Day twenty-five started with the dead electric cat body problem.
The thing was still on a thick branch about a ter from Eren’s sleeping platform where he’d left it last night after failing to hang it properly.
So fragile leaves made rope problems..
He’d tried the sa trick he used for his stone water cups, tying bark rope around the body and suspending it from a branch close to the trunk. But the cat weighed more than everything else he owned combined and the rope snapped twice before he gave up and just shoved it onto the widest branch he could reach. He’d spent the night hoping nothing would climb up and steal it.
Nothing did luckily.
Then he rembered that dangerous but harmless looking bird from yesterday’s chaotic ti.
That bird was barely bigger than a parrot. Maybe the size of a large pigeon if you included its tail feathers. But last night it had opened its beak wider than its own skull and swallowed a cat bigger than itself in a single motion.
So kind of spatial skill or a body modification ability that Eren couldn’t even try to understand in this shit show that he had to use half of his drinking water to clean his ass.
There were enough problems he had to find so answers like a "clean ass" in this place and a magical bird wasn’t his concern if it didn’t eat him.
A parrot-sized bird that eats creatures ten tis its own size and scares every predator in the forest into staying away from that tree. Whatever that thing was it wasn’t a bird in any definition Eren knew.
He’d been staring at the dead cat since dawn trying to decide if eating magical monster at was a good idea or an incredibly stupid one. The exposed muscle tissue still had faint arcs of electricity crackling across it even though the thing had been dead for hours. It slled like burned rubber mixed with raw steak.
The colorful bird gave it to him and Eren still didn’t know why.
That tiny little bird that could swallow sothing 5 tis its size gave it to like a gift.Either it’s saying "welco to the neighborhood" or "fatten up before I eat you."
He poked the at with his sharpened stick and the electricity arced into the wood, making his fingers tingle for a second. It wasn’t painful but it was definitely weird.
Back on Earth he wouldn’t eat at from a street vendors let alone from the corpse of a magical electric panther-cat delivered by a parrot-sized apex predator. But back on Earth he also had a refrigerator and a phone to order delivery from.
He tried to butcher a small piece from it’s leg with heavy stones and slightly sharpened rocks. There was still electrical activity in the inner flesh. And sohow it still existed like this body was acting like a biological battery.
He couldn’t figure out how to touch the more deeper sides so using that leg part was the only available option for today.
His Fire Making skills wasn’t a magical skill as a matter of a fact!
He had many fire stones and a trusted thod that he used to make the fire in two minutes. Which was a improvent instead of the four straight days of failed attempts in his first week. One of the few things in his life that had objectively gotten better.
He held the at over the fla on a stick and watched it cook. The arcs died as the heat increased and the color changed from raw purple-red to sothing closer to normal cooked at. The sll improved too. Actually it slled kind of good.
If this kills at least I’ll die eating sothing that isn’t a grub or wet cardboard mushroom.
He took a bite.
It tasted like pork. Smoky and slightly tallic but definitely pork. After three weeks of grubs and mushrooms and the occasional stolen fruit this was the best thing he’d ever eaten in this world. He took another bite before even finishing the first one.
Then the tingling started.
It wasn’t the food-poisoning kind he’d learned to dread after the purple berry incident. This was different. It started in his tongue, traveled down his throat and spread through his chest and arms and legs. A buzzing warmth like his whole body was a phone set to vibrate. His skin prickled everywhere at once and for about five seconds he felt like he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket without the pain part.
[Congratulations! You have learned a new skill]
[Electric Resistance (Rare) - First Evolution League]
-Gives elental resistance to current based damages
-Level 2: Electric Resistance 6%
(Each additional skill level: 1%)
Eren read it three tis and figured it gave %5 for the base skill and with level 2 it was 6 now. But..
Rare huh...
He smiled but it was a bir forced. He would likely wish for a electric attack skill or a movent skills related to the elent if it even existed.
It’s not that bad, I guess.
Also every skill he’d gotten so far was either Basic or Uncommon. The system had never given him anything Rare before. And it started at Level 2? He didn’t even know skills could skip levels.
Six percent resistance. So if one of those electric cats bit right now the shock would be six percent weaker.
That didn’t sound like much. But six percent of "instant death by electrocution" was still "slightly less instant death by electrocution" and in this forest that fraction was the difference between losing a limb and losing your life.
His brain imdiately started doing the math. If every level added one percent and the base was five then Level 95 would be... one hundred percent? Complete immunity to electricity?
