Adam had been playing with his watch for a while now. With a bit of concentration he could simply feel what his mana was like. Whether it was full, medium or empty. He likened it to the feeling of hunger or thirst. You normally knew whether you were hungry; but it was hard to tell exactly and certain things could easily trick you. Like toast, the smell of toast would always make him hungry. White toast covered in butter. He broke free of the day-dream. Wheat like grass meant he could potentially make flour and flour meant bread. All he was missing was: a mill; an oven; yeast; salt and most importantly the butter. No point in thinking about bread for now. Concentrate on the task at hand. To know the exact value Adam had to concentrate and a visual reminder would pop up which had been distracting and disorientating, until now. With the help of Person; Adam's watch was now a top of the range multi-functional smart watch. Looking down he swiped through the faces.

There was a simple clock which he had set to twenty-four hour mode to show time of day. Person had won the argument of whether what was likely a different planet still had twenty-four hours in the day by pointing out the regen amounts and annoyingly stating, through interpretive dance, that they could work it out better. Adam conceded but called it a draw as Person had no reply to his arguement that an hour might pass quicker here and the second timer was moving quite fast in his opinion. Adam relpayed the discussion in his head and was sticking to the score being 1:1 by the end.

The other faces held his total levels; regen levels and then the same broken down by category. For completeness there was also a heartrate monitor and pedometer. Adam couldn't get it to show calories burnt but figured this was a step too far anyway; it wasn't like he had to run off a burger and fries anymore. It also showed the weather which was pretty pointless as he could just look up but a nice feature to show off to his friends. He didn't have lots of friends back in his old life; he got on really well with work colleagues that were friends and then there were his parents. None of them were here so it wasn't really possible to show them his new watch. Well at least he could show it off to Person.

In response to the showing off; Person conjured a mini-watch equivalent for their wrist and proudly added a tiny cuckoo that came out when they pressed a button at the bottom. This made Adam laugh; taking his mind off the fact that he couldn't show the watch off to anyone else as he had left his old life behind. It was probably for the best he buried those thoughts for the moment. He needed to be practical and work to survive; not dwell on things he had lost and left behind.

Moving on to more practical things Adam contemplated how to spend the rest of his day. On his run to the river Adam had been mainly concentrating on his stamina but in the back of his mind he had a basic plan on how to make his tent more secure. Step one was to build a small fence around his tent from branches and step two was to remember not to store food inside the tent. Simple plans were often the best. He had no idea how to get water to camp; so was putting that task on hold for now and finding the vermite sounded too stressful until he knew he could sleep easier at night.

Using his new gadget he found a running speed that kept his stamina regen at about -20/hour and was now only stopping if he saw something he wanted to investigate with his skills. He headed downstream towards the forest deciding that more trees would make it easier to find the right kind of wood for his purposes. He had used about half his remaining stamina and was midway through the morning when he could tell from his Inspect skill that the area had changed. Concentrating as before he learnt that he had entered Forest, edge - low threat, level 1. He now knew which trees were hazel and vaguely remembering that a hazel fence was a thing he concentrated on finding these for his collecting. It turned out that these trees had some nice long and straight branches. Adam made two piles; one of older hard and straight wood and the other the younger more flexible wood that he optimistically planned to weave between the older wood.

The collecting progressed nicely with a break here and there to get a drink of water from the river or inspect something new. A large oak tree grabbed his attention as he explored and gathered. A search around it led to the aquisition of an upgrade to his club (stick) to what he was calling an oak staff (longer, thicker stick). Given that the staff was still intact and sturdy after two rounds of what Adam was calling 'fight the tree' and his old club had broken on round one; he was sticking to the designation of upgrade. He had also discovered that hazels produced hazelnuts; made sense with the name. These were duly collected and added to his pack. Once he was happy with the size of his piles he had a break to eat an apple and plan how to get the wood back to camp.

The solution had been to put on his backpack and then slide the branches through the straps behind his back. Trying to run once loaded with wood took too much concentration and had a significant impact on his stamina which was quite low having spent all morning being active. It was into the afternoon by the time Adam had made a couple of trips bringing the wood back to camp. He was now ready to build his defences.

Problem one had been getting the stakes into the packed earth that made up the ground around the tent; solved by using one end of his staff to dig a little hole for each of them. This led to problem two - getting the stakes to stand up; solved by making little piles of rocks around the base. Problem three - having placed the stakes too wide apart to weave the thinner branches through effectively was solved by digging more holes; adding more stakes and basically starting from scratch with the weaving. Having completed his task Adam stood back to admire his work. There was definitely room for constructive criticism. The main positive being that it was definitely a fence. It stood about four feet tall; varying in places to be slightly higher. There was one entrance that he had left to the side rather than in front of the tent with leftover shorter branches to fully enclose him when needed. He hadn't enclosed the campfire; mainly because he couldn't light a fire at the moment. Checking his watch; it was now 17:00. Stamina = 20; Regen = -2/hour. He had food; had a fence which he hoped would protect him and also had a staff that would protect him more with the downside that it wouldn't help while in the tent. He was also thirsty which meant a trip to the river since he hadn't found a way to bring any water to the camp yet.

