Deciding to forgo starting another fire to cook the left-over bug meat from last night I chewed on the last remaining crumbs from the cake things as I walked around Tane once more trying to spot anything that might be of interest nearby. I made sure to have the Amoeba follow me. I probably wouldn’t actually need it for anything today but there was little point leaving it sitting outside the hollow as well. Besides a little caution never hurt anyone.

I was still shirtless after what had happened yesterday but thankfully it was warm enough that I wasn’t very bothered by that for now. I still made a mental note to sort something out to replace the shirt though since getting hit by another acid attack without something to protect even if it was just a little seemed like a really bad idea. In some of ways wearing a shirt would actually be a bad idea for me unless I was fighting since I had the Photosynthesis Skill which would allow me to convert sunlight and water into energy like a plant but that didn’t mean that I might not need something to wear if the weather started to turn. Come to think of it, I should probably be thinking about making some basic protective gear that wouldn’t slow me down too much for when I went hunting. If the fight with the bugs yesterday had taught me anything it was that even comparatively weak monsters like them could injure me quite badly if I wasn’t careful. Most of the Yajashian warriors that I had seen in my dream last night hadn’t really worn much armour but what little that they did have looked like it had been made with mobility in mind so I decided to base my own equipment off of theirs when I got around to making it.

“Hmm, Tane would it be alright for me to use this?” I asked the tree as I came to a halt in front of a large branch that had obviously fallen off of Tane at some point. It would be difficult to know for certain without using my Nature Shaping Skill on it, but I got the feeling that it would make excellent material for many things. Possibly even the basic protective gear that I was planning on making.

“Use what?” Tane asked.

“One of your fallen branches,” I explained.

“Sure, go ahead. I don’t really care, it’s not a part of me anymore after all,” Tane replied. “I don’t even know why you asked.”

“Because it used to be a part of you so I just figured you might have a problem with me just using it without your permission,” I said then realised that as a tree Tane wouldn’t understand the concept of ownership. In fact, explaining ownership to a being that only needed sunlight, water and fertile soil to survive would probably be completely pointless. “You know what never mind. Thanks, Tane.”

“That’s fine, I have no use for it. However, may I ask what you plan on doing with it?” The tree asked.

“Well, I’m not sure yet but the wood that you’re made of must be pretty special stuff,” I replied looking up at the magnificent tree that towered so high above me I was amazed that clouds hadn’t formed below its crown. “So, I bet I could make some really interesting stuff from it with my Nature Shaping Skill.”

“Your Nature Shaping Skill?” Tane asked curiously. I was starting to get used to talking to Tane this way. “Could you please explain what you mean by that?”

“My species have the ability to shape stone and wood using their Mana,” I replied. “Mana is the same energy that I used when I went hunting earlier. In fact, I suspect that you actually use it to do things like talking to me or repelling the local fauna. You know what; why don’t I just show you what I mean?”

Reaching out towards the massive fallen branch which was almost as thick as I was tall, I infused my hands with Nature Mana and pulled a small piece of wood off with ease. Looking down at the wood in my hands my eyes widened. This wood was by far the easiest for me to shape so far and my Nature Shaping Skill was telling me that it was also stronger than any other that I had shaped. As one might expect by the ease with which I could shape it, it also conducted Mana very well which didn’t really surprise me that much considering what I had just said to Tane.

“Well that is interesting,” Tane said inside my head as I continued to mould the piece of wood in my hand over and over again.

It wasn’t large enough to be actually useful for making something, but I decided to keep it so that I could use it to practice my Nature Shaping while I walked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “In a lot of ways, it’s my most useful Skill.”

“I will be very interested in seeing what you can do with it,” Tane replied.

“So, will I,” I agreed as I continued to walk around Tane. I wasn’t just wandering for the sake of wandering I was actually looking for something that I had found the other day.

“Ah there you are,” I said as I came to a halt in front a strangely shaped rock. It was shaped like an elongated egg and stood about one and a half times my own height. In other words, it was the perfect height and shape for me to make it into a statue of a certain man who had given his life so that his troops could retreat.

Making a statue of Tarko might not be the best use of my time but I had decided that showing my respect for him was important enough that I should at the very least get started while I still remembered what he looked like. Besides it wasn’t like I could use my Mana Shaping Skill for very long with my current MP regen so I would be able to get some training or other stuff done while I was waiting for it to regenerate.

Using my hands like blades I started removing large chunks of stone from the rock. I chose to leave the pieces that I had cut off where they fell for now. Later on, I planned on fusing them together to make some sort of plinth for the statue. In a lot of ways that was what made my Nature Shaping Skill so useful. Even the things that would usually be waste could be recycled into something else.

