Kestra had paid attention to the gear of the people in Tank's camp, and once she was far enough off from his team, she shimmied up a tree and pulled out her journal to sketch out the clothes designs. There was no telling if the clothing was typical of the region, or a kind of rebel uniform, so she wasn't about to stitch up a set of clothes to match them, however noting down the differences from her own gear seemed worthwhile.

One immediately obvious difference was that everything was cloth, and had the drape of a plant-based material. The colors were also muted yellows, greens, and browns, which were common enough in plant based dyes. The pants the women of the camp wore were fuller, almost more of a divided skirt than pants, and their shirts all had sleeves down to the wrists. That hadn't been the case with the men. Their pants were more tube-like, and their shirts had ranged from the long-sleeved kind the women wore to sleeve-less vests.

The men had also sometimes sported leather jackets like Tank and Puck had worn, with metal plates sewn into them. The jackets extended below the groin and had three-quarter sleeves. Over the sleeves, most of the men wearing the jackets had had on open fingered leather bracers that covered the cuff of the jackets and had straps across the palms of the hands.

Their shoes had been made from formed leather, and had the click on stone of a hard sole. Except for Tank and Puck's boots. Those, too, were a formed leather, dyed black, but their soles were a flexible something that had muted their steps. She had also noticed that they left tracks during the walk away from the camp that were foot-shaped, but filled with a weird grid, unlike the more solid-filled steps of the other men and her own partial footprints.

Once she left their team behind, moving to reduce the trackable traces she left behind hadn't even been a conscious decision.

Leaving aside the issue of clothing, Kestra contemplated what she wanted to do in this realm based on the bit of interaction she had had.

More transmigrators, a lot more, it sounded like, pointed to a worrying circumstance. Kestra wasn't a [Mage] or a [Scholar] to go poking at the metaphysical underpinnings of the realms, but she couldn't help but worry about the stability of this realm if so many people were being pulled into it. She didn't remember that topic being covered in the tome of divine revelations she had copied during her tribulation, but she also felt very … fuzzy about all that had occurred since entering the holy place, looking for an upgrade to her [Combat Alchemist] class.

There must have been something special about the tribulation non-space she had been in, because Kestra was pretty certain sure she couldn't create a new personal realm now, in the mortal plane of existence. Not just because there wasn't enough mana, but something else she couldn't put her finger on was missing.

Stewing on the what's and why's, however, didn't change the what was, and the biggest concern for her situation came down to lacking a safe place to hole up and assess her current assets.

Oh, she knew what was in her Holding ring. She didn't know what was in her connection to this new realm.

Grunting huffs caught her attention, and Kestra pulled her strung bow from her Holding ring, withdrawing a hunting arrow from her hip quiver.

Hunting, as opposed to war arrows, didn't bother with affixing heads to the shafts. Either the shot was good enough to instantly cripple, or the prey would have a few moments to bleed out. A war head was intended to cause as much muscle damage as possible, which was contrary to the hunter's desire to gain as much good meat from their prey as they could.

A boar with a pale coat snuffled out of the underbrush. It was coming up along the path she left, and seemed mildly confused when it sniffed its way to the base of the tree she was currently sitting in.

Kestra took a moment more to study it before acting. Its eyes were beady, its tusks quite nice, and were she standing next to it, it would probably come up to her waist at the shoulder. It was a big specimen, and monstrous if it was hunting her. Until she could see its teeth, she wouldn't know if the boars here were carnivorous, or the omnivores she was used to.

That pause gave the boar enough time to spot Kestra staring down at it, and it squealed and backed up, which Kestra interpreted as readying itself for a charge.

Kestra had also been sighting her arrow during that time, and she loosened it, right through the boar's beady left eye.

The boar dropped. A golden vapor-thin mist rose from the boar and swirled up at Kestra. As it sunk into her, causing no small amount of panic on Kestra's part, a blue screen under the EXP stack started flashing for attention.

Level Up!

You have reached the next level. You gain 5 boosts to distribute across your statistics.

Was the golden glow this EXP stuff? She made a psychic search of herself, but found no new, adverse affects conditions.

There was also a miniature stele poking up over the boar's corpse. Knowing she didn't have much time before the smell of fresh, mana-filled blood would attract other predatory monsters, Kestra shuffled down from her tree and approached the corpse.

She had to touch the corpse to store it or strip its carcass down to usable material, though she tried to avoid the itty-bitty stele as she did so. On touching the corpse, though, another blue screen popped up for her attention, this one a general type.

White Boar Slain

Loot:

‎ - 2 Ivory Boar Tusks

‎ - Pristine White Boar Hide

‎ - 10 Kilos Boar Meat

‎ - 1 Low Base Elemental Core (Earth Attuned)

Do you wish to loot this corpse?

