Chapter Eight: Catching Light (Patreon)

Before

The cooling breeze as the sun goes down makes up my mind for me. I’d rather not freeze, and honestly, the safety of being able to see in a certain radius is more preferable than being completely blind in the dark.

I spend a few minutes preparing a fire. Fortunately, being in a forest, there’s plenty of dead wood, leaves, and kindling, so it takes less time than it might have. It’s still almost dark by the time I think I’m ready. I pull out the flint and steel which Nicholas provided me with. It’s not actually a flint stone, thankfully – it’s more of a ten centimetre long stick of an indeterminate material. Maybe metal of some sort? Or stone? I can’t work it out as it seems to have a somewhat mixed appearance. The rod is accompanied by a piece of metal attached to it with a cord. Again, practical.

Of course, knowing how to use the tools thanks to absorbing the stone and its helpful memories is one thing; being able to do it is something completely different. It takes long enough for me to get the technique right that I find myself wishing I was a smoker. Sure, it would be annoying to be without cigarettes in a completely different world, and my physical stats would probably be even worse, but at least I’d probably have a lighter with me. In the end, I manage to strike the rod correctly enough to generate a spark, and then do the right things to turn that spark into a flame, which then catches on the pyramid of branches I made.

It’s at that point that I realise it’s catching light a lot faster than I thought it would, and I scramble to go and get some more branches to add to the fire. It’s probably a good half an hour before I feel confident that the fire can occupy itself for a bit. I slump next to it with a sigh, only now realising how much my feet hurt. I lever off my shoes and massage my aching soles. Fortunately, I chose good shoes and don’t have any blisters, though there are a number of parts on my feet which feel quite tender. OK, water, check. Fire, check.

Next, food. I haven’t dressed the bird, and I’m not keen on doing that right next to my camp: my absorbed memories say that that is a big no-no. The scent of blood and offal will draw scavengers, and possibly predators, like a moth to a flame. So I guess the bird is off the menu. I start hoping fervently that what is in my Inventory will be kept in stasis or something, as otherwise I risk the meat spoiling overnight, if it hasn’t done so already. Anyway, seems like rations are my only option then as testing new plants is not a good idea right now.

That could be a problem – I investigated the rations earlier, and they...aren’t exactly abundant. Nicholas gave me a small quantity of dried meat, dried samova beans – as my new knowledge tells me – that look and taste like a type of nut, and some long, dried pieces of green plant – malachy leaves, a type of nutritious seaweed. Together, they will provide everything my body needs...for about two days. Three, if I stretch it out.

I’ve already chewed a few bits of dried meat as I got hungry while walking and figured I have a whole load of meat in my inventory to replace it with. Of course, I’m assuming that I won’t just have to ditch it when I finally get around to processing it. No, no worrying needlessly. Bad Markus. Directing my attention back to healthier places, I withdraw a small handful of samova beans and a single malachy leaf.

I force myself to put the rest back, and put the satchel out of arm’s length and line of sight in order to lessen the temptation to get more. I chew each bean long enough that it’s completely disappeared before I put the next one in. It’s hard not to just shove them all in my mouth and probably look like a chipmunk – I’m not used to being unable to assuage my hunger.

At least the beans taste pretty good, though would be nicer with some salt. The malachy leaf makes up for that – it’s very salty. Almost too much, but I’ve lost a lot of salt today through sweat, so I force my way through. Mental note: next time, maybe use the malachy leaf in a stew or something so the salt is diluted. Right now, I’d rather not risk the smells of a cooking meal attracting something tougher than me.

My stomach still rumbles even after ‘supper’ is over. I decide then and there that my first task tomorrow will be investigating the corpse in my inventory, and hopefully cooking it up for later use, presuming it’s still good. I’ve found the river, at least, enabling me to wash my hands, tools, and anything else which gets dirtied by blood or other liquids. I decide to distract myself with my Status screen: time to investigate it a bit and make some plans.

I command the misty box to appear once again. The numbers appear identical to the last time I looked at it. Well, I say that, but there is a small change: the percentage of Energy to the next level has gone up by two percent. I consider that thoughtfully. It’s been, I guess, about seven hours since I last looked at that, and apparently I earn about five units per hour, so about thirty-five units….that makes each percent worth about seventeen Energy, more or less. I started with two percent: does that mean killing the bird was worth about thirty-five Energy units, or had I already earned some Energy? I check the letter Nicholas sent me; sure enough, it said that Earth had had some Energy, it was just in very small amounts. Hmm. A thought for later.