It was a balance of time and stamina to get to the river and back before it was getting dark but Adam managed it with some time to spare; watching the sunset as he arrived back in camp. He watch showed Stamina at 4 which worried him initially as regen had been -5/hour on returning to camp but was now climbing back up. Eating a few pieces of fruit seemed to help this and as his stamina level dropped to 3 the regen turned positive again to 1/hour. Not wanting to test his fence all the rest of the fruit and nuts that Adam had gathered through the day was placed in a pile on the outside before filling the gap he was using as an entrance with the remaining branches. Nothing else to do Adam climbed into his tent; secured the entrance and lay on his blanket. His watch showed 21:40 and though it was dark outside he wasn't quite tired enough to sleep. Each rustle of wind outside was also reminding him of the vermite that had arrived the night before. He felt more secure than previously but now the sun had set a flimsy fence suddenly didn't seem enough protection.

Not able to sleep he took the only distraction open to him and looked through his status windows rather than sit there inventing monsters at every noise. First, he must have some exp to collect after his hard work.

Quests Complete? Exp

Work out where I am

-continue exploring area

25% 40 Survive the night 0% 10 Get a better weapon 100% 5* Find a way to bring water to camp 0% 20 Brush teeth 0% n/a Find food and water 100% 5* Find out where the vermite come from 0% 25 Make camp more secure 100% 5 Buy some ice-cream 0% n/a Collect Y/N 10

The practice quests were still on the list so he crossed them out; no point in leaving it cluttered. Then he collected the exp. Which meant, he did some maths in his head, he should have fifty experience by now. He would think there might be a reward by now. He concentrated on the experience column in the chart activating Inspect; hoping he could learn more. Experience - Experience is gained for completing tasks and defeating monsters; can be used to level skills. Damn, he had to allocate the experience; why had he not checked this before a whole day had passed. He presumed that he was just going to level up once he gained enough. He pulled up his skill window; inspecting the levels in more detail and filled the information in with a new column.

Skill List Level Level up (exp) Cost Description Inspect 1 20 0.1 mps Allows [Inspection] of objects (including plant life) and system Discern 1 20 1 m Allows [Inspection] of beings and animals stealth 1

20

5 sp (activate)

2 sp/hr

Allows user to hide from simple detection methods

Great. He could level up two of his skills to level two if he wanted. Decisions, decisions. He didn't really have much use for Discern currently. That left Inspect and stealth. No way he was rushing this one though. Mana Check = 14.3 but would levelling Inspect make it drain more or less mana? He concentrated on the level up column and was left with the impression that it would cost less mana at level two but gained no specific details. So Inspect was top of the list at the moment. Wait though, if experience levelled skills, what would cause his class to level. Adam looked at Person for guidance and rather than the expected shrug was pointed towards his class title. He concentrated on the level part of his class and was rewarded. Class Level - Determined by the level of your class skills.

This made his first choice easy. He levelled Inspect

Skill List Level Level up (exp) Cost Description Inspect 2 40 0.05 mps

Allows [Inspection] of objects (including plant life) and system.

Increasing level gives additional information where available

Just in case Adam double checked - he was still God Class - Level 1. He activated Inspect again while concentrating on the level and was glad to see additional information was available. Class Level - Determined by the level of your class skills. You can increase this by increasing your average skill level past your class level. Ok, not that complicated. Increasing Discern would increase his class level. This was tempting. Some more information gathering was needed first though. There was only one skill in Scout class; so a level there would mean he would level Scout class; and stealth was more useful than Discern at the moment he could tell that Scout was secondary to God in the class structure though so would this make any difference?

Adam used inspect on different parts of the system to try and gain some insight before making his decision; asking Person for help and insight whenever he thought it might be useful. This was particularly tricky in the dark until Adam used Inspect on the system interface menu and learnt that Person had a setting that allowed them to give off a dim lumnious light while in the dark. He didn't really learn much else of use. The outcome was that he basically didn't know enough and would just have to guess and make a choice. On coming to this conclusion two things happened. First his watch started beeping causing him to look down at it and see the time was 0:15. Second the rustling outside the tent increased in both volume and intensity.

Thinking the noise had caused the increased rustling Adam frantically pressed the screen to see what the problem was. He swiped through the pages and found the culprit. His stamina regen was -20/hour and this; coupled with the fact that his stamina was only at 8 had activated an alarm he had set while playing with functions by the river. Something was draining his stamina. Unable to think rationally about what this could be Adam sat listening intently to try and work out where the noise outside the tent was coming from. He thought it was the direction of the food he had left outside his fence and only now considered whether it had been a good idea to leave it anywhere near the camp. While thinking what to do; he glanced down at his watch again. 0:29; how had fifteen minutes passed already? He thought back to his earlier conversation with Person; maybe a minute was truly quicker here. He realised he had no time to get distracted as he watched it flick over to 0:30 noticing at the same time that his stamina regen dropped to -30/hour. His stamina now at 2 Adam made the same decision as the night before. His leveled his only protective skill - stealth and activated it. The last thing he was aware of before passing out a second night in a row was a notification.

Scout Class has reached Level 2