Chapter 24

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[Floor 3 – Day 9]

[Total Days in Trial: 91]

[Status]

Name: John

Attributes

Class: Disciple – Skills: 4/7

Titles:

Perks:

Strength:

15

-

Lesser Analysis

Dexterity:

13

Archery 9

Constitution:

23

Resist Poison 19

Intelligence:

10

-

Wisdom:

14 [+2]

Meditation 11

Lesser Heal 8 - (Miracle)

Wise man of the Mountains

Charisma:

10 [+0]

-

Ambitious [INACTIVE]

I probably should have expected as much, but I soon found that trying to increase Strength while I was being limited to two small meals a day was not a fun process.

In fact, if I'm being perfectly honest: it felt downright impossible.

The only way I knew to grind Strength, was labor intensive. Essentially, I would just be repeating what had worked for me when I was on the first Floor. The process involved a lot of "pushing my limits" as just a blanket statement. If you can imagine the song "Eye of the Tiger" playing, only instead of a boxing montage, I'm just off in a field somewhere doing pushups. Or deadlifting heavy looking rocks and doing jogs around the town walls, all while occasionally stopping to pick up very specific weeds.

As a general rule of thumb, the human body seems to respond to heavy bouts of exercise in a few predictable ways. For one: hunger. My body wanted me to eat more food. The increase of calories out lead to a demand for more calories in. Which was tricky, and my original plan had just been to try and endure. Which I did, until the normal hunger, was soon followed by the second, probably predictable, outcome.

The over-all exhaustion.

That's when the going got tough. My muscles hurt after lifting and exercising, sure, but healing myself twice a day seemed to fix most of that. The growing concern, was that I was starting to feel extremely weak, and I was starting to slow down in what I could actually do. As in, really starting to slow down. Which was serious trouble, considering what the [Trial] had already shown itself to be capable of throwing at me. Being in a weakened state because of exercising, was somewhat dangerous. More so, when I was so hungry I wanted to eat the grass I was picking.

If there was a metaphor that fit, I suppose it felt a lot like I was dying of thirst, while swimming in a lake.

It wasn't like most people would be in any trouble, given the situation. There was food pretty much everywhere in town, and the simple quests I completed paid me more than enough to afford anything I was interested in trying. So, in that sense, there was no barrier between me and more food. I wasn't running out of money, and unable to buy something to eat. It wasn't like the town had a shortage. No, the problem was that eating more food ended up doing me a lot more harm than good. I didn't have medication to help me, and the Miracles only worked so well.

So, hunger was normal for me. After surviving the second Floor, it might as well have been a constant companion, and I was used to it. But... here on the third Floor, I had a lot more choices than wild game, garden veggies, and biscuits. And that was becoming a growing temptation. One that was always waiting for me, when I just finished a heavy workout and I was on my way to turn in another successful quest. I always returned to town to find something catching my eye, despite my best efforts not to look. Like a huge sandwich, filled with deli-meat, or some sort of pasta-thing, or... oh god: some sort of sauce-covered, smoked, breaded, cheese-laden, monster-meat-on-a-stick.

Giant, sauce-covered, smoked, breaded, cheese-laden, monster-meat-on-a-stick, that only cost two measly copper?

Well, my willpower could only hold out so long. You can't dangle food like that in front of someone who is literally starving for days on end. It's cruel as hell, and eventually, unless said person is in possession of the strongest will-power known to man: temptation is going to win out.

And, as it turns out: I am not in possession of the strongest will-power known to man.

After days and days on end, I bought at least five of those delicious bastards, and I regret to inform: I ate them all.

Of course, then I used the Miracle to the fullest extent of my ability, cycling through the echoes of the healing it provided for almost a full thirty minutes. As I did this, I calmly reasoned to myself that it would all work out. That even if it wasn't perfectly healed, it would probably be enough, and I'd make it work. I was getting good at this, after all.

No.

Wrong.

Miracles are not equivalent to modern medicine.

I learned my lesson.

Oh, did I learn.

Modern insulin stays in your system for hours, starts working quickly, and keeps working until it's gone. Meanwhile, Miracles are short bursts of healing, which can only linger from a few moments to a little more than half an hour. Whatever benefits they provide, fade quickly after.

As a direct consequence of this: Miracles do not handle greasy, fatty, carb-ladden, monster-meat-on-a-stick (which takes hours and hours to digest) very well. And this is a fact made even worse, when you consider there's around a twelve hour cool-down of careful breathing, before being able to cast said Miracle again.

Which I really needed to do, in order to correct how badly I had messed up.

Because, holy crap, did I mess up.

To make a long story short: I wasted more than half a day vomiting, as my entire body suffered through a [Trial] of its own. Suffering, which I would wish upon no one. It was so bad, that I really thought I was going to pass out and die, because the situation wasn't getting better- only worse, and my meditation's breathing pattern was being broken by the repeated need to throw up. Which meant that all my efforts to gather more mana were being hindered. Which meant the next Miracle I was trying to prepare, was getting farther and farther away, while I continued to get sicker and sicker...

Of all the ways I had ever imagined a monster killing me, I'd never quite pictured going to the grave like this. My body had no real defense except to hold out for as long as it could while I tried to keep the water I managed to drink from coming back up. My ability to use the Meditative breathing, kept faltering.

