“Find anything good?” Kira asked. I had broken down the mining node in front of me, just as they came back from clearing another cavern. We were once again back in the Rabbit Warren dungeon, and I had taken my frustration out on the mining node. Talking with reporters always set me on edge, and I did consider dropping my future class just to hit stuff and hurt it.

Looking down at the single small rock on the floor, “Nope, the RNG hates me right now.”

“I still can’t beli—” Blaze started.

“That you missed HannahVixen both times,” Kira and Robin finished for him.

Pouting, he continued, “She’s hot, and sh—”

“She got these huge tiddies and likes to show them off,” they finished for him again, with One-Eye joining in as well. Blaze flipped them the bird.

“You guys are mean,” he muttered as he sat down to meditate.

“You shouldn’t repeat yourself a hundred times then, and stop being a creep,” Robin said. She was also meditating.

They usually did that in the caverns they cleared, so I had to ask, “How’s it going up ahead?”

“Well, we almost lost Ed’s summon to a pitfall,” Robin said.

Kira continued, “And the cavern up ahead is swarming with rabbits. So we’re, uhm, kiting?”

“No, we’re pulling,” Robin corrected her.

“Oh right, we’re pulling a few at a time into the tunnel. But Robin accidentally pulled too many, so we had to throw a sour bomb and pull back. We’ll head back again in a few minutes, “ Kira finished her explanation.

“I see, well it’s a good thing that we got a total of four hours in here instead of two then,” I commented, “And since we’re all here, how about some food?”

“Didn’t you say you couldn’t trade as an escortee?” Blaze asked, “My satiety is getting low though. It seems that it doesn’t follow the normal game time. I’m still ticking down every six minutes, not every twelve minutes.”

“I can trade once, so I’ll make a lot of skewers, and trade to one of you. And it’s because it’s not the time in the world, but the time we’re experiencing that counts. It’s one of the dangers with certain haste spells and effects,” I said and when I got a weird look in return, I elaborated, “Most haste spell doesn’t just make you move faster. It speeds up the time in the spot you occupy, meaning that a spell that makes you a hundred times faster for three seconds, will result in a tick. Continued use of haste and spell effect can lead to empty pools real fast.”

“There’s spells that can make you that fast?” One-Eye asked with wide eyes.

“It was an example. But to be honest, when you reach the mythical tier, spells and abilities are crazy powerful, so maybe,” I grinned and pulled out a table. It might not matter because of game logic, but I was not about to slice and dice meat on the cavern floor. It was just too unhygienic.

“Oh,” he muttered dejectedly.

Ed spoke up, “There’s some kind of glowing crystal in the far end of the next room. Damian do you think it’s the crystal mentioned in the Warren Heist quest?”

I knew it was, but they had not mentioned they had taken the quest, but before I could say anything, Blaze asked, “What crystal? I didn’t see any crystal.”

“I saw it when I used Share Senses with the elemental as we fell back. I made it suicide run into the cavern,” Ed explained.

“Okay. Well it sounds like it,” Blaze said confidently, “The quest mentions glowing crystals, which allows the rabbits to leave the pocket worlds.”

“Yeah, I asked one of the priests at the temple why the quest paid so much, not that I expected to get an answer, since they’ve nothing to do with the quest,” Kira said, “But he said that it has to be done regularly. These crystals grow in size, and when they become big enough, it releases a wave that’ll attack the town.”

“So we’re saving the town?” Blaze asked with a huge smile, “Awesome, we’re regular heroes if we can get our hands on it.”

“I wonder if the rewards depend on how close to releasing a wave the crystal is?” Robin mused. Inwardly, I smiled. They were right, the closer to releasing the wave the bigger the reward. However, I kept my mouth shut. It seemed that Ed was fishing for information, and I would be damned if I gave him anything.

They continued their musing, while I received a very welcome entry in my event log.

