New World Day 12

  I dropped the axe to the ground once the final blow was struck and tore off my burnt, bloody, and ripped shirt. A large grin spread across my face as I used it to put out the fires that the pink birds had started. I had done it. All 10 birds were dead. It had proven to be much more dangerous than I had expected thanks to that last azure bird’s tornado, but I survived. With minimal injuries too! After I put out the fires, I opened up the garage door and dragged the corpses of the other seven birds into the garage. I made a point to put the two lanterns in the sun to charge back up before closing and locking it. I didn’t want anything to steal my food, and I didn’t want to have to use candles again to light up the rooms at night.

  Now that I had all 10 birds inside, I grabbed two empty buckets from the workshop and drained all of the blood into the first one. I used the second one to hold all of the internal organs from the birds. The only internal organ of sorts that didn’t go into the second bucket was the mana stone. The mana stones from the birds were smaller than the ones I took out of the forest coyotes and geyser crayfish, but the inner glow was brighter. I didn’t want to mess with them at the moment so after I cleaned them I set them on the workbench in the workshop for future experiments. I had never prepared a bird for cooking from start to finish before, but I had watched my dad and uncle dress a turkey in the past. I plucked all of the feathers from the ten birds and cut off their heads with the axe. I put their heads in the bucket with the internal organs. Now that they were dressed as best I could manage, I proceeded to grab some bleach and the torn up remains of some of my shirts and cleaned up the garage including setting the barricades back up.

  I wiped the sweat from my brow and elected to get rid of the two disgusting buckets after I finished with cleaning the garage. I checked for any danger outside, then slipped out of the garage, and threw the blood and organs over the hill towards the lake before I dashed back inside and locked the garage door again. I saw that almost the entire ground outside was covered in the little red corpses of blood mosquitoes. There had been far more of them out there than I had ever suspected. Shaking my head, I realized how lucky I had been to survive the swarm. I had to think of a better way to handle any future swarms, but it was time to move on to the next step of my current endeavor. I needed to open up the fireplace in the garage. I picked up a sledgehammer from the side of the garage and walked over to the outside facing wall. It wasn’t hard to see where the fireplace was originally supposed to be located. The concrete was darker there and just to be safe I knocked on the concrete to determine that it was hollow behind there.

  With the location determined, I circulated my mana and pumped up my body’s strength to its highest point. I smashed the sledgehammer into the concrete wall with all of my strength. A loud crack rang out and echoed through the garage. I didn’t want to drag the process out for longer than I had to due to the fear of something more dangerous finding me so I swung again and again with all of my might until I had cleared a large opening to use for cooking. The edges were crumbling and uneven, but beauty wasn’t important at this point. Hmm, I had my fireplace, but it wasn’t going to be easy to cook in it. I needed the grate from the fireplace out front and some of the blocks to hold it up above the fire. I checked out the surrounding area for anything dangerous before I stole out, grabbed the metal grate, and dragged in eight blocks from the outside fireplace. It took three trips to get everything inside, but I didn’t run into any trouble. When I passed the corpses of some forest coyotes along the way, I was tempted to look for their mana stones, but I didn’t want to get caught out here in the open without any weapons. One big brawl was enough for today.

  I set to work getting the fireplace setup once I had gathered everything I needed from outside and was back in the safety of the garage. The fireplace didn’t have much depth. There was just enough room to fit two of the blocks side by side. I set two blocks on each side of the fireplace, and then I put the remaining four on top of those four. I finished things up by placing the metal grate on top of the blocks. Now I had something to put the food on and room underneath to start and stoke the fire. I should have grabbed some kindling when I went out to steal the blocks and grate, but it slipped my mind. I rummaged through the boxes and bins of the workshop instead of going back outside until I found a decent supply of cedar planks and scraps. My dad had made some circular cedar planks that were used as centerpieces at a few weddings. These must have been the leftovers from those projects. There was just enough for one good fire. I would have to move some of the firewood from by the original firepit into the garage tomorrow.

  I had everything that I needed for the moment though. I piled in the cedar scraps first and used the lighter from my makeshift flamethrower to start the fire before I tossed in a few of the planks to really get the fire going. My new fireplace was wide enough that I could fit four of the birds on the grate at one time. As the fire built up to an acceptable temperature, I went over to my supply of spices in the workshop to see if there was anything I could rub onto the birds, but nothing caught my eye. I put four pink birds on the metal grate to cook once the fire was roaring. While the birds were cooking, one small part of my mind was keeping an eye on them while the rest was deciding on what to do with all of the title points that I received thanks to my mana vein skill. I thought about purchasing a variety of spells and resistances along with some combat skills that I could use with my axe, but one thought kept popping in my head. How was I going to protect myself from the blood mosquitoes next time that they appeared? They had a short life span, but I feared that like many insects their eggs would hatch multiple times a year. I wasn’t sure how long I would be stuck out here. I could very well still be here the next time they hatched. I needed more than just towels, duct tape, and a flamethrower next time that they hatched.

  As I pondered over a solution, a thought struck me, What about barrier magic of some kind? I was excited over the prospect of such magic. Such magic could protect me from more than the blood mosquitoes too. I asked the System to show all the available barrier skills right away. Three skills appeared, and there was one that stuck out like a sore thumb.

