Instead, we collected the scattered logs, dug a new fire pit, and got a pretty jolly flame going by the time the night became impenetrably black and cold as shit. True to Methol’s word, the area felt off while the ambient mana regenerated. Birds called in the night, and the forest rustled, but it was all muted and distant, almost shy.
The air felt thin somehow.
That, or my senses were off in some way, though I couldn’t put a finger on it. I felt more clear-headed than I had since I arrived.
Made me look back at the past few days and their stupidity with different eyes as I stared into the fire. Crystal was rummaging through some dark corners of her den, squawking from time to time as she won some minor skirmish against the spiders. I warmed some of the dried fish we still had stocked.
“Every stat has a threshold reward, right?” I asked Eternity as I added a couple more sticks to the flames, then shifted some of the warming fish. Didn’t want them burned.
“Yes,” came the answer from atop my head.
“Every fifteen levels?”
“For the first two thresholds. Later they will be far more spaced out.”
“Any particular reason for that?”
“Cognitive overload. Latter thresholds bring larger changes. The larger the change, the larger the foundation needed.”
If I ran the maths a little, I wouldn’t actually get that many of these thresholds if I just levelled normally. If I reached Methol’s level, I’d only have like four at most, and that didn’t really inspire a lot of confidence for later, unless this wasn’t the only way to level and there was still more to learn.
Or maybe, like my skills, there was some way to develop my base stats?
Before I dove into that particular rabbit hole, I had one other thing on my mind. My intelligence sat at ten, while my wisdom was at five. I stared accusingly at the later in the stat sheet, my only stat still at its original value, not buffed by the Runic Swordsman class. I begrudgingly had to admit to how fair the assessment actually was, given my behaviour to date.
I could dedicate my next five levels to intelligence and try to buff up my understanding of the world and how things worked, get it to the point where I could grasp stuff quicker and better.
But that would still leave me an impulsive idiot. A smart impulsive idiot, which is somehow worse in my opinion.
Practice the same thing a thousand times and become a god at it, but never know when to use it. To my mind, that’s what a buffed intelligence stat looked like.
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known in life have also been some of the biggest, most aggravating morons imaginable. And they were always huge headaches. There’s nothing more frustrating than arguing with someone that’s at once way smarter and more learned than you on a given subject, but completely oblivious to all the ways in which their clever solutions would break under real world strain.
“What are you considering?” Eternity asked after some time.
I realised I’d been staring into the fire, one stick held out to it, its end burning, remembering once wanting to beat one such genius with a robot programming console.
“Thinking of my build, if I’m honest. Is there any way to change allocated points later on?”
Eternity let out that misfiring lighter sound as it laughed, and that answered that. My reality wasn’t a game, I had to remind myself. These stat changes were physical, so how could you reset them? Stupid question. At least the dragon didn’t answer.
“Right. I’m going to level wisdom next,” I said, more as a promise to myself. “Time to make good on my boasting about learning.”
“Your intelligence is much closer to a threshold, if that’s what you’re aiming at.”
“I’m aiming at not being a headstrong idiot anymore. We’ve done enough of that so far and I’m tired of always putting my foot in the manure.” I grinned. “To borrow your idiom, I’m tired of being my worst enemy. I think it makes the monsters try harder to catch up.”
How many more times could I realistically get away with diving into a mob of monsters and somehow scraping by? How many more Methols or Crystals were out there to bail me out of the worst scrapes or to dunk me in a river after I’ve set myself on fire?
Smart money said ‘too few’.
A single bad encounter with a Nobody would likely end my travels. Maybe not walking up to the scary woman lurking in the forest was a pretty good way of surviving long-term? Maybe I needed to remember that more efficiently? Write it into my bones and all that.
Not to mention all the monsters I’ve so far poked with the proverbial stick. That stalker creature still lurked on my map, its grinning skull a reminder that luck alone had spared me a gruesome death not too long ago. There were probably more of them in the forest, and far more comparable creatures out in the wider world. It would pay not to engage them unless I actually needed to.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
The trick I’d been using with saving a skill point as a quick energy injection wasn’t going to work for much longer. It would only be a matter of time until I ran into something that could outlast my skills, no matter how I tried to cheat, then shove my whole head up my ass while it took its time killing me.
Eternity coiled up in my hair and puffed out a bit of smoke. “I can only agree with this fresh direction you’re taking,” it said sleepily. “I look forward to your growth.”
So, next goal was to up my wisdom to a point where I would actually think through my next moves. One would think that was simple to do by just… thinking through my next moves. But fundamental behaviour change is hard and stats are training wheels anyway, and applying lessons was something I needed to get better at.
As long as I didn’t go Hulk-mode again in a fight, I didn’t really need strength all that much, not yet. My Burning Lash was more than a decent enough equaliser in a scrap, and Melenith’s rune was an excellent nuke in a scrap.
Willpower remained a nonstarter. While I saw the use in buffing it, I didn’t want something that altered the me of me that drastically. I wasn’t blind to the irony of buffing wisdom, but I still carried the ick from the first two points dumped there and how easily they helped me get over the iepurran’s murder. I just wanted to get brighter, not grow inhumanly cold.
