A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 6

When morning came, Alice was freezing. She hadn’t dared to light a campfire, afraid that whatever had killed the man in the river would find her if she made herself more visible. However, after several hours of nothing happening, her frayed nerves were beginning to restore themselves. Cautiously, she poked her head out of the cave, before slowly scooting her way back into the sunlight. After another tense minute of observing her surroundings, she breathed a sigh of relief, before she once again inspected the things she had found from the river yesterday.

Of greatest interest to her was the soaked piece of cloth she had found floating down the river. Since she frequently suffered from the cold weather in this world, having thicker and warmer clothing or better blankets for the night would drastically ease the difficulty of surviving. After taking another look at the incredibly soaked cloth, she unfolded it and placed it on a nearby rock, hoping it would dry out by nightfall. Then, she returned to the river, keeping a wary eye on her surroundings just in case. For the next several hours, she didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary as she caught and smoked fish.

Four smoked fish and one level in the {Fishing} skill and one level in [Survivor] later, Alice returned to the cave. Midday had come, and there were still no notable incidents. Since [Survivor] had reached level 15, Alice had another perk selection available, and she wanted to see what was available before she started studying the book she had found.

Enhanced Regeneration

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Any damage to your body heals at a significantly faster rate without increasing the consumption of calories and nutrition.

Enhanced Endurance

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

The effects of the [Endurance] Stat are increased by 5%.

Bone Strengthening

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Your bones become able to resist outside impacts more effectively and resist breaking more efficiently without any negative side effects.

Nutritional Balance

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Regardless of your food intake, your body will maintain proper nutritional balance. This does not substitute for lack of food - instead, it strips some of the nutrients out of various foods consumed and converts them into other vitamins and minerals based on what your body is lacking.

Friend of Animals

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher, Charisma 110 or higher

Simple minded-animals are less likely to bear ill will towards you, and are less likely to attack you or steal your food. Does not affect monsters.

Extremophile

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Extends your survivable temperature range by 10 degrees Celsius. You will suffer no ill effects or discomfort while within this extended temperature range. (This applies to both hotter and colder temperatures).

{Friend of Animals} was almost immediately struck off the list. She wasn’t sure what the distinction between ‘simple minded’ animals were and regular animals, which made the usefulness of the perk too uncertain for her tastes. Even though being less likely to tangle with the wildlife was somewhat tempting, it simply wasn’t tempting enough. She did note that the Perk mentioned ‘monsters,’ which made her quite nervous, but she had no idea how many or how few monsters might be present in this area. Hopefully she just wouldn’t stumble across any until she returned to civilization?

{Enhanced Endurance} was also eliminated by her, since it didn’t have a very big impact either. While it might be more useful in the long run, she also needed to live long enough for there to be a long run. {Bone Strengthening} and {Enhanced Regeneration} were also removed from consideration after some brief debate – she wanted them, of course, because they seemed like they would be useful. However, compared to the last two perks, they didn’t do anywhere near enough. She had no idea how much {Enhanced regeneration} boosted her regeneration by, and having sturdier bones and quickly regenerated wounds just didn’t seem to deal with the most likely ways she would die, which Alice currently believed to be hypothermia and starvation.

That left {Extremophile} and {Nutritional Balance} as the two Perks that she felt were most useful right now. Alice didn’t have to think for too long before she picked {Extremophile}. Problems caused by lack of nutrition seemed much less lethal in the short run than freezing to death, and an extra ten degrees Celsius of warmth could make a huge difference.

Although, Alice did wonder why the System seemed to consistently use the metric system. Not that she objected – even though she was raised in America, she naturally had to use the metric system in her Science classes, and had a good enough understanding and familiarity with Celsius and meters that it wouldn’t hinder her usage of the System. However, thus far she had been guessing that the System seemed to translate perks and ideas into language that she found most easy to understand, based on her analysis of its interaction with the English language, so the sudden demand that she think in metric units threw her off a bit.

