this new world.
He returned to his comfortable seat and spent the following dozen plans, a total of twelve days, mindlessly posting things. On his Isekai Adventure Log, he started to detail things not by real-time, but rather by his own perspective time; each day he spent in his 'Actions' was thus detailed as a real-time day; which sometimes required the writer in him to spice up a few things, like when he had to kill and hunt or interact with other creatures.
Photos were posted and hosted on the website. He even went out to recreate some of his favorite moments, taking pictures of various slain goblin camps, or old ones that he never bothered to clean up, and rooting around to find their rotting corpses left out for scavengers.
He took a plethora of selfies, documented the land, and started a new hobby that he became invested in while working on his blog: cartography.
Using his paper manufacturing facilities, the paper quality he produced wasn't the perfectly white, impurity-free paper that the modern world uses, but it was legible and durable multilayered wood-pulped paper that underwent several chemical treatments to enhance its durability and longevity. Vital documents that he wanted to preserve were being treated in a layer of dried slime-resin; queer creatures that were ever stereotypical to fantasy worlds that indeed had all manner of valuable properties.
Including a crude means of laminating and preserving papers.
In August, he embarked on an artistic journey to become a world-renowned cartographer, hoping to avoid the legacy of old-age explorers who often exaggerated entire landmasses, as evidenced by older maps of Earth that sometimes included entirely false islands.
He began by posting on his blog in his region, but then he started thinking, as he spent time looking at Google Maps and wishing he knew more about the world he found himself in.
August knew where to find all manner of valuable resources that he used to build up his various facilities, greenhouses, home, and factories, but he knew not the shape of the continents, whether this world was flat or spherical, or any other nuanced detail that he thought he should know.
With most of his concerns regarding dying to some fantastical disease mitigated, August knew that this was his next calling.
Mapping the world in its entirety, to the best of his abilities.
To do this, he started by hunting down some dragons.
He, of course, included their butchering, vivisections, and detailed biological analysis on his blog, with a note that there was something magical about them that was allowing these multi-ton beasts with bones as dense as steel and as tough as diamonds to fly. Of course, he simply said on his blog that he 'fought and slew a few dragons today', and neglected to mention how, as in reality he'd simply walked into their lairs while they were sleeping, set down his butchering tools, a stack of glass jars filled with preservatives, and started his bloody work.
What he was after, however, was the membranes of the wings. After butchering four dragons, which he posted in gory clinical scientific detail on his blog, August worked on stitching together a working prototype hot air balloon from the dragon wing membranes.
The prototype worked, and he pulled a Sokka by adding a hatch at the top for when he wanted to descend.
He gained some experience by flying around in the balloon over his forest, adjusting his rise and using sails to alter the direction he was moving. Once he was confident in his abilities to pilot the balloon, August preserved enough food to keep him fed and watered for a hundred days in real-time, which translated to practical centuries with him using Instantaneous Action for most of his trip.
His power kept his own body in stasis for the most part while he was within an Action, although he did find some caveats to that, as was evidenced by his physique.
As he rose into the air and was carried by the air currents, he gazed down at the frozen landscape of his home. He completed the first part of his blog, concluding August's Isekai Adventure and beginning August's Isekai Cartography Guide.
Flying around the world with an easel in his hot air balloon and enough paper and supplies that he was worried about the amount of weight he was bringing with him, August was lost in his work.
At first, he flew around at random, producing map after map of local regions, mountains, frigid terrain, or sprawling deserts and more besides.
Each new land, biome, or subjective distance he'd travel, he'd land. There, he'd refuel on wood, burned for charcoal, and try to harvest coal or similar burnable materials in the local region. Before striking gold, he found the 'hot' version of the crystal he used to cool his home.
His fuel and resource gathering missions altered themselves, as while within the area, he'd scout around and assassinate some of the local wildlife.
He called his 'hunting' assassination, as he didn't feel like he was hunting when the creature he was 'stalking' or 'tracking' could not fight back. He'd fill his blog with their bloody workings and biology, sometimes censoring some of the more fantastical mentions of their abilities. Still, sometimes he'd get a bit lost in his theories regarding such things and would include them.
August had no real course or guide in learning the source or cause of what he deemed as magical abilities. To the many creatures inhabiting this world, he ascribed their unique abilities as magic, as while some did indeed have anomalous biology that nothing he could find on the internet could solve or explain, most of what magic did didn't seem to be biological.
