The Forest (1)

An ordinary man from a ruined world had died. It was a regular occurrence, as it was normal for people to die suddenly of all sorts of causes there. After his death, his soul was sent to another world as atonement for having to live in that ruined world. He reincarnated into a world of cultivation.

He woke up and saw that the sky above him was clear. Where he lived in his past life had a kind of smoke that permeated throughout all of the planet, making it hard to breathe without a mask. He wondered where he was and what had happened for him to be in the state that he was.

He got up and looked around him. He seemed to be in a forest that had sparsely populated trees as well as grass underneath his feet.

As he simply woke up after getting transmigrated, he had no idea who the body he possessed used to be. The body was a mortal's, with no indication of any attempts to cultivate. From the relatively sturdy external body, he could deduce that the body was a worker or a farmer previously.

Standing around wouldn't help anything, so he decided to walk in a random direction. He noticed that the trees were swaying in the wind and was reminded of his previous planet that had only mutated trees which could survive the smoke.

He kept walking forward in the same direction. There was no sense of time as the sun seemed to be permanently directly above his head. After walking for what felt like an eternity, he noticed that the trees no longer swayed. Everything was completely still, almost eerily so.

Something clicked in his head-- there was something wrong with the world he was currently in. All he saw were the same kind of trees and grass, the same sky as well. But that wasn't right; if time was moving then the sky should change in some noticable way eventually. Time seemed to stand still in where he thought that he was.

He started to perceive his environment closer. Moving along the same line that he took since the beginning, he saw an indentation on a patch of grass in the shape of a man. That grass looked awfully similar to the grass that he laid on previously. He had only moved in a single direction the entire time, and yet he had arrived at the place he started at.

He retraced his steps over a long period of time and ended up where he was before. In this place the trees were swaying. It seemed as if different regions of the world existed under different laws.

He looked up at the sky as he had before. There was the same sun, the same fluffy white clouds and yet it wasn't the same as before. Something was slightly different from the place he'd seen the indent.

He started feeling a bit tired, so he laid down on another patch of grass and fell asleep.

He awoke to the sound of thunder echoing in his eardrums. Startled, he jumped a bit, and got up again. It was night time and the moon was out, directly above his head like the sun had been.

Would the world change every time he fell asleep?