Still stealthed, Kaltyr swiftly entered the clearing she knew to be the only place wherein she’d be completely safe.

“Woooo!”

Mentally exhausted from exerting herself so much in just a few hours, the girl let loose a celebratory cry and pumped her fists into the air, dropping and scattering the fish for the last time.

Then, a bird’s squawk sounded from the direction of the beast battle and crimson blood showered the ground next to the clearing’s barrier.

“Whaaaa?”

Kaltyr made her way to the clearing’s edge and was met with a gruesome sight that she’d inadvertently caused.

Oh, well… Oof. That bird was unlucky.

She’d been silently observing the battle as much as she could without her Magic Sense on her way to the clearing and even up to the point when she shouted in celebration of her safe return. As it turned out, the beasts really hadn’t been aware of her presence, because the bird was clearly very surprised by her yell, turned to look at her, then lost sight of its opponent, ending in its demise. Its opponent—a rodent, as far as Kaltyr could tell—had managed to take off its head with a single strike by utilizing Kaltyr’s distraction.

Wait, isn’t that the same squirrel that I shooed away earlier?

To the girl’s surprise, the squirrel nomming on the bird—which seemed to have been some type of owl—possessed a bright red stripe situated along its back, from head to tail. Either it was the same kind of squirrel, or the same squirrel after gaining a level…

And…no way… It doesn’t see me?

Kaltyr creeped to the edge of the clearing, a few meters from where the squirrel feasted on its spoils of war, and put a hand to her mouth, preventing herself from gasping. Though, it wasn’t the morbid sight of what was taking place that nearly caused her to reveal herself, but the very fact that the squirrel didn’t seem to notice her!

Maybe it only heard my “Woooo!”, but didn’t see me when I did it, causing me to remain invisible to it?

Slowly, Kaltyr removed the hand covering her face to reveal a vicious smile hidden beneath.

This is a huge opportunity for me! Like this, I can test how effective Stealth Mode is.

Her heart set on obtaining an easy kill, the girl did her best to smoothen and dampen her breathing as she took a tentative step forward, exiting the clearing. Then, she immediately stopped, checking for the beast’s reaction.

Oh, good! It seems like it really is the Stealth Mode that’s hiding me. I was worried that the safe zone also had a part to play in it.

After that, it was a game of patience for Kaltyr. The squirrel didn’t seem to have any other plans to attend to as it enjoyed its rather large meal, and there was enough owl flesh to last it a long while—she wasn’t worried about the squirrel leaving. Instead, the girl was completely fixated on making as little noise as possible, planning each and every step, taking each and every breath slowly, keeping her arms out and away from her body to balance herself as much as possible. Her earlier shout had made it clear that Stealth Mode only did something akin to erasing her visible presence or making herself invisible, so crunching a single leaf, or stepping into soil too soft to hold her weight that would create a foot-sized depression, could likely end in her losing easy XP.

Or maybe losing my life, considering how fast this bucktoothed hairball is. But it’s probably tired from losing so much energy fighting something that could fly, so…yeah, I’ll take my chances. It’ll probably just run if it sees me.

Banking on that hope, Kaltyr continued her progression, using as much as fifteen seconds for a single step forward, doing her best to ignore the burning pain from her still wounded thigh, until she was only two meters from the squirrel.

Now, can I get close enough to stab it, or should I throw from here?

As the girl raised her knife, she was befallen by a conundrum.

On one hand, if I throw the blade from here, I really doubt that I’ll miss. It’s a small target, but I feel like I have a good handle on throwing stuff. If I manage to instakill it here, or pin it down long enough to step on it, I’ll have killed a higher-level beast. That’s probably worth more experience than fighting stuff around my level, right?

Kaltyr very slowly changed her posture, putting her left foot forward while bringing back her right arm, which held the knife.

Buuuuuuuuuut…that’s only short-term gain. If I think long-term—which I should undoubtedly be doing—it’s far more important to know how close this Stealth skill allows me to approach anything unaware of my presence. I mean, what if I happen to find myself in a situation where I need to sneak past a beast in a cave, or something? I’ll need to know whether it’s possible in the first place! If stupid me waltzes right up to whatever I need to sneak past and get so close that it can hit me, AND IT DOES…that’d be too stupid a way to die.

