[NR] Big, Not Giant - Chapter 571 (Patreon)

Jason sighs, maybe the System is fairer than he gives it credit for. Then again, what is fair? His skills and abilities allow Jason to punch above his level, but the System had decided that wasn’t fair and so tried to restrain him. Yet at the same time, it has also given him a title which would allow Jason to manipulate the System itself.

The only problem was that the titles were too monolithic. Not as in size, but make up. Each title, besides maybe the titles which can merge and such, were black boxes. You couldn’t pick apart the pieces and get down to what they did at a basic level. They didn’t even grow, so you couldn’t poke at the edges. It was all just a sleek black box that did “The Thing”.

This drew Jason’s attention back to his skills. Why? Because he had the perfect guinea pig. Titles and the other bonuses might not change, but skills could grow. On top of that, he had just received a new skill. That meant there would be a period of quicker growth as it caught up to whatever Jason’s actual skill was.

Not that he was expecting to advance this new skill to match up with his others. Though it is possible as his other skills have been mostly stagnant as well. Maybe the construction skill would be able to catch up if his actual ability with it matched his other skills. Jason doubted this, though his farming skill had surprised him.

Either way, it meant he needed to get back to building. In fact, it meant he would be building more things than originally planned. Even stuff he can’t complete quite yet would be started.

Of course, all work and no play makes Jason a full boy, so he isn’t only building things. He makes short ventures out into the nearby woods for supplies, visits the settlement a time or two, and most importantly can once again focus on both his in and out of game cultivation.

All the while, Rosha and Courtney are out adventuring. In fact, a couple weeks after their house is finished, we find them four days into an expedition. This time, though, they are heading away from the great lake that the giant beasts like to stop at before hitting up the settlement.

At first, they didn’t really find anything new. The same pattern of biomes being smashed together. An oddity that Courtney choked up to the nearby kingdom’s work at stabilizing this section of the Deep Wilds. However, this time they don’t come across any worrying biomes, like the berry one they found on one of their first trips.

Then once they got past those strange mashed up biomes, the Deep Wilds opened up. While hectic and full of fighting, the band of biomes were like a pressure cooker or a Gu pot. It stuffed so many opposing elements, both nature and monster based, that it was quite unique even for the Deep Wilds. That might even be the source of the giant beasts, though Rosha doubted that conjecture.

She might not have been able to actually examine any of the giant beasts, but she has talked to a few people with personal experience. A beast raised in that edge area wouldn’t act like those giant ones. Such a place could only breed crazed destruction, not mindful mayhem that the giant beasts seemed to prefer.

Though whatever the case may be, they were now in what Rosha described as a desert, pretending to be a rainforest. The ground was sand and the plants were mostly cacti of one sort or another. However, there were a lot of them. In fact, as far as sources for a giant beast go, this wouldn’t be the worst for some kind of cactus eating beast. There would certainly be enough food here.

Despite that, or maybe because of, they had come across very few large animals. There were all kinds of poisonous snakes, rodents, birds, and so on. However, the biggest they had seen, including the monsters, was an admittedly giant for its kind, kangaroo mouse. Still, that mouse was only as tall as their knees. Oh, and there had only been one that size with the rest they’d spotted more around the size of one of their feet.

Both of the girls had a good laugh about it being one of the giant beasts, just that this was as large as it got. Though while they joke, they also admit it can’t be. After all, the snake that attacked wouldn’t naturally be all that much taller than the mouse, even if it was much longer. So a giant kangaroo mouse would still be larger than them.

What they don’t consider is the chance that this might be a young giant beast. That isn’t right, but at the same time could be seen as reasonable. The fact they missed the possibility coming more from their general disbelief. Oh, and the fact that the kangaroo mouse was very cute.

Now, while seeing the cute mouse would have been accepted by the both of them as having made the trip worth it. That wasn’t all they left with. Of course, a desert isn’t the place to find plants for a temperate forest clearing with a small pond, but that doesn’t mean nothing could be harvested.

Rosha used knowledge and skills to gather a collection of odd plants and minerals. Stuff like the fruit of a cactus that had a large circular clearing around it, a collection of rocks that glowed only under the moon, and of course the venom sacs of a number of snakes that thought attacking them was a good idea. Because of this, the end of their excursion came about not because of growing low on supplies, but rather the lack of space to put new things. So satisfied with their haul, they turned towards the direction they could feel their anchor and set off.

This direction, to anyone who had followed them would be strange. The path wasn’t actually back towards the clearing, at least it shouldn’t lead there. However, this was the Deep Wilds and over their days of travel, things had changed behind them and now the correct way back wasn’t what others would think.