Immediately after picking the perk, she felt the difference. The air around her felt warmer, the cold less biting, and the misery the weather in general seemed to disappear. Alice had been nervous for a while, because the strange warmth near her heart that had kept her alive after her mana baptism had been fading day by day, but suddenly the problem seemed utterly nonexistent. Ten degrees Celsius felt like more than enough to survive chilly weather, as long as she didn’t take a bath in ice cold water or something. If before she felt like she had been locked into a walk-in freezer, now it felt closer to a chilly room. She still found the temperature unpleasant, but it was no longer cold to the point of being life-threatening.

After a lunch of smoked fish and nuts, she began studying the book during the second half of the day. She first started by looking for any common and repeated characters in the book – it was important to know whether the language had an alphabet or whether it was closer to a language like ancient Chinese, where most concepts and ideas each had their own unique symbol.

Luckily, the book’s language clearly used some sort of alphabet. There were 39 different characters in total, and all of them were repeated several times. While she didn’t know what any of them meant, she at least didn’t need to decipher 10,000 or more unique ‘letters’ to read. After some more analysis, Alice started making a few guesses about some of the character she saw repeated throughout the book.

Are some of the characters punctuation, perhaps? She tried looking through the book to see if there were any common ‘periods’ or something that seemed to crop up after a certain amount of text had been written, and found a few different characters that seemed to show up less frequently and were more evenly spaced out. It could be a coincidence, or it could be punctuation.

At least it was somewhere to start. Afterwards, she began counting various other things, trying to find other patterns within the language. Fifteen minutes later, the real result she was hoping for finally appeared.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Illvarian Language Proficiency 0 -> 1

Alice was immediately able to translate a few of the words in the book. Not only that, in a way she somehow completely failed to comprehend, she was suddenly certain that she could also speak the words she had just learned out loud with no problems.

Testing it out a bit, she spoke a few words out loud, and was somehow certain that she was not only speaking the language correctly, but was also doing so with no noticeable accent. She only knew a few basic words like ‘hello,’ but the fact that the system allowed her to fluently speak a foreign language with no accent after twenty minutes of guesswork was… stunning. Was this some sort of benefit she got as an {Outworlder}, or were languages just really easy to learn in this world? Alice couldn’t help but feel a bit curious about how the System influenced language learning in this world as she flipped through the book over and over again. She set a small goal for herself of figuring out the book’s topic before sunset.

Unfortunately, while she could make out a few basic words, the book seemed to be more complex than she had originally thought. One of the only things she could make out was on the first page, which seemed to be some sort of… introduction?

Greetings …. …. ….. . I …… ….. …….. ….. years…. …. …. ………..

Beyond that, most other things she could translate were just random collections of words like ‘I’ or ‘the.’ She was missing so much context that the book was still total nonsense to her, even though she could occasionally recognize a word or two here and there. However, that didn’t deter her. If she persisted long enough, she would naturally be able to understand the book as long as the System kept giving her Skill levels. It was just a matter of patience.

She continued looking for clues about the language and the book until the sunset. When she went to sleep, she first checked the cloth she had left outside, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was dry. Then, she fell asleep in her newly acquired blanket. It was warm, her belly was closer to full than it had been in days, and she was able to study a new language without any immediate threats to her survival. It was the best night she had spent in this new world so far.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Illvarian Language Proficiency 1 -> 3

* * *

The next day, Alice started out by gathering some more firewood for the morning and then went to gather some more fish. Smoked fish would be a critical food supply for her over the winter, along with nuts, and the fish would be particularly difficult to restock after winter began since the river would probably freeze over. She also needed a way to store some water or a way to break down the ice chunks into drinkable water, which caused her to once again come back to the issue of boiling water. She wasn’t sure if she needed to be afraid of getting sick from drinking bad water, since {Outworlder} and {Microbe Resistance} seemed to be doing a good job of keeping her protected from illness, but it didn’t hurt to take more precautions just in case. She could try finding some sort of uniquely shaped stone, but it was unlikely to be able to hold any reasonable amount of water unless she got incredibly lucky, and Alice didn’t really fancy her chances when it came to luck these days.