And just like that, she returned to her sneaking stance with a mental sigh.

Yeah, second option. I don’t wanna die in a cave somewhere because I thought I could get closer to my opponent than is actually possible.

So, Kaltyr took another step.

Suddenly, the squirrel unburied its head from the mass of owl flesh in front of it and turned toward Kaltyr, prompting the girl to stop completely and hold her breath.

Wait, did I consider whether I could still be smelled? I mean, my thigh is still bloody and I was holding a bunch of fish for a while…but can it really catch my scent through what I imagine is the overpowering smell of owl blood covering its face?

Kaltyr nervously watched the squirrel that was seemingly staring past her legs, still unable to see her. After a long, tense moment where she thought she might die of asphyxiation, the squirrel stuck its head back into the owl corpse. The girl breathed again, but did not move, remaining as still as possible.

I’m onto you, squirrel! Kaltyr smirked. I can see that your little head isn’t bobbing up and down like it did before—you’re not actually eating!

Thus, another minute passed until the rodent began feasting once more.

Ha ha! I’ve outsmarted you, little one! Your intellect is no match against a human’s!

Kaltyr took another slow step forward, and the squirrel bolted.

Shit!

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Kaltyr adjusted her posture as quickly as possible, bringing her pocketknife back over her shoulder and behind her head, delicately adjusting her wrist and fingers with care, all the while keeping her eyes trained on the red-streaked rodent that ran in a straight line toward the nearest tree.

Kaltyr threw her blade.

Yes!

Just as she’d hoped, her aim was spectacular, and the girl dashed after the rodent that she’d pinned to the forest floor.

Well, almost spectacular.

Kaltyr cringed as she noticed that her pocketknife hadn’t exactly struck the most favorable part of the squirrel. She’d wanted it to pierce directly through the beast’s chest and end its life there, but her weapon had merely dug into its tail—far from a lethal blow.

The thought of what she needed to do made the guilt and shame from earlier rise once again, but she wasted no time hesitating. It wasn’t a pleasant choice, and her lust for experience and blood quickly disappeared as she found her knee raising up to her chest, but it was necessary. Her boot came down onto her next stepping stone.

……

Kaltyr sat before a raging flame, basking in its glorious light as she remembered the crunches that she felt travel up her leg from crushing the bodies of two beasts. The splintering of their bones, the splattering of their blood. Then, for the umpteenth time, thought, “I’ll never get used to that, but I need to.”

With the umpteenth heavy sigh, she tossed another handful of sticks into the fire, then adjusted the border of stones around it, making sure that all the burning fuel was contained within. She’d already made a few too many mistakes regarding fire safety that potentially threatened the entire forest, and herself by extension.

After having killed two beasts in ways her conscience disagreed with, all motivation to do anything eluded her. The memories of how she ended the lives of the wild cat and squirrel consistently caused a pit to form in her stomach, and she didn’t like it one bit.

However, that wasn’t to say that Kaltyr allowed her guilt to control her. No, the girl still remained productive throughout the rest of the day. Almost too productive, even. She’d discovered and learned so many things on just the second day of her existence on Manic alone that wild theories formed in her mind. Had she done it all before? Was there a time when she knew everything about the world she currently resided within? Was she actually always a resident of Manic, who was punished for a crime by being placed in the wilderness with nothing, not even her memory?

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Kaltyr hugged her knees as she watched the mighty flames of her campfire rise into the air, flickering like snake tongues and burning with the power of combustion, somehow making the forest shadows appear deeper.

After the events with the squirrel, Kaltyr had taken the corpses of the fallen beasts into the clearing with her and tossed them to where the dead fish lied. She took a second to remind herself that she was in such a world where she was forced to kill in order to gain strength for the purpose of protecting herself, but had minimal success psyching herself out of her rut. From there, she spent a few hours circling her clearing, gradually getting farther and farther from her space of guaranteed safety, bringing back every dry stick and dead log she saw—Kaltyr did not wanted a repeat of the night before, where she naively assumed her pile of leaves and sticks was enough fuel to burn through the night. Though, she really didn’t need a fire burning through the night. The girl just liked to be warm.

