Sara was not having a good day.

First she stubbed her toe leaving her room, then she noticed that she had no more groceries and when she finished work on the fields the butcher had already sold his last stock, meaning she would need to eat grass porridge for lunch and dinner unless she found some wild vegetable. As a young woman with some energy in her bones, she at least tried to look for it, but of course she'd get ambushed by wolves not too far away! Because that's completely normal occurance, right!?

Not even her tired mind allowed her to escape from reality as she cursed whatever fate or god had her bleeding to death on the floor of some random woods a month after she quit being a full time hunter.

She had actually hoped to not become awake again since that'd likely mean being eaten alive, but that happened anyway.

Her situation was a bit different than expected however, what with her arms and hands being bound by stone around her midriff and good bedding to her back despite the cave ambiance of the surroundings.

"You are awake. Good. Can you understand me?" Asked the brown haired young man sitting by her side. He seemed to have been staring at nothing before she focused on him, but that wasn't the strangest thing around, nor was it the worst since this was clearly a crazy noble if his strange high quality clothes and old accent indicated anything besides the fact that he was likely the one responsible for the clearly magical bindings.

Despite several locks of purple hair falling over her vision, Sara pretended well enough to be scared and gulped some saliva before nodding.

"Fair enough i guess. I don't expect you to actually refer to me as anything other than derivatives of deranged mage or some such, but my name is Aki. I have healed the wounds caused by my wolves, though it is a shame that i am unable to produce similar results to the badly healed leg wound. Before you suggest anything, i have not touched you nor do i intend to, no, i am much more likely to just let my canine companions eat your flesh and break your bones for fun in case of something that would anger me beyond reason. You are a smart enough woman to understand that such would not be a desired outcome to either of us, correct?" He asked while looking at her.

Something she immediately noticed was that his eyes were roaming around, and although he was clearly eyeing her form, he seemed almost as interested in the wall, his nail, some of her scars, the barking noises outside and even something she could not see.

Sara nodded again, groaning her response.

"Good, stupidity is one of the greatest killers known to men." He sagely nodded before intently looking into her eyes, no movement from his gaze this time. "I am unfamiliar with the local culture, so excuse me, but how would you prefer to be called?" And that was where shit could go down for her, but the man appeared to be stable enough to not fulfill his promise of painful death for not addressing him correctly if the lack of title in his introduction and strangely accurate estimates of her impression of him were any indication.

"I am a simple commoner sir, my name is Sara of Quartz Wood." She meekly said, not daring to dwell on any detail for too long.

"Well met Sara, but fuck if i am actually a noble, i'm just prodding you, though yeah, the accent is pretty much ingrained in my speech already, so it might as well be natural. You were famished and yet almost took down two dire wolves alone, with a foot like that, so excuse me if i don't believe for a second that you can actually be intimidated and broken so easily." That made her frown. Magicians of uncertain origins were not much better in her books, but if she could reach a good enough deal... "No more beating around the bush then." He shrugged. "I am interested in recruiting you as a subordinate, guard work and a bit of using another pair of hands around, maybe train me with the spear."

His sudden proposal was met mostly with genuine shock as she played the words again in her head. This was very weird on so many ways.

"Sir, if you don't mind me asking, why?" She asked anyway, still laid in the distractingly soft pillow.

"Because." He pointed out with much the same inflection and a sagely nod before smirking, which made her notice he was not going to actually follow with any kind of sentence.

"And if i refuse?" She asked with more than a bit of rage on her system.

"I will bind you with a magical contract forcing you to not speak or hint about me, our encounter and the related circumstances and then try to recruit you again when i take over the village you currently live in, whose vicinities the contract will stop you from leaving." He smiled at her.

*****

[Name: Sara

Race: Human

Gender: F

Age: 22

Class: Advancing spear woman (Un)

Level: 47

Hp: 98/98 (192)

Mp: 43/43 (46)

Skills:

Spear technique Lv 4

Steps that follow the wind Lv 5

Trained body Lv 2

Hunger resistance Lv 2

Abilities:

Spear god (minor) Blessing]

Looking at the floating screen near the trembling woman, Aki became pretty sure that the luck ability he gained had an addictive effect instead of a multiplicative one. He'd likely only ever been this lucky once in his life.

"Four times is enough, I can't keep going." Sara said, her feet slowly bringing her into the stone table by the side and collapsing into the cushioned chair before resting her bare foot on the water with a small flow of mana.