That meant that she needed to make something. A stone bowl might be achievable – that would at least allow her to boil water. She could even, very roughly, guess how she might go about doing so – if she hit rocks together for long enough, that might allow her to at least make a depression in a stone if she found a softer stone and used a harder stone to chip away a bowl shape. As for storing the water… she had no idea.

Alice hummed thoughtfully as she started getting ready for her usual fish-hunting. Despite the fact that she had survived the past few days, it felt like there was still so much she needed to do, and she hadn’t had any time to prepare before winter was upon her.

Suddenly, Alice felt fear pierce through her body. She wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but she froze, listening to the sounds around her and trying to figure out what had disturbed her. After a few seconds of stillness, she saw something black scuttle around in the corner of her eyes. She turned her head to stare at it and saw something that looked like a mixture of a crab and a spider. That is, if crab-spiders were as tall as her waist, had four claws, ten legs, and twelve eyes. It looked like someone had simply stuck the two animals together in a blender with no regard for sensible biology.

The strange creature seemed to be sniffing the area, trying to find something. Her heart started to pound. Alice had no idea if it was her intuition or her levels in Survivor, but something was telling her that this thing was dangerous.

After a few seconds, it edged a little to the left, maintaining a distance with her. It ran its limbs over the ground, and Alice took a cautious step away from the fish she was cooking. She would be seriously upset if her three fish were taken away by this thing, but wild animals were attracted to food, right?

If it was looking for her meal, she would happily exchange it for her life. She took another step backwards. And the thing finally noticed her.

With a sudden shriek, the thing rotated its body towards her and pounced. Alice shrieked, then immediately turned around and began running towards the trees. She hoped that this thing couldn’t climb trees. The thing seemed to be entirely ignoring her fish. Instead, it was sprinting directly towards her, expressing no interest in her fish at all. Alice leaped up, grabbing at a tree branch. She slipped, nearly falling to the ground. At the last second, she managed to stabilize herself and haul herself onto the branch, scratching up her hands along the way. At the same time, she felt something painful latch onto her foot and bite down hard. Alice screamed and kicked, feeling some of her flesh tear as something heavy flew off of her leg. Screaming in pain now, Alice finally pulled up the rest of her body, her injured leg throbbing as she moved it. Unsure if she was safe yet, Alice moved up one more tree branch as she tried to stifle a moan of pain. The system started spewing out notifications, but she couldn’t spare the time to look at them or her status screen.

The creature that had tried to eat her had already shaken off her little kick and was already prowling underneath the tree, looking up at her. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to be able to climb trees, but her leg hurt where it had bitten her.

Alice clawed her way up another few tree branches, stifling whimpers of pain. Then the creature hurled itself against the trunk of the tree, over and over again to no apparent effect. After almost a minute of watching the creature try to reach her and fail over and over, Alice felt comfortable enough to inspect her wound.

Her foot didn’t look like it was in critical condition. However, there were two somewhat deep puncture marks near her ankle, and the area around those two puncture marks had two long and bloody gashes where she had dislodged the creature afterwards. She tried wriggling her foot a bit, and was thankful that it still moved properly. At least the spidercrab hadn’t injured a tendon.

Shakily, she stood up on the tree branch and tried to put her weight on her foot, and fiery pain bored through her entire leg. Gasping, Alice gave up the attempt. Instead, she tore off a strip of her pajama sleeve and then used the cleaner side to start wrapping up her wound. She needed to keep the wound from being infected, just in case her perk and achievement weren’t able to cope with an infection.

Given the creature was still snarling and trying to bash the tree down, Alice carefully made her way up one more tree branch, just to be safe, and then started checking the system messages she had been ignored. Please, let me have reached level 20. A Perk might save me. Please.

You have levelled up!

Survivor level: 15 -> 17

You have gained an achievement!

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Given the fact that they're everywhere, you're bound to encounter them sooner or later, right?

