Since Methol did all the actual work, realistically speaking, I set to gutting the catch and, to my surprise, getting her away from helping. She seemed almost hurt that I refused to just be fed.
In retrospect, I suppose she just worried I’d poison us.
Back home I was pretty good at cooking, fish in particular. My wife burned the ever-loving shit out of any cut of fish she tried to prepare, so it became my eternal responsibility. I could pan fry a salmon fillet to absolute perfection even on stainless steel. Without the smoke detector beeping once. Not to brag, but I am a decent cook with the right tools.
At the moment I would’ve killed for a nice, juicy salmon. Heck, even some carp would’ve been great. The catch we had were all on small and greenish side, armed with thorny fins that suggested we’d get a lot of bones in the meat. Something like perch, actually, that promised way too much trouble to clean for how little meat there actually was on them. Still, beggars and choosers.
“You wouldn’t happen to have salt in your magical reality marble,” I said after most of the fish were prepared.
She threw me a fist-sized box of an ash-coloured rough powder. My inventory immediately tagged it as ash salt. Metal as fuck.
“Keep it. I’ve got tonnes of the stuff,” she said absently as she dug us a fire pit and protected it with a stone circle. Before long she had a jaunty little flame going, filling the clearing with dancing orange light and later afternoon shadows.
Some of the cleaned fish I mounted on sticks to dry and smoke around the fire. They’d be good for a couple of days after that.
The others I wrapped in the leaves Crystal brought in. Not exactly banana leaves, of course, but they were thick and slightly oily. The fruits they’d picked up were a kind of apple mixed with citron, smelling of honeydew melon. They were a dark-red, with thin skin and lemon-like pulp inside.
Eternity and Ever both confirmed I could eat the things. Somehow, that wasn’t a concern for Methol or Crystal, which only enforced my conviction that my constitution was the first thing that needed serious buffing.
I sliced up the fruit—finally finding a less gruesome use for my often-ignored cloudsteel dagger—and shoved them into the fish, together with some of the iepurran dried veggies from my pack. Seasoned the whole thing with ash salt—had a smoked aroma and taste—and some shards of verdant heart, then shoved the whole packages straight into the coals.
In minutes the whole clearing smelled amazing. My mouth watered and my stomach growled with hunger. It occurred to me, distantly, that I was burning up a lot of calories quickly, what with all the exercise I was doing, if one could call it that. Rather than eating from boredom, as I used to, I was coming to understand what real hunger actually felt like and how much my body demanded fuel now.
Evening encroached. Sunlight failed. As before, Crystal set out her lamp that cast its strange soft light. With the fire and the cooking fish and the soft hiss of the river, I experienced a near-overwhelming moment of nostalgia.
Once upon a time, I spent summers with friends at a cabin on the Bicaz lake. We were unsupervised stupid teenagers managing on our own until food and drink ran out. We drank too much. Built bonfires. Cleaned the lake shore. Caught fish and threw them back because the lake was filthy and we were too squeamish to clean guts.
The lucidity of these surfacing memories was striking. Like I’d lived them yesterday, all their edges and contours sharp and focused, all my senses awake with remembrance. Nothing blurred with age. I could even bring up faces I hadn’t thought of in years.
Most of all, I felt the same I used to back then, when we’d all gather on those short summer nights and drank round the fire. Free. Full of restless energy. Excited for a future that was just beginning.
Granted, now I was flanked by a goblin and a half-elf-half-goat-all-blue chick. So… not exactly like those bygone days, but the feeling was nice. If every dungeon delve ended with something like this, I could see myself getting used to risking my neck for thankless tasks.
Methol sat by the fire, quiet and with a faraway look in her eyes that I think was her using the chat interface.
Crystal was giving Tusk a scrubbing down in the river.
Tusk was not amused and grumbled and splashed through the water.
Eternity landed on my shoulder as I sat next to the fire and poked at the bundled fish.
“Your stats are beginning to take root,” it said as if reading my mind. It still insisted it couldn’t do that, but I remained unconvinced. “Without your support harness, they’ll now have far greater influence on you.”
“Wasn’t the harness supposed to make me stronger?” I blinked and snapped back into reality. “Or amplify my existing stats anyway?”