Crystal finally joined me by the fire, carrying an armload of junk. She threw it all on the ground, then ambled over and grabbed one of the dried fish, to finally sit by me.
She’d poured something in her ears, some green slime from a jar she carried around. It bubbled out and drooled down her shoulders like melted wax. Smelled of gasoline almost. At least I didn’t have to yell for her to hear me anymore.
“Trade for one more heart?” she asked, though her exuberant tone was gone. She almost sounded tired. “Last blow up too hard.”
I still had three of the things and various smaller shards and flakes. They could be worth money in a city, but I also needed supplies now. As the first act of Wiser Klaus, I pulled one out of my inventory.
“I need a pot, some fire starting supplies, a water skin or two, some satchels, bandages, and whatever salve you have for wounds.” I wasn’t going to get food from her. Learned that lesson well enough. I tried to think more about what I needed as Crystal chewed on her fish, bones and all. “Some sturdy rope. Something to keep off the rain. And I think that would be it for now.” I juggled the amber-like crystal. “Good trade. Yes?”
“That a lot of stuff for one heart,” Crystal muttered while cleaning her teeth with the skewer. “Two heart.”
“No heart and fuck off. You still owe me a lamp.” And anyway, all that stuff would be junk to her, and worth far less than a verdant heart. “Don’t make me go through your shelves. I’ll find more stuff I want.”
She grumbled and swallowed loudly. “Fine. One heart.”
“Deal.”
I fed the last of my fish to Tusk. He kept snuffling at my back as I ate. Since I wasn’t vomiting blood yet, from all the berries and mushrooms I’d eaten earlier, that meant the old boy really knew his stuff. He more than earned my fish.
As it turned out, Crystal was shrewder than I gave her credit. Making the lamp itself was literally no big deal at all. Any container that could hold a candle would be sufficient. It didn’t even need glass windows or anything of the sort—what Crystal had were panes of a translucent resin that could be harvested off some of the silverleaf trees, boiled, then poured into molds to cool. She then inscribed their exteriors with some very simple words of power, that were just fancier runes. Their role was mostly to strengthen the resin.
I copied it all in my notes. The words were simple, easy to follow, and only needed the barest energy to activate. Then they would self sustain off very little ambient mana. Clever, that.
And that was where the shrewdness came in.
The candle inside the lamp was the real power behind the ward. One could burn for a few nights straight, and the lamp was only built around it so the flame wouldn’t be snuffed out accidentally by wind or rain.
Of course she demanded another verdant heart for the recipe and supplies to make the candle on my own.
I threatened to cut off her hands and stuff them up her nose. My patience would only go so far.
In the end, after enough cursing to match a sailor’s vocabulary, she relented and ponied up the recipe and enough materials for me to make a couple candles in a pinch. The rest, as she described and Eklil confirmed, could be found in the Brightleaf easily enough. All I had to do was not get stung to death by bees.
I paid a chunk of verdant heart for the know-how of avoiding that particular fate. It was worth the trade.
By midnight I had my very own working lamp with a misshapen candle burning inside as a test run. Eternity confirmed it functioned correctly as a ward, though I should probably not expect a wide area of effect given the lamp Crystal spared for me.
The thicker the wick, the wider the area. I didn’t have thick wicks and Crystal refused to part with any of hers, so I settled on what I could get.
Red-striped bees produced a wax that pushed predators away even in its natural state. When heated up and burned, it let out a special kind of light along with some chemical compounds that pushed away anything with ill intent. Nifty that, a natural remedy for a predator issue.
The whole lamp was just a cube on a stick, wobbly as all shit, drooping from how poorly its elements were glued together. If anything, it looked like an electric torch out of Minecraft or something. The top was a cube made of resin, with holes poked in its sides, and the whole thing was glued atop a gnarled branch of black wood, almost as long as my arm. The candle inside just sat in a little support and wobbled dangerously when I moved the lamp around.
First thing to do in a large city was to get a proper fucking hand lamp. Something I could hold on my person and still move around easily.
If I shook this thing with any more strength than a gentle breeze, the candle inside was likely to topple.
Oh well, I’d demanded a lamp, not a good one. More fool I.
By early light I was itching to go.
I had my destination. Now I also had a decent pot in which to prepare myself some food, satchels to carry stuff, and even a decent, if moth-eaten, tarp to protect myself from rain.
Much as I wanted to practice my [Energy detection], my patience was simply not enough to keep me from going. I wanted that next Insight. And I wanted to be back on the path, to travel and to explore and to discover.
Unlike the iepurrans who minded their own business, Crystal went through my prep for leaving with the care and interest of a mother hen. It actually surprised me that she checked my backpack, my understanding of what Tusk had shown me, and the direction I was headed in. She also made me make another candle to store inside my ring, just in case.
In the end, she made the offer I hadn’t and we connected our interfaces. Hopefully, she wouldn’t be too annoying in the long run, but it was a risk I could accept in exchange for access to her knowledge. If I could trust that knowledge was a different matter altogether.
I was as ready to go as I could be, and it felt right. Maybe this newest adventure would finally be a pleasant one.
Eternity laughed before I even finished the thought, the git.