It also lowered the level of pressure that I would normally feel if I attempted something like making a statue like this. Even if I made a mistake, I could just fix it with my Nature Shaping Skill, and I was definitely going to make a lot of mistakes. I wasn’t a sculptor, hell I wasn’t even that artistic. But in a lot of ways that was why doing this was so important to me. I didn’t know if the Yajash had a tradition of making statues of their fallen heroes like humans did so for all I knew I was the only one who would do something like this.

I hoped that this statue of Tarko would become the centrepiece of the village when the Yajashian refugees got here and functioned as a symbol of the resilience that would be needed to survive in this savage world. But in the end, I was really only doing this so that I would remember what Tarko had done for the rest of my life.

While I was working, I made sure that the Amoeba was moving around in increasingly complicated patterns in the hope that this would allow me to continue to increase my Minion Control Skill while I was working.

However, I was soon forced to stop to take a short break when my MP ran out. Despite the fact that I was only using my Nature Shaping Skill in bursts as I sliced the excess material away using Nature Shaping still drained my MP very quickly. I had also been explaining to Tane what I was doing while I was carving the excess stone away which meant that I was actually much more tired than I would be normally. Explaining things like this to Tane was actually really difficult and even by the time that I had run out of MP the tree still didn’t really understand. This didn’t really bother me. Being a tree Tane didn’t have a point of reference for what I was talking about as the closest thing it had to a social life until I arrived was occasionally communicating with one of the other members of its species in this forest. Tane had even admitted that it only very rarely talked with the other members of its species that were close enough that they could communicate and that the idea of talking to me as much as it did was an unusual one for Tane.

“Well I appreciate you talking to me as much as you do Tane,” I told the tree. “My people can go insane if they don’t have anyone to talk to for an extended length of time. Uh, insanity is a type of sickness that makes us act unpredictably, among other things.”

“Well then I shall continue to do so,” Tane responded as I decided to continue scouting out the area while my MP regenerated. I had scouted out some of the area already but the only area further away from Tane that I had really checked out was where I had hunted the bugs yesterday.

As I walked through the forest, I noticed a tree with familiar looking fruit hanging from it. A grin crossed my face as I clambered up the tree to pick some of the fruit. After plucking several fruits I dropped them onto the soft body of the amoeba so that they wouldn’t bruise before climbing back down.

Other than the small amount of fruit that I harvested, there wasn’t very much else in the surrounding area that interested me right now. I still didn’t know much about the local flora or fauna and I wasn’t willing to try eating some of the other plants until I saw something else eating them and even then, I knew that I was going to have to be careful.

Taking one of the fruits from the amoeba I decided to head back towards the statue that I had started earlier only to have it snatched from my hand by a dark blur.

“What the fuck!?” I shouted in surprise as I turned to look for whatever it was that had stolen my snack. At first, I didn’t see anything until I heard a strange squelching sound and looked up to see a four-winged creature eating the fruit that it had stolen. It looked quite similar to the creature that I had seen caught in the webbing that I had managed to avoid during my run through the forest the other night. I hadn’t really gotten a chance to get a good look at the creature that had been caught in the webbing, but I was pretty sure that this was a different species.

Realising that I had spotted it the pterosaur-like creature looked down at me with what I could’ve sworn was a mischievous sparkle in its eyes.

“Oh, so that’s how it is, is it?” I chuckled. Despite how odd its appearance was there was something endearing about the little creature. I had a few more pieces of fruit that were still hidden away safely in the amoeba’s body, so it wasn’t like losing the one that it had stolen from me was that big of a big loss. It was also too small for me to bother catching it for food, so I decided to leave it for now. If it caused me any real problems, I could always deal with it later. “Well then enjoy your meal.”

With a laugh I continued on my way back towards Tane in good spirits. Once I was sure that it wasn’t following me, I took another piece of fruit from the amoeba and took a bite smiling as a trickle of juice ran from the corner of my mouth. These things really were delicious.

When I arrived back at the site of my little project, I once again started carving away pieces of stone with my hands. This time I actually started working on the shape that I wanted the statue to have. The image of Tarko standing tall as he stared down the Devourer’s cannons entered my mind and I nodded. The older Yajashian man’s knuckles had been white as he propped himself up with his weapon but the defiant grin on his face told anyone who was watching that even though he was going to die in the next few seconds, he had won.

I nodded to myself. That last image of him that had been burnt into my brain was exactly what I wanted the statue to be and I started to carve the stone into the basic form that I wanted it to be. My MP didn’t last long enough for me to quite finish doing this though, so I decided to shift to a different sort of training.

