“Shit!” Lyrhea stuck her finger into her mouth out of habit as the pain quickly subsided. Pulling the now healed finger back out, she looked up towards the canopy and sighed. “This is harder than I expected it would be….”

She now had a much deeper appreciation for her ancient simian ancestors, that is if you believed they existed, which was something a surprising number of people did not. Either way, humanity’s climb up the tech tree had to start from somewhere and the first tools were almost certainly made with stone, wood, and bone, so she was starting from a similar place, no matter when you thought that place was for humanity, chronologically speaking.

She had, so far, managed to make a decently sharp piece of rock, and not much else. Sure, she had about a few hundred off failures around where she was seated, but she was literally going at this with zero training and zero prior experience, so the fact that she was able to create something of even marginal use so quickly was a feat of luck in and of itself.

“Now what the fuck am I supposed to do with you?”

Yes, she had bothered to make a sharp rock but had not bothered to think of what she would do with it. It was too big to be used as a stone thrown to startle animals into traps, too brittle to be used as a weapon for very long, too fragile to cut through trees, and too unwieldy to be held in her hand and used for anything.

All in all, it had been a waste of time and energy, but at least she now had a sharp rock to show for it.

“You must be enjoying the hell out of this…” Lyrhea said, directing those words at the wolf-bear that had watched her for all of this time. “Yes, yes… Look at the silly snake-ape, with its sharp rock that does nothing of any worth!”

She tossed the waste of time to the side and got up. She needed to eat something again. She took another step before coming to a conclusion about something else.

She pulled the clothes that were still there from before her transformation close to her nose and sniffed them, and then immediately recoiled. No wonder the animals knew where she was; she stank to high heavens!

She shot a glance at the wolf-bear and then recalled where a nearby stream was relative to her position. Hopefully, none of the human kids were out and about again. She would not be a nice person for them to meet if they saw her naked.

…

She twisted her clothes as dry as she could before putting them back on, but there was still water in them and the chill annoyed her greatly.

“Still watching?” Lyrhea asked as she glanced over across the creek. The damn wolf-bear was still there, silent and unmoving as ever, just watching her like a damn creeper. “Get a damn life already.”

The wolf-bear didn’t respond. Maybe it didn’t understand what she was saying? Maybe it just didn’t care? In the end, it didn’t matter either way, so she would have to let it slide for now.

Lyrhea moved up from the bank of the creek and began to walk back to her makeshift base camp, only stopping from time to time to pick up a few edible plants and shove them down her throat. Well, that and plan out where she could set more pitfalls and hunt more efficiently.

She eventually made it back to her little corner of the world and set to planning a new way of dealing with her current Quest. She figured that, if anything, she was likely leagues behind anyone else who had woken up in a similar position with similar Quests forced upon them, so she would need to pick up the damn pace.

Still, she was no tank, so she had to be smart rather than try the whole ‘unga-bunga’ route that she had been doing many times before. She had a brain, god damn it, and it was high time that she used it properly.

As she absentmindedly nibbled at her nails, she got an idea that was so stupid and yet so brilliant that it just might end up working. She went deeper into the forest and began to grab random twigs for her next potential project.

If this worked, it would make things so much easier.

…

Sitting in front of a fire brought memories to the surface. She had managed to make this fire by sheer luck and hard work, and it was the first time she had ever managed to do so in both of her lives.

She felt a sense of pride from being able to make a fire using nothing more than what she had on hand, but there was a time and place for that, and it wasn’t right now. She slowly began to try and do something that she had only heard stories of, not knowing if she could actually pull it off in a reasonable and capable way without hurting herself in the process.

She slowly inched the longer twigs that she had gathered closer to the fire, but not so close that they would have caught alight, and just waited for something to happen. Time passed, and eventually, she decided to risk it, and pulled one of the long twigs back and tested it.

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle…” Lyrhea said with astonishment as she applied a bit of pressure to the twig in various directions. It had worked.

She had heated the twig just right, and in so doing, had essentially fire-hardened it. Mind you, this likely never would have worked this way before the Fog came down and did weird things to everyone and everything, but still, she had fire-hardened a piece of wood, which could not be used as a small sharpened stake.

Her eyes darted over her new creation, and Lyrhea unknowingly had a serpentine smile fill her face, which got slightly concerned looks from the wolf-bear that was still watching her. Lyrhea then stuck the hardened, sharpened stick into her mouth and began to coat it in as much of her venom/ poison/ toxin/ saliva as she could, only bringing it out to let it dry off for a bit before sticking it back in to add another layer.

She had more sticks besides this one to treat, and if they were left in just the right places, she could score many, many pieces of prey with absolutely minimal effort. Three cheers for higher-level cognitive brain functions!

Truly, a mix of high dexterity and high intelligence can create some utterly broken builds in the MMORPG that is Natural Life. Human Mains know what I’m talking about.