Insult to injury: When I finally did manage to get the Miracle to cast again, I was left even more hungry and tired than I was before I'd eaten. With the added bonus of having achieved nothing of real value in the time spent being sick.

So, yes: a lesson was learned.

A humbling lesson.

I was still sick, and I was not invincible. No matter how many Attributes I gained, no matter how strong I felt: everything could quickly come crashing down, because my [Lesser Heal] was still just a crutch. The Miracle was nothing more than a rigged up workaround to a serious problem that had not, and would not, be going away. And if I continued pretending it was anything more than that, I had to acknowledge that I was going to wind up dying in a coma, wasting away to a stupid and avoidable end.

This was a wake-up call, to say the least.

In retrospect, my Consitution and Poison Resistance were probably the only reasons I pulled through. Together, those were giving me a fighting chance, helping me as I coasted along from the state of "I feel alright" into "Oh man, I'm dying" on repeat, every single day. Without them acting as a buffer, I'd would have likely been cruising in the fast lane straight towards the dying part.

That I'd never been stupid enough to intentionally try and go without medicine before this, wasn't helping though. On a personal level, I was in mostly uncharted territory, health-wise, even before factoring in all the Attribute and Skills. I didn't know my exact limits, and I didn't feel inclined to try and figure them out on the fly. Or ever, if I could help it.

The dinner-gone-wrong incident, came with some sweeping changes to my plan for the Floor.

My meal times became much less relaxed, for one. Dried meats and dried... mushroom-things, which were both part of standard Adventuring travel-rations, became my regimented meals of choice. They tasted like crap, but they didn't mess me up nearly as badly as the other food might. No real variation was allowed in this.

In addition, I also made sure to start using the gate into town that forced me to walk farther, just so I could avoid some of the food vendors. Staying away from the temptation that came with the wafting scents of delicious things, which I really could not have, was going to be crucial.

Most importantly, though: I also decided to stop trying to improve Strength.

It wasn't a difficult choice, in the end. While it hurt to admit how badly I had misjudged myself (and how badly I'd misjudged the progress I was going to make) the reality was that Strength training did me more harm than good. As I currently was, I could either make some more pitiful attempts at it, or I could admit my loss and point myself in a different direction. So, I hard-shifted my focus towards the next most promising Attribute to improve, and I opted for Dexterity.

If I understood what this Attribute gave me correctly, I could sum it up as both reaction time and reflexes. It was the Attribute which improved my ability to do fine-motor control, and improved my perception. It made what I could see, sharper, and my movements crisper.

Compared to the overwhelming power that came with Strength, these effects were more subtle. Day to day, I had just adapted to the small gains I had made in this Attribute and I rarely noticed the difference. Still, I understood that they were no less useful in their own ways than Strength was, and I hoped that I might be able to grind the Attribute by using the Archery Skill, without pushing my body completely ragged. So, the plan was set anew. While Archery was still physical work, it was a lot less calorically demanding than heavy exercise was, and I could maintain it for a lot longer. So, in a way, I felt this all might turn out to be even better. Or, so I told myself.

The end result of that mess, was a situation which was mostly salvagable.

It wasn't all bad. A day later, the miracles seemed to flush my system back towards normal, and from there I was able to move on from the embarrassing mistake only a little worse for wear. But the facts didn't change: I'd slipped up, and I had been lucky this had happened in a way that hadn't gotten me killed. Just because I had mostly recovered and I had also seen a small gain in my Constitution, didn't mean it hadn't been extremely stupid.

I had known better.

The mistake I'd made had cost me time, and time was a precious commodity. In the day I spent being sick, I had missed my chance to knock out another quest, and the overall decline of my physical condition now probably had a big headstart compared to before. So, chances were good that I would now need to leave the floor a lot sooner than I'd originally been planning to.

The worst part of all of this, though, was that it had shaken any sort of confidence I'd regained since arriving on the third Floor.

For the first time since arriving in the [Trial] I'd been feeling reasonably positive about my chances. The healing effect that restored my body after clearing the second Floor had me feeling strong again. The Attributes I'd gained stacked on top of that, and had me feeling like I was a new man. With my mind relatively clear, I had been acting with the knowledge that I had a "perfect" safety net. I had known that I could easily rip through the quests that were keeping me here. If I wanted to pull the cord and get a move on to the fourth Floor, it wouldn't be much effort to do so. And because of this, I'd felt like nothing could really touch me.

Now, all that confidence was gone.

I was reminded, painfully, that I wasn't invincible. That I really might not survive long enough to rely on that "perfect" safety net. That I'd dropped my guard and almost killed myself, not because of a quest I hadn't been ready for, or some sort of real danger, but because I'd stupidly gambled on the fantasy-equivalent of fast food.

I was shaken, and a little bit ashamed.

I couldn't mess up like that again. From here on in, I knew I had to be more than just a little careful.

As I set myself back to my grinding outside of town, tossing arrow after arrow into a sack I'd stuffed full of straw, I did my best not to let all of this get to me. Each "thump" into the target launched a tiny piece of my stress away, but never enough. Not even after night was starting to fall, and the sack of straw was falling to pieces, was this enough.

But, it would have to be.

What was done, was done. Tomorrow, I would get up and start over. I'd make the best of what time I had. I would learn from this and move past it.

And I knew I'd be stronger for doing so.