It was a bright and sunny day on the third layer, I just did some sport fishing and caught myself a promotion to level twenty!

By now I was sitting on a whole sixteen skill and attribute points, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to spend them on. On the skill point side, it was a bit easier to decide, since I’d already bought out most of the tree. All that was left were three nodes worth eight points each, as well as the capstone ability for fifteen points.

I’d been agonizing over which of the three abilities I’d hold bacon for now, because all of them were good in their own right. But I made a snap decision just now.

Poison Master (Passive) (A)

Lets you stack the effect of poison twice.

Fast Learner: Poison (Passive) (A)

Poison magic becomes easier to level up

The third available passive would have made poison spells thirty percent cheaper to cast. Sure, this would have let me cast a whole lot more poison spells, but the ones I had weren’t that expensive, to begin with, and I had a lot of MP anyway. So picking these two… just made sense.

If there was one annoying thing, it was how many skill points I’d need to complete the tree. Assuming tier three went up to level twenty as well, I’d still be short three points for the capstone ability. And oh boy, was it a juicy one. It would add a small chance to instantly kill anything I poisoned.

Of course, this effect was dependent on things like, what tier my poison and the victim were, as well as some other factors. But it would have been amazingly funny to one-hit the Hunter… even if it probably wasn’t going to happen. And well, anything that relied on luck to trigger was welcome in my book. After all, I could cheat my luck to be better.

Which still left me with my attribute points. I was very tempted to just dump all of it into Wisdom. Being able to cast more spells was incredibly useful. Maybe I was doing the attribute a disservice by solely focusing on that one aspect of it, but out of all of them, the MaxMP increase was the most notable. That, and the increased regeneration.

Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to invest some more into Agility and Constitution. I’d been neglecting Agility since I couldn’t use it anyway, but now I could! And I’ve shunned Constitution for Wisdom recently, which was part of the reason I was such a glass cannon now. The smart part of my brain was telling me that Wisdom was high enough for now, and to distribute my points across the other attributes.

But the dumb part was telling me to dump it all in one stat, and oh boy was it hard to resist.

Rational thought eventually won out, and I put ten into Agility and six into Constitution. Agility badly needed the points, and Strength was essentially useless to me. My stats were looking insane, and I’m sure that compared to any other tier-two monster, they were higher by an entire order of magnitude. The fact that I had access to the system was like a cheat, and as long as I was careful and didn’t encounter other travelers, I should be able to fight off almost anything.

With my newfound heightened agility, I was able to zoom around even faster. And now that I thought about it, strength might’ve helped with my jumping ability after all. Well, too late to change it now.

I was hopping around the oasis, avoiding monsters and looking for any interesting things, but mostly I was searching for the fruit of evolution. I covered quite a bit of ground and attempted to move in such a way that I was covering the entirety of the oasis. I’d go in a circle around the lake, building new shelters along the way.

Eventually, the sun was on its way toward the horizon and I decided to return to my old hideout for today. Tomorrow I would test how fast I could make a new hideout. I did get a bigger mouth, after all, and that should make the process quite a bit faster than when I did it the first time.

It was the next day and I was out and about. Today, I wasn’t planning on fighting anything, if I could help it. For starters, I moved about ten minutes away from my base and looked for another suitably big tree with a fruit bush that would hide the entrance. It some searching, but the vegetation in the oasis was abundant, and I found one eventually.

I immediately got to work and immediately notice just how much faster I could work. Building my first hole had taken me three days, moving tiny mouthfuls of dirt at a time. With my newly mutated mouth, I could fit four, maybe five times as much dirt into my mouth. I also got the brilliant idea to see if I could just swallow the dirt and have gluttony take care of it, but for some reason, it only seemed to apply to food.

When I ate something I, or more likely, the system didn’t consider as food, it would be deposited in my actual stomach, instead of the infinite space the skill generated. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very comfortable feeling to have dirt in my stomach, so I immediately stopped after trying with a small amount.

Still, with my increased load capacity, combined with my faster movement speed, I should be able to make a sufficiently big hole for myself in about half a day. The dirt I spat out was usually covered in mucus and stuck together pretty well, so to save time I chucked the lumps away with one of my tentacles, saving additional time.

And truly, about half a day later, I had finished construction. This hole was a bit smaller than my first base, but it’d suffice as a place to stay the night. I was taking a small break in my new hole thinking about how to proceed from now on.