“Yes. No. Both. Depends.” Eternity let out some sparks and a tendril of smoke, amused with its wit. “Its role was to give you the time you needed to adjust to your interface and bridge the gap between your baseline species and what you’d need to be in order to survive on this world. Towards that goal, it did suppress some of your stat growth while your body and mind adjusted.”
“Couldn’t you have just built me differently?” I tapped my chest. “This isn’t my original body. You said so.”
“It is your original mind, down to the last detail. The body was constructed based on your view of your ideal self, adjusted for ease of integration. Experience has taught that too large a physical change can lead to difficulties in adjustment.”
I bit down on the childish joke prancing on the tip of my tongue. There were two ladies present. Three, if I counted Ever.
How boring was I that the only thing I really wanted changed from my days before was to lose the gut?
“In short, us fleshies can be a little fragile-minded when it comes to our bodies,” Methol piped up. “Culture and innate psychology play big roles in what we find acceptable. I’ve met people who couldn’t adjust even to this small level of change, in spite of it being constructed on their own desires.”
“Yeah, I can imagine that,” I said, aware of past struggles of my own.
We didn’t speak much after that.
Crystal joined us, sniffed suspiciously at the food, but sat down to eat with us without comment. It was all delicious, much better than I expected it’d turn out. This was becoming a running theme on Oresstria. Either the food was indeed something wholly special, or something in my constitution was altering the taste.
But damn, I ate three whole fish, the veggies, and about four of those kimliki apples—as Crystal called them. They tasted lemony and left a refreshing tingle on the tongue.
[Congratulations!]
[You have trained a new skill: Forager - INITIATE]
[You have trained a new skill: Cooking - INITIATE]
[Warning!]
[These skills are not part of your class build]
[Levelling these skills will not count towards your growth]
[FORAGER]
[Sometimes one must live off the land. The land, very often, will not appreciate that]
[Identify, track, and harvest edible plants, fungi, and even small creatures in the wild before hunger, or something far larger, finds you]
[Reduces the chance of poisoning yourself, starving to death, or eating something’s mating display by accident]
[“Do not eat that, fool! Did you not see which part of the animal it came out of?!” - Saramana, of Pavla’Mi, First of her House]
[COOKING]
[The basic art of turning almost edible into something worth chewing]
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[Greatly reduces the risk of producing environmental hazards by boiling water]
[Combine ingredients, heat, time, and stubbornness to create meals that nourish, bolster stats, and maybe impress your peers]
[“Salt is not optional. Take this back and have the cook arrested.” - Veck’Al’Mar the Royal Taster]
“Really?” My eyebrows shot up. “These count as skills?!” The descriptions were fun at least.
Methol let out a low laugh. “Domestic skills do exist, yes. And they can be trained, same as any other.”
“And evolved?” I asked, staring at the notification. “Cooking’s going to evolve into… alchemy? Or what?”
“Something of the sort, thought not quite so dramatic a change as you might imagine.” She reached over to the fire and plucked one of the smoked fish. “Domestic skills are nice-to-haves. You’ll get a lot of utility from them down the line, if you train them properly. This, prepared with the right assortment of spices, could give you any number of immediate health benefits.” She gestured with the half-eaten fish. “Don’t ignore your domestics or you’ll end up like Tiamat, always begging for someone else to feed him.”
I added food buffing to the ever-growing list of stuff that I had to care about, especially if it could lead to some serious buffs down the line. You could never know how the most random stuff could be useful at the most random moment.
It was a nice night. The fire remained warm and burned bright and long. Tusk snored, curled up in a ball with his back to the fire. The water whispered and gurgled. The after-storm air felt crisp and so wonderfully clean. And, after the past couple of days and all the chaos I’d endured, I had a full belly and rested comfortably on a makeshift mattress of packed grass, still green and fragrant.
Methol fell asleep soon after we ate and cut off my curiosity. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” she’d said, and was out like a light not a minute later.
Crystal spent some time rummaging through her bag. I learned where she’d disappeared to while I fought the glitch artefacts: she’d been out stealing in Harriet’s Heap. Now she catalogued her haul. It didn’t take long for her to doze off, basically atop all that stuff, back to the fire.
