The slow steady rhythm of Mina and Scarlet breathing put Scott at ease. They had fallen asleep after they had thoroughly enjoyed their lengthy snuggle session. He smiled down at them briefly. They looked quite beautiful intertwined together.

After soaking in the glorious image, he walked into the living room. While he could have used a nap himself, he had other things to focus on. He sat down on the couch and opened up his skill screen to check skills. He did not have many that he could work with at the moment. Most were related to battle or training demi-humans.

“I’ll need to pick up a few more skills. I need stuff to work with during down time.” Scott considered his needs. While he wanted to become a powerful figure in this world, his primary focus at the moment was to raise his army. What he had in raw damage potential was reasonable for the level of enemies they would face until the level cap ended. What he needed was support.

Scott frowned and rubbed his chin. He did not want to expend a precious slot in his current army for a support girl. After he had a lot more people to work with, it would be good to make an entire support squad. At the moment, however, he wanted to be able to fight and defeat stronger monsters quickly.

“I suppose I can become the primary support person until our levels increase. I am planning to become a ranged fighter for the moment anyway.” Scott considered the options carefully. Cooking, repairs, healing, and maintenance were the most important skills he would need in that role.

He had skill books for cooking and maintenance. He had lost his healing prayer spell, sadly. He would need to reacquire that or find a different one. “Maybe I should learn alchemy?”

The ability to create potions would be good, but a healing spell might be better. Potions required money or ingredients, sometimes both. “I can’t do everything myself. I’ll never develop enough skill to be useful in my role after a certain point.”

What Scott needed was to become skilled at a few support skills for the moment. He did not need to be the best, just good enough for their current needs until he could acquire the services of someone more dedicated to those tasks. “The repair skill would be nice to have, but I can pay to have equipment repaired. Maintenance will take care of minor issues. As long as I maintain our equipment regularly they won’t need to be repaired as often anyway. I’ll definitely learn it in the future, though.”

He opted to focus on cooking, maintenance, and acting as a healer. “I’ll need to learn a healing spell, but till then I can buy potions.”

Scott rubbed his chin. Cooking and maintenance would need to be his priorities. Maintenance was more important than cooking since food can be purchased in bulk. Still, campfire cooking in the wilderness would allow them to use the meat and other items found in the wilds to supplement food. That would provide them with the ability take longer hunting trips.

Scott shut down his menu screen and stood up once more. It was time to train his skills. Hunting would be difficult in the current time-frame, but that just meant that he had the chance to grind his support skills.

Maintenance was not really optimal for training at the moment since his army currently had very little equipment to work with. Cooking was a much more viable training option at the moment.

“I’ll need to go get some ingredients. I have plenty of rabbit chunks floating around, but I’ll need stuff to go with it.” Scott quietly left the cottage.

Over half an hour passed before he returned. The girls were still asleep, so he chose to be quiet while he went about his training.

He went into the kitchen and took out several pots, pans, and a myriad number of cooking utensils. He recalled the words of the cook at the restaurant that he had worked at alongside Scarlet. “Start simple and build a recipe book. I already gained one recipe by acquiring the skill so I should auto-create that.”

He started his cooking training by opening his skill menu and clicking on his cooking skill. The recipe list popped up and he chose to make toast.

Simple Toast

Bread lightly toasted on both sides. It is one of the simplest possible dishes.

Difficulty: F-1 Taste: F-1 Preparation Time: 2 Minutes Mana Cost: 35 Per Slice Maximum Servings: 4 Will You Make Toaste? Yes | No

He chose to make two pieces of toast through auto-creation. He had purchased cooking ingredients in bulk earlier, so he had plenty of bread.

After cheating his way to more bread, he pre-heated the oven and turned on the stove top burners, all of them. A few minutes passed while he busily prepared several dishes at once. One pot of water held rice. One held boiling eggs. Another held pasta. A final pot was a basic vegetable stew mixed with chopped chunks of rabbit.

In the oven he had chosen to create three dozen biscuits. Time passed and he made several dishes. Sometimes the sheer amount of things cooking at once overwhelmed him and they did not turn out as well as he would like. Still, he acquired over a dozen new recipes, all low-quality, and increased his current cooking skill level by fifty percent of his needed experience.