The best course of action would probably be to move through the oasis until about noon and then start constructing a new hideout. This way I could comb through the oasis and would eventually end up with a nearby shelter, no matter where I currently was in the oasis. Sure, this would take considerable time to do, but considering that I was in need of shelter anyway and would most likely spend my time as a tier-three in this oasis as well, it seemed worth it.

I’d much rather prepare too much, than too little. After the fiasco of descending to this layer and then getting stuck here, I wanted to leave nothing to chance, if I could help it.

Well, one problem at a time.

For now, I went back out to explore my immediate surroundings, and come tomorrow, I’d start exploring for real.

Five days later, my exploration of the oasis was coming along nicely. I felt like a pioneer exploring an unknown jungle, braving the dangers of the wild. Since I did my exploring during the day, I was mostly left alone but I still had to dispatch a monster here and there. Usually, I only got involved in a fight when something managed to sneak up on me, as I would mostly hide in advance whenever I felt something approaching me.

My big MP pool allowed me to absolutely pepper these foes with both poison needles and spears, the cast time for these two being near instant, and my agility was now high enough that I could dodge their attacks… well, most of them anyway. I still had to tank a hit here and there, but my defensive skills in combination with my high constitution assured my survival as long as I wasn’t hit too hard.

I’d shelved the void javelin for now, since its big explosion was like a magnet for disaster. This also had the added benefit of leveling up my poison spells some more, especially since I now got my new posion passives.

Exploring was a slow process, especially since I’d spend half of the day constructing my shelter and putting some markers on the trees in the surroundings. If I had to wager a guess, I was maybe done with about a quarter of the oasis so far.

It was mostly more of the same. Just endless palms, bushes, and weeds, sometimes more dense, sometimes sparse. But, the same nonetheless. I hadn’t seen any fruit that looked to be unusual and made sure to eat a fruit every time I stumbled over a coloration I hadn’t seen before, but none of them triggered the completion of the bonus objective.

I know that I’d decided to complete the bonus objectives no matter what, but I was honestly questioning this decision about now. Extreme mortal danger? I could handle that. But getting sent on a wild goose chase throughout the entire third layer? Yeah, not happening. If I found one in this oasis? Good. If not? So be it. I wasn’t down to waste weeks or months looking for something that’d give me a small advantage and that I wasn’t even guaranteed to find.

Aside from the fruit, I was also looking for a good spot where I could eventually attempt my 100-man-kill-quest, but so far nothing stood out to me.

Onwards!

Another five days had passed, and I was starting to feel a bit hypocritical. A few days ago I said I wouldn’t spend too much time looking for a fruit, but here I was, spending what would probably be close to a month, looking for it and digging holes while stagnating at the max level of my tier.

At least I had the excuse of this being a predictable time investment, that would pay dividends once I evolved.

For the report of the past few days: No fruit. No cool spot to fight it out at night. More trees and bushes. I was actually wondering if there was any point to what I was doing, but I’d finish what I started.

I stumbled upon something interesting about two days later. At first, I thought that I found a collection of large rocks, but upon closer inspection, the stones seemed to have faces. Like, I’m talking human faces here. There were about twenty of these large rocks scattered around this part of the oasis, most of them with human faces. I was fairly certain some of them were of elves, due to the pointy ears, and some others might have been dwarves?

This might be a racist assumption since all I had to go on was that the rock faces had beards.

Some of the rocks were also partially, or completely, destroyed. Most likely due to the local monsters fighting around them and hitting them with a skill. Still, their presence begged the question: Who put them there? And why?

I spent almost the entire day scouring every inch of these sculptures in an attempt to find literally any clues on what they were for but wound up empty. They were so out of place and mysterious that there had to be some sort of hidden piece associated with them, similar to the rainbow moth, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure it out.

Eventually, I had to hastily dig under one of the statues because I was so entranced by them that I forgot about the time. I even made sure to check the bottom of the statue I was under, just to make sure, but that also gave no hints as to their origin or purpose.

I spent the entire next day looking over the statues again. I crawled over and into the broken statues to see if anything was inside of them. I tried hitting them with some of my skills to see if it would cause a reaction. I even took a risk and blew one of them up with a void javelin, quickly hiding in my hole and observing as soon as I launched it, but the only thing that happened was that the face broke and a bunch of monsters came to check out the noise.