Increases the effects of the [Endurance] and [Dexterity] stats by 2%

Through training, you have increased an attribute

Endurance 52 -> 55, Strength 45 -> 47, Dexterity 49 -> 51, Perception 101 -> 102

Through training, you have increased a Skill

Medicine 0 -> 1, Sprinting 0 -> 1, Climbing 0 -> 1

What the heck did the system mean with ‘they’re everywhere?’ Alice had previously been hoping that monsters weren’t that common, even when she had seen them mentioned in the {Friend of Animals} Perk. It seemed that her hopes had been extremely misaligned with reality, and she would need to face monsters often in this world.

Suddenly, Alice felt very nervous. What was attacking her wasn’t just a wild animal, it was, for some reason, classified as a monster. Alice didn’t know what the difference between a wild animal and a monster was, but all sorts of crazy and scary ideas for what the difference could be sprang into her thoughts as she observed the spidercrab hurling itself against the tree below her.

It was also very clear that the System wasn’t going to save her here. Level 17 did not grant a perk, and she probably needed to get to level 20 before she got another Perk. In other words, she was on her own. Not to mention, even if she survived this encounter, the message accompanying {Monstrous Encounter} hinted that, rather than being unlucky she had stumbled across a monster, she might be lucky that she hadn’t found any so far.

Alice looked at the creature below her again, and imagined a giant swarm of them tracking her down and eating her as she tried to follow the river upstream. Then, she imagined a swarm tracking her down while she slept and eating her inside of her cave. She had no idea how she would survive either encounter. In the end, it seemed to come down the fact that she had no way to defend herself alone in the wilderness like this…

Panic seized her thoughts, and for a moment, she wondered if there was any way to survive at all. Even if she lived through this encounter, would she live through the next one?

No. She clamped down on her panic, trying to regain her focus. She refused to die here.

She frowned, and looked at the spidercrab. It was still hurling itself against the tree, over and over again to no effect. It didn’t seem particularly intelligent, and was very, very hostile towards her for some reason. However, it had no way of climbing up the tree, and didn’t seem able to use its spidery legs to climb for whatever reason.

Alice glanced around again, and confirmed that she had no weapons or offensive tools. If she had been thinking more clearly, she would have carried her stick with her instead of leaving it to keep smoking her fish by the fire, but she had panicked when she had seen the monster rushing at her.

The monster showed no signs at all of giving up, and if anything it was throwing itself at the tree more ferociously as time passed, so this wasn’t something she could just wait out. Alice looked around her, and saw browning leaves and dying tree branches… tree branches?

Alice grabbed one of the sturdier tree branches that she was able to reach, and after several tugs managed to break it off. The branch was around four or five feet long, and was much more unwieldy than a real spear, but at least it would help her attack from a distance. She inspected the point at the end of the branch, which had luckily produced something that at least resembled a sharp tip, and decided that it was probably able to make a dent in the softer parts of the spidercrab’s body. As the spidercrab hurled itself at the trunk of the tree again, Alice stabilized her position on her tree branch as best she could, and then stabbed towards one of the fleshier spider limbs.

She felt a tremendous jerk as she nearly dropped the branch, unprepared for how much force was behind the animal’s leap. However, fortunately, she felt something squish.

SKREEEEEEEE! The spidercrab’s howl sounded like nails being scratched on a dozen chalkboards at the same time. If before it had been thinking of her as a meal, now it was seriously pissed off.

More System notifications sounded in her ears, but she ignored them.

Although she hadn’t done any major damage, she had injured it!

“Die!” Alice yelled, half to hype herself up and half to try to intimidate her opponent. It would have sounded much more intimidating if her voice hadn’t quivered halfway through her statement, making her sound more terrified than brave.

She stabbed at the spidercrab again.

This time, her aim was much worse than before. She managed to stab the air above the spidercrab’s legs, injuring nothing besides her pride.

The spidercrab, seeming to have realized something from her previous attempt, leapt towards her again. However, this time, it swiped with its legs in midair, trying to knock the stick out of her hands. Alice instinctively flinched away the moment the monster did something unexpected, saving her from losing her weapon as she cowered back onto the tree branch. More System dings rang out, all of which she ignored.

The creature leapt for a final time, ignoring the tree trunk entirely this time as it tried to reach Alice. As it was doing so, she managed to steel her heart and stab once more towards its eye. More through sheer coincidence than any skill, Alice managed to penetrate the thing’s eye, and felt something else squish under the force of the stick.