“Cooking takes a lot of effort to increase. They were right about that.” Cooking seemed like it would become a primarily auto-mode skill once he started to make decent food. The amount of experience earned dropped considerably for those dishes, but at least it could be used consistently, even while hunting.

“Hmm, I should make something that I actually want to eat tonight.” Was it wasteful to think that he had cooked solely to be better at cooking? Did it matter? He knew that the girls ate a lot and he was no slouch when it came to consuming food. None of it would go to waste.

He looked at the massive amount of rice sitting in a large mixing bowl then scratched his chin. He had roughly two hundred pounds of rabbit meat to dispose of somehow. He had often made stir-fry chicken strips. It would not hurt to test out rabbit stir-fry.

Scott washed his hands and acquired two chopping boards. First he chopped up the bell peppers and onions that he intended to use. Afterward he placed them into a bowl. A large slab of rabbit meat rapidly became several dozen smaller strips of meat.

Time passed as he stir-fried several pans of rabbit meat with onions and bell peppers. When the first two rounds were complete, he had just enough left for one proper pan of stir-fry so he decided to take extra-special care with it. He seasoned it at just the right time. He stirred continuously. He allowed the meat to drain properly. He did everything that he could think of to make it the best stir-fry he had ever made.

When he finished the dish, the result was clearly superior to his other stir-fried creations. He was not surprised when he heard a soft, “Ding!” Whenever he created a new dish he would be able to add the recipe, after all. However, the screen that popped up was not what he had expected.

You have created a fine medium-quality dish!

Horned Rabbit Stir-Fry Difficulty: C-3 Taste: B-1 Presentation: D-3 Overall Score: 45

Bonuses

+5 health regeneration for one hour.

Cooking Skill has increased 1 level.

Intellect +1

Agility +1

“What the... I gained more experience with that one pan than everything I cooked this whole time?” It became apparent that the key to developing the cooking skill was to actually make an effort. It made sense, but now he felt that he had wasted his time during the last hour.

Since it was his best effort, he decided that it would be the first thing he ate in this world that he had made with his own hands. He scooped up some rice from the bowl then spread it around on his plate in a careful manner. He liked to flatten his rice out on the plate when he made stir-fry and rice.

He added the stir-fried rabbit and vegetables to his rice then grinned. It looked lovely! Before he could taste it another soft ding caught his attention.

You have created a medium-quality dish!

Horned Rabbit Stir-Fry Over Rice Difficulty: C-3 Taste: C-4 Presentation: D-4 Overall Score: 45

Bonuses

+5 health regeneration for one hour.

+10 Stamina for one hour.

Cooking Skill has increased 1 level.

Intellect +1

Agility +1

“You’re kidding, right? There’s no way! Two levels just like that? What the hell was I doing for the last hour?” This was ridiculous. He changed his evaluation of the cooking skill. The auto-mode would be used for eating in the wild, but when he actively trained it would be with all of his heart and stomach. One would be for general dietary requirements; the other would be to save his sanity.

The rapid increase in experience had to be due to the overall score for the dish. None of the others that he had made had even topped the twenty-point mark. “Hmm, none of the simpler dishes had a presentation ranking, either.”

He was done cooking for the day, possibly for several days, so he packed everything up and stuck it in his inventory. It would not spoil for a minimum of seven days inside his inventory, so this cooking spree would be good enough for a few days of hunting at least.

Scott sighed then turned to look at the worst part of cooking, the mountain of dishes that he had to wash. He had thought that increasing his cooking skill would mostly involve grinding, but nothing prepared him for the sheer magnitude of what it took to clean those dishes. Plates, bowls, pans, chopping boards... they consumed his life. He had prepared fourteen dishes, but made enough to feed about fifty people for a day or two.

After he finally finished the Herculean task, Scott washed his hands and sat down at the table. He checked his skill-levels with the vain hope that he had acquired some sort of experience for that. There was no change in either his skills or stats. Washing dishes was not something that he could benefit from besides having clean cookware.

“You know; first chance I get... I’m training someone to do this shit.” He blew out a soft breath then spied a pot-lid that had escaped his notice.

