Pleased with my decision, Orthok slapped me on the shoulder, “That’s the right decision, Jason! Let’s get some proper loot before heading to school, learning is much more fun with full pockets!”

Even though Qu Ji and I had been out all night, we decided not to rest and go straight on. I renewed the strengthening spells, which lasted about an hour, the magic would help us get through the day.

Before we left, I transferred what was still warm from the stew into a bowl and stowed it in the storage ring. This was my way of checking to see if the physical processes were continuing in the pocket dimension. Then we quickly cleaned the dishes, packed everything up and marched off.

Orthok and I walked side by side and talked, while Qu Ji stayed a little to the side, constantly shifting from left to right and back to keep a better eye on the surroundings. As I had observed, the slave warriors were accustomed to operating in groups of three, now he was surely missing his comrades.

For my part, I did not forget to check the area ahead of us for magic, not only because of the possible dangers, but also in the hope of finding more resources to reinforce my magic core.

However, the day passed pleasantly quiet, except for a few animal tracks, we saw no signs of life of monsters or people. During my absence, Orthok had made himself a replacement bow and was pleased when I returned his artifact quiver with the good arrows. Thus armed, he promised that we would always have enough meat to eat. Along the way, he gathered herbs for seasoning and tea, and at one point he stopped and dug several roots out of the ground, explaining that we would cook and eat them.

It did surprise me that our journey was more like a hike somewhere in the Midwest. Where had all the dangers of the Devastation gone? Then I remembered that we were not in a video game, whose creators made sure that there was no boredom while playing, confronting the players with one enemy after another. In the most dangerous jungle on earth, you weren’t constantly attacked by wild animals or bitten by poisonous snakes, which didn’t mean that this possibility didn’t exist every second. So I stayed alert and didn’t forget to use my Magic Vision.

So all day we were traveling through a steppe-like landscape, large open grassy areas dotted with bushes and clumps of trees. The trees reliably pointed out water sources and provided welcome shade during our short rests. In the late afternoon, a forest appeared far ahead of us, which we approached in the hours that followed, finally reaching its edge at dusk.

We quickly set up camp, Qu Ji pitched the tent, and Orthok was pleased when I handed him one of the bedrolls from the slave warriors’ camp. After a modest dinner, he took the first watch. Qu Ji and I crawled into the tent and fell asleep on the spot after 40 hours without sleep.

The short summer night flew by. When Qu Ji woke me up after his watch, the sky in the east was already starting to get light. The Irichian lay down to grab a few more hours of sleep and I left the tent for my watch. The pleasant morning chill helped me wake up quickly. The first forest birds greeted the start of the new day with their sounds, otherwise nothing stirred in the surroundings.

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I fetched one of the armchairs on the storage ring and sat down comfortably. The first thing I did was check the temperature of the stew I had stored in the ring and was pleased to find that it was still just as warm as it had been when I put it in almost a day ago. So the physical processes were not continuing in the ring and I could use it to transport the monsters’ internal organs, for example, without them spoiling over time. That was good news.

After that, I took out the last two magic-laden stones I had taken from the cave and used them to increase the capacity of my mana core from 147 to 192. Considering that I had started with a measly ten units a week ago, I could be proud of my progress. In addition, I had increased my Focus to 1.16 and learned fourteen symbols of the primordial language from which I could create various spells.

I looked again at the three grayed-out symbols from the lightning field, whose meaning I had not yet been able to decipher. If I were to recreate such a lightning field with earthly technology, I would need a control unit for it, usually a computer. The magic took over the role of the whole technology as well as the control. It was amazing what a magic could do. But back to the computer: it would have to be programmed, of course. The program would check to see if anyone or anything was in the monitored area. Most of the time, this would not be the case, so the check would have to be done again and again, in a loop.

Could it be that the last symbol stood for repetition? I placed the symbol in the air in front of me and quietly commanded, “Repeat!” There was no visible effect, but in my symbol library the symbol no longer showed as inactive. Excellent! I sat back, satisfied. Now there were only two unknown symbols left. It occurred to me that I still had the book on artifact making in my memory ring, maybe it would help me understand how the magic controls worked?

I was about to start reading when the sleeping Orthok stretched, then sat up and wished me a good morning. That was the end of the rest and the reading hour had to give way to the morning travel routine: prepare breakfast, eat, pack everything up and set off.

Our path now led through the forest. The good news was that the trees protected us from the sun and it wasn’t as hot as the day before. Unfortunately, that was the only good news. No one had bothered to lay out comfortable trails for us. We struggled through the brush, climbed over fallen trees, and walked bent over or even on all fours on animal trails. Visibility was limited, the roots and branches on the ground were trying to bring us down, and the insects were getting on my last nerve.

So I was only glad when Orthok, who was walking in front, raised his arm to make us stop. We were just walking through a fir forest and the dark firs with their dead lower branches spread a gloomy atmosphere around them, which suited my mood well. I cautiously approached the hunter and stopped behind his right shoulder. “What’s wrong?”, I asked in a hushed voice. He pointed forward. “Look between the two trees, do you see it?” I looked closely and sure enough, there were... cobwebs? Semi-transparent spider webs as thick as a computer cable stretched from one tree to the next. “A monster spider?”, I asked hesitantly, as my mood deteriorated even further. I hated spiders! “It probably is one,” Orthok confirmed.

I looked at him, “What do we want to do?” “Well,” he said slowly, “spiders are unpleasant opponents. They are fast, can be poisonous, and slow us down with their cobwebs. Plus, there’s magic involved, so that doesn’t make it any easier.”

“But...”, I echoed. “I definitely hear a but coming.”

The hunter sighed. “We don’t know if she hasn’t noticed us by now. If that’s the case and we continue on our way, she can track us and ambush us. Then we’ll have the fight anyway, but on her terms.”

“So you think it would be safer if we attacked her ourselves?”

“I think that’s the better option, yes. Besides, one of our goals was to hunt monsters for loot, right? Then we might as well start now.”

“Alright,” I said, looking grimly at Qu Ji, who was standing next to me with a spear in his hand, looking around warily, “I feel like killing someone right now, anyway!”