The thing shrieked again, and Alice could almost feel its anger as it lost one of its twelve eyes. Upon landing on the ground again, it shrieked, then hurled itself against the tree trunk again as if it had lost its mind. Alice stabbed at it, trying to get in another lucky blow, but missed completely. Finally, Spidercrab failed one of its landings and flopped onto the ground below. Alice crawled down one or two rungs of tree branches and stabbed at its softer underbelly as it tried to claw its way back to its feet. Even with her terrible aim, she could hit a flailing stationary target, and stabbed it in the stomach. After she managed to get in a few good jabs, Spidercrab was noticeably injured and bleeding, favoring one of its sides as it finally climbed back to its feet. It screeched at her one last time, letting her know just how pissed off it was, and then scuttled back towards the trees. It wasn’t dead, but it had given up on turning her into a meal.

Alice stayed on the tree branch for almost an extra half hour, waiting anxiously as she stared at where the spidercrab had disappeared back into the wilderness. She couldn’t shake off the fear that the creature was preparing to ambush her the moment she lost her safe spot in the tree. However, eventually, she calmed down her wildly beating heart and rough breathing and realized that the creature was gone for now. Slowly, she checked her system messages.

Through training, you have increased an attribute

Strength 47 -> 50, Endurance 55 -> 56, Dexterity 51 -> 52

Through training, you have increased a Skill

Spearmanship 0 -> 5, Climbing 0 -> 2, Dodge 0 -> 1

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 17 -> 19

Alice looked over her levels and attributes and realized that she had gained more levels in the last hour than she usually got in a day. Not to mention, she had gained almost as many stat points during the fight as she had during her entire stay on this planet so far. This led her to some new guesses about how the System worked.

The ‘levels’ obviously seemed to work differently than they would in most RPG’s, since her ‘survivor’ class kept levelling up based on her wilderness survival instead of killing monsters or something. However, perhaps fighting monsters still boosted her experience point gain or something? Maybe that was why her magic class wasn’t levelling up… ?

Or, alternately, perhaps the system responded to danger. Since she had almost died in the last hour several times during the fight, she had been exposed to far more danger than she had at any other point in time on this planet. Perhaps that somehow increased the rate of stat gain or something. Or maybe there was a totally different set of rules that she wasn’t aware of. Honestly, she had no idea. Even if it were true, she wasn’t exactly eager to throw herself into danger in order to gain more stats and levels. That just seemed like a good way to end up in a monster’s stomach.

Alice finished climbing back down until reached the ground, making sure to keep her weight off of her injured foot as much as possible, and waited another five minutes at the tree base to make sure the spidercrab hadn’t just been waiting for her to get down from the tree before making a move. Then, after seeing no movement in her surroundings and deciding she was safe, she flopped onto the ground and took a few minutes to just rest her injured and tired body.

Afterwards, she slowly limped back towards her fishing spot. After seeing to the fish that she had been smoking, Alice was relieved to find that they were still intact. Although, that raised another question. Why had the monster gone for her and not the food? It seemed to be pursuing a meal, but many animals on Earth would have gone for the food she was cooking after scaring her off, rather than risking a fight with a potentially unknown animal.

Furthermore, the system hadn’t classified a single animal she had seen so far as a monster, but specifically distinguished this one as a ‘monster.’ Even the weird, scary raccoon-like creature she had seen on the first night hadn’t triggered the {Monstrous Encounter} Achievement. What was the difference? Aggression? Some quirk of biology? Alice had no idea.

Alice sighed. She had no idea how to answer any of her questions for now. What she DID know was that there was an entirely new component of the environment she hadn’t paid attention to before that had a very high chance of killing her. She hadn’t thought much about her initial run-in with the raccoon thing her first night, due to how much she was trying to process at the time, but this had brought that encounter back to the front of her thoughts. In addition to potentially toxic mana, starvation, freezing to death, and the difficulties of surviving alone in the wilderness, she had to worry about freaking monsters.