Chapter 11 - Charcoal

The climb down the tree once Nik woke up was a lot more difficult than the previous day. He didn’t remember the handholds he had used and it was darker than the morning before since the moon that had shone upon the land wasn’t illuminating the sky now, and it was what seemed to be the middle of the night again. Additionally he suffered from the fact that the whole sky was covered by clouds. Reaffirming a theory Nik had formed the previous day. He had grown tired a lot earlier than what was usual for him, at first he had blamed stress on his new sleeping rhythm, but the more time progressed the surer he became that the day here was actually longer than it had been back on earth.

His repeated struggles of climbing down a tree at night were rewarded through whatever felt like granting him skills.

You have fulfilled a requirement for one (perception-type) race skill.

A new skill is available.

You qualify for obtaining the following Race skills [3 slots available]:

[Unobstructed Optics]: Increases visual perception.

...

A quite easy solution to a somewhat complex problem. Nik accepted the spell during the early steps of his downward climb, and for the most part it had been a tremdous help.

But the worst thing, and probably the main factor why he had woken up was the cold humid air and pelting of water droplets on leaves and the forest floor. This was the first time Nik had experienced rain on the new world and it was annoying. He had not only gotten wet and slightly injured himself during his descent - a result of him slipping the last few meters down, due to the porous nature of a piece of bark - no, his throat had also started feeling somewhat sore.

With a growling stomach, he began devouring some of the nuts and fruit he had gathered on the previous day. A messy affair due to his thoughtless handling of the berry basket, bolstered by the lack of light. The berries leaving a pleasant cooling sensation in the back of his throat, counteracting the upcoming cold. The nuts were pretty much the opposite so Nik only at a few, fully aware that he would be hungry soon again without calorie-dense food.

However, this was the least of Niks worries right now, as he had begun on the on him imposed smithing journey. The first step had been to gather wood in order to create some charcoal but as per nature’s harsh decree, it was not to be.

He had basically given up the hope of his last charcoal production run surviving the ongoing rain. A fact that didn’t prevent him from wanting to see how successful his charcoal production could have been.

Impatient, cold, and lacking anything to properly entertain him Nik started moving around trying to warm his soaked up body. Fire was not an option as Nik hadn’t bothered collecting wood or creating a place for wood to dry - something he swore to himself he would rectify as soon as he had some tools to accomplish a project of that magnitude.

Remembering some of the exercises from PE he moved towards the beach to warm himself up through exercise. Not wanting to dirty his remaining clothes he would rather put up with spikey pebbles than mud-crusted clothing.

He never enjoyed exercise mainly because of the soreness and how lacking his endurance was. He suspected that things would be different now.

------------------

Things weren’t different, sure he didn’t feel as tired as he usually did on the rare occasions of doing sports but the exercises were just insanely boring. Just like hearing your classmates ask the same question for the third time in the same period, waiting in line behind someone counting coins to get rid of their change, sitting in the doctor’s office for 2 hours.

He couldn’t fathom how people did that for fun. Maybe his perspective was skewed since he hadn’t actually earned his progress. Back a couple of weeks ago he might have succeeded in doing 2-3 pushups. He had managed to do over thirty in one go, the same holding up for most exercises he was aware of and had tried out.

Slowly it had gotten brighter during his exercising, the only good thing about his workout in Niks’ opinion was that time had passed faster than only sitting around.

Well, there was another pretty big thing that had happened during exercising. Nik had received a notification in his mind that he was able to gain another skill, while he had been trying to lift a rather heavy rock.

You have fulfilled a requirement for one (intrinsic-type) race skill.

New skills are available.

You qualify for obtaining the following Race skills [2 slots available]:

[Lesser Strength Foritification]: Strength’s effectiveness is increased by 25%.

...

This was a skill Nik wanted to take for sure and so he did. Strength was his highest stat right now, the result of a high boost from his class levels and some investment from his unallocated stat points that originated from his race level-ups.

Cheerlessly Nik looked up at the sky once again, in the hopes of spotting some amount of unoccluded sky but it was in vain. The clouds looked as though they had still plenty of water to pour down on him.