Back when I was a kid back on Earth my parents had signed me up to learn Tae kwon do for a couple of years but when my knee had been injured in a tournament the doctor that I had gone to had told me to stop in case another accident occurred. It had been a long time since I had even thought about what I had learned but I was pretty sure I still remembered a bit of it and Tae kwon do was mostly based around kicks which meant that it should be a pretty good addition to my fighting style.

Setting into an approximation of the fighting stance that I had been taught over ten years ago I started going through the first of the two kata that I could remember. To my surprise things actually came back fairly easily despite the fact that this body shouldn’t have the same muscle memory that my old body had.

As soon as my MP had regenerated completely, I returned to carving the statue. This time I even managed to start on the details of Tarko’s face before my MP ran out again. Obviously, I was only doing the rough work for now but even then, the work was being massively accelerated to ridiculous speeds by my Nature Shaping Skill. It was still going to take quite a while to carve the detailed parts of the statue because of my lack of experience in such things but I was pretty sure that I would be done in just a few days of work. I wasn’t planning on spending a massive amount of time on this since it wasn’t really that important in the scheme of things. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have even really started making it today, but I just wanted to get started while it was still fresh in my mind. Besides, I actually still had enough food for another couple of days.

There were a few other reasons that I had chosen to start making the statue today. Number one being that the bugs might still be on guard after I’d attacked them yesterday and I wasn’t confident of surviving an ambush at this point. Number two was that I wanted to Level up my Nature Shaping Skill as much as possible. I still believed that Nature Shaping was my most useful Skill. It could be used to create all sorts of different things. At the moment I couldn’t make much (mostly because I didn’t have enough MP or MP regen to use it for any real length of time) but eventually I could even be able to create actual houses and other useful things with the Skill.

This time when I started going through the kata, I made sure to try and improve things like my stance and as soon as I did this every move felt easier. This time when my MP had finished regenerating, I actually decided to keep practicing instead of moving back to carving the statue with my Nature Shaping Skill because I was starting to feel like things were clicking. The sun beat down onto my bare back as I continued to walk through the steps that I could recall causing a strange combination of sensations as energy started filling me thanks to my Photosynthesis Skill and sweat began to run down my back from my exertions.

As things started making sense to me once more, I actually started enjoying myself and stopped simply repeating the same actions over and over again. Instead I started imagining a Crawler in front of me, how it would fight and how I would respond to it if I was caught unarmed and low on MP. I had actually really enjoyed going to Tae kwon do practice when I had been a kid. That is up until the incident one day at training when I damaged my knee badly enough that I was still walking with a slight limp the day that I had died.

Eventually I was forced to stop and take a break when I started getting short of breath and turned once more to the statue that

A few minutes later I decided to stop and take a short break. After refreshing myself with some water that I made with my Condense Water spell I had the amoeba come to a halt beside me and took a couple of pieces of fruit from it.

I now had the two familiar symbols that meant that I had learnt new skills and Levelled Up some others which came as absolutely no surprise to me. Since I was taking a break, I decided that now was as good a time as any to check them and assign any Aspect Points that I had earned.

Unarmed Combat Mastery Unlocked!

This Skill increases your ability to use your body as a weapon.

Growth Rate increased by 1 Strength

1 Aspect point awarded for unlocking Unarmed Combat Mastery

Front Kick Unlocked!

Lash out with a powerful kick that does slightly increased damage. Cost 10 SP

Growth Rate increased by 1 Strength

1 Aspect point awarded for unlocking Front kick

Roundhouse Kick Unlocked!

A high kick that deals increased damage with a small chance to stun if it strikes an enemy in the head. Cost 20 SP

Growth Rate increased by 1 Strength

1 Aspect point awarded for unlocking Roundhouse Kick

I nodded my head happily as I read the description of the three Skills that I had unlocked. Like most of my other physical Skills they weren’t flashy but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be effective and the fact that I had unlocked two Active Skills was a bonus. But the best thing about unlocking these three Skills was that I had just doubled the Growth Rate of my Strength Stat. Of course, that meant that my Constitution now had the lowest Growth Rate which was in some ways worse.

Skills increased!

Mana Manipulation increased to Lvl 14

Nature Shaping increased to Lvl 8

Telepathy increased to Lvl 6

Growth Rate increased by 1 Willpower

Minion Control increased to Lvl 6

Zoology increased to Lvl 8

Unarmed Combat Mastery increased to Lvl 2

Available Aspect points increased by 9

Total Aspect Points: 17

“Well that’s not a bad haul,” I said nodding happily as I took a bite of my fruit. Yes, compared to my recent hauls of Aspect Points the 12 that I had earned so far today certainly wasn’t anything special, but it was still pretty decent.