>Your Cooking skill has increased to level 4. 1 Skill Point awarded.<

>Congratulations! You’ve enough Skill Points to level up. You’re now level 6.<

Smiling I opened my character sheet to distribute my five Attributes Points awarded to me on the level up. I dismissed Endurance and Dexterity immediately. They were at 20 points each, meaning that to upgrade them by one I would have to spend two APs. When they reached 30 I would have to spend 3 points, and so on and so forth.

I could dump all the points in Strength, which would increase my mining speed a lot. Maybe even let me consider taking on the level 3 node a few meters behind me. On the other hand my mana was a bottleneck. However, that was further bottlenecked by Meditation. In ten minutes of Meditation I could only regenerate 56 mana. So any investment in Spirit would be a single point at most, because I lost efficiency if I meditated for more than ten minutes. Agility and Resonance was of little use to me at the moment, I actually doubted if they would ever be of any use to me.

That left Vitality. The exploding potions had made me a bit wary of dying accidentally. However, I was not cooking up potions that often yet, so I felt one point in Spirit and four in Strength was the better option.

Name

Damian Heosphoros

Race

Human

Class

Locked

Level

6

Skill Points

0/7

Upgrade Points

3

Skill Cap

12

Skills Learned

12

XP Penalty

0%

Health

100/100

Stamina

320/400

Mana

55/55

Satiety: 5/100

Hydration: 5/100

Unassigned Attribute Points: 0

Strength: 19

Agility: 10

Dexterity: 20

Endurance: 20

Vitality: 10

Spirit: 11

Resonance: 10

Looking over the sheet, I was quite happy with my progress, sure I was a few levels lower than the average level of players, if only calculating the people playing from the first day. Nevertheless, as a crafter the first levels were hard. Sure, the higher level was just as hard, but you got access to more material, higher quality and rarity, meaning you could craft more complex things, which would in turn earn more XP. A pure crafter would always be lower level than a dedicated warrior though, because a pure crafter did not get the extra XP from killing stuff. And I had a couple of skills I had not used at all.

I finished cooking the amount of skewers needed to sate all of us. A total of fifty attempts to make fifteen filling skewers for them and four for me. Of course, I managed to get a bit more successes than needed, but since they were pretty much full and did not want to gain a debuff, the extra successes got thrown away. The Hydration was easily handled. I always had two waterskins on me, as well as a forty liter barrel in the cart I refilled every morning.

“How much stuff have we gotten already from the rabbits?” Ed asked while munching on his skewers.

“We’ve got thirty pieces of meat, almost ten ki—” I started, but was quickly interrupted.

By Ed who asked, “Can we just get the value in contribution points?”

“Five hundred and eighty four points.”

“Per person?”

“No, total,” I offered a small smile.

“We should’ve let those that followed us to the dungeon pay for the privilege,” Ed grumbled. I just shook my head. A couple of groups, PUGs, had followed us when we cleared the way to the dungeon. It was no extra effort on our parts, and we were heading to the dungeon anyway. If we started demanding money for that, it would make us no better than the Bears.

“That’s not a lot,” Blaze commented, then mumbled a bit before exclaiming, “If you had paid us per rabbit it would have been one thousand and thirty points.”

“Nine hundred and twenty seven,” I corrected him, “You forgot to deduct ten percent, but remember that the value I pay for the rabbits are one I’ve just set, in order to entice people to sell me their rabbits instead of looting them. And sure it might not be a lot, think about the XP gain and the fact that while we’ve spent an hour in here, only thirty minutes have passed for the others.”

“How can you make a profit like that?” One-Eye frowned, “Sounds like you’re losing money.”

“Sure, might sound that way. And in this particular batch, sure it’s true. The RNG was against me, and the higher levels reduce the chances a bit as well. However, if I take the time I can turn the meat into something that’s four times or more worth what it is now. The bones I can turn into glue which can be worth a silver instead of the copper coin it’s worth,” I explained to them, “And usually the haul is better, it’s the law of average. This time it was on the shitty end of the spectrum, next time it’ll probably be on the good end.”