With a downtrodden mood, Nik moved to get back to his charcoal pit. In addition to slowly starting to regret not making the pit at his current base where he had all of his iron-rich rock, he was also worried about storing the charcoal he had hopefully produced.

Without any real possibility of influencing the current state of things, he began running in a slow jog, slowly ramping up his speed to get back to the small stream as quickly as possible.

That had been a mistake in retrospect. During his trip, Nik blundered, due to using his running skill on full blast and using haste. This reckless behavior had forced him to take a break since he injured one of his ankles.

Unsure of what had happened exactly Nik sat down to take a short breather. His ankle was hurting and his HP was dropping at a really fast rate. Though it didn’t take long for it to stop. It was worrying, however. He had gone down to 43 HP as a result of what he assumed to be a snapped ankle. How did that work? Back when the boar had ripped some of his muscle tissue - an injury presumed to be a lot worse - it had taken less HP to heal the wound.

This gave him a confirmation he had been trying to get for some time. His HP didn’t actually say how healthy he was, well they did kind of, but only how much capacity his body had to heal. Much like stamina was an indicator on how much physical exercise he could perform, and mana showed the capacity for magic. So if he wanted to see if his body was healthy he would have to look at how his health was changing and not what it was currently at.

After his self-imposed running break, he started up again, making sure to only use the base version of his running skill. Regretfully he considered the spells he was able to take. The was a little skill called [Stable Footing] he was eying right now. Though he was aware the picking a skill for a circumstantial reason was kind of stupid. He still hadn’t really gotten any use out of his tracking skill.

When he arrived at his charcoal pit some relief could be seen in Niks’ face. The minuscule slope had prevented major puddle building and it looked like his closing of the air intakes had also somewhat prevented internal flooding. The only issue was that there was a small puddle on one side of the construction along the entire side.

Carefully he went to the stream facing side of his dirt mount and tried to open a small hole to see inside. It was obviously quite dark inside, and due to the low visibility, he had issues discerning the charcoal status.

Experimentally he put a hand inside to check for moisture and to figure out the general status of the coal.

You have created |Lesser Charcoal|. 1 Experience Point gained.

Wow, well that is nice I guess. Well somewhat nice. Good to know that I can gain experience from other things than fighting. It would have really sucked if I had to keep hitting monsters without an actually good way of fighting them.

With a slight grin on his face, Nik moved to the stream to wash his had and also drink a bit.

He had multiple options right now. He had a mediocre way of transporting goods and with some improvements, his baskets could probably even be worn as some sort of backpacks, though that would be less than comfortable.

The others were to gather either more wood to create more charcoal, collect more rocks that identified as having a higher mineral concentration or construct a kind of furnace that he could use the first crack and then smelt his ores.

The last would most likely suffer from the light ongoing rain, the others were somewhat valid though. After some more considering, Nik favored the most comfortable option, to look for a tree similar to the willows from the earth. He wanted some longer, but also thin and bendable branches for his backpack. He doubted that he would be able to gracefully work thicker branches into his existing basket structure.

For that, he would have to most likely go back to the lake and actually explore some more, something he really wasn’t in the mood for. He had been attacked multiple times while exploring new areas and he hadn’t really been successful at fighting those situations off. Sure he had managed, but he presumed that in both instanced he had only won due to luck and his enemies underestimating him. This could eventually change but for now, he was unarmed and thus had a real fighting chance.

If he had skills and it would be a fair assumption that everything had skills and higher stats, resulting in an uneven battlefield for someone with a crafting profession. Though it could technically be argued that I have a fighting skill, a lesser hammer strike allows me to use blunt objects to fight. Something that a skill like lesser sword slash, if that even existed would most likely not allow. Maybe someone with a spear or staff skill could use some thicker branches.

In the end, he decided on gathering rocks, a whole lot of rocks. It wouldn’t do for him to have his smithing infrastructure set up, only to lack stuff the smith later on.

Grabbing his two strapless baskets Nik moved out again. This time angling towards the mountain next to the lake. His previous excursions had been peaceful, though somewhat worrying when he had been all the way on top, a feat he was not interested in accomplishing again.