So I found myself sleepless again, with nothing but my own thoughts to occupy myself with. Eternity lay curled up on my shoulder, its tail wrapped over the back of my neck, its eyes on Crystal’s lamp again.
All in all, this was the perfect time for an internal review.
[Name: Klaus]
[Class: Runic swordsman]
[Level: 9]
[Strength: 9]
[Intelligence: 10]
[Constitution: 14][+2]
[Wisdom: 5]
[Willpower: 8]
[Free stat points to allocate: 0]
[Free skill points to allocate: 0]
[Insight level: 2]
Not much had changed in terms of stats. While I technically had sixteen points in my constitution, the interface apparently demanded I get to fifteen points cleanly before I’d get whatever the upcoming bonus was. One more level and that would be achieved. Made me giddy to think about.
My skills list had grown exponentially since my time with the iepurrans. It was getting difficult to keep track of the many trainable skills I had access to. The descriptions had become somewhat more vivid now, even for those skills that I never really thought about much.
[HEAVY BLOW]
[When a light tap won’t suffice, or the enemy is too stubborn to understand it’s in their best interest to walk away]
[Channel all your strength into a single devastating blow]
[Who needs speed when you can strike with enough force to shatter bone?]
[“Yeah? You dare me to hit you? Fine! I dare you to stand right there and watch this here blade.” - Alassan the Fell Hand]
Whoever Alassan was, or had been, I liked him. He didn’t feature in all the skill descriptions, but he was in plenty of them.
“Who’s this guy?” I asked Eternity as I scrolled through the various explanations. “The Alassan guy?”
“Twenty second Immortal Hand of Eternity, First Class. Active in Sector Gama 1221. Base of operation on Qualitch #1241. Main class: Bonecrusher sage. Currently developing his fifth subclass. He has thus far developed and recorded over two hundred skill variations for the Sword Aptitude martial line.”
Eternity rattled off the explanation as if the word soup was supposed to mean something for me.
“Wait… you mean he’s alive?” I asked about the only detail that actually meant something for me.
Eternity nodded. “And thriving, yes.”
“But not on this world?”
“No.”
“Wait… in what sector are we?”
“You are currently on Sector Zeta 522, in the Neieran cluster.”
I mused on that for a moment. “So… far from that guy?”
Eternity made that lighter sparking sound that constituted its laugh. “Depends on your scale of measurement. In cosmic terms, you are basically atop one another. In realistic terms, he’s several thousand light-years away.”
A novel I once read had a paragraph that stuck with me for the longest time.
“Mysteries we did find, and they were many. But I learned that something can be too mysterious, too alien—so mysterious or alien as to approach being meaningless.” Fittingly, it was about exploring an alien spaceship.
Nothing like trying to make sense of your circumstances only to discover it opened up a whole universe of nonsense to pollute your goals with. I pushed all this malarkey away, aware it wasn’t something that could or should interest me right at that moment.
Most of the flashing in my interface had to do with skills and their updates. My two resistances now basically said they’d be improving my body’s response to toxins… if I subjected myself to more toxins. Fucking nonsense. The best way to get better at surviving blunt force trauma to the head is to repeatedly get a horse to kick you in the head. Had to love some of the interface’s logical failings.
Once I went through all of them, the interface finally quieted. No more blinking bullshit to draw my attention.
Aside from the map, the biggest change was how populated my Bestiary had suddenly become. The reason I hadn’t made much use of it before was that it offered very little of use. “A duck. Bird. Can fly. Everyone knows what a duck is.” That sort of thing.
But now, with the second insight level, I got a whole expansion of the thing that I could riffle through. It now featured more detailed information about the critters I faced, as well as observed weaknesses. Which was nifty enough to warrant a more careful examination.
[Black temple spider]
[Black temple spiders were first observed on Oresstria within various religious edifices, leading to the creature’s naming. Unfortunately, they are not confined to only such habitats and can also be found within densely forested areas, inside remote habitation—”
Bla. Bla. Bla. The entry went on for a considerable while longer and stopped abruptly when talking about how the creatures could be killed. Apparently, I wasn’t going to be given quite so simple an answer. The list only included how I killed the things. Boot to the eyes featured in there and made me chuckle.
“Why’s this so vague on kill methods?” I asked.
“Because you can kill anything in several thousands of ways,” Eternity said.