“Well, we won’t make any contribution points sitting on our butts,” Robin said as she stood up, “Lets go kick some rabbits, and see if we can’t get to that crystal.”

“Will you be fine on your own?” Kira asked me.

“Sure, I might go back to the first cavern, there were some glowing moss and mushrooms I want to harvest.”

“But we didn’t clear the other passageways, what if you get killed?” Robin frowned nervously, “You’ll lose all your stuff.”

“Well getting killed would certainly suck, but if you’re killed in a dungeon, you don’t drop any items, and my cart gets removed as well. And it respawns when I do,” I smiled reassuringly. To be frank, the thought of getting killed scared me. The amount of XP I would lose was huge, just to see how much, I pulled up my skill panel for the first time in a long while.

Name

Tier

Level

XP

Observe

Beginner

1 (+1)

588/2000

Lesser Transmutation

Beginner

0

0/1000

Greater Transmutation

Beginner

0

0/1000

Imbue

Beginner

1 (+1)

1176/2000

Message

Beginner

0

485/1000

Meditation

Beginner

3 (+2)

431/4000

Butchery

Beginner

5 (+3)

4003/6000

Gem Cutting

Beginner

1 (+1)

23/2000

Alchemy

Beginner

1 (+1)

1506/2000

Cooking

Beginner

4 (+2)

127/5000

Herbalism (new)

Beginner

5 (+5)

2455/6000

Mining (new)

Beginner

0

51/1000

Unassigned XP: 0

Upgrade Points: 3

As I feared, dying would cost me over ten thousand XP. The Alchemy, Imbue and Message XP would be pretty devastating. Not that the others would not be greatly missed as well.

Seeing that they had already entered the tunnel to go deal with a rabbit horde, I turned my attention to the third level node behind me. I felt a bit eccentric when I said out loud, “Just you and me now.”

The trip back to town was a bit weird. On one side there were a lot to celebrate. The party had retrieved the crystal for the repeatable quest and I had gotten my hands on another rabbit’s foot. Not just any rabbit’s foot, but a brown one.Which was the only colour I missed for a complete set. On the other hand, Kira had perished because of a blunder Blaze had made, while clearing the large cavern with the crystal.

When we got back to the gate, I saw Kira chatting with Nise and Phil. Blaze must have seen her as well, because he took off in a sprint, shouting, “Kira, Kira!”

The look on her face when he tried to full body tackle her was pretty hilarious. Even more hilarious was his low strength score, which resulted in him hitting her hard, before falling to the ground. Kira on the other hand had not moved an inch.

“I’m so sorry Kira,” he moaned from the ground, “I didn’t mean to slip on that rabbit corpse and fall face first into a bunch of living ones.”

“Well, it shows a fatal flaw in the training I’ve been providing,” she smiled. Not a nice smile, but one of those devious smiles where you just know that you will not like the answer.

“What do you mean?” Blaze asked oblivious.

“Tomorrow we’re running an obstacle course,” Kira declared.

One-Eye scoffed, “That’s not hard.”

“Blindfolded.”

“Come on. That’s not fair, I hated when dad made us do that,” One-Eye whined.

“Deal with it. Anyway did we get the crystal?”

Ed pulled it out of his inventory, “It’s right here.”

“Great, let’s go turn it in. Our first party quest,” Kira was all smiles. I turned my attention to Phil. When we had left him, he had a large pile of logs. Now it was gone more or less, and he was level 2. An army of small wooden statuettes was lined up. They were incredible in my opinion.

He must have seen me looking, because he shook his head, “They’re crap.”

“What do you mean?” I could not help but ask, “They’re amazingly detailed.”

“They’re all wrong, can’t get my hands to move right. Helped a bit after upping Dexterity to fifteen, but there’s still a disconnect.”