She’d also used the time she spent searching for kindling to patrol the area around her base. Kaltyr didn’t know what was going on during the first day with how she explored so much land and never came across a beast, but something had clearly changed. Alongside the starry-eyed beast that stalked her the very first night, the band of wild dogs, and the pair of beasts that chose to settle their differences with a life-or-death brawl at her doorstep, Kaltyr stumbled upon five more creatures staking out the land she’d claimed. Of the five beasts—a woodpecker, a fox, a boar, a snake, and a frog—none were over level 1, and all died to Kaltyr rather quickly.

Firstly, when Kaltyr threw the knife, even before it left her hand and pinned down the red-striped squirrel, a force inside her seemed to dispel and her soul returned to its former state, alongside the reappearance of her Magic Sense skill. From that, the girl knew for certain that she couldn’t simply stay in Stealth Mode all her life and kill everything whilst being invisible, because attacking canceled her Stealth. However, while patrolling the land she’d claimed as her own, she’d discovered that Stealth Mode seemed to last indefinitely—incredibly great news, because it allowed Kaltyr to sneak up on every one of the beasts she encountered and deliver a devastating sneak attack… Almost, every beast.

When Kaltyr first left the clearing with the intention to search for stuff to burn, her hypothesis that everything could utilize the Stealth skill gained more support when a level 1 woodpecker suddenly appeared in the air above her, diving beak-first. Unable to react very well in time, the bird grazed her skull, leaving a long cut going down her head behind her right ear. She killed it after its ambush by shooting it out of the sky with a rock, but the event still scared her quite a bit, and she resumed her patrol in Stealth Mode.

When she came across the fox, it had been chasing a seemingly normal rabbit that did well to zigzag between trees, but was ultimately outmatched in speed. It was up against a beast that used mana, after all. With a very successful knife throw, Kaltyr stunned the fox enough to grab it, remove the knife, and stab it through the brain to end its struggle. That encounter had been very clean and didn’t arouse the same negative feelings from slaughtering the wild cat and squirrel.

The boar came across as rather arrogant to Kaltyr, as she found it while it was foraging for food, digging into the ground with its nose and loudly snorting and squealing when it found something it liked. The boar even revealed a stealthed snake and just trotted on past it! The level 1 serpent was merely minding its own business in Stealth Mode under a large rock when the boar turned its shelter over. The snake reacted as well as serpents often do and lashed out, biting the boar…with no consequence! The boar beast simply walked away after the bite and continued foraging. The whole thing sparked many questions for Kaltyr, so she sought to answer a few of them. The girl first quickly made her way over to the snake, which had begun the process of entering Stealth Mode and sat completely still, coiled up in the same spot it was in when the boar turned over its rock. Then…Kaltyr crushed it with its own home, lifting the rock and dropping it onto the danger noodle. The act caused her Stealth to dispel and her position to be revealed to the boar, which Kaltyr turned to face, not even bothering to make sure she killed the snake because of all the cracking sounds it made when she dropped the rock. Up to that point, Kaltyr had been using her legs as though one of them weren’t injured, but the truth of the matter was…she was fine. Yes, her thigh still burned as though on fire when she flexed her leg, but the girl had come to realize over the hours since obtaining the injury that it wasn’t much worse than skin-deep. The fish that caused the damage had tiny teeth and only managed to get a few bites in before dying. Since that was the case, Kaltyr had no qualms with brutally kicking the boar away when it charged at her, then closing the distance between them while it was stunned and stabbing its brain. After the killing, Kaltyr answered her questions by attempting to loot the snake for its venom glands—which failed, because that particular type of snake lacked them. Useful information, too, because Kaltyr then knew she didn’t have to worry too much around the same kind of snake.

The last beast Kaltyr came across—the frog—came with the most useful learning experience of the five beasts. The girl had been stealthily sneaking around when she came across a large outcropping of rock “south” of her base and decided that it looked like a good spot to rest. Evidently, she wasn’t the only one to think so, because upon climbing the rocks and finding the flattest surface, a “ping” sounded in her mind as a spot on the rocks shimmered, revealing a pink amphibian that had previously been stealthed. Kaltyr shrieked, revealing her own presence, and startling the frog further. From there, it was a single knife throw before Kaltyr added another kill to her name. That encounter had taught Kaltyr something incredibly important—she could reveal stealthed creatures. It seemed obvious after figuring it out, but when Kaltyr thought about it, the creatures that she’d seen exit Stealth Mode, before the frog, had done so purposefully by attacking. The woodpecker had sneak attacked her, the snake gave the boar a warning bite, and the frog…it didn’t do anything. The “ping” sound had indicated to the girl that she was capable of revealing another creature’s stealth!