Right now, the most important thing is that if the current rate continues, it will take approximately fourteen days to level up, just surviving. Maybe less, since I will have to hunt animals in order to not starve. Is that fast enough? Is leveling up something that could help me survive?

I guess so. I mean, stats, Skills, magic… It all sounds pretty much like a video game to me, and in video games, people get stronger when they level up. I think. It’s been a while since I played games, but I’m pretty sure that that was true? Even in the games I played most often which were more of me managing a city or nation, when the place leveled up because I’d done the correct actions, it gained bonuses or otherwise grew stronger or more powerful. Surely the same would be true of this?

I decide to try to dive deeper into this strange display hovering in front of my eyes.

I explore my status screen a bit, learning how to manipulate it with my mind. Fortunately, it’s not particularly complicated. I can see my messages which include previously read ones, and my status screen, nothing else. Returning to the status screen, I try to work out what each of the stats actually mean. By concentrating on them, I find I can I start to get a sense of what they’re about. It’s nothing ground-breaking; more a combination of feeling and observation than a clear tool-tip telling me about the stat. Hopefully the System lore stone will have more to offer me when I finally get around to absorbing it.

Intelligence must be something to do with absorbing and processing information, based on the fact that it’s this stat which determines how many stones I can absorb and in what time frame. Clearly from the status screen, it’s also the determiner of how much mana I have – magic, I guess from context. Whether this is immediately important to me will depend on if my only other Skill Lay-on-hands uses mana or something else, and if it uses mana, how much. Of course, I can’t stop the image of a fire-throwing god-like figure from blossoming in my mind, but that’s a long way away, if possible at all.

Wisdom, well, given how little I have of it, I can only think that it’s a reflection on my capacity to choose whether doing something is a good idea or not. Recently, my self-control in that area has been a little lacking...actually, thinking about it, it’s been lacking for a while. There’s nothing like sitting in the middle of the wilderness with no way home to make you reflect morosely on your past life choices.

I force my mind away from the threatening black hole and continue to look at my status screen. Clearly, Wisdom affects the regeneration of mana, perhaps as a fail-safe system? Imagine a mage with high Intelligence and low Wisdom: they’d be able to throw around powerful spells, but they’d have enough time to regret it while waiting for their mana pool to recover. Or maybe there’s another explanation. I don’t know.

Willpower…. I can only think that it’s a reflection of one’s self-discipline, like not eating food that’s supposed to last me for at least two days because my stomach is still growling, I tell myself, forcibly making myself sit still and not go to get more beans. Would increasing this reduce the temptation, or increase my ability to resist it, I wonder in an effort try to distract myself. There’s also the fact that it determines my health regeneration. Why? What does willpower have to do with getting better?

Healing is about biological processes, which can be helped along by pharmaceutical agents to treat symptoms and boost the body’s immune system. But it’s clear that in this new reality, Willpower directly affects health regen. And a pitiful regeneration it is too: four units an hour. Though, thinking about that, does that mean I would have recovered completely from my head wound in less than ten hours? Because if that was the case, four units per hour is actually pretty awesome. Musing about the nature of Willpower, something suddenly occurs to me and I switch back to the message panel, albeit a bit awkwardly. I haven’t quite got the hang of this mental manipulation yet.

In my message box are two categories – read and unread messages. Of course, the latter is empty, but the former holds the messages which came up after I absorbed the Tamer Class stone. Reading the one about the Tamer skills adds a further clue about Willpower.

That sentence which ends with ‘even with a lower Willpower than your opponent’, and the other which talks about a ‘Battle of Wills’ indicate an important point: this skill scales off my Willpower. Or, at least, having a higher Willpower than my opponent increases the likelihood that this skill will succeed. There’s even a recommendation for the minimum level of Willpower to have before attempting to Dominate another creature.

I’m rather depressed when it appears that I can’t even use one of my Class Skills yet: I’ve got a four in Willpower. Is it the same situation for Tame? I check the description again. No, it doesn’t seem to be the case: the description for Tame only mentions that a being of high Intelligence level can reject the bond, but there may be an underlying modifier that I don’t know about.

It would have helped if this whole thing came with a manual, I think uncharitably at Nicholas. Then again, maybe that’s what the System lore stone is...but I don’t dare put that higher up the priority queue than knowledge about hunting and tracking. Well, either way, my Willpower sucks, so it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to use Dominate any time soon – not without stacking the deck significantly in my favour, at least.