Robert walked towards Riley’s old hunting ground. He was in a majestic forest. Enormous trees stood tall, like pillars of the heaven, up to at least a hundred meters in height. Thick bushes twice the height of Riley formed the underbrush. A soft wind carried the sweet fragrance of wildflowers.
“The growth of the flora and fauna in this world seems supercharged, might have to do with the abundance of the dark energy here.“ Robert thought.
After walking for half an hour through the dense forest, he reached his goal. It was a meadow with an ocean of emerald grass, bushes of colorful wildflowers made it look like a green silk cloth with jewels sewn upon. According to Riley’s memory, he stumbled upon this place while he was looking for herbs in the forest.
Dozens of rabbits were running around. Although he knew their real name through Riley's memory, he couldn't call them anything else than “rabbits“ in his mind. In appearance, they were like rabbits but these animals were twice as large as their counterparts on earth and twice as fast. Although herbivores, they would fight when in danger and bite with their incisors. Riley had a few painful first-hand experiences with that.
Robert carefully made his way towards the rabbit burrows. He stopped some distance away and lay low inside a bush so he wouldn't alarm the rabbits or drew unwanted attention.
The village hunters used bows or traps to hunt these giant rabbits. But the agile nature and their aggressiveness made it hard and occasionally painful to hunt them. Also as they weren't as delicious as the deer and other animals, Villagers have made them only a secondary choice. But if Riley were to step into the forest to hunt deer, with his strength, he would only end up being fodder for the wild animals or the small spirit beasts.
Robert took out one of the tubes he had prepared. He inserted the index finger of his right hand in one end and a dart into the other. In preparation to not lose the pressure he planned to build up with his right hand, he blocked the hole where the dart went in with his left. He then used the low energy consuming candle flame and quickly divided the flame to micro level to build up the pressure as well as not to burn the bamboo tube.
After building up pressure he found it hard to keep his finger inside the tube and the dart was vibrating with pressure. Aiming at a nearby rabbit, he released the dart. With a loud pop, the dart flew faster than a crossbow bolt but missed its target by a few meters.
Hearing the sound, the rabbits became alert and looked up but couldn't make out the source of the noise and didn’t run away. Robert tried it again and the third shot found its target. More luck than skill, he saw the dart penetrating the rabbit's head, piercing its brain and killing it. Seeing their comrade fall and no enemy in sight to fight off, all other rabbits ran away. Robert slowly extracted himself from the brush and after collecting his bounty, went off to find another spot where he could hide and pray for another group of rabbits. He had to replace his darts often. Due to the nature of his makeshift "gun", only every third dart flew true. Another problem presented itself in form of exploding Bamboo tubes. Mother nature just didn't anticipate a guy pressurizing the hollow tubes over and over again. But, ignoring a few splinters in his finger, arm, face and 5 self-induced near cardiac arrests, Robert was happy with his method of hunting.
After the fifth exploding bamboo tube, however, Robert decided to call it a day. All in all, he shot 17 rabbits freeing them from their boring, peaceful grass munching earthly shackles. To transport his prey back to the village he had brought along a bag. A very big bag. Which he now had to drag back to the village through a forest with dense underbrush.
The butcher, named Hewie, was amazed by Riley’s haul and gave Riley two silvers for its entirety. That was 30 coppers more than it was usually worth. The going rate for one rabbit carcass was 10 copper. But considering what Riley recently went through, he wanted to help the young man at least a little bit.
“Poor boy...” Hewie said to himself as he watched Riley walk away.
He felt bad for the boy, being an orphan, growing up was not easy. But these days, after the incident in the abandoned house, he seemed to be different. Unlike his previous self, who tried to survive each day, he now seemed to have dreams and an ambition.
Robert was beginning to really like the villagers. Although Riley was an orphan and more of a recluse, these people all treated him well and helped him in whatever way they could. The old healer, storekeeper Rudo, Old man Jia, this butcher Hewie and wherever he went, none of them saw him as an outsider. He wanted to bring these people along when he attained a prominent, wealthy position in the kingdom or even the empire. And Robert was determined to gain power and position in this world. That was probably the only way he could get information and exact revenge for Riley on that bald skinny old man.
