“Hmm... I’m tired and sore. Let’s head back to town for now?” a woman with long hair said to a bearded man next to her. She had just taken down her twenty-first slime, her newbie adventurer’s starter pack slung over her shoulder like a tennis bag.

The man nodded to his wife. “Can’t quite move like I used to, Helda. Let’s go.”

Vaughn, who heard the exchange while picking up some loot, noted that the couple were just normal people that he’d probably run across in the supermarket on any given day. They were the kind of outlanders that entered the Gate due to a sense of adventure and to escape the mundanity of their lives back on Earth. The Gate had brought all kinds of folks in, from the terminally ill with nothing to lose that took it as their chance to live life happily, to yuppie couples that looked like they were doing their weekend hike in their Patagonian vests, to… well… erm… shadow assassins and archmages.

Slowly but surely, the cave was beginning to clear of outlanders, as more and more people completed the dungeon and received their rewards. Not everyone had finished all their class quests; in fact most people just did the melee one, since it was the most straightforward to complete.

Soon, most of the normal outlanders retired, and all that were left were the more ambitious outlanders, composed of the diehard grinders. Needless to say, Vaughn’s party was still present among them. As the hour rolled by and Vaughn finally finished up the slime dungeon quest, he felt a sense of satisfaction seeing the notification.

Quest completed, [Clear the beginner slime dungeon].

[Completion criteria: Defeat twenty slimes [20/20.]

You have received a [Newbie starter adventurer pack].

A bag appeared in front of Vaughn out of thin air, containing all the necessary weapons required to continue on with the class quests. Vaughn was curious if it contained a health potion as well, for the people who did not realize that slime blobs healed to complete the healer quest, which was pretty much… everyone. As far as he could tell, nobody else had taken the liberty of slurping up some slime globs.

He opened up the bag. Sure enough, tucked in a pouch at the side of the bag was a healing potion with red liquid inside.

God, the system made this too damn easy, didn’t it? It was as if they were being spoon fed. No weapons? Here you go! No healing potion? Here you are! Unsure about your combat ability? Why not take a jab at these absolutely harmless green slimes that don’t attack back in any meaningful way or shape! Maybe it was the ambitious tendencies in his heart, but Vaughn could only wonder… where was the difficulty here? It’s not like he was expecting an Elden Ring smacking right off the bat, but at least some kind of challenge?

Well, now that he thought about it, the pillar did want to make things more accessible and encourage all kinds of outlanders to come over here. He wasn’t completely sure about the motivations of the system, and perhaps it was some big and cartoonishly evil plan to trap humans or something like that, but so far he just got the vibe that the rationale behind the request for outlander presence was a lot more mundane.

If he had to guess, they might have been brought here because the system thought it would be a good idea to stimulate the economy with some trickle-up-fantasy-economics. And so outlanders were being babied to make sure they learned the ropes without dying, to eventually become self sufficient adventurers and Alvatrossian-economy-stimulators, which wasn’t really that bad of a deal because even the grandpas that went through the Gate were able to do some monster ass kicking.

Alright, back to the newbie starter adventurer pack bag and that red vial of mystery liquid tucked neatly in the pouch to the side, which was probably made with only 10% real fruit juice, despite the plastic label showing all kinds of fruits in an attempt to trick less informed supermarket moms of its juice content and nutritional value.

As he examined it, an option to Identify the potion popped up. Normally in games, [Identify] would be its own separate skill and there would be some kind of cool mechanic about leveling up the [Identify] skill to see more info, but here it seemed to be just built into the system without much fanfare. Dhunnim would probably get pissed about this. After all, according to the dungeons and dragons 5th edition manual, Identify was an ability that had a casting time of one minute, a range of touching range, and was only available to bard or wizard classes or through scrolls.

Here that was probably not the case.

Vaughn took a look at the vial with Identify activated.

[Minor Healing Potion]: A healing potion able to heal minor wounds. Consume when injured, and results will show almost immediately.

Yeah, it read pretty much like Vaughn expected it to. Pretty generic. But for some reason, he felt like it was nowhere near as effective as the slime blobs. Now that he thought about it, Vaughn wondered if he could bottle up those blobs for future use…

Now that was an experiment that he definitely wanted to try out.

You are unable to determine the ingredients in this potion because you are not familiar with this material. Please increase your [Familiarity] with [???] first.

Well, would you look at that? There was something interesting about the identification system, and believe it or not it was completely different from the dungeons and dragons 5th edition manual!

That made Vaughn kind of excited. After all, his personality type was the kind that enjoyed discovering and figuring out new things. That was because he had some semblance of neuroplasticity, unlike some people–

Okay, hold it right there. Vaughn did not want to overly piss off anyone who happened to be reading his inner thoughts at this moment. Maybe there was some evil demon king in this world that liked reading people’s inner thoughts and would get offended, and would teleport across the world to smite him on the spot with his magic cane of destruction.

Better safe than sorry. Vaughn cleansed his inner thoughts, lest he get smited by the Staff of Oblivion for wrongthink. After all, it wasn’t like anyone could prove that the evil demon king wielding the Staff of Oblivion didn’t exist, so it was better to be safe than sorry in case the evil demon king wielding the Staff of Oblivion did exist–

Wait, no, that train of thought was not good either. That’d piss off the church, and while Vaughn was perfectly fine with doing that back on Earth, since it wasn’t the 17th century anymore where Galileo would get his finger cut off for proposing the heliocentric model, from what he knew about this new world so far, it was probably not a reach to say that there were some god-like entities here or there, so he better keep his inner thoughts taped shut before he offended anyone up there in the multiverse’s cosmic C-suite.

Alright, alright, he digressed once again. Back to the point. Like a mad scientist or Galileo incarnate, Vaughn Hallows now had a searing desire to figure out what exactly happened if he stuffed a slime blob inside a vial. Would he create a whole new potion?

Hoarding and spelunking would have to be put on hold for the moment as he explored this new possibility.

Vaughn popped open the cork of the minor healing potion and downed the rather vibrant tasting red liquid, smacking his lips. Good. Now he had an empty vial to work with, and also he definitely just confirmed that the minor healing potion was a whole lot worse than those slime blobs.

He took out a bow from the newbie adventurer’s starter pack and aimed it at a slime. He’d never held a bow in his life before, but that wasn’t going to stop this ambitious treasure hunter from becoming the best warrior/archer/mage/healer/any-other-class-that-he-came-across that there ever was through lots of dedicated practice.