Everything seemed good as Jamie checked the system's functions, until he found a problem.
"Hey, system, you said you don't provide materials and I had to get them outside, right? Then how do I start? I don't even have money to buy materials to start my 1st forging."
[You don't need to worry. You were woken up in that broken house for a reason. That place was originally the storehouse of an abandoned iron mine. They said it has been depleted, so they left it. But who knows? Maybe there were leftovers.]
"So you tell me to scavenge scraps."
[You will eventually need to mine materials yourself in the future because rare materials are hard to come by. Sometimes you will need to explore the wilderness to gather unique materials and mine them yourself.]
"That's fine, but no tools?"
[It is never easy at the beginning.]
"... Dammit!"
Jamie came out of the Pocket Dimension and returned to where he woke up. He quickly went out because the worn out building looked like it could collapse anytime.
Outside, he looked around and found out that there were more abandoned buildings. Some of them were made of wood, but more were made of stones with simple designs.
"A mine, huh? The stone buildings must be storehouses while the wooden buildings were offices."
Jamie assumed so because the wooden buildings have more luxurious designs, like those palace buildings in Ancient China. He could be wrong because of his little knowledge about chinese culture though.
"Say, system, can't you give me the ability to locate treasures or metal?"
[Not yet.]
"Sigh, fine."
Jamie then started checking the buildings one by one, starting from the edge. He always preferred doing things in order because it was easier to keep track of what he did.
The 1st building was a place to store firewood. It was still full of firewood, which was a surprise. But when he thought about it, the miners must've stocked up on the firewood and just left them when the mine depleted because they weren't valuable.
For Jamie, however, these firewoods were very valuable. He needed fuel to make fire for forging and firewoods were good sources. He would turn them into charcoal, but he never did it before, so it was a good thing that there were many of them for him to practice.
Another good surprise was also found in that building. There were 2 very rusty Axes, a very rusty hand saw, and 3 very rusty machetes. These were the tools they used to gather wood back then, but they left these things.
"Nice, some materials to practice. They may be rusty and made of common metals, but they were good enough as starters."
Jamie threw everything he found into the system's Inventory. The system actually had game-like inventory with a very big capacity. It wasn't unlimited and could be upgraded with Points.
The inventory worked like in most games' inventories. Same items stack in a slot with maximum capacity of 99 items in each slot. There were 50 slots, so Jamie could store up to 4950 firewoods.
He would throw the rusty axes, saw, and machetes into the Pocket Dimension if the inventory was full. It might really happen because Jamie even planned to take apart the buildings to get their woods.
Though it wouldn't happen soon because storing too much was also not a good idea. He planned to collect more after turning all the firewoods in the 1st building into charcoals and there were more than 1000 already.
So Jamie continued checking the other building, focusing on materials other than wood. Shards of broken pickaxes and other mining tools, broken kitchen tools, scraps of unknown origins, and even pieces of leftover ores.
"This place surprisingly still has quite a lot of metal scraps. I guess they are useless for the force behind this mine. They won't need these scraps if they can get good materials, after all. But man, this is so tiring."
Jamie looked at the remaining buildings and sighed. He has gotten quite a lot just from exploring a quarter of all the buildings here. It would take a few days to finish because this place was the size of a village.
Well, the miners and officials lived here. So they had to have proper facilities. Though by proper facilities, he just meant lodgings, offices, storehouses, kitchens, and dining areas.
There were no human rights or worker rights laws here. Maybe the miners were even prisoners or slaves. They were only given basic necessities and only officials enjoyed good facilities.
Just from looking around, Jamie could already guess how harsh the living conditions in this place were. Even in Modern Earth, many places still had bad working and living conditions, not to mention this kind of world where survival of the fittest applied deeply here.
Jamie rested in his Pocket Dimension. The God that gave him all these things was considerate enough to give him food and drinks in the Pocket Dimensions, although he had to eat them there because they couldn't be taken out.
There was enough food for a month, as if to encourage him to focus on gathering materials and make his 1st weapon. So he did just that because in the end, he could only get money to buy more food once he made at least a decent weapon.
Jamie kept exploring the buildings and finally finished after 5 days. Some buildings were about to collapse, so he had to be careful. Sometimes he had to make sure they wouldn't collapse by shaking them a little to check their structure.
A few buildings actually collapse just after being pushed a little. He was really glad he made them collapse when he wasn't inside.
Though there were also unlucky times when the buildings really collapsed when he was inside. At those moments, he quickly entered his Pocket Dimension to save himself.
Thanks to his quick thinking, he could survive until he finished exploring the mining town. He planned to explore the mine itself next, but he already got enough materials to try his new blacksmithing skills now, so he would start making his 1st weapon.