If I ever get to a hundred percent resistance could I headbutt a lightning bolt and walk away? Could I grab one of those electric cats by the face and just tank the shock?
But electricity wasn’t the only danger in this forest.
What about fire resistance? If I could eat sothing fire-based and get the sa kind of skill... half the creatures in this forest use fire. The bears, the snake-birds, even so plants spit sparks. And what about physical resistance? Is that a thing? Could I get a skill that just makes harder to cut or crush?
Poison he already had but that was from almost dying, not from eating sothing on purpose. Could he farm resistances by specifically hunting and eating the right creatures?
He didn’t even know why he was asking these questions. It wasn’t like anyone was going to answer.
What is this place? Why does it work like a ga? Who built the system and why does it reward for eating monster at?
Gods? A simulation? So kind of test? He had no idea. He didn’t even know if there was a way out of this forest let alone a way back ho. And thinking about it too long made his head hurt worse than the purple berry incident so he stopped.
He sighed and looked at the remaining cat at on his platform. There was probably fifteen kilograms of usable muscle on this thing and whether the universe made sense or not he had a plan now.
Fire resistance. I need to find sothing fire-based and eat it. Sothing small enough to kill first obviously.
He ate more of the cat and the skill didn’t level up again. Figured. Rare skills probably needed insane amounts of repetition or exposure to grow. He wrapped the remaining at in broad leaves and tied them shut with bark rope, hung the package from the thickest inner branch he could reach and climbed down.
..
He spent the afternoon gathering instead of hunting. Yesterday’s battle had put ideas in his head that he couldn’t shake.
The white ants didn’t fight anyone. They just grabbed what they wanted from the destroyed nests and left while everyone else killed each other. The ghost-deer did the sa thing. And honestly that’s what Eren had been doing every morning with his breakfast runs.
Grab and go. Don’t fight for it. Just be faster than the things guarding it.
He activated Kinetic Flux Runner and hit the ground sprinting.
That first burst of acceleration still made him grin every ti. The skill didn’t make him faster, not technically. His raw speed ca from Strength and Endurance sa as before. But Kinetic Flux made his body move so cleanly that no creature with the sa stats could keep up with him. Zero wasted motion, zero balance loss on turns, zero stumbling on roots or uneven ground. He moved through the forest like he’d been running in it his whole life.
He thought about his stats back at Level 1-2 when he first woke up in this dirt. Strength around 7 or 8. A normal human averaged 5-6. So he’d been maybe fifty percent stronger than a regular person at best. Faster by roughly the sa margin. Enough to outrun a sli if he really pushed it but nothing else.
Now at Strength 52 he was almost ten tis stronger than an average person. And with Kinetic Flux Runner on top of that his effective combat speed was probably even higher because he never wasted a single step. A running skill. The most boring skill in his entire list and it had saved his life more tis than his whole Magician of Love class combined.
My class gives ninety-nine Charisma in a forest full of monsters. My running skill keeps alive every single day. The system has a sick sense of humor.
He smiled to himself while dodging a low branch at full sprint.
First target was a cluster of glowing blue mushrooms growing at the base of a rock formation about a kiloter southeast. A pair of territorial lizards usually sat on the rocks above them sunning themselves. The lizards could spit a corrosive liquid that lted wood on contact and Eren had watched them dissolve a fallen branch in under a minute once.
He approached at three-quarter speed, dropped to half as he entered the danger zone and his right hand swept low. Swift Snatcher did its job. Three mushrooms pulled clean from the soil and identified as non-toxic by touch alone. He was past the rocks and accelerating before the lizards even lifted their heads.
Three mushrooms in two seconds. Those stupid lizards are still looking the wrong direction.
He ate one while running. It tasted like dirt and tal and nothing happened. No skill, no stat boost, no tingling. Just a bad taste.
Not everything magical gives you sothing. Noted.
He hit four more spots in the next hour. A vine with purple flowers near a wolf den. Moss on the river bank that his Collector skill flagged as "potentially dicinal."
Three different berries from three different bushes he’d been avoiding for weeks.
Two of them like the vine flowers and the moss did nothing and also tasted so bad he almost threw up, but his Poison Resistance absorbed whatever toxin was in them.
[Congratulations! Your skill Poison Resistance levelled up]
-Level 4 > Level 5
Am I suppose to be happy about this..?
Give a random Teleportation skill and let be go ho!
FUU**UUCK!!
Eren almost lost his cool when he rembered his circumstance and the dangerous forest he was trapped in. Almost...
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