After confirming his choices, he felt light-headed for a moment before ultimately everything returned to normal, if not clearer than before. However, even then, the notifications did not stop.
< This marks the start of your acclimatization, due to a lack of people having chosen similar options to yours in a significant geographical radius, the first few parts will be experienced on your own. >
< Warning! You have an opportunity, just as everyone else to choose to go through the acclimatization, and then the rest of your life using a premium version of the system, whose benefits include and are not limited to: Increased survival rates, faster progression, easier understanding of the system, regular personal updates on important events, the ability to see the status of other premium users under certain conditions, and a connection to the system's cloud. In exchange, you will be entitled to let go of your personal data as it is given to you by the system through your status, and to occasionally directly respond to the system's call as a small favor. By refusing, you put yourself at higher risk death and may encounter troubles throughout your acclimatization, but will not give out any personal information to the system other than the fact that you have refused this opportunity. You may still have access to your own personal status as basic rights under the system, and the general act passed by the council in the past to push through the generalization of such information to any available life form. >
Seeing the glorified slave contract together with the option to refuse it without silly consequences such as immediate execution as you may expect in such fantastic cases, he didn't think twice before disagreeing.
Now he had also pretty much convinced himself that this was all just a glorified joke played by his own brain high on some weird mysterious mushroom he shouldn't have eaten last night.
With no new notifications seemingly wanting to pop up out of nowhere, he tried to refocus on his original plan, getting back to the trail he exited last night and get back on his journey to mount Emei.
Though with his current situation, he was honestly weighing the option to wait out the effects of the mushroom, since he still felt some strange clearance in his mind which was certainly out of the ordinary and thus put up as an effect from being high. His senses also felt sharper and he heard strange noises from pretty much everywhere around him too, a clear sign that he was currently even experiencing hallucinations (other than the fact that he was pretty obviously seeing things that didn't exist), the only bizarre part is that he was aware of the fact that he was hallucinating, and wasn't sure if that was supposed to be the case or not.
In the end, he decided to just lean down against a tree and wait until he felt more normal.
After two full hours though, the effects didn't seem to subside at all, if anything, they only seemed to be getting stronger, now he even heard muffled voices and grumbles, or animal grunts, which he had never heard in the three months he spent in China. And to top it all off, several times in the span of these two hours a huge shadow was overcast on his position for a couple seconds, as if a cloud went and past in front of the sun, except it was always accompanied with a high pitched shriek that was weirdly pleasant to the ears.
Bored of waiting, he figured that maybe if he went ahead and confronted his hallucinations directly, it might help them pass.
Agi thus picked up his big backpack again, and decided to randomly err around the forest waiting for an opportunity to encounter the source of the noises he heard for the past two hours.
The problem though, is that relying only on his hearing to track down something especially when untrained, is next to impossible, especially in such a forest, where you could simply lie down somewhere and become practically invisible unless someone focused directly on you while knowing you where there.
After wasting his energy for another hour he pretty much mentally gave up, if he wasn't high on mushrooms then he was sure to go absolutely mad because of all the chaotic noises coming from seemingly all around him while he couldn't see any of their origins.
Maybe they were the legendary voices one would start to hear in their head after having gone mad from solitude.
He was forced to put these amusing thoughts aside for now though, since after deciding to just go find another spot to settle down, another one of his senses started to get attacked.
Indeed, his sense of smell was suddenly invaded by a very unpleasant odor. Finally picking up a more tangible hint he grabbed his pair and followed the smell. The closer he got, the more it reeked of a putrid stench, so much so that he put a random mask he had in his bag, thankful to his past self for packing up all sorts of miscellaneous items that might come in handy in the future.
Once the scent was so bad that it was barely bearable even with the mask on, he knew he couldn't be very far from its origin.
He kept making his way slowly through the dense vegetation, when suddenly, the noise made by his foot touching the ground on his last step wasn't quite the one you'd hear when stepping on foliage, that as well as the strange texture he could feel through his shoes urged him to look down, and the sight he laid his eyes upon immediately made him reflexively throw up.
