After running the first 42 foot lap, he realizes something, and looks at his left leg. "Oh, wow. So, it will reconnect muscles and skin. I hope it regrows limbs and stuff, too." He pulls out his glove and puts it back on before touching his back and he immediately pulls away from the pain. "But my back's still messed up. Why my leg first? Some internal healing priority, or because I wanted it more?"

He shrugs and continues running. He runs a little over 60 seconds before his stamina runs out, causing his chest to become cold and start to ache. He sits down and rests until his stamina is full again. He continues running once it is full, leveling up the skill shortly after.

This allows him to run a little under 80 seconds before pausing. During one such pause, he says, "I had, what, 17 stamina when I first came here? Seems pretty accurate, considering how out of shape I am. Couldn't run four seconds without dying." In the next pause, he states, "Wait, I'm not faster, despite leveling it?" He pulls out Running's popup.

Reduces stamina cost of running.

40/(Physical + SLevel) = 2.22... Stamina per Agility feet

"Oh, it only affects stamina consumption. I bet there's a Sprinting skill that has a flat cost per agility feet, but increases sprinting speed." He continues running after his slightly extended break. He continues this process for a little over 10 minutes, slowly leveling up the skill. At the end, he opens his skills.

Stomp lv2

Running lv5

Improvised Weapon Mastery lv2

Search lv4

Scan lv4

Visualization lv15

??? lv0

Punch lv4

Kick lv1

Jump lv9

Mana Bolt lv6

"This'll be slow going, but I don't want to bother Beltag more than I have, so no punching him, and punching the tree hurts... A pain resistance skill would be really nice. Maybe there's something else I can do? Minimum jump for Jump, maybe a flexibility skill? Ooo, maybe some haste skill? How would that work? Let's see if I can manipulate stamina in the same way as mana." He sits down.

He tries imagining pushing stamina, pulling it, and letting it flow, but he's unable to make it leave his chest. "Ok, then let's..." He stands up and stomps the ground, focusing on what the stamina does when he does so. It happens too quick for him to completely understand exactly what happened, but he felt a very, very slight pulse of warmth in his chest as he was about to stomp, followed by his entire leg feeling like something inside it moved.

"So, explosion, like a bullet?" He repeats it, and now that he knows what he's looking for, it's easy for him to notice. "I have no idea how to describe or replicate that movement. If it were slower, maybe, but it kinda just feels like something swells. A tube, maybe?" He shrugs. "Maybe you aren't intended to be able to move stamina like you can with mana. I'll try again when I have time to mess around."

He stands there, his eyes glaze over for a while, before they focus again. "Maybe I can increase my mana regen by meditating or something? What does its regen feel like?" He sits and focuses on his head, where his mana pool is, feeling the cold very slowly coming back. Even while paying close attention, he's unable to pinpoint a location of origin or any way that the cold is returning.

"So, while that would be cool, that's a no, as well... Or, at least, not in the way I'm trying to do by detecting and assisting." He stands up and starts running again, thinking about his skills. A few repetitions in, he levels up Running and says, "Oh, hey, IWM has higher scaling than my unarmed skills and it won't cause pain. Hopefully. Stick, stick, stick."

He runs over to the tree line and finds a long, somewhat thick branch to use. "You're going to break so fast," he says to it. "I should get more. Oh, wait, what ever happened to that rock I had?" He thinks back. "Last time I remember seeing it was when I first laid down to test if my image would help with skill creation. I probably left it on the other side of the river, then..."

He shrugs. "Oh, well, let's just find a new one, or maybe just break a bunch of sticks." He gathers 32 sticks and lays them next to the tree he said he'd take down before leaving. "Let's start," he says, grabbing a stick with his left foot and bringing it to his right hand.

A little under two minutes later, he's made a dent in the scorched bark, and is out of sticks. He goes to replace his sticks. "23 lasted three hits, two lasted two, one lasted one, five lasted four, and one lasted an entire seven." He sighs, picking up more sticks. "This will take a while. Did get IWM to 12, though, so that's good." He puts his 10 PP into Hoarder.

He finds it harder to find good sticks this time, taking nearly 20 minutes to find just 12 decent sticks. "I even went to a new place... Maybe I just got unlucky with Search this time, or I got lucky last time." He shrugs and notices he gained another level in Search. "I have no idea how you gain experience," he says, putting the PP into Hoarder.

"Combat skills seems to be equal to the damage they deal, Running seems to be 1 per 10 seconds, Scan, I don't know, Jump is one per jump, all before Human's +20%... But Search doesn't seem to have any logic behind its experience gain at all. Maybe its experience gain is tied to the hidden luck stats in some way...?" He shrugs. "More questions I'll probably never have answers to."

Each stick lasts a single hit this time. He aggressively rolls his eyes and sighs angrily. "Of course they'd break instantly. Why would they ever last a decent amount of time?" He puts the PP he earned into Hoarder. "Given my luck last time, it'd be better to do nothing and wait for my mana to regenerate." He checks his status.