YES / NO

Kestra mentally poked the YES option, curious to see what would happen.

Personal Storage Device Detected

Would you like to always send loot to your personal storage device?

YES / NO

In point of fact, Kestra would rather this "loot" go to her personal realm for Inspri to sort.

ERROR!

Discovery of personal sub-realm attached to low leveled entity! Assessing mana draw …

Additional attached personal sub-realms discovered! Assessing mana draw …

World seed discovered in connected personal sub-realm. Mana draw stable. Assessing origin of sub-realms …

Low leveled entity possesses title: Transmigrator.

No action needed.

Personal Storage Realm Detected

Would you like to always send loot to your personal storage realm?

YES / NO

And she had apparently thought that in the direction of her connection to the Realm of the Ten Horizons. Yes, she might as well follow through on her whimsy.

Compatible Storage Detected

You have an inventory system in the personal storage device to which you always send loot. Would like to automatically loot all corpses to which you contribute to the kill? Note: this option may be changed through meditation.

YES / NO

That sounded useful, so Kestra chose YES for now.

During her distraction with the blue screens, Kestra noted the boar's corpse visibly deflated when she chose to loot it, and as soon as the hide was stripped away, the corpse broke up into mana and was absorbed into the land, along with her arrow.

That was annoying. And far too like how she expected a dungeon to operate.

Anyhow, she was lingering too long near the site of a fresh kill in monster infested woods.

She made a last visual sweep of the area and took off, storing her bow as she moved.

It wasn't so much that Kestra ran into the monstrous elk as that the elk ran into her. It was moving quickly enough that Kestra heard its approach, but didn't have time to get up a tree. She was around thicker brush, so she decided she wasn't going to have sufficient range to bother with her bow. Her swords it was, then.

If the elk had kept on running, Kestra wouldn't have engaged it, but it seemed to have spotted her just fine and put its head down for a charge.

She dodged out of the way just enough to ram one of her short swords into its neck, letting go to keep the sword in the elk's throat so the wound stayed open. Quick healing had been a common problem with the dire beasts of Kestra's home realm.

The elk grazed Kestra with a hind-kick, which probably bruised her thigh bone if experience were anything to go by. She retaliated with a slice across the elk's tendons, with made it stumble and crash into the brush. While it was struggling to right itself, Kestra pushed off with her good leg and jumped onto the elk's back. From there, a brutal thrust though the elk's spinal column finished it off, and she quickly retrieved her sword still in the elk's throat lest it be turned to mana with the deflating corpse.

She dismissed the loot notice, and the new level up notice, cleaned her blades and stored them again.

Then a bear roared behind her, and Kestra took off running. Even without turning dire, bears were bad news to tangle with. She risked a glance back and saw it tearing apart the shrunken elk corpse. Maybe interacting with the corpses prevented them from dissipating so quickly? Kestra filed it away for future experiements and kept on putting distance between herself and the bear.

She found a stream around the time her stamina bar began flashing at her, and she paused there just long enough to wash the worst of the sweat off her body and drink a few handfuls of the water. She pulled out a travel loaf and a belt knife, cut off a few slices, and made short work of eating, returning the cleaned knife and the rest of her loaf to her Holding ring.

Eating brought her stamina back up to a quarter full, and Kestra moved away from the water source carefully, striving to leave as little trace of her passage as possible, including her mana-scent. When she felt safe enough, she climbed another tree and settled in for some soul scouring.

One of the first things she did was add another notice box for the blue screen stacks, this one holding the loot notices. She colored it purple. Then she went through the general notices, saw nothing new, and cleared the EXP notices. The white boar had been worth 880 EXP and the savage elk 600, which put her 400 EXP toward level 5. That would require a total of 1,600 EXP to achieve the level up.

Why was it so hard for the people of this realm to level? She wasn't sure, but it felt like she was getting some of this EXP for increasing her skill ranks, a minor amount compared to the kill EXP she had gained, but killing wasn't that hard, was it? True, the fights had required skill, but surely they weren't that far beyond the normal capabilities of a human?

Kestra shifted, feeling the pain of her bone bruise, and reminded herself that even in her old world there were a lot of people who went out of their way to avoid fights. Having the Blades skill didn't mean one used their sharp, pointy bits for cutting up enemy monsters; one could just as easily whittle or prepare ingredients for the cook pot.

And thinking of her wound, Kestra recalled accidentally making that Tiger's Eyes spell the night before, just by focusing on how it felt when her Night Sight potion worked through her body.