His mind stop functioning the moment he saw it, and his body acted all on its own. After throwing up his breakfast, he didn't even look at it a second time, it would only make things worse and put him into more danger. Instead he got into a full sprint through the forest guided simply by instinct.
His sprint lasted a couple minutes thanks to his body being heavily trained for his job as well as to be able to do these long adventures in nature. That combined with the adrenaline rush, he managed to maintain his top speed for quite a long time.
Stopping for a few seconds, Agi looked around and decided the safest option would be to climb into a tree, speaking of which he unconsciously realized that they were abnormally wider and taller than before, without putting any more energy into that thought for now he focused on the climb.
The bark having grown bigger and more robust, the climb was rather easy, and he would gladly exchange a few splinters in his hands against a feeling of safety right now.
Once in the highest spot reachable that could support both his weight and that of his mass, he could finally slowly let the panic settle down and rationally analyze everything that happened in the span of not even 5 minutes.
Back there, the thing he saw that made him panic was a corpse. But not just any corpse, it was an utterly mutilated one, he didn't stare at it for long to not have a precise lasting image of the thing, but for the second that the scene reflected in his eyes, he could easily identify an astronomical amount of blood and organs littered all over the ground, limbs clearly separated from the body, a body which was of a dark brown color almost that of tree bark, with green patches at places which he wouldn't be able to tell whether it was actual moss that just fell there or something else.
Reflecting over the scene his imagination also made things significantly worse, since he didn't have a clear look, his brain was filling the gaps, and since it was in such a disheveled state, the things it made up was all the gore and disgusting stuff one could think of.
At the same time, his mind was also trying to rationalize what exactly that thing was. It wasn't human, that is for sure, but he didn't think it was a primate either, as it didn't seem to have any fur, just weird colored skin. He couldn't make out anything beyond that because he didn't look at it for long enough, which he was thankful to himself for.
He could still note down two significant elements though. The first one being the sheer size of the corpse. It was absolutely massive, and the only reason he didn't see it before stepping on it was simply because of how dense all the vegetation was there , hindering most of his vision, and thus when looking straight he couldn't really see down.
And the reason as to why the size of that unknown creature mattered was simply his safety. He didn't know anything about what kind of animal that was, what it ate, what its social habits were, how you could possibly communicate with it etc... At least if it was a silver back gorilla he would know it wasn't really aggressive if you weren't, and obviously not carnivorous, therefore he wouldn't know how to react if he encountered one alive, should he flee as fast as his legs allowed, should he stay still, should he give the illusion that he is big strong, scary and shouldn't be messed with?
But all this in the end was secondary, when the moment would come, if it ever did, he would see its basic behaviour and his body would probably take over fueled by survival instincts once again.
His primary concern in this situation wasn't really who the cadaver belonged to, but more to who the killer was. This was the biggest unknown factor, knowing that there was something around him capable of leaving a corpse in such a state was indeed pretty worrying, and there again many hypotheses were forming in his mind.
It probably wasn't a predator, otherwise the corpse would have been eaten, and though he might not be able to tell if a chunk or two weren't missing, hunting such a thing only for a snack or for sport would be pretty ballsy, unless you were overwhelmingly more powerful, which was an idea he didn't really want to entertain at the moment, and he had plenty of other theories.
Maybe it was a fight between two alphas, or two different species altogether for territory or something, and though that didn't quite match the gore he saw in his mind, he could just rationalize him by saying that since he had never seen the remains of such a battle before, and that this was a completely different and new species, it might just be the case, and would explain why it was just left there.
Following this reasoning to further put his mind at ease, there was no proof that the one who did this left unscathed. For all he knew, another corpse in a similarly bad state could have been found if he just kept looking close by, or at the very least a blood trail.
If he went to more far fetched hypotheses to simply cope with the situation, maybe this was the work of another human with a rocket launcher or something, he couldn't really yet trust the veracity of what the system told him about being alone after all, similarly, it could be an explosion by whatever chemical elements did that, and that animal just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One thing was for sure though, after what he experienced, over were the lingering thoughts that this was simply an elaborate hallucination following a bad trip on shrooms, he would now take every situation as if his life was on the line.