The next morning, Mike surveyed his work from the previous day. As he had approached his old campsite, he had realized Bart was right, much of his equipment had just vanished. The list of items he still possessed was short: the now very ratty clothes on his back, his Dayton ax, a single sheath knife he had made, and blessedly, some small pouches of salt and pepper. Deciding that setting up a base of operations was most important on his list, Mike had spent the day finding a new campsite, which was a quaint quarter acre clearing with a stream nearby. He had then scoured the area and found some local vegetation that he could plant and have a garden to tend. He had found that even though he no longer had his copy of “How to Survive in Montana: Plants and Wildlife”, he could easily recall passages he had only read once. This had made the foraging much quicker than he had expected. Unsurprisingly, his work here had gotten him the Foraging skill, which didn’t give any stat bonuses, but was satisfying nonetheless. The final hours of the previous day had been spent creating his garden. It was primitive at best, but hopefully there would be time to add to it later. Currently, he had three small rows of Nodding Onions, Stinging Nettle, and best of all, some small Huckleberry shoots he had pruned from some larger bushes. He couldn’t be sure, but the small plants seemed to have grown overnight. He had originally thought that the garden was a long term project to help him get through the colder months ahead, but maybe plants grew faster than they did before the integration.

Turning his thoughts towards the labors of the day, a huge smile split Mike’s face. He had always wanted to live off the land, and now he finally had that opportunity. Being essentially back in the stone age, Mike tried to prioritize the things he needed most. He figured he had some time before people found his valley, and during that time, he needed to get a sustainable food source, create a defensive strategy, and he needed to equip himself with better weapons.

From all of his survival training and research, he knew where he needed to start. Searching along the river bank, he found a bank of clay not too far from his new home. Mixing the clay with water, he made a large ring, about 8 inches high and 2 feet across, leaving the ring unfinished for about 6 inches on one side. He then packed together a disk of clay that would fit over the top of the ring and, using a straight stick, he poked 12 holes in the disk. He then slowly worked the clay into walls on top of the disk, directly above the ring that formed the base. When he was done, the structure stood about four feet high. Using a hand drill and some small sticks from nearby, he then started a fire in the bottom chamber formed by the ring. Almost as soon as he stepped back, he got a notification:

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Tinkering.

+1 stat point by assignment.

Keep testing the limits of your imagination.]

Not knowing where to assign the stat point, he instead decided to allow the system to identify his creation:

Clay Kiln

Quality: Shoddy

Durability: Medium

Rarity: Uncommon

Attributes: Earth Attunement-small chance to grant items fired in this kiln an earth affinity, higher chance at high luck. Uneven Heating-Small chance of ruining items in the firing process, especially if the item is of crude quality, lower chance at high luck.

“Is shoddy better or worse than crude?” he wondered, eyes moving from his ax to the kiln. “At the very least, the kiln won’t hit me in the face when I use it.”

Knowing that it would take a few hours for the kiln to get hot enough to make the clay harden, Mike turned his attention to making some clay vessels that he could use to cook and store items. As the sun reached its peak, his first ceramic creations since high school were already heating up in the fire. The first piece was a small bowl, a kind of test to make sure he could still remember what he had learned about pinch pots. The next piece was a quart sized jar that he made from coiling clay in a spiral to get the walls high and even. The final piece was a gallon sized jar that he planned on using to carry water.

Keeping the kiln going required his presence around his camp, so he spent the afternoon tending to his small garden, setting up some racks to dry out reeds on, and looking through the Menu. Though the Menu was very intuitive to use, it had some many options that it was easy to get lost in. After some time, he found out he could bring up notes on his various skills. The notes all related to how to get to the next level. He had to kill 10 people from 20 paces away with throwing knives to level up Knife Throwing. He had to amputate a limb for First Aid. Probably the weirdest one of all was that he had to correctly recover from an accidental fall of 10 feet or more to increase the tumble skill. It seemed that every single skill that would help him be prepared for combat, required him to actually be in combat… except for Hardened Skin. He had initially passed by the requirement of being involuntarily hit 100 times by a blunt object, but after seeing how hard the other combat skills would be to train, he had circled back to hardened skin. He had an ax that regularly rebounded and hit him, and with his low luck score, he figured it wouldn’t take him long to test out his theory to see if he could move the ticker on the level requirements.

