Chapter 6

Before going any further, Luke spent the AP from his new level up. It was tempting to just dump 2 into each stat, but he still wanted to hold onto that single point until he finished going through the skills list. There were just so many skills for practically everything it seemed. System was less than helpful with any specific advice, leaving Luke to comb through thousands and thousands of potential skills.

He kept that last point in reserve and bumped agility, stamina, and perception up 2 points. Strength got 1. The physical differences were minimal this time, which Luke appreciated. Agility helped him with his coordination, but it was still disconcerting to be suddenly stronger and faster. Perception was perhaps the hardest stat to get used to. It fed him so much new information that had to be sorted and filtered, and Luke was starting to think putting any additional points in it would be a mistake.

He killed a few more marmots, just to get the hang of his increased stats and to practice with the swords he’d taken from the goblins. Even with his increased agility, it was still uncomfortable to use the swords. His hands were simply too big to hold onto weapons sized for goblins. Luke resigned himself to his fate though; metal weapons were too much of an advantage to pass up on just because the hilts didn’t fit into his hands well.

Following System’s directions, Luke cut across the forest to the east wall of the valley. The farther he went, the smaller the fields and glades got and the taller and thicker the trees grew. It wasn’t like the side he’d landed in was all that tame to begin with, but the further he went, the more foreboding things got.

He was an hour or so into the journey and slightly frustrated at how slow his progress was. It wasn’t like walking down a sidewalk where all he had to do was put one foot in front of another. [Survivalist]helped to keep him moving, enough at least that he was considering ranking it up as soon as he got the 3 AP it required, but more often than not, there was no trail to find. Forging his own way through the trees and brush was a chore. Doing it while keeping his weapons, food, and water with him was an exercise in masochism.

Luke forced his way through some interweaving branches, only to freeze halfway through when he felt the presence of something with a lot more XP than him nearby. It was the soft sound of something rasping across a bed of pine needles that clued him in. Slowly, still holding onto a branch to keep it out of his face, Luke looked down.

His foot was inches away from a snake, but not a small one like he was used to. Its scales were shades of black and green, and its body was thicker than his leg. He couldn’t see the whole thing, but it had to be at least seven or eight feet long.

Thankfully, it either didn’t realize he was there, which Luke doubted, or it wasn’t hungry. Not everything was as territorial as those damn marmots, apparently, and the snake slithered off without ever acknowledging Luke’s existence. He was just fine with that. Snakes had always creeped him out a little bit anyway. Snakes and spiders.

He’d take an encounter with a snake any day though over finding a wasps’ nest. He’d done that once back home when he was a kid. The thought of finding one here, even if every wasp was level 1, was kind of terrifying. He could well imagine killing a hundred of them, only to be stung to death by the other thousand. An involuntary shudder went through him just thinking about it.

Not every animal was as relaxed as that snake. Luke barely made it another hundred feet before some sort of giant squirrel lunged at his face from a nearby tree. Between his perception and his agility, he managed to not only avoid it, but to spin on his heel and skewer the rodent with his sword.

[You have slain BarkRipper Squirrel (lvl 3). 9 XP awarded.]

“I wonder if you’d be any good to eat,” he asked the body, still impaled on his blade. “And how does an herbivore get to level 3 anyway?”

Then again, considering the way it went straight for his face unprovoked like that, it might have been a mistake to think it didn’t eat meat too. The squirrel was monstrous, bigger than any squirrel he’d ever seen in his life. It was as tall as his knee and he guessed ten to fifteen pounds.

The upside of everything being so damn aggressive was that it wasn’t hard to find food. That marmot meat had tasted like shit, but Luke was willing to admit he wasn’t a good cook under the best of circumstances. His primary goal of roasting that meat had been to avoid getting sick from eating an undercooked meal, not to make it taste better.

He didn’t feel like carrying the corpse around while he walked, didn’t think his grocery bag would even hold the weight, and also didn’t want his water bottled covered in blood. Shrugging, Luke whipped the sword in an arc so the squirrel would fly off and watched it bounce away into the underbrush. There would be more later, and he wasn’t hungry right now.

What he did want was some sort of creek or stream, something with running water. [Survivalist] told him that the faster it was moving and the clearer the water, the better. There was more to it than just that, of course, and he was well aware that just because something looked safe to drink didn’t make it so. The other half of the test was to find signs that animals also drank from it and that there were no obvious sources of contaminants nearby.

He eventually found a small stream, maybe five or six feet wide and clear enough that he could count the rocks in the bed. There were animal tracks in the soft mud near the edge of the stream, and nothing jumped out to him as dangerous. There was even a cloud of insects floating near the surface, which he took as a good sign that the water wasn’t killing the animals drinking from it.