Even on the way up the slight slope still in the tree line, he found plenty of rocks that identified with a high or greater rating in iron and also some other samples, mostly they were minerals that were used in modern alloys but Nik had no idea on how to implement them in a smithing alloy. Something his engineering classes had not prepared him for at all.

All in all the rock collection went rather well and Nik stopped collecting mundane rocks once he had found a cave. Cave was a generous declaration of what he found, it was just an indent into the cliff face, luckily it was deep enough to shelter him from the still ongoing rain.

Drenched to the bone Nik quickly moved under the cliff face and undressed to wring out his clothes after having checked that there were no monster remains that would indicate previous monster presences. Something he had learned in a tv program he couldn’t even remember.

This oddly also leveled his tracking skill up. A weird occurrence, as he was checking for the absence of tracks and markers but it was what it was.

Freezing Nik sat on the stone floor, only separated by his folded shirt and jeans from the cold ground. He was bored out of his mind. While he was happy that he found a place that would offer shelter from the rain it was boring. He didn’t have his smartphone with him - something that was an odd feeling in general. Sure he couldn’t have used it but it had been a companion for several years but he had left it at the tree since it was probably broken anyway. Not like he had a way of generating power to charge his phone anyways.

Due to being cold, Nik wanted to experiment with his magic. Stealthy Movement sat at a solid 100% and wouldn’t level up unless he was in danger or actually moving while using the skill, so he had only his less vital mana skills to work on. Energy Veil seemed to be a prime candidate for training as it would conceal him even further if he actually ever came across something with a magic sense. He wasn’t sure if any of his previous encounters had an exact skill like that of were just able to pierce his stealth skill.

Obviously, his other two internal energy skills could be helpful as well, but after having applied them to running he had no idea what else to do with them. Nik was kind of hoping that they would evolve into versions that would allow him to use those skills outside his body. Only time would tell if such a thing was possible. Though the prefixes ‘internal’ had him worried.

He worked for several hours until the rain had let up. Gaining him a single level in energy veil and two in both internal energy skills. In his boredom, he had tried to create energy structures inside his body. Something that showed mixed results. He had not gained the ability to gain any new skills, but he had accomplished some stuff.

The stamina in his body was quite difficult to distribute, and so far he could only encourage it to seep into his muscles, something that seemed to increase his strength by a barely measurable amount but had a slightly higher effect on his tired muscles. While he had yet to get muscle stiffness, his muscles would feel tired after some time. Using this method alleviated some of those issues. Only slightly, however, there seemed to be a limit.

Mana on the other had been a different story. If he got himself in the right mindset he could affect the flow and concentration in his body somewhat. He tried out several patterns that he could think of. Having a mana density distribution move through his body akin to waves turned out to be a bad idea. Hurting in his extremities after amassing sufficient amounts of mana - even though those ‘sufficient amounts’ were barely a few percent deviation from the norm.

A more interesting application was mana rotation and what he named mana pressing. The earlier was creating a vortex kind of structure of mana in his body. He would churn it and to some degree, it would hold up and continuously rotate for a few seconds before dissolving and equalizing with the surrounding mana. The second was almost a fusion with energy veil, and most likely the reason why energy veil even leveled. He had pushed some slight amount of mana just under his skin - the layer in which energy veil was located and pushed against energy veil while trying to keep the veil structure up. This worked as long as he didn’t shift his position. Apparently, mana would become kind of stiff and rigid in such a situation. This would break when he moved, causing his efforts to be in vain.

Finally, he had managed another feed he was quite proud of since it had taken him the biggest amount of time. He had actually expelled mana from his body. He hadn’t really seen anything happen, but his mana had dropped by 3 points over a minute. He had tried to push the mana through the pores on the back of his hand. It had hurt quite a bit, and now the back of his hand was completely free of hair.

Nik would remember this technique for the next time there was bad weather or he had downtime of some other type. He would give his face a nice clean shave - something really necessary if he were ever to meet people again.

With an occasionally clearing sky, Nik moved to collect his charcoal. He had some stuff to do.