Chapter Fifteen: So, what is this all about? (Patreon)

The next morning dawns bright and early but I’m fully awake seconds after opening my eyes. As I learnt from my snake-alarm the day before yesterday, a near-death experience is just as good a stimulant as a strong espresso. This time it’s a horrific cross between a snake and a millipede which makes me shriek at a pitch far higher than I would ever willingly admit to. But honestly, who could stay quiet when waking up to a long, thick creature with sharp legs wrapping its body around you, and burying its sharp fangs in your thigh as soon as you start to move?

Fortunately, or not depending on how you look at it, I’ve been in so many of these life-death situations by this point that I don’t have to have my brain fully supplied with oxygen in order to know what to do. Grabbing my knife with my right hand, I try to gain some sort of purchase on the creature’s body with my left, pulling it away from me as hard as I can. Bringing the blade up to counter attack, I shout again in pain as this makes the fangs buried in me shift. Gritting my own teeth, I stab upwards at its body, trying to get between the hardened scaly armour to reach the softer flesh below.

It’s a race between whether I will get in deep enough to damage something vital, or bloodloss from my many, many wounds will take me down first. I cast Lay-on-hands quickly, which helps: the slices in my skin aren’t very deep, but they are bleeding rather heavily and there are just so many of them. All the while, I keep jabbing my knife, finally managing to knock off a scale and stab into the flesh of the beast.

By this point, the snilapede has decided that I’m too tough as potential prey, and tries to make good its escape. I grit my teeth at the feeling of sharp feet pulling their way out of wounds, the small barbs on them doing even more damage. It’s fast, all those legs a real advantage, but I’m faster. Or at least, I’ve stacked the deck to my advantage by grabbing its tail before it can completely disengage. It whips around to attack me again, but this time I’m ready. I grab its head and shift so I can put my knee on it, stabbing again and again into the small patch which lost its scale. Pinned by its tail and head, it writhes as much as it can, but not enough to make any difference to its fate.

By the time it stops writhing and just twitches, clearly already dead and just waiting for the muscle spasms to catch up with reality, I’m panting and weak. Collapsing to a half-sitting, half-lying position next to my attacker, I spam-cast Lay-on-hands, fighting against unconsciousness. I lose the battle eventually, bloodloss taking its toll, but I’ve – hopefully – got myself past the most dangerous point. I just hope nothing comes to take advantage while I’m almost out of it.

Fortunately, I never lose consciousness completely, nor does anything attack me while I’m helpless. I guess still being mostly-protected in the hollow under the tree helps. It does confirm my decision that this is no good as a potential shelter, though. I’m glad I decided to take the Dexterity point last night, even if it cleaned me out of Energy – who knows whether my new fine motor control was part of what enabled me to kill this new foe.

My weakness passes after a time, my multiple casts of Lay-on-hands both healing my wounds and helping me replenish my blood supply as I gnaw on bird meat and drink water to supply the nutrients. After some experience through the last few fights I’ve concluded that Lay-on-hands can’t magically – hah – produce blood, but if I eat something while casting it, it will convert the nutrients in what I’m eating to blood. When I’m feeling better, I push myself to my feet and shove the beast corpse in my Inventory: I figure that those legs will be useful as fish-hooks at some point, considering the backwards pointing barbs which made such a mess of me.

Sighing a little at the blood covering me and the numerous rents in my clothing, I crawl out of the burrow and head towards the river. I reckon these clothes are no good for anything more than bandage strips – when properly sterilised – or cleaning rags. My trousers are ripped in several places from the raptorcats last night, and my shirt and jumper have been torn to pieces by this latest attack. This world sure is hard on clothing. Much more of this and I’ll be reduced to wearing hides of the animals I’ve killed like a proper wildman, despite having brought half my wardrobe with me!

After cleaning up, I eat some more bird meat. It’s getting a bit boring, but I’ll take boring over hunger, so there’s that. Then, deciding that as long as I’m careful I should be able to absorb the next stone. Sitting near the water is as safe as I’m going to get right now so I take out the System knowledge stone to absorb.

Compared to the other stones I’ve absorbed, I’d say it’s probably between the wilderness survival stone and the tracking stone in terms of mental load – probably more towards the tracking stone than the other direction. Unlike the tracking stone, it’s not because of breadth, but depth. And, I think the fact that it’s all so new makes it harder. Actually, I know that now.