“It’ll get better, a few more levels and you can get to the point where it’ll be better than in real life,” I commented, looking over all of the statuettes again. I was glad he had chosen to remain true to the period. The soldiers he had made was all of medieval natures. Knights, archers, catapults, axemen and many other different motifs. All of them stood about a handspan to one and a half tall.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked pulling up the information. They were not worth much more than firewood. His level was too low. So was the material’s quality and the rarity was common. It did not have enough points to provide any benefits.

“What I don’t understand is why they’re worth so little?” Kira butted in.

Seeing that everyone looked to me for an answer, I sighed, “Art in the game is handled weirdly. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Won’t change the price set by the system. It’s all governed by skill and crafting points. You need lots of crafting points to provide effects. The better the effect, the more it’s worth. In fact you could make amazingly expensive art by just putting a single red dot on a canvas.”

“That’s not art,” One-Eye protested.

“Didn’t say it was, but some will argue that it is. But for the purpose of the game, it doesn’t matter if it’s a finger painting by a one year old or the Mona Lisa. Only the effects that the piece of art provides influence the price, which depends on the rarity and quality of the material. And later on the skill levels of the artist. Of course if someone likes the look of something, they can offer more.”

“Who’s Mona Lisa?” Blaze asked. Only Phil and I rolled our eyes. No appreciation for history or old culture in young people it seemed.

“So, what are you going to do with it?” I asked Phil again.

“Use it for firewood for all I care. They’re all failures in my eyes,” he shrugged.

“You know what, I got an idea,” I said and started to pack up my own stuff, “I’m going to go to a shop or two first, but then I’d like you to come with me to somewhere I think your statuettes can be appreciated.”

“Of course. I was thinking of logging out soon. Need to see about arranging for transfer to your pod-hotel. I’m in Quadrant thirteen B ninety one.”

“Great,” I said as I saw the party and Nise head into town. Me and Phil still had a bit to pack up. A thing I noticed while rearranging the inventories was that I was running out of space. All the bones from the rabbits was simply taking up too much space. I considered selling them, but it was a great resource for grinding Alchemy and could easily be increased in value. What it really came down to was that I did not have enough hours in the day. And that was with forty eight of them in one. However, I might sell a few hundred kilos of them, since it was such a huge amount.

As we headed back to the town square, I made the decision of staying online every other night. It meant I would be training less for the next game, but I should be able to get a bit of a grind on. At least at the moment, focusing on this game instead of the next would be more important. Unfortunately, tonight was physical training break. So I would have to log out for some tortur— training.

After selling the items that had no other purpose for us from the dungeon dive, I went into the alchemist’s shop. I was curious about the two kinds of mushrooms I had found: Buzzing Stammerstool and Brown-eyed Cup. It was not names that I recalled from my last life.

“Evening,” the young man tending the store greeted as I stepped in, “Oh, it’s good to see you again. Here for more potion bottles? Only thing the other Travellers ask for is potions, and I don’t sell that. I’m not—”

“An alchemist, you run an alchemist supply store,” I finished for him with a grin, “Good evening Beroyn. I’m afraid I’m not here to buy anything just yet, but I was hoping you could help me with these two mushrooms.”

As soon as I pulled out the two kinds of mushroom he frowned, “Well, I can tell you which poison recipes they’re used for, but I’m not going to sell them to you. I’m not sure if we should trust such things to Travellers.”

“I’m not here to buy, I just found them and was wondering what uses they had.”

“Well, the stammerstool is used for a weak silencing poison, while the brown-eye is used for a blinding poison. But as I said, I’m not comfortable selling poison recipes,” Beryon stated once again. Looking very firm and puffed up. Which was a little funny, seeing that he was barely one and a half meters tall.

“Thanks Beryon, I was just looking for information. See you tomorrow I think,” I bid him goodbye and left. Phil was outside, looking around with a bored expression.

“Why are those people staring at me with such hate?” he asked and pointed to an alley.