"Fair enough. I even got the first level of spear handling, so I can experiment on my own later too." Said the blood covered young man. He wasn't wearing a shirt at the moment, and the baggy pants he did wear were tattered and cut all around.

"Wait, already?! It took me a week to unlock it when I was younger, and I know this training is clearly much more demanding, but isn't two hours too little to learn a weapon skill?" She refuted in shock.

"...Do you want me to explain to you how acquiring skills and XP works? The actual process or the short version?" He asked after a pause, not getting up from the ground.

"The short version." Sara answered after blinking. A dungeon master would clearly know more than a village elder, so she might as well use her new employment to obtain such information since there were many secrets within the system hoarded by the few.

"Ok, let me see... Skills are knowledge and experience fastened to small constructs inside the souls of those inside a system, held together by an energy that forms the very existence around us and XP is that which constitutes the soul, gained from taking it from other beings and or generated through meaningful experiences. The difference between me, and now to a lesser extent you, and everyone else, is that we have more of the energy allowing the soul to bind XP. In cruder terms, everyone only collects a portion of the total XP, but we can collect more, meaning the only thing stopping me from advancing is the amount of effort I put into things. I'd tell you the actual terminology of said things, but they are a restricted knowledge, which even I shouldn't actually posses as of now, so it is better you do not let something troublesome escape on accident." As Aki slowly explained, one of his wolves entering the room and asking for some attention, which he immediately gave.

His newest hire just sat there and thought, taking the information slowly.

After some more talk on what benefits she would receive, she had bound herself to the dungeon with the contract yesterday, the woman returning this afternoon to receive orders to teach and spar with him inside a prepared training room.

As they fought, she clearly had trouble with her mangled foot, but the woman was stronger, faster and more experienced than her opponent, destroying him at every turn.

Her status, however, showed that her injury had become better, regaining 3 of Hp and a couple stats across the board.

The room they stood at, was not a regeneration array or the like, but a mutation one, which was unlocked after a couple of wolves had been evolved with his magic.

Basically, it would make their bodies reach their peak more easily.

For Aki who wasn't the most athletic, that ment he was gaining muscle mass at least twice faster than he should. For Sara, who had an almost crippling injure, that ment her original template was being restored as she forcefully tried to rely on both her feet, allowing the restorative magic later cast to make a new appendage similar to a reflection of her other foot.

There was, of course, the option of grating away the mangled flesh and nerves before making new ones, but such would still be a problem as long as her soul template was locked on the flawed slab of meat on properly set bone a ligaments, but Aki was more likely to make her completely lose the foot than to restore it if he tried doing it at once as of now, while the gradual way would need her to be awake and experience the whole procedure.

When given the choice, she'd immediately leaned towards training till it naturally got back to normal.

"I think I got most that, but it does make me question why you'd choose me as a subordinate. Again. Isn't that kind of advantage finite and rare?" She questioned, her stamina ticking up as she prepared to leave.

"Not really. Everyone has it, it's just that I have a bigger allotment thanks to the dungeon producing it." Aki shrugged, getting up with the help of the meter and a half tall wolf by his side, summoning a shirt and a pitcher filled with orange juice and sitting on his on chair.

One side effect of using the 'mutation room', was that hunger was much more prevalent, despite both individuals currently in it already partially existing by relying on mana.

Luckily, 'biomass' was easily produced by dungeon working, meaning both individuals had a lunch consisting of mixed salad, rice and beans, grilled pork, roasted chicken breast, french fries and a hamburger with triple cheese and mixed spice.

For dessert, Sara had a banana split and Aki had a sunday.

All in all, the young man was quite happy to have human company again and the young woman now had several foodgasms a day.

It was only when said company went away that he started to practice magic while expanding the dungeon downwards however, his dungeon fairy already used to his insistence on her describing her feelings on the subject just to find that an hour later he'd somehow guessed what all that ment and started casting spell after spell of all elements to surprising degrees.

It'd been eight days since he'd arrived after all, so she started trying to simply look at all the elemental rewards they kept unlocking as he obtained more and more skills.

Maybe she would think it normal were things as simple as he'd explained to the new girl, but one would normally need some kind of skill to properly use the energy available to Aki, generally a fate or XP multiplier, so she didn't actually know what he was doing to circumvent the fact that he'd not gained such from either the summoning or from becoming a dungeon master.