Name Degritone Race Human Resources 58.33.../58.33... (+157.72...) 63.33.../63.33... (+92.31...) 55.98.../82 (+90.77...) Class None Experience 0/0 Strength 6 Endurance 5 Vitality 7 Agility 4 Physical 17 Magic 12

"Oh, hey, I'm full health." He checks his back and feels it's back to normal. "Cool. Though, I could probably try making the sword now... Meh, I really want it to succeed. No trying until I'm full. I really need a skill I can grind up super easily. I can't wait until I have an actual weapon and can just stand next to a target dummy slashing away for hours, instead of having to replace sticks every 30 seconds."

"40ish minutes...? I'm already bored of running, and gathering more sticks is annoying. No physical fitness skill for push ups or sit ups, no video games to play... Man, this world is pretty boring. I thought it'd be really fun. Though, I am forcing myself to not fight anything while also being in a part of the world that has absolutely nothing in it.

"Let's see if there's a digging skill." He sits down before picking up the longest of the broken stick remains and using it as a makeshift shovel. "Barely extends past my palm, but better than nothing." After about a minute, he finds himself pulling up an unnatural amount of dirt with every swipe of his stick. He checks his new skill.

Dig lv1

Increases the amount of material obtained while digging or mining without increasing difficulty.

((Physical+SLevel)/10)% = 1.8% more material

"Hm. Seems pretty useless except for as a PP grinding skill. Unless it counts flesh as something you can dig, or it affects attacks against golems, which probably exist. Create, or extend?" He takes another swipe at the dirt, this time slowly, paying attention to where the extra material comes from. The hole widens slightly further than his stick as he does.

"Extend." He nods. He spends the rest of the 21 minutes digging, checking his mana every minute or so. After a minute or two, he starts singing Diggy Diggy Hole. "I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole. Diggy, diggy hole, diggy, diggy hole~"

By the time he's finished, he's gotten Dig to level 4 and dug a small circle around himself. He checks his mana one last time, finding it full, before he sets down his very dirty stick. Once again, he pulls the mana to his palm, but forces it to stay in place as he changes its shape.

First, he creates a foot-long hilt for him to hold onto, then creates a simple cross guard before moving onto the blade. He keeps extending it, extending it out to 6 feet, with a very slight taper all the way up, and a much sharper taper at the end. After this three-minute endeavor, he checks his mana.

8.54/48! (+97.23...)

"What happened to maximum mana?" He pokes his maximum mana to get its popup.

Maximum mana.

Used for magical skills.

10*(1-0.1)*Endurance*(1+Magic/max(Endurance,20-Endurance)) + bonuses

40 maximum mana subtracted while Mana Sword is active

"Wow, decently costly. Good thing I'm not planning on using mana for active combat. Skills."

Stomp lv2

Running lv5

Improvised Weapon Mastery lv13

Search lv5

Scan lv4

Visualization lv15

??? lv0

Punch lv4

Kick lv1

Jump lv9

Mana Bolt lv6

Dig lv4

Mana Manipulation lv6

Mana Sword lv1

Creates a sword made of mana.

1 minute cast time

(4+SLevel+Magic/15)% Strength = 0.356 bonus mana damage on-hit

Costs 20-50 maximum mana, based on total volume of sword, while active

Nodding, he places his 8 new PP into Hoarder. "Let's get hacking," he says, taking the sword with both hands, its weight equal to what you would expect a metal sword its size would be. He swings hard from his left, making sure the edge of the blade stays parallel with his swing. A small bit of bark flies off as he cuts into the tree. He inspects his blade, seeing it not having any damage.

He checks his skills and he did gain a greatsword mastery skill.

Greatsword Mastery lv1

He nods, before returning to the tree, slashing at it over and over, needing to take a break every 20 or so swings to regenerate his stamina.

15 minutes and 250 carefully placed attacks later, he finally fells the tree. Rubbing some sweat off his forehead, he calls to Beltag, "Hey, Baltag, what's a normal skill level to have in a weapon at level 20?"

He starts to answer, but is stopped. "I cannot answer," they say.

Degritone shrugs. "Whatever, then. Off to the little end. I'll see if I can't add you to my friends list once I'm out." He starts walking toward the little end. Looking at his new 36 PP from getting Greatsword Mastery to level 30 and Mana Sword to level 8, he spots new paths.

Greatsword Mastery I 0/100

Novice 0/150

He looks taken aback slightly due to those PP costs, but thinks for a second before nodding. "Interesting. Given how fast skills level compared to Randidly, the high PP costs aren't as high as my initial reaction made me think. But whatever, let's max Hoarder then start down Greatsword, since I plan on using one primarily," he says, finishing off the Hoarder path, granting him a skill.

Strength of the Hoarder lvX

"Seems pretty useless, since I don't doubt there's something like a bag of holding, but whatever. Obtaining it wasn't very hard, either. And it did apply a debuff to the skill. Interesting." He then puts his remaining 23 into Greatsword Mastery I, granting him +1 Strength at 20.

"Hm. Maybe I should have gone Novice. It probably gives some free stats. But whatever, I'll most likely get skills I'll definitely use from this one, so whatever." He shrugs and continues walking.

20 minutes later, he sees a blur beside him, and he jumps away from it, getting his sword out in front of him, as he stares down the Ambush Grimalkin in front of him. "I'm prepared for you this time," he says, stepping toward it, slashing at it.