I spotted someone and after using Observe, it informed me it was members of Blood Bears, “Oh, it might be because they’re trolls and not very good at it?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. While moving to the poor district, I regaled him with the run ins I had had so far. As soon as I mentioned the incident at my interview, he knew who they were. He had just not caught their names.

When we entered the poor district, Firan was the first to spot me, and immediately there was a gang of children, hoping to get picked to be my “waste” disposal assistants for the night. Setting down my cart, I asked Phil, “Could you wait here a moment?”

“I can do that,” he replied with a shrug.

I headed over to the Butcher, who was leaning on a couple of creates, observing everything, “Good evening, Butcher, I was wondering if we could talk for a moment?”

“I reckon we can,” the man said without greeting back.

“I’ve come to ask for permission to share the quest with my guild. With more people working on it, the better we can help you,” I asked, “And oh, I got an idea that might help everyone here.”

“Let’s deal with the sharing of the quest. I guess that’s okay, as long as the other thing goes unmentioned,” he said gravelly.

“What other thing?” I asked with a wide grin and a wink. Cheesy, but it seemed to fit the situation.

Grunting and shaking his head, he then asked, “And what idea is that?”

“If I’m not mistaken, no other Traveller has been by to ask for guidance, is that correct?”

“You’re not wrong.”

“Right now, the only thing the Travellers’ care about is fighting and getting horns.”

“Why?”

“For their starter quests, which also means they’re looting the rabbits instead of selling them to me,” I frowned.

“Which in turns mean you got less meat.”

“Can be the result,” I agreed with his assessment.

Frowning, he asked, “How do you propose we handle this?”

“Post the children near the gates, let the Travellers hand their rabbits to them. The children comes to you, you slaughter the rabbits. The Travellers get the horns, the children the meat and the rest goes to you,” I told him my little plan.

Shaking his head he disagreed, “If I agree to that, I would do nothing but slaughtering rabbits for them the entire day, and I’d lose my own business without any meat.”

“Make it a quest, so that they can only hand in fifty rabbits of any colour and a ten white ones. That’ll let them complete the quests, and it’ll limit how much of your time it’ll take.”

He growled in a thoughtful manner for half a minute before saying anything, “I guess that could work. But it’s only a temporary fix.”

“I know, but it’ll buy us time to find a solution. Players have already become level five and are approaching level ten,” I trailed off, knowing he would get the implications.

“Meaning that you want to sell food to them, not just feed us. And when the wound and fatigue system activates for them, you’ll be selling more food,” he was frowning a lot, “That doesn’t bode well for my neighbours.”

“I’m looking for more permanent solutions, but there’s a limit to what I can come up with at the moment. One of my guild mates have started farming though, so there might be something more we can do soon,” I explained.

Nodding slowly, he finally said, “Well, the people are hungry.”

“I was just about to handle that,” I grinned and returned to my cart. As I set up my table and grill, I explained what was going on, and shared the quest with him.

After I was done explaining, he simply said, “I see. And seeing all these kids around, you figured the statuettes I made, might be appreciated as toys.”

“Correct,” I grinned at him and fired up the grill.

“You know I should be affronted,” he commented, “It’s art, not toys.”

“You were going to burn it,” I pointed out.

“That’s a valid option for subpar art, then no one can see the atrocity,” he gave a big smile, and started handing out the statuettes. At first the kids was wary, but after getting the nod from the Butcher, they became excited. After handing out the last piece, Phil left for the inn.

I had to chuckle at Firan, who was so enthralled by her female knight statuette, she missed that I had finished the first skewers. For thirty minutes I sliced, diced and cooked over two hundred skewers, getting me halfway to another level in Cooking. I would need to start using more than one ingredient, the XP was simply not cutting it any longer.

There was one last important thing for me to do, before logging out for training, and that was to use Greater Transmutation for the first time. I knew some of it from my previous timeline, but when I had learned the spell from the scroll, it had downloaded the information into my brain, making the process much clearer for me.