While their anomalous properties were interesting puzzles to scratch his head at, some creatures were more annoying to investigate. His tool-kit of vivisection blades, needles, scalpels, tweezers, hooks, and other interesting bloody equipment did wonders on even the most defensible of creatures, refined throughout his journeys and scouting expeditions. Made with the same unnaturally rugged and durable material that his lathes and drills were made from, they cut through hides and scales with absolute ease, allowing him to process and preserve their organs with the patience and clinical apathy of a surgeon and butcher combined.
Then he'd fly off, returning to his work on mapping the world.
He, of course, found forms of civilization. His first experience with civilization was with one being nearby his forest along the western coast of the continent. Possessing a fancy lighthouse, he used to gather bearings and act as a landmark. August tended to use this unknown city often in navigating and moving about the world. However, it was but one of hundreds he'd found, with his library continuing to fill up with sketches of the towns, villages, or cities, all drawn and investigated using a spyglass to spy on the population.
His discovery of civilization led him to note a deviation in technological prowess between certain provinces.
There was a strong presence of a pseudo-industrial population of humans; he'd seen roads of a moderately advanced level of infrastructure decorating the countryside, including a few interesting vehicles in the form of queer airships riding through the skies. These sky-ships sailed lower than his hot-air balloon and lacked any visible means of flotation, which led him to believe they sailed the skies using some form of magical technology. They navigated the skies using sails and were, quite literally, ships in the sky.
Villages and more rural areas were still characterized by a level of early-to-late medievalism, with an odd inconsistency in the spread of ideas and technology among distinct cultural groups. While the most advanced nation was merely in the Victorian-steampunk-lite age of magical technology, most countries around the continent were still in an era of highly industrial and magically assisted or enforced medievalism.
All of the nations differed, of course, with those in the far snow-blown north being less technologically developed than the nations in more temperate biomes. However, they were still thriving as ever, with him wondering if he should pop over and introduce glass-making and instruct them on how to produce greenhouses within their frozen reach of the world.
As he worked to cross-reference noted sigils, banners, and markings, he determined that he'd confused one singular nation with several separate city-states. Due to proximity and expanse of these cities and seeing as they were seemingly the central and sole authority within those territories, he'd assumed them to be city states that were self-sovereign but were a unified collective after seeing a jumble of knights bearing a collage of banners and sigils that suddenly made sense as being a unified collective.
In a more anthropological sense, August also created numerous observations on his fellow man and even spotted other races within the mixture.
Using his spy-glass and a low flyby, he'd indeed drawn close enough to spot and observe the local populations of a few villages and cities. Noting that the people on this continent were fair-skinned humans with a tendency to possess blonde, brown, grey, silver, black, and auburn hair colorations. Odd outliers of hair coloration, being red, orange, shades of green, and shades of blue or purple, have also been spotted. Those individuals, however, were rare to see and may have had unusual hair colors.
He highly doubted the latter theory, as this was likely 'anime fantasy land' and people in these types of settings tended to have hair every color of the rainbow.
Those in the north periodically possessed a bright crimson or orange hair coloration. Commonly, blond hair or light brown hair was the most populous, and everyone in the north was equally pale. T
Tribes and what he termed as 'Oasis Cities' within a large central desert that resided within the equatorial region of the continent were of a darker skin tone, duskier than what he'd call a Native African, and more so Arab in coloration.
The sandy region was where he judged the equator of the world to be, which was proven later using mathematics. This conclusion was reached through his estimations of the world's circumference and the creation of a world map. He'd sized out his map using simple mathematics, comparing shadows and the like together. Surprisingly, this world was somewhat larger than Earth, with its estimations cutting in at fifty-three thousand kilometers in circumference.
Odd, as he'd tested gravity and found it was slightly lower than Earth, coming in at 9.32 m/s² instead of 9.8 m/s². Seeing as a world that had more volume was meant to have more mass, thus a greater gravity, it only made sense in his head if magic was somehow interfering with gravity, as the floating islands were wont to proclaim. Of course, the density between masses depended on the material, and theoretically, the core of this world could be some hitherto-unknown material that had a high volume but a low mass; but that was getting into a field of science that he didn't want to bother speculating about.