“Ah. So, the best kill method for them is…”
“Whatever you’re best at doing.”
In this case, the entry read “blind with a kick to the eyes, then sever cephalothorax from abdomen with a quick strike of the sword”. Hey, it worked.
Something rustled near the small sphere of light the lamp offered. My ears prickled at the noise but, before I reached for my sword, the sounds headed away, towards the water. I heard the unmistakable slurp of some animal drinking, then the rustling of vegetation as it headed off.
“You should rest, Klaus,” Eternity said in a low voice after some time. “You are perfectly safe here. Methol has also set up her own barrier.”
“Can’t sleep yet.” I slid my hands under my head and stretched out my legs properly. The fire crackled and threw sparks into the air, bright as fireflies. “Brain’s too wired to shut down.”
“I see.” The dragon moved on lower, to settle on my stomach. That way it could keep one eye on the lamp, and the other on me. “Do you wish to talk about it?”
“Not really, no.”
There wasn’t anything to talk about. The interface was quiet now that I clicked through everything and got a good, heady dose of word salad thrust at me. I was content. My belly was full, my clothes dry, my wounds healed. For the first time in days, I felt good.
Which, of course, meant that something was about to happen. It had to. My heart rate spiked stupidly even as I tried to relax. Every quiet moment in the past couple of days had brought nothing but almost immediate misery.
“What is our next move?” Eternity asked after the silence stretched on a bit too long.
“Next dungeon.” I didn’t even need to think about it. “I need to find a high vantage point, right? I’ll do that tomorrow. Maybe Methol can throw me up some tree.” I didn’t relish the idea of climbing the prickly things, especially since some could be tree fathers. Wasn’t in a hurry to tangle with one of those again.
“Ever informs me that Methol will leave tomorrow. If you’d like to ask her more questions, I suggest you prepare them for morning.”
I looked over to where she slept and raised an eyebrow. Earlier, she’d sidestepped my question about her being there altogether, so I wasn’t sure if to insist on it or not. Whatever business she had was hers alone and I didn’t feel much need to intrude on it. Maybe she was really friendly and this was all happy coincidence. Or maybe she was stalking me and waited for the right moment to stab me.
Because a level 67 really needed to sneak up on a level 9 to flatten them. I chuckled at my own imagination.
Still, I was far more interested in staying a couple more days with Crystal. First to get some food for the road. Whatever her other faults were, she could forage and I needed to learn to do that for myself.
My second goal was to train my energy detection to a point where I could use it to create runes.
I opened my goal list and made some fresh notes, not really hoping for another level up.
In the short term: learn to identify edible stuff in the forest, and make a stocks, then see about testing the energy detection skill in a way that would teach me elemental runes. Melenith said all elements are present in nature and I just needed to find them, and so far she’d been the most reliable teacher I’d had.
In the medium-long term: find a high vantage point and pick out the next destination. As long as I headed away from the sea, I should be moving inland. Maybe once out of the sticks I could find some indication for how to reach Dragon’s Tear. I didn’t want to ask Methol for the information, mainly because I wanted to get there on my own.
No rush, right? What to rush for?
A glimmer of light snagged my attention. At the far edge of the clearing, among the trees. It cut through my idle interface poking. Firelight glinting off… something.
I rose and Eternity took to the air.
Eyes watched me from the treeline. Strange eyes, luminous and wide, almost like a cat’s, stared straight at me.
My hand wrapped around my sword’s hilt and I took a step forward.
“Klaus, don’t.” Eternity glided right in front of me. “You mustn’t. She will leave if you ignore her.”
With my eyes adjusting to the dark, I made out the face waiting there. I immediately raised a warning finger at Eternity.
“Bite my nose again, and we will have an issue,” I warned the dragon as it tried to obstruct my view. “Who is she?”
“Nobody,” it answered. The growl in its voice suggested no such thing.
“Then nobody maybe can tell me what she wants from me.”
“Klaus—”
“Warn me when I’m at the edge of the lamp protection.” I wasn’t completely insane. Whoever this was, and whatever she wanted, I wasn’t going to just hand myself over without more information.
“Yo,” I called out in a half-whisper as I walked myself nearer to her. “Mind telling me why you’re following me around? It’s fucking creepy.”