Westfae village was pretty peaceful all year round, except when a random spirit animal rampaged through it. Last year two spirit animals attacked the village together. The hunters were helpless and had to hire some higher level magic users from Goldfair. When all hunter of the village worked together they were able to bring down a very low-level spirit animal. But two blue leopards were not something they could handle. In that fight, 3 hunters had died.
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There was only one dark mage of journeyman level in this village, the village head Heng. The old healer was a journeyman magic user but he was a light wood magus. His hospital was renowned even in the Golfair and a lot of people traveled to Westfae to get treated by him.
Robert bought another book, called “Level Up !”, from the storekeeper, Rudo. It had cost him another 50 bronze and contained the basic methods of meditating with which one could absorb the energy inhabiting this world.
After he put his change in his pocket his mood soured a bit. “Knowledge seems to be expensive everywhere,“ Robert thought and let out a sigh. A quarter of his newfound “riches“ gone just like that.
He walked along the dirt road to his hut. At the west side of the village was a cluster of huge bushes, a mini forest of bushes really. Riley’s home was in a clearing in the middle of the “bush forest“. It was a small wooden cabin with a thatched roof. In the front courtyard was a small garden, filled with plants that Riley has found interesting while wandering through the forest.
After entering his hut Robert lit up the light orb. This was the cheapest light orb one could buy and could only stay lit for a week before it went out of energy and fell inert. It still cost a silver.Riley scarcely used it as he wasn't able to hunt the quantities Robert did today and a silver was a lot of money for him. But Robert could allow himself to use it a bit more freely as he made 2 silver today.
Robert began reading the book “Level up!”. It went on and on about entering a receptive state to absorb the energy permeating the world into his body. It was a quite confusing read. But from whatever angle he looked at the information he got, he was sure that they simply described a method of simple osmosis.
If you took two solutions of salt in water, divided it with a semi-permeable membrane, the water went to where there was more salt. In other words, the water traveled from the solution with higher amount water to the other.
This type of energy absorption only worked until one reached the apprentice level though. After that one required spirit stones or good cultivation methods to increase the internal energy and breakthrough.
But Robert had another theory. Energy only flows from a higher concentration to a lower concentration. But once the body was saturated with energy, it would be in equilibrium with the outside world and osmosis would stop occurring. You would need a higher source of energy, like spirit stones, to continue to collect energy, or you had to compact the inner energy which would make it denser. It got costlier with each level. And even the method of compaction of the internal energy wouldn’t work after some time, and that would be the pinnacle of cultivation.
But Robert was thinking about overcoming that limitation! “According to Einstein E=MC^2, right? Then M=(E/C^2) and if that energy that allows magic to exist is converted into mass and stored, theoretically, wouldn’t the energy storage limit reach a frightening level?“ The chain of thought gave Robert chills.
"But doing so would require frightening amounts of pressure and I can only hope to be able to do so in the future." Right now he decided to simply practice the meditation techniques.
Robert meditated for a long time and finally was able to open some of the pores in the semipermeable membrane that was his body to the energy. He did it with the knowledge he had about the cellular level workings of the human body. He couldn't imagine how the natives did it. The number of receptive cells in his body increased, and energy started flowing in from the outside world. His speed was below that of genius cultivators but if anyone from his village saw the amount of energy that he was absorbing, their eyes would have popped out of their sockets.
He remained in that trance meditative state till morning. When he came out of it he realized that his cultivation had reached the peak of the “normal level“ users. Now he had to choose between delicate control over energy, light, and the brute force approach, dark. After thinking about it for a while, Robert decided to go with delicate control. His thinking was that he could create weapons he knew about from his world to fight. There were even some stray thoughts about armies armed with his weapons marching on his behest. But armed with the knowledge of his world, he would be the best craftsman!
After practicing his other elementary magic skills for a bit, he became drowsy and decided to go to sleep.
The next few days passed uneventfully. He would stay at his home practicing with elementary magic and when he was hungry he would go to old man Jia’s shop to grab a meal. On the way back he would often stop by the general store and listen to storekeeper Rudo's stories of this world.
After a week he passed through the bottleneck of the 9th level normal magic user. If anyone had seen this speed of cultivation, they would have been frightened.
But for Robert, it was now only getting tougher to cultivate. He had to either find a way to get his hands on higher energy sources, or he had to find a way to compact the energy within him.