Chapter 1: Survival

South America, the Amazon basin.

Forty thousand square kilometers of tropical rainforest stretched across this region, one of the last few uninhabited places on Earth. And this was where Gunsmith's plane had crashed.

Colonizers had arrived here as early as the late nineteenth century. For the next century, so-called civilized people set about destroying tribes and ravaging the ecosystem. Only the outbreak of the Empire's war of unification, which indirectly reshaped the human world, brought all this to a halt.

Some had predicted that the greenhouse effect and declining rainfall would cause this rainforest to disappear. But by the middle of the twenty-first century, a host of new technologies had given humanity the ability to intervene in the environment. New energy sources, together with the Empire's iron-fisted policies, had all but wiped out those who made their fortunes destroying the environment. Mind you, by wiped out, I don't mean they gave up the business. I mean they were killed off.

In the days when many nations existed side by side, unscrupulous businessmen colluded with officials to reap enormous profits from businesses that destroyed the environment. When challenged about their disregard for future generations, they could calmly reply that once they had money, they could emigrate to cities like Vancouver or Singapore. What happened to other people's descendants had nothing to do with them.

Once the Empire had unified the world, however, the imperial family had yet to find a way to emigrate to another planet. Their attitude toward the environment was therefore that if anyone dared dig up so much as a single radish in their garden, they would stuff his entire family into the hole.

November, 2100.

Gunsmith found five bodies in the wreckage. As expected, everyone except him had died. Though he didn't even know their names, he still went to the trouble of digging graves with a broken piece of steel plate and burying them.

If this crash had been an attempt to murder him, then these five people were undoubtedly innocent victims. That was how Gunsmith saw it. He wasn't superstitious, but he wasn't about to leave their bodies lying out in the wilderness, either.

"If it were Tian Yi, he'd throw them in the river to feed the fish..." Gunsmith muttered to himself. When he was in trouble, he often thought of this old friend. Nothing in the world seemed difficult for Tian Yi. You could throw him into hell and he would surely find a way to climb out.

The rainforest soil was soft. Burying the dead had taken a fair amount of time, but little effort. Now that Gunsmith had done his duty by them, he had to think about staying alive and getting out.

Gunsmith sat on the ground and ate the chocolate bar he'd found in the copilot's pocket, the only thing that was still edible. With a little energy restored, he went back into the fuselage. He emerged a little over ten minutes later with at least a dozen seat belts looped over his right shoulder, a stack of seat covers in his right hand, and a collection of mechanical parts in his left, salvaged from who knew where.

After piling everything together, Gunsmith went to look for water. Earlier, he had heard running water not far from the crash site. Following the sound, he soon found a small river.

Finding water in a rainforest wasn't particularly difficult, but it wasn't necessarily clean. In some swampy hollows, pools stretched for a kilometer or more, looking as though they connected to a river. In fact, they were all stagnant. The terrain and humidity allowed rainwater to collect and linger. The water was extremely murky, and heaven knew how many plants, animals and parasites lived in it.

The river Gunsmith found wasn't wide, but it was clearly a tributary of a larger river. Several tree trunks lying across it suggested that the water could rise sharply after rain. They must have washed downstream during high water and become lodged across the river as it receded.

The water here could hardly be called clear, either, but it was much better than the swamp water. Gunsmith stepped into the river. The current wasn't particularly strong at the moment. Standing near the bank, he took off his clothes and washed them. He drank some river water. It tasted pretty awful, but at least it replenished some of his fluids. Before leaving, he also examined the surrounding terrain and the signs left by animals, but found little of use. Large animals such as hippos could usually be found in open river valleys, but this appeared to be the heart of the region, where swamps, rivers and jungle formed their densest, most tangled maze.

Gunsmith had a poor sense of direction and couldn't handle any form of transport, even a horse, but he was an excellent hunter. During his childhood on Siberia's vast white snowfields, a light snowfall could cover tracks left only five minutes earlier, yet he could still pick out a trail. Retracing his steps through this jungle was naturally no problem.

Following his own footprints, he soon returned to the wreckage. He was stark naked. Though he didn't feel cold, the mosquitoes here were no joke, so he'd better get a fire going, dry his clothes and put them on.

There were still glowing embers scattered throughout the shattered aircraft, so starting a fire wasn't difficult. A little over ten minutes later, Gunsmith had dried his clothes.

Sitting by the fire, he slit the aircraft seat covers with his knife and tore them into long strips. Then he rolled his trouser legs up to a suitable length and stitched them in place with the fabric strips, using a steel needle barely thinner than his own finger. This would let him move more freely. Fortunately, he had found his dress shoes so uncomfortable earlier that he had worn his usual boots instead. Dress shoes would soon have worn through in this jungle, leaving him barefoot.

As Tian Yi had pointed out, Gunsmith was the finest craftsman of his age. Over the next thirty minutes, he turned a heap of seemingly useless equipment, little more than scrap metal, into a makeshift radio. He also built a recording device and began broadcasting an automatic distress call.

His limited power supply probably wouldn't last long, though, and Gunsmith knew he was only trying his luck. There was more than a ninety percent chance that no one would receive the distress signal. In a place like this, unless another plane happened to fly overhead within range, his only hope was that there might be some well-hidden drug traffickers nearby.

Once he had finished the distress radio, Gunsmith walked over to a broken tree trunk. Some water had collected inside the remaining hollow section. He picked a leaf slightly smaller than his palm, took his tie from his pocket and removed its metal pin. After rubbing the pin repeatedly against the silk tie in the same direction, he set the leaf on the still surface of the little pool and placed the pin along its central vein.

This worked like a compass. The leaf carrying the pin would float on the water and gradually turn. But what Gunsmith saw now was extremely strange. The pin kept spinning, never settling to point in any one direction. Only after some time, when it had lost its magnetism, did it stop moving.

Gunsmith looked up at the sky and muttered, "Could a magnetic field have brought the plane down...?"