I...suddenly understand why I had to wait a day between each stone. In fact, I really should have waited more, especially between the first and the second stone. I feel a surge of regret inside me at the thought of the amount of knowledge I probably missed from the second and third stones because the first was still settling in. Shame joins it when I realise that Nicholas obviously didn’t think my Intelligence score would be as low as six. He was probably expecting it to be eight or nine: that would be sufficient to allow for one stone per day, though only just.

Still, I’m glad that I absorbed this stone now; hopefully it will stop me making stupid mistakes like that again. For certain, I’m not going to absorb the hunting stone for at least two days. That should be enough time for my new knowledge to settle and my mind to be ready to accept further information. Standing up, I set off downstream again, my mind going over my new knowledge even as I keep a watch out around myself for potential attackers.

So, what is this all about? In short, Energy. I suddenly understand the concept far better than I ever did before. Actually, the idea in itself is nothing ground-breaking – when I had thought about Energy before, I’d gone back to my school days in physics class: you know, kinetic energy, potential energy, chemical energy, etc.

And indeed, these are indeed forms of Energy, but peripheral ones – something like the aftershocks of an earthquake rather than the earthquake itself. The fact is that Earth doesn’t seem to have Energy-energy, or if it does, it has it in such small quantities that we don’t notice it. Or maybe it’s what we would consider miracles? I don’t know. Anyway, that’s not relevant.

The point is, this Energy is ever-present in the world from which Nicholas comes, and, given he sent me here to collect it, I have to assume the same is the case in my present world. By itself, Energy flows in and out, around and through everything, but seems to particularly collect in living creatures. The higher the intelligence level, the more Energy collected – which explains why Intelligence is the modifier for my mana pool.

Though, on that point, the reason why Wisdom is the modifier for mana regeneration is because Energy and mana are not the same thing: just as the food we eat – chemical energy – has to be converted into kinetic energy for our muscles to move, so mana has to be converted from Energy. That said, I’m still a bit unsure as to why Wisdom would be the modifier; either I’ve lost that bit of knowledge by absorbing the stone at the wrong time or it was never present in the stone to begin with.

So, Energy collects in everything, but living beings especially. The problem is that living beings can’t do anything about that. What? But then what was that whole thing about Intelligence and Wisdom?! Apparently, that is where Classes come in. When I absorbed the Class stone, I absorbed more than a status screen and Skills: I absorbed a metaphysical structure and storage container that’s inter-dimensional in a way that makes my mind tie itself in knots even considering thinking about it, let alone actually pondering on it. I quickly stop – I know where my limits are, and most ‘hard’ sciences at any significant depth are beyond them!

The storage container accumulates Energy, either through natural absorption – which I guess is my seven units an hour, actually, eight now – or when I kill another living creature. Apparently, part of the Energy held by the victim goes to its killer while the majority is lost to the world around. So that accounts for the hikes in Energy I’ve gained from my life-death encounters. Fun fact, apparently a little Energy remains in the flesh of the creature for an hour or so after its death, and so eating it within than time can increase Energy gain. Extra fun fact, some parts of the body – like the organs – are more energy-dense than others, and special preparation can increase the amount of Energy absorbed multiple times.

So maybe I shouldn’t have ditched the bird’s organs. And the corpses of the weasitors. At least I still have the corpse of that weird scaled rabbit which attacked me soon after lunch yesterday. That one in particular was a bit of a nightmare – giving me flashbacks to watching an iconic film years ago. Despite almost seeming like a harmless herbivore, it had had two sets of razor-sharp teeth that latched painfully into my arm.

It would have bitten out my throat if I hadn’t caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye and managed to get my arm there in time. No way was the creature going to get away without being eaten after that. I take far too much pleasure at the thought of cooking the wretched creature on a spit: by the time I pinned it down to kill it, I was bleeding heavily in five places.

Then again, apparently whatever the Inventory is made of is rather anathema to Energy. My stones were OK there because they are stable, self-contained weaves of Energy. Fortunate, as the thought that I might have inadvertently ‘wiped’ my sole hopes of survival like a hotel key card put too close to a mobile phone makes my stomach swoop unpleasantly.

Something as unstable as uncooked meat, however, stands no chance. Key point to take home – immediately cook and eat organs of worthy foes if at all possible, but accept that my supply of emergency food in my Inventory is not going to improve my Energy stores in any way. I suddenly wonder whether my phone or kindle have been badly affected by being put in the Inventory. Deciding that the answer to that question is worth using a bit of battery, I pause, checking around myself first for danger, then dig in my backpack and pull out my phone.