Mentally preparing himself, he walked over to the nearest spruce, pulled out his Dayton ax, and began testing. After about 20 minutes, Mike reviewed his findings. Yes, the rebound did count towards his Hardened Skin requirement. No, he couldn’t swing the ax softly, it had to be a swing capable of injuring something. No, the ax wasn’t very predictable in how it rebounded, his broken toe was proof of that. Yes, the Hardened Skin did make breaking his toe about 10% less painful than he would have guessed, which is to say, he still screamed aloud when it had happened. Overall, he only had to hit himself 94 more times with the rebound. It had taken 20 minutes to get 6 rebounds, so barring any serious injuries, he would need to keep up this activity for roughly five hours. Just as he had resigned himself to taking another beating, he was greeted with another notification:

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Pottery.

+1 to dexterity

Art is what separates society from animals, too bad you have no society as a monster]

Even with the jab at his predicament, he couldn’t help but feel happy at the extra point to dexterity. As he had planned out his strategy for self preservation, he felt that speed would be key. That is what had allowed him to engage so well in the last battle, and if he could sharpen this edge even more, he might just survive this ordeal.

Suddenly realizing what the notification meant, Mike happily put off beating himself til tomorrow and went to check on his pots. The fire had died down and he was able to look inside to see the results. Only the quart sized clay pot remained. Both the pinch pot and water jug had broken during the firing. Analyzing the clay jar didn’t help him cope with the loss either:

Clay Jar

Quality: Crude

Durability: Low

Rarity: Common

Well, it wasn’t what he was hoping for, but he had figured it would take a couple of tries to get it right, and earning a new skill wasn’t nothing. Opening the Menu, he checked the requirements for Pottery level 2. He only had to make a usable pot of shoddy quality or higher. That was definitely something he could attempt tomorrow… along with trying for Hardened Skin level 2, Foraging level 2 and setting up some traps to add some meat to his diet.

As Mike drifted off to sleep that night, he couldn’t help his thoughts drifting towards the future. Hopefully he would soon be in the Iron Age, which meant cooking pots, which meant pot roast.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

The next three days flew by in a dull blur. The first day he had managed to get his Hardened Skin up to level 2, gaining another point in toughness and an increase to his resistance to blunt force trauma, now 20% less damage, but the progress had ended there. The next requirement for Hardened Skin was 1000 involuntary hits, which left him wondering how anyone ever got this skill without a rebounding ax and a low luck score. It would take him 50 hours of chopping down trees to get to the next level. If we went all out, he could put in about 8 hours a day, which left him broken and bleeding and barely able to function. Surprisingly, with just a little care each evening, using a paste he created from local flowers, his body felt whole again each morning.

Upgrading his Foraging skill had also been a bust. The next requirement was to find a sustainable source of food from a plant. Apparently his small onion and berry plants weren’t good enough.

On top of that, he had been unable to successfully make a jug, or anything for that matter. He had tried to make a better quart sized jar, but even those had blown up. Apparently his luck score and kilns didn’t work super well together.

Despite all of these setbacks, Mike was committed to persevering, and the fourth day was different from the instant he woke up.

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Gardening.

+1 to intelligence

Plants regularly grow on their own, but you lined them up well]

Having learned that skills tied to an accomplishment, he went to check on his little garden and was shocked to find that the small berry shoots he had planted were now small bushes, bedecked in clumps of berries. He had noticed that they were growing much more quickly than normal, but yesterday there had only barely been buds on the bushes, and now there were full berries. The harvest was small, but adding in the small fruit to his breakfast of fish and water was a real treat, and somehow made him more optimistic about his pottery prospects for the day.

