He found the wall at the northern edge of the village where the buildings thinned out and the ground began to slope gently upward toward the treeline. It was a low stone boundary, knee-height, the kind of wall that functioned more as a border marker than an actual barrier. There was a gap in it wide enough for two people abreast, and through the gap he could see the Greenveil Forest close enough to smell: damp soil, bark resin, the living green underneath. A tooltip materialized when he looked at the nearest visible tree: Ancient Oak — Old Growth. [Locked — Tutorial Completion Required]. He reached toward the gap anyway, already knowing, and the soft resistance met his outstretched hand — not a wall, more like the texture of stopped possibility — and the tooltip appeared: This area requires completion of the New Player Tutorial before access. Return to the Village Green to complete the Combat Tutorial. He stood at the gap for a long moment, looking through it at the forest. A wolf moved between two trunks in the middle distance — a proper wolf, grey and large and moving with a purpose that belonged to the forest rather than to the game's combat systems. Higher up in the canopy, a bird crossed a shaft of late-afternoon light and was gone. The trees were enormous in the specific way of things that had been given time rather than rendered big for visual impact. He turned back to the tutorial zone, mildly annoyed.
The annoyance lasted about thirty seconds. Then he started actually looking at the tutorial zone as a space rather than as a funnel. He was standing in it and it had been designed to resemble part of the village, which meant it had been dressed — made to look inhabited, functional, real. That meant details. Details meant things the designers had placed without necessarily expecting interaction. He walked the perimeter with his eyes actually open. There was a small woodshed against the eastern boundary wall — practical-looking, weathered, with a split-log pile visible through the open side. A rack of practice weapons outside the armory building, rendered in enough physical detail that he could see the grain of the wooden practice swords. A patch of garden with decorative stumps scattered in it, the kind of thing you placed to suggest a clearing had once had trees. A scrap pile behind the woodshed containing rough-cut timber pieces, the ends freshly cut and pale.
He read the woodshed first: Storage Shed — Millhaven Wood Reserve. Public access. Public access. He opened the shed door. Inside: stacked logs against the back wall, a worn workbench, a barrel of assorted tools with the quality of things that get used regularly and put back without much care. And leaning against the wall beside the door, in the casual position of something placed there and forgotten: Worn Woodcutting Axe — Woodcutting tool. Stat Requirement: Woodcutting 1. Durability: 40/100. Weight: 2.1 kg. Note: Shows significant wear. Still functional. No quest marker. No golden glow. No arrow. No tutorial dialogue pointing at it. The developers had put an axe in the shed to make the shed look like a place where axes lived, and had made it interactable because their world-building philosophy apparently required that interactable things be actually interactable, and had never considered that anyone would pick it up. Connor picked it up.
The weight registered in his hand with a specificity that hit differently than he'd expected even after eighteen months of reading about the NerveDive's haptic system. The handle was smooth-worn wood over a metal core — he could feel the density of the handle differently from the density of the head, the natural forward lean as the heavier end pulled his wrist fractionally toward the ground. It was the weight of a tool designed to fall toward its work. He looked at the three practice logs stacked on the splitting block beside the shed. Set dressing. Background detail. He examined the first one. Practice Log — Interactable. [Chop?] He swung.
The resistance was real in a way that nothing before the NerveDive had made him understand real could mean in a virtual context. The axe caught the wood and the wood pushed back — not the binary of hit/miss that games had been giving him for fifteen years but the specific resistance of dense fiber and grain, the axe driving through it the way physics required, the vibration traveling up the handle and through his palm and wrist and into his shoulder in a sequence that was entirely accurate to the sequence it should be. The thunk of the blade seating in the split was the most satisfying sound he'd heard since the game loaded. Chips of wood scattered to the left. The log cracked two inches deeper. In the corner of his vision, quiet and small: Woodcutting: 1 → 1 (0.4 progress). He swung again. Woodcutting: 1 (0.8 progress). Again. Woodcutting: 1 → 2.
He stood still and read the stat notification. Not the number — he understood the number — but the fact of it. The game had registered the action. The skill had moved. He had become, by some small but measurable and permanent amount, more of a woodcutter than he had been thirty seconds earlier. The number would always be higher than it was before he made those three swings. He looked at the practice logs again. He looked at the scrap pile behind the shed. He looked at the rough boarding on the shed's back wall. He looked at the decorative stumps and the fence posts and the wooden handles on the practice weapons rack. He looked at all of it with the particular expression of a man doing math that has suddenly produced a much more interesting answer than he expected. He started chopping.
He worked through the practice logs first — three good strikes each once he understood the grain — then the scrap pile, then a section of rough boarding on the shed's exterior that was clearly replaceable staging material. By the time the other players had completed their combat tutorials, Connor was Woodcutting 3 and had a real stack of rough timber in his inventory and was examining the garden stumps with professional interest. A combat player walked past him on the way to the village gate, already equipped with a starter sword. They glanced at Connor's axe and at the timber in his inventory and at the conspicuous absence of any weapon. They opened their mouth. Closed it. Walked on.
Connor checked his tutorial completion counter. Tutorial Progress: 1/3 complete. [Combat Tutorial: Optional — not required for world access.] He read that line twice. Then he read the actual objectives. Objective 1: Collect 5 wood materials. Complete — 7/5 collected. Objective 2: Visit the Market District. Objective 3: Speak with any NPC in Millhaven. The combat tutorial was optional. It had been optional the entire time and the interface had simply pointed at it first because most players went there first. He filed the lesson: read everything before assuming. He went through the gate.