Luke hopped out onto a rock poking out of the water and dipped one of his water bottles into it. After filling it and holding it up to the light, he shrugged and took a drink. It was fine, he guessed. He’d tasted worse tap water, at least. He filled up the rest of the bottles and kept walking. If he wasn’t shitting his guts out in an hour or two, he’d know it was safe to drink.

“System, how far away am I?”

“Curtis Bennet died in a cave about half a mile east of here and perhaps a hundred feet below ground. If you were to follow this stream up to its source, you would exit the tree line close to the location you’re seeking.”

“Thanks,” Luke said. He turned to follow the stream.

“What do you think of these swords?” he asked a minute later. “Is there anything you can tell me about them?”

“They appear to be Gnomish in origin, but not well cared for,” System replied.

“Gnomish? How did a bunch of goblins end up with them? Are there gnomes in the valley too?”

“Goblins are well-known for raiding other settlements for supplies, and have no cultural taboos against indiscriminate killing. The weapons were likely brought back following a successful raid outside Tenebrous Valley, probably many years ago.”

“Damn, there goes any hope of finding help from someplace civilized. You know I’m really not an outdoor kind of guy, right? I am making this up as I go along.”

“I understand, Luke. I apologize for not being able to assist you more.”

“Yeah, yeah. Not enough admin access or whatever. I’ll have to get to the command console first.”

“You may be able to purify your bloodline prior to reaching the console. In theory, I would be able to assist you further if you were able to do so.”

Luke stopped and stared at the ghostly figure. “What the hell does that mean? It sounds… kind of racist, honestly.”

“I do not understand,” System said.

“Talking about pure bloodlines and shit. It’s… never mind, you’re probably not thinking of the same thing I am anyway. Just, what does purifying a bloodline even mean?”

“There are many sapient creatures with bloodlines that enhance them in some way. These traits are inherited from their ancestors and passed down to their descendants. Depending on pedigree, a bloodline may become weaker, but there are skills that allow access to rituals which can be used to purify a bloodline and restore it to the power it had in prior generations.”

“Oh, so exactly what I thought you meant, except with some sprinkles of magic bullshit on it. People here literally have it on their status screen to reinforce it too. God, this is going to be a fucking mess to deal with, I can already tell.”

He could just imagine rich people with their heads up their own asses going on about why they needed to fuck their cousins to keep their bloodlines pure, except in Aros, their status screens would reinforce the idea that they were right. Hell, they might actively select against genetic diversity because some kid was born with a ‘weak’ bloodline, whatever the hell that meant.

The thought of some rich twat being the king or whatever after a century of selective inbreeding was somewhat terrifying, but he consoled himself with the fact that everyone having levels probably made it hard to consolidate military might and prevent insurrections if things got too far out of hand.

Maybe he was overthinking it. If they had a thing to ‘purify’ their bloodline, maybe they used that liberally every generation instead of marrying their siblings or parents. Somehow he doubted it. He’d read the Sneetches when he was a kid. Those naturally born with pure bloodlines would be ‘better’ in some asinine way than those who’d had to artificially purify it.

This was not going to be his problem though. He was going to buff his levels, make his way to the God Machine as fast as possible, and bring his family back. He’d worry about what came next after he got that far. Inbred politics was so far outside his sphere of concerns that he didn’t even want to think about it.

“Is this skill something I can get for myself, or would I need someone else to do it for me?” Luke asked.

“Let me show you where to find it in the skill shop,” System said. The menu opened in front of Luke and System navigated through it quickly. It was down the magic section, which Luke had only briefly looked at before dismissing it as too expensive since even the cheapest spells cost 10 AP to learn, under a section called ritual magics.

“50 AP for rank 1?” Luke said. “The upgrade to rank 2 is 150 AP!”

“Yes, it is a very powerful skill, and quite rare for anyone to fully explore it. The ritual masters who have this skill are generally placed quite highly in whatever society they are a part of.”

“Which does fuck all to help me,” Luke said. “I’d have to do nothing but save for this for the next 5 levels to get the first rank, then I don’t even know how many for rank 2. How many ranks does this have?”

“Most skills have 5 ranks, though there are always exceptions,” System supplied.

“Doesn’t seem worth it,” Luke said. “Would a bloodline upgrade help that much?”

“I am not able to comment on what kind of access a higher level SysAdmin bloodline would grant.”

“Of course you’re not. Oh, hey, is this the place?”

Luke spotted a cave nearby, the opening partially hidden behind some scrub brush. It was a vertical split, ten feet high but only two feet wide. He’d have to squeeze around the brush, but he wasn’t going to bother if it wasn’t the right spot.

“Yes, this is it.”

“Oh good. Let’s do this then.”