I had to waste some time waiting for them to finish, occasionally taking poisoned potshots to help speed the process up. Apparently, drenching a face in blood also did nothing, although I wasn’t directly responsible for trying.

The mystery of the stones vexed me to no end, but eventually, I gave up on them… for now. I still had more oasis to cover and an elusive fruit to find.

Another few days later, I found another rock formation and almost despaired thinking it was more statues. Turns out it was just a spring, feeding water into a short river that flowed into the lake.

I carefully made my way up a rock to take a better look and was surprised by a crystal clear basin of water that didn’t contain a single water monster. This might be a good spot to make a camp nearby since it was an uncontaminated source of clean water. So I decided to dig another resting spot under a tree a scant few meters away from the spring.

Then, as I was working, I bore witness to an interesting event. Since I always had one eye checking for flying predators, I saw the platform descending long before I could actually make out what it was. I curiously watched it come down, eventually stopping a few meters above the spring basin. At first, I cursed my luck, having picked a platform that was so far away from an oasis, when there was one coming down right here before I quickly changed my mind.

Turns out this wasn’t really a platform and more of a container. I watched as the bottom of the big cube opened up, tons of water rushing out of it, and mixed into the water, was a monster. It was quickly swept into the lake by the mass of water, immediately being engaged by the aquatic equivalent of the worm I saw when I came down.

Which is to say, spawn campers.

So this was how the water monsters came down from the higher levels, huh? Kind of interesting, but ultimately not really a game-changer for me. So long as I didn’t evolve to be able to breathe underwater, these transfer stations would remain off-limits for me.

I went back to work and eventually completed my newest hideout. Tomorrow I might find something interesting again, and I was kind of looking forward to when I did.

Dear diary, today I found a weird tree.

Sure, I’d seen some pretty alien-looking trees in my time as a slug, and this one wasn’t really out of this world, compared to some of the foliage on the second layer. The thing that made this one so weird, was that it wasn’t a palm tree.

I’d scoured about seventy percent of the oasis by now, and the only type of tree I’d seen so far were palm trees. They did have some subtle differences between them, like size, bark coloration, and leaf shape, but they were palms nonetheless.

The tree I was looking at right now was barely about two-thirds the height of the surrounding trees, looked dead, and weirdest of all, had a weird cone shape. Its base was a good three meters wide and tapered off to a point. There was a singular branch sticking out from one of the sides, about halfway up the tree, with not a leaf in sight.

The tree was bizarre to behold if it even was one. It kind of looked like a scuffed pyramid, which I suppose goes well with the desert theme of this layer. I circled the tree several times, inspecting it as well as I could. I climbed to the top and took a closer look at the branch, but for all intents and purposes, this looked like a dead tree to me.

Still, it was suspicious, which is why I decided to make one of my holes nearby. I had been looking all over the oasis for this stupid fruit of evolution, and this was the first bit of vegetation that I could put down as a definitive maybe. If this really was the tree where the fruit grew, there most likely would only be a single one, hanging from the only branch available.

I had an inkling that it would be heavily contested whenever one was ripe.

Of course, I would need to be right about the nature of this tree first, but I had high hopes for this. Unless I could find anything else of interest, this would probably become my main camp after I was done exploring. That way I could keep an eye on the tree and be the first to know if there was going to be a fruit.

Or I could just be wasting my time.

On the other hand, the lack of diversity in the oasis made it so it didn’t really matter where I set up my main camp. It was mostly the same all around the lake, so I could pick and choose, really.

I finally did it. Today, after twenty-four days of running around and digging, I completed my tour of the oasis.

Which meant I now had twenty-five holes spread around the oasis for me to hide in during the night. I’d killed quite a few monsters on my little trip, bringing my DP up to 2.3k, I managed to get six more attribute points thanks to gluttony, and I had sixteen more corpses stored in my inventory.

Life was good.

Now that I’d completed my preparations, my next goal was to complete my bonus objectives in an orderly fashion. As for the fruit of evolution, there was little more I could do than make camp near the weird tree and hope for the best. On the matter of killing a hundred monsters in a single night, I had thought up three methods that could potentially work.

I’d just have to give it the good old college try and hope one of them managed to do the trick. Whatever the case tho, I was about to receive a whole boatload of DP, which I was looking forward to.

This was going to be a massacre.