Walking over to the now ravaged river bank, he gathered his daily load of clay and took it back over to the kiln. His happy attitude had him rethinking how he usually coiled the pots, and this time smoothed out the clay after the coiling process was complete. The now familiar task took barely an hour, and the results were two pots of the finest quality he had created to that point. Setting the fire and leaving the pots to fend for themselves, he moved on to his most dreaded task, smacking a tree with a now very dull axeblade.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t sharpen his ax, he was in fact very adept at sharpening almost any blade under the sun, it was just that he had found he got more consistent rebounds from the tool when it was dull. At this juncture, that was way more important than safety when chopping firewood. More importantly, it decreased the risk of him taking a sharp axeblade to the head if a rebound went extremely south.

As he passed the large piles of logs that his self destruction had created, he marveled at how much wood he had managed to chop. It was a testament to his changing body. He didn’t have the energy or the ability to see through the bruises at the end of the day, but happy as he was, it was easier to see the progress he had made in the last week. His aching joints felt young and new again. His shoulders and arms were getting bulkier and his waist leaner.

“Now if only there was a way I could fix my bald spot,” he sighed to himself, rubbing the smooth surface with his off hand.

Two hours later, Mike was approaching the 500 hits mark when he received a notification that his Pottery Skill had advanced to level 2, gaining him 2 additional points to dexterity. Putting his ax away, he eagerly went to inspect his work, hoping that the iron age was finally just around the corner.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

The clay jar would have been considered worthless before the integration, but Mike’s eye’s shined as he looked at what his hands had made. A quart sized jar of shoddy workmanship, or so the System said. To Mike, it represented the key to smelting.

Leaving the jar to cool, he headed down to the riverbank and slowly walked along it, examining rocks as he went. Every so often, he would bend down and pick up rock, until his arms reached capacity. Almost all river rock is a small percent iron, he remembered reading, so he had tried to pick the rocks that seemed to shimmer just a touch more than the others. Setting the rocks down by his kiln, he once again went to gather clay so he could put his bushcraft and loose apocalypse theory to the test. He first made a smaller version of the kiln, standing only 2 feet high, but he left two holes in the bottom of the ring. From on hole, he created a small tunnel that connected to a second cylindrical tower. He then took his knife and carved a branch down to a usable sized pole and wrapped the last of his rawhide around one end of the pole. Smashing up the river rock between some larger rock took time, but he eventually had the kiln side full to the top with chunks of rocks no bigger than his fingers. Using the second hole, Mike lit a fire in the bottom of the kiln and covered the hole with a clay plug designed for that purpose. Moving over to the other tower, he began pumping the wooden plunger, made from his rawhide and pole, up and down the tube, pumping air into the fire and causing his kiln to reach higher temperatures.

[Congratulations! You have leveled up your skill Tinkering, now level 2.

+3 stat points waiting to be assigned]

He hadn’t been sure that the blast furnace would be enough to level up the tinkering skill, which was the only skill that didn’t give him exact instructions on how to increase his level, but he had hoped that it would.

It took hours to heat up the rock inside the kiln until it glowed white. A week ago Mike was sure that he wouldn’t have been able to pump the bellows for that long, but it was almost relaxing compared to chopping trees. Eventually, the rock was too bright to look at and he had finished another task. Moving back over to the kiln, he unstopped the hole and used two sticks to dig the rock out of the kiln, separating it into piles. As the rock cooled, one pile shone a dull gray in the evening light. The process had worked, he had successfully extracted a small pile of iron from the river rock.

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Smelting.

No rewards available for level 1]

With or without new stat points, this process had been every bit rewarding as he had imagined it would be, and seeing that small pile of iron brought even more hope to his heart than the berries had that morning. It was the perfect end to his fourth day of nonstop toil.