Available Barrier Skills:

Basic Mana Barrier (Active) (B) * Cost: 10 point

Basic Strong Mana Barrier (Active) (B) ** Cost: 20 points

Basic Barrier Runes (Active) (B) * Cost: 65 points

  The first two skills seemed to be personal protection spells which would no doubt be useful, but they weren’t what I was looking for. The last skill though, Basic Barrier Runes, looked to be what I wanted. The only issue was the extreme cost of the skill. If I bought the skill and it wasn’t something I could make use of, then I wouldn’t have enough points left to buy either of the other two skills. I sat there debating on the best path to take as the fire flickered and crackled from a mix of the burning cedar and the dripping juices of the four birds. A strong cedar smell mixed with hints of grilling chicken started to fill the room. There was something odd about the chicken smell. Something off that I just couldn’t quite place, but my mind wasn’t really into figuring out what was different at the moment. I was still sitting there watching the fire and tending the birds while I worried over the risk of buying the Barrier Runes skill when a powerful shriek bounced down through the fireplace and into the garage. The shriek was loud enough that the metal grate rattled and it pushed the fire down into the depths of the fireplace for a moment.

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  That shriek was from the big bird that had come to steal my food the two times I cooked outside. I had named it a thunderwind hawk after the loud shriek it let out every time it appeared and the powerful winds it used to fight the python and the frog. There was a series of clattering sounds coming from the roof right after the shriek. I hoped that I heard the sounds thanks to the fireplace because otherwise if they were loud enough to reach me in the garage then the hawk might have torn through the roof of the house. I sat there with sweat pouring down my bare torso as I waited for the hawk to make a move. Ten minutes later, I hadn’t heard any more noise from the hawk, and the four birds had turned a nice deep brown. I swiped them off of the grate without a care for the heat and started to devour them. I wanted to eat them as quickly as I could so that the smell would dissipate which should then cause the hawk to leave me alone. The birds were tender though a little dry and there was a coppery tang to them that I suspected came from eating all of those blood mosquitoes. The tang made me a little uncomfortable, but they were still good. Just not as good as the crayfish tails. After a few minutes and a handful of minor burns, there were just bones left from the four birds. A half hour later there was another clatter and shriek. I hoped that meant the hawk had flown away.

  Phew, that was close. After such a close call, I made up my mind. I was going to take the risk. I purchased the Basic Barrier Runes skill from the System. A torrent of knowledge poured into my mind after I purchased the skill. There was 20 times as much knowledge as the two footwork skills combined being forced into my brain, and there was an accompanying increase in the pain as well. I fell backwards flat on my back in the garage and just lay there twitching until the System finished pushing all of the skill information into my brain. The pain was excruciating, but when it was done, I smiled and let out a long hearty laugh. The skill was even better than I had dreamed it could be. It was perfect!

Basic Barrier Runes (B) * LVL 1 0% : This skill conveys to the user all of the knowledge necessary to use the seven basic barrier runes. The rank of the skill will increase with every ten levels. Higher ranks allow the user to create a set of runes more quickly and carve them on more surfaces. Higher rarity versions of the skill contain more than the seven basic runes and allow the user to create barriers that are hidden from senses of others, barriers that draw on the natural mana in the air to power them, and/or barriers that use other energies to power them.

Name: Jason Silver

Job Name: N/A

LVL: 8 48%

Job LVL: N/A 0%

Job Points:

N/A

N/A

N/A

Titles:

Survivor (B) LVL 8 20%

Fool (B) LVL 8 96%

Swarm Killer (B) LVL 9 31%

Beast Killer (B) LVL 9 49%

Risk Taker (B) LVL 6 68%

Repeated Risk Taker ( C ) LVL 7 15%

Compassionate Fool ( C ) LVL 1 78%

Curious Fool ( C ) LVL 3 71%

Stupid Fool ( C ) LVL 4 81%

Extremely Stubborn Fool ( C ) LVL 2 97%

Greater Mana Wielder ® LVL N/A

Title Points:

*

*

**

*

*

*

*

*

*

**

*****

5

Stats:

HP:

MP:

Mana Regen:

Endurance:

Strength:

Speed:

Spirit

Bonus Points:

96/130

46/46

12 per min (-2.75)

14

10

11

8

28

Status Effects:

Regen, Spirit Regen, Disease Resist, Parasite Resist,

Poison Resist, Minor Burns x4

Skills:

Basic Axe Mastery (B) LVL 8 66%

Basic Gun Mastery (B) LVL 5 11%

Minor Regen (Passive) ( C ) LVL 8 8%

Minor Spirit Regen (Passive) ( C ) LVL 2 40%

Basic Disease Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 9 60%

Basic Parasite Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 9 74%

Basic Poison Resist (Passive) (B) LVL 8 82%

Minor Mana Control ( C ) LVL 5 56%

Greater Mana Vein (Passive) ( R ) LVL 1 0%

Flexible Mana Lake (Passive) (B) LVL 1 0%

Pain Control (B) LVL 3 77%

Basic Close Combat Footwork (Active) (B) LVL 3 44%

Basic Ranged Combat Footwork (Active) (B) LVL 3 59%

Basic Barrier Runes (Active) (B) LVL 1 0%

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*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*****

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