“Well, anyway I suppose I should use these,” I said around the juicy mouthful as I brought up my Aspect Screen.

Unlocked Aspects

Aspect of the Warrior 0/25 (Locked until Lvl 10 Aspect of the Crafter 0/25 (Locked until Lvl 10), Aspect of the Wizard 0/50 (Locked until Lvl 25), Aspect of the Sage 0/50 (Locked until Lvl 25), Aspect of Vitality 1 (0/25), Aspect of Intelligence 1 (0/25), Aspect of Willpower 1 (0/25), Aspect of Agility 1 (0/25), Aspect of Toughness 1 (0/25), Aspect of Coordination 1 (0/25), Aspect of Constitution 1 (0/25) Aspect of Perception 1 (0/25).

Aspect Points: 17

Personal Aspect

Aspect of Evolution

160

I currently had quite a few things to choose from but In the end I narrowed it down to either the Aspect of Intelligence 1 or the Aspect of Willpower 1 but picking between the two was a bit more difficult especially since I didn’t really know what benefits any of them would give me other than the obvious ones. The Aspect of Intelligence 1 would obviously give me boosts to my Intelligence but other than that things were a bit up in the air. And the Aspect of Willpower 1 should provide a boost to the Stat I most wanted to increase because it would raise my Control Points. In the end I decided to go with the Aspect of Intelligence since that should give me a boost to my MP which would be more useful to me right now than increasing my Control Points would.

As soon as I placed the 17 points that I had saved up into the Aspect that I had chosen I was immediately sept away into my internal world. When I opened my eyes, I found myself looking at a nautilus. I had of course seen other cephalopods before, but this was the definitely the first nautilus that I had seen. The one that I was watching right now seemed to be hunting one of the primitive fish using controlled jets of pressurised water to fly after its prey much faster than it could swim. As soon as it caught up to the fish the nautilus’ tentacles latched on and wrapped themselves around its struggling body as the nautilus brought its face to it and started ripping into its flesh with its beak. Thankfully I was soon pulled away from this rather grisly scene as my point of view shifted to land where I could see a variety of greenery beginning to emerge from the rocky landscape providing shelter and food for the animals that had made their home there.

Opening my eyes back in the real world I read the new notifications that had popped up in front of me while I munched on the rest of the fruit that I was eating happily.

Aspect of Intelligence 1 has been increased to 17/25!

While Intelligence is most important to those who use magic that doesn’t mean that is useless to other people.

Intelligence increased by 3!

MP increased by 20!

Soul Aspect increased to Level 177!

The first nautili have appeared in your inner world. Some species are dangerous predators that use jets of pressurised water to hunt down their prey while others simply feast on what is left behind by the larger ones safe in their tough shells.

On land strange new plants have started to evolve. Some are large and resemble the trees that will come later but others are small, with long thin leaves.

Agility increased by 2

Coordination increased by 2

Toughness increased by 1

Constitution increased by 1

Growth Rate increased by 1 Agility and 1 Coordination

Once I had finished reading the notifications I nodded happily. While I hadn’t gotten any new Skills, I had gotten a decent number of Stats. The extra MP I had gotten from the Aspect of Intelligence was particularly welcome. With a thought I brought up my Stat Screen to go over it again.

Status

Level 2

Exp: 2%

HP: 205/205

MP: 317/317

HP Regen: 23 per minute (+1)

MP Regen: 21.1 per minute

SP: 133/133

Essence: 21

SP Regen: 17 per minute

Control Points: 26 (16)

Str: 12 (+12/Lvl)

Agi: 31 (+12/Lvl)

Con: 29 (+ 4/Lvl)

End: 18 (+8/Lvl)

Tou: 30 (+7/Lvl)

Int: 41 (+28/Lvl)

Coor: 30 (+8/Lvl)

Vit: 28 (+8/Lvl)

Wis: 26 (+13/Lvl)

Will: 41 (+26/Lvl)

Per: 26 (+16/Lvl)

Cha: 18 (+8/Lvl)

Additional Growth Rate: +14 Unassigned Stat Points/Lvl. +20 MP/Lvl. MP regen increased by 1/min per Lvl +5 Control Points/Lvl.

Unassigned Stat Points: 0

Once I had finished reading my recently updated Stats I returned to the important job of eating. When I had finished my rather frugal lunch I got to my feet and walked back over to the unfinished statue. I was probably going to hit a bit of a wall soon at my current level of skill but for now I would just have to see how far I could go. After all, if there was one thing that was even truer in this world than it had been on Earth it was that the only way to get better at something was by practicing over and over again.