“Damn...” He reached under the table to pick it up and noticed that it had a small dent in the side.

“That’s probably from where it hit the ground.” Scott started to toss it in the sink and forget about it, but realized that it would give him a chance to test his maintenance skill.

“Fine, let’s see what happens. Maintain!” A soft blue light streaked across the dirty, slightly dented, pot-lid. Once the brief lightshow ended Scott grinned. The dent was gone. The maintenance skill could correct minor flaws such as a small dent or a small break. Greater damage than that would require use of the actual repair skill.

His joy ended as quickly as it had begun, however. “Where did the food stains go?”

He stared at the spotlessly clean pot-lid. “No.”

Scott grabbed a bit of food from one of the containers. He dirtied the lid and let it sit on the table for a few minutes. After he was satisfied that it was quite dirty, he repeated his maintenance action. The food stains disappeared and the lid took on a spotless appearance.

“You’ve got to be kidding! I just washed all of these dishes, and all I had to do was use the maintenance skill on the pots and pans?” He was both distraught and delighted. Life had a funny way of sticking it to him that was both beneficial, and maddening.

Maintenance included things like cleaning, realigning, and performing minor repairs. When he washed the dishes by hand, nothing had changed so he had overlooked that skill. It was a skill that had to be activated directly to work! “Hell yeah... They go hand in hand. Even when I’m not fixing equipment, I can use this to clean dishes.”

He would wash them lightly afterward, anyway. Even if they looked perfectly clean, he wanted to feel like they were clean. Still, performing a light wash and rinse was a lot better than dealing with the burnt in stains and terrible gunk he had been forced to scrape away.

After finishing the clean-up he smiled. He had gained two levels worth of cooking skill and increased two of his stats in the process. He almost wanted to settle in and cook more, just to use his maintenance skill, but he opted to go out to the garden for some much needed exercise.

“Let’s see just what I can do now.” said Scott.

The newly classed demi-human trainer dropped down and started to do push-ups. He used to perform vigorous physical exercise in order to try and increase his stats. The system had changed a bit, but he would probably still be able to increase his abilities through hard work. Push-ups were like a strength cheat code as far as he had been concerned.

Scott performed his push-ups with his arms spread far apart. Up and down, up and down, he continued to raise and lower his body while controlling his breathing. He had twenty points of strength. That was twice the strength rating of an average level one human. Of course, that average was meant for someone who was fit and athletic.

“Sixty-seven... Sixty-eight...” Scott continued to count. He started to tire when he hit ninety-two. By the time he reached one hundred wide-arm push-ups his arms started to tremble. He persevered, however.

He felt pain lance through his arms and chest, but he continued to push. After one hundred twelve push-ups he collapsed to the floor. Scott panted heavily then smiled. That was better than his personal best in the army. He had managed to do seventy-four in two minutes for his fitness test, but that was a severe outlier. He typically managed only to perform in the low fifties.

A soft dinging sound echoed in the cool evening air. A message screen appeared.

You have taken damage due to pushing yourself beyond the limits of your stamina. Health regeneration is decreased by ten percent for one hour.

“Good.” Scott yawned then rolled over. That had sounded ominous but he received warnings like that all the time. They were actually a good thing. It would force his hidden stamina stat to increase slightly after he healed up. Of course, after he regained his health he would not be able to do as many push-ups before he reached his limit again. Yet, that was also a good thing to a point.

He felt an electrical pulse pass through his body. Scott smiled while looking up and the sky. He held one hand up and waved at a passing cloud. This world and its wonders... He felt truly alive here.

It was not long before the pulses stopped. He knew what that meant. He had fully regenerated his health and stamina. “This existence... I like it.”

Scott smirked once more then rolled over and started to do push-ups once more. He brought his arms close to his body and began to push with conviction. He kept doing that. He did over a thousand push-ups before he received his first notification that it had paid off.

Due to your intense physical exertion over the course of time your strength has increased.

Strength + 1

“Sweet, but it took a little over a thousand push-ups... I’ll have to intensify my work out soon.” Scott rolled over and started to do crunches. While his girls slept the sleep of the naughty and satisfied, their master worked hard to be just a little less weak.