She focused on how her Minor Healing potions felt when she used them, willing that feeling to apply to her bone bruise.

Congratulations!

You have successfully taught yourself the [Novice] Grade [Minor Healing] spell!

+100 EXP

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Minor Healing

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

GRADE: Novice

Use mana to accelerate the target's natural healing.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Components: Target's Stamina

Cost: Channeled, varies by severity

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Her mana bar dipped down to three quarters before her Healing spell stopped, and Kestra ate another few slices of travel loaf to help her stamina bar recover.

The green stack notice was bright, indicating other skill related notices. They consisted of having gained a Marksman skill, probably when she shot the boar, and a Blades skill, most likely from fighting the elk. She was a little surprised that she hadn't gotten a Running skill from escaping the Bear, but she wasn't going to complain.

The loot from the savage elk consisted of hide scraps, 10 more kilos of meat, and a low grade Base elemental core with Wood affinity.

The cores were interesting, but could be dealt with at a later time. Kestra pulled up her Profile again and looked it over.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

PROFILE

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

NAME : Kestra Boom-Smiter

LEVEL : 4

EXP : 500/1600

RACE : Human

TITLES :

‎ Transmigrator

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

BOOSTS: 20

STRENGTH: 7 + 0 = 7

AGILITY: 10 + 0 = 10

STAMINA: 8 + 0 = 8 [120]

STAMINA RECOVERY: 8 + 0 = 8 [0.8/s]

MANA: 10 + 0 = 10 [100]

MANA RECOVERY: 10 + 0 = 10 [1.0/s]

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

OPEN APERTURES: 1

TEMPERING STEPS: (0) Untempered

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

She settled herself more firmly into her seat in the tree branch and began willing the allocation of her boosts, one boost point at a time.

Back home, they had received grades for attributes of Might, Endurance, Limberness, Focus, Potency, and Wits, with Vitality and Charm mentioned, but never explicitly identified. Which attributes one could perceive in themselves had to do with which classes one possessed. Her [Combat Alchemist] class had let Kestra know that her Focus and Limberness were both Good, and her [Woods Wraith Hunter] class had shown her that her Might and Endurance were Moderate. Potency and Wits were the domain of spell chuckers, so Kestra never expected to see anything about them.

Fighting with her swords and running around indicated to Kestra that she needed to increase her strength and stamina attributes, at least up to the level of her agility. Her recoveries seemed to be needful, too. That would take seven of her boost points, leaving her thirteen more to distribute.

Going slowly, she noticed her body was incapacitated with each boost point applied for about five minutes. She also noticed that her mana pool was ten times her mana stat, but her stamina pool was fifteen times the total stat. That raised the question of why, which reminded Kestra that she needed to head to this Sortalheim to get her Guide to the Ten Horizons .

On the bright side, she was able to do her meditations even with her body out of her control. She added another indicator to her holographics, a rotated blue square on top of her EXP bar to quickly access her Quest notices.

She still had the three open quests: the welcome quest to reach the anchor, tempering her body, and opening her apertures.

Tank had said there was a maximum number of boosts that could be put into any given stat. He also said that humans started out with between three and five in any given stat, and her lowest had been seven. Maybe she should see what a difference those three points into her strength made.

Kestra was up to three fifths of her stamina bar when she finished bringing her lower stats up to ten. From her Holding ring, she pulled out a length of seasoned wood sufficient to make a decent club and looked around for a fallen branch of roughly to same size. She knew she had been able to make the wood in her hand bend before, but not break, and while she wasn't about to waste the good material she brought with her, she could get a feel for how close the fallen branches around her were to it.

She had to get down from her tree and cast around on the ground for a good half hour or so before she found a decent comparison branch. With it being green wood, it would be a bit more inclined to bend, but it should still break after about the same amount of pressure.

It snapped with only a bit of effort.

Kestra went looking for more wood to break, reaching her limit with a branch as wide around as her thigh and not much longer than her leg. She dusted off her palms, used a quick casting of her new Minor Healing spell to fix the scrapes, and reconsidered.

She had entered this realm with the stats of someone already to level five, and a Free Lancer's skillset. Maybe she wasn't the best person to compare the average native with, but she should definitely expect that there were natives like her fellow Free Lancers, filled with the curiosity and drive to improve and explore.

If the average level of this Horizon was eight, like Tank had said, then she needed to do some hunting and some exploring, and figure out a bit of the basics of this realm's Alchemy.

Kestra started her exploration by getting back into a tree and checking on her personal realms.

Inspri was pleased with the new items to inventory, but was always eager for more to order. Her cabin realm was quite sterile, but stable. The realm with the world seed seemed both overfilled by the pressure of the seed, and empty but for that single mass of crystallized mana hanging in the middle of an unformed spherical expanse balancing atop a closed tome.

