And as my prize, I get: foul-tasting wild jackal blood, equally foul-tasting raw jackal meat, a skin to cover my damn head, a raw wet rotting furred skin to cover my head from direct sunlight, and a bitten leg that would kill me if not for Miracle regeneration.

Fuck this place, aight? 

It's better than almost everywhere in the universe! 

I'm gonna pass out now, thanks.

Hopefully Miracle regeneration and immunity mean I don't die to an infection or parasites.

Nah, don't worry about it.

Oh. It's a new morning, and my leg is as good as new, and I don't even have a stomach pain.

Thanks, Origin or God or aliens or secret mad scientists or whoever.

Time to walk the earth in the same arbitrary direction at an automobile pace again.

To think, someone who isn't a Miracle would have to worry about subtly going in circles!

The Earth is made for walking it!

You know you look and smell like a horror movie monster right now, with a corpse covering your head and while carrying two more corpses with you, coated in blood and dirt and sweat?

Eh, nobody is around to notice it.

Miracles tend to give less fucks about stuff like that, which isn't usually me, but it feels like a good thing to lean into this at this specific moment. 

In fact, I'm gonna growl and howl like a caveman a bit, actually. Because why not? Hell, if anyone sees me, that's an absolute win, considering the circumstances.

That's adorable! 

That's kinda fucked up! 

Anyway, is the hellscape over before I run out of blood to drink and corpses to eat? 

Nope.

There's no way that I find nothing useful along the way. I walked like a fuckton of kilometers now.

Aha! There's some land that looks like it might be slightly wetter and greener! 

So I've once read somewhere about the practice of qanat commonly employed in the countries of the region. That's digging a network of underground tunnels to distribute water from the aquifer to irrigation channels and water supply.

Which means that this ship's biscuit of a land has aquifer, on relatively common occasion.

So, are you willing to bet however many calories you want to bet to get a chance at an immobile source of freshwater at this random place?

No, who do you take me for?

I am going to try to find the lowest point in the landscape nearby, and if that looks promising, I'm going to attempt to dig there. 

A baseline would definitely lose the direction they are trying to keep to, but I'm no baseline, sue me.

IRL hill-climbing valley-descending algorithm goooo!!! 

Oh hey. Look at that.

That looks like, dare I say, an oasis of sorts.

I bet I can eat this plant! And this one, too! Not... sure about this one, not really a biology guy, but if it's poisonous, that ain't useless either!

And I can definitely drink this water!

And I can cool down in the mud and drain all the excess heat because it's 14:00 and I am slow-cooking! 

And I can fill all those stomachs I didn't eat with water to carry!

Except for the ones that I accidentally tore apart without noticing while briskly walking. Which are all but two.

I'mma pass out again, thanks.

Okay. 

Civilizaaaation!!! Where aaaaaaaaare you?! 

Hey. Is that a river over there?