Since the rabbit’s feet did not take up much space, the table would work just fine for the ritual diagram. Pulling out a piece of chalk, I started drawing on the table. What I made was just a simple triangle. It was not that complicated. I added a small circle at the tip of each point of the triangle.

For the two transmutation spells you needed a figure drawn out on the ground or any flat horizontal surface. The complexity of the diagram was determined by the quality of the material you were transmuting. Below average was considered tier three, so it would need three intersecting points in the diagram. Hence a triangle. Average quality was tier four and would need four points, meaning a square was a good figure. Or a triangle with a line dividing them. The favourite for perfect quality, which required ten intersecting points, was the pentagram.

Since I was not trying to improve the quality, the end result was still a tier three, requiring the three points. Next was placing manastones at each intersecting point. I needed to put at least the same amount of mana as crafting points at each point. Below average of common rarity meant fifteen mana. Since I only had manastones with ten mana, I put two stones at each point. A rabbit’s foot of each colour went into the middle of the triangle.

Next came the part that had me worried. The actual casting. Pulling up the overlay had me frowning, the chances of success was what I had expected, but it had taken me five ingame days to get these feet.

Rabbit Foot Charm

Greater Transmutation Level: 0

Recipe Used: No

Combined Crafting Points: 90

Highest Crafting Points of the Materials: 15

Possible Outcomes

Failure - 68%

Flawed - 20%

Success - 10%

Exceptional - 2%

Brilliant - 0%

Master Work - 0%

Base Experience: 90 XP

Mana Cost: 45

With trepidation I poured mana into the spell diagram, it took fifteen minutes to cast the spell. I kept an eye on the event log, as if it was a matter of life or death.

>You’ve finished trasmutating: Rabbit Foot Charm.<

>Rolling for outcome: 13.<

>You’ve achieved a Flawed Success. Awarding 151 Greater Transmutation XP.<

It was weird, at one hand I was super excited that I had managed to get a Flawed Success, on the other hand I was sad about the roll. If it had just been one lower, it would have been a normal Success. It was strange feeling conflicted about something that should be cause for celebration. Stopping my attention back to finish crafting the item.

Item Name

Crafting Points

Effect 1

Unlock Effect 2

Rabbit Foot Charm

68

N/A

100 points

I selected the list for Effect 1, since I could not afford to unlock any other effect. I did not even bother to look at the list, because I already knew what I wanted. Mentally I choose, ‘Luck.’

Fifty points was deducted, leaving me with 18 useless points. Not that I would have more use of a Success or an Exceptional Success, since increasing Luck a second time would cost one hundred points. However, they would have provided more XP. Nevertheless, the single point in luck was what I had been working towards so far. I also changed the name.

Item Name

Crafting Points

Effect 1

Unlock Effect 2

Lucky Charm

18

Luck +1

100 points

The single point in luck might not sound like a lot, but if I had had it on this particular roll, I would have gotten a Success instead of a Flawed Success. Luck increased the chance of all outcomes relating to chance. Which all crafting skills relied on. I could also have chosen a more targeted luck. For example, I could have chosen to focus the luck on Butchery, and I might have been able to get a two or three point increase when I used the Butchery skill. Which would be useful, no doubt, but since I was spanning so many different crafting skills, a broad spectrum increase would be worth more.

With a smile, I put the charm in my inventory.

A magical trinket, “Lucky Charm” has been detected in your inventory. Do you wish to attune to it?

0 out of 1 attunements detected.

Yes/No

Of course I chose to attune with my new charm. The charm was a special form of magic items. It was classified as a trinket, and so was jewellery. While there was no upper limit on magic weapon and armour, except for what you could physically carry and wield, the same was not true for trinkets. Every twenty fifth level you acquired a new attunement slot. If a trinket was unattuned, you could still carry it, you would just not benefit from its effects. And there was an hour cooldown after removing an attunement before you could attune to again.

Finally satisfied with the outcome, I looked at the clock. Seeing I had a bit more than an hour until I had to log out, I turned my attention to butchering some darn rabbits.