Kestra didn't really know what to do with that, so she decided to work on her cabin realm. That could use more dirt, air, and water. She had somehow given it a day and night cycle during the tribulation, but until she tried to grow some plants there she wouldn't know if it was the right kind of light.

Fortunately, Kestra was in the middle of a wild wood. She decided to just send over some loam with each of her steps, and once the soil level felt deep enough, she would see if she could transplant individual herbs and maybe even some trees. If that worked, she would focus on gathering up alchemically interesting plants and turn her cabin realm into more of a garden realm.

Until then, she continued to inspect the plants around her, harvesting the ones her Identify spell noted as having some alchemical use and making preliminary assessments of how and were to extract their alchemical properties.

She also kept an eye out for the various tracks and traces left about. When she came across some small game trails, she decided to set up a few hunting snares for small game, to see what she would catch.

While she was out and about, she came across what seemed to her to be a deer trail. She followed it to a cluster of berry bushes with sharp, pointed leaves. Her Inspect spell identified the berries as very tart Five Year Pucker Berries, rich in Wood Affinity. The berries were still pale green, a sign of immaturity.

Kestra decided to take a cutting of the berry bush, but found to her surprise that it wasn't a bush so much as a vining thicket, with shallow roots. She instead dug up a smaller cluster of vines and sent them to Inspri to store with her other potential transplants.

While she was straightening from that, she got a notice about killing a whispering hare, which yielded a scant 85 EXP. Still, better than nothing. She debated for a moment, then decided to continue after the deer.

She found the trail makers bedded down for the day in a patch of Three Day Itching Leaves, a prickly bush with a mild Fire Affinity. They weren't deer, but they were something that looked at least closely related. They all had horns, two that grew in between their ears and sloped back, providing a bit of protection for their necks. There were three in the group she found, with one larger one and two nearly as large.

Kestra pulled out her bow and quiver, lined up her shots, and managed another eye shot on the largest of the slumbering horned deer. Her second arrow, fired off quickly, caught the nearer of the smaller horned deer in the throat.

It woke, kicking, staggered to its feet and getting the second smaller beast to surge away in a blind run. Kestra let it flee, sending her third arrow into the second beast's neck again.

She put her bow away and drew out her short swords. Taking care to avoid the toxic bushes, she paused only long enough to retrieve her arrow from the corpse of the first beast, a Forest Antelope from the loot notice. Then she took off after the wounded one.

It didn't go far, but it also bled a lot. Kestra carefully approached the collapsed, but still living, beast, circling to come in from an angle that the beast was least likely to be able to react to, and stabbed it in between visible ribs.

A quickly dismissed blue screen heralded its death, and she again just as quickly snatched back her arrows while her auto loot made short work of harvesting materials from her prey.

Kestra then left the dissipating corpse behind, heading for water again to rinse off the scent of her kill.

She got another kill notice, for a second whispering hare, on the way, with a level up notice for reaching level five, and diverted to check her traps. If she was going to need to wash anyhow, she might as well do it once.

The whispering hares were pale creatures that provided high quality hides and Earth Affinity claws, along with half a kilo each of meat.

She reset the snares, crushed some fragrant herbs nearby to cover her scent, and returned to the stream she had found and washed again.

She also diverted quite a lot of the stream into her cabin realm, including scooping up a bunch of tiny fish. There was a stony basin where the water she had made during her tribulation already sat, and she simply added the stream water to it.

Kestra picked another tree to settle in for the night, ate more travel loaf for dinner, and considered how much easier her day had gone with the increased stamina and strength. She decided to put her remaining boosts, with the five more from reaching level five, as five each into strength, stamina, and stamina recovery, with the last three being held in reserve.

While she was doing that, she got another notice about killing a Golden Badger. That brought her attention to the subtly brightened skills notice stack. She checked that and discovered that she had gained skills for Traps and Tracking. She still didn't know what the blue screens referred to as her Skill Book, but she also wasn't terribly concerned about it just yet.

When she was done with applying her boosts, she deftly scampered down from her tree to go collect her bloody harvest. The EXP she was gaining from killing with her traps was augmented by gains in her Traps skill, but it was a trickle compared to actually hunting her quarry. Kestra decided not to reset any of her sprung traps anymore, and to take down any that didn't get sprung by morning.

She planned on sleeping up a tree tonight, and after looting the Golden Badger corpse and taking down the remains of her trap, she gave a quick wash of her hands, then headed back to the tree she had been perching in while boosting her stats. It had some relatively comfortable branches.