After her encounter with the pink amphibian—which she discovered to be poisonous by touching it with her hand, suddenly feeling woozy, then looting its poison glands with a touch of her boot and carrying them with a leaf—Kaltyr returned to her base and sorted that day’s loot…which was also all the loot she’d ever obtained.

The girl categorized and separated all that she’d brought with her, forming several piles scattered around the clearing: one for the fish, fish scales, and fish fillet, one for all the various bird feathers she’d looted, one for the frog poison glands, and one for the corpses she hadn’t looted yet.

Of the fish stuffs, Kaltyr knew she could loot them for fillets, but realized that she didn’t have any ideas of what she could use the fish scales for, so she moved to the next group.

Of the feathers, the girl knew she wanted to fill a pillow with them, so then moved on to the next group.

Of the poison glands…those brought a big grin to Kaltyr’s face. The single touch to the frog quickly resulted in her becoming woozy and losing her balance, thus using the poison offensively in combat could result in big gains if she ever had to fight something too big, like the deer she glimpsed or even…bears.

Then came the corpses Kaltyr didn’t immediately loot, which included the fox, boar, snake, and owl. The girl had a few ideas for what the corpses could provide, but no confidence that any of them were good. To begin with, all corpses could provide a great source of food—especially the boar, which weighed almost fifty pounds—but weren’t necessary. She already had plenty of food from the river and a few nutritional supplements in the form of the edible plants she discovered. In addition, she inferred that she got XP from even the fish she killed, giving her an incentive in making the river her main source of nourishment. After crossing food off the list of uses, Kaltyr focused her attention on pelts, which would be incredibly useful for wilderness survival, but…what was a pelt?

As far as Kaltyr could recall, a “pelt” was the skin of an animal with the fur still attached. That seemed to be a fine enough word to use when looting, but there were other, similar words that weren’t interchangeable, like, “skin”, “hide”, “fleece”, “coat”, and “fur”. The first and third word were obviously different enough from “pelt”, meaning the outer membrane and woolly covering of sheep or goats respectively, however…the other three words? A “hide”, Kaltyr remembered, had undergone some kind of treatment like tanning, or something. Could she loot a “hide”? Then there was “coat”, which she imagined was the same as a “pelt” or a “fur” in that they were all just the skin of an animal with the fur still attached, but what if they weren’t the same? Kaltyr had already tried looting “fur”, although while imagining just the fur without the skin, but did what she imagine make a difference? What if “coat”, like “fur”, only gave her a pile of animal hair?

It was for those reasons that Kaltyr was so hesitant to loot the fox, whose red coat was simply gorgeous, and the boar, which didn’t have fur. Of course, the obvious solution to her conundrum was to try out all the words, but she didn’t have nearly enough corpses! Even excluding “fleece”, which likely solely concerned sheep and goats, there were still four words to experiment with when she only had a single corpse that had fur, and a single one without. Ultimately, Kaltyr decided to leave the corpses alone until she gathered enough of them to experiment all the words with, then moved on to the snake body, which she looted for its bones without a second thought. Its bones, she thought, might display some use as stabby weapons. She attempted to loot the owl for its feathers but failed, and was too tired to think about it. She decided to leave that matter for tomorrow.

By the time Kaltyr finished sorting through her loot, the sky had shifted to the ominous dark purple she knew came before night…and after registering that the sky’s colors alternated in the same pattern as they did the day before in what felt like an epiphany, she realized that the sky’s colors could likely be used to tell the time. Red was the first color, and purple the last, designating them as morning and late evening.

From there, the girl gathered a few dead, moss-covered logs, stacked them atop each other the best she could in the center of the clearing, then collected a bunch of rocks each larger than her fist to circle them. Kaltyr was moments before striking a match when she remembered the clumps of cat fur in one of her cargo pants pockets, which she then scattered across the logs before setting them ablaze with a match. With the fire alive and burning bright, she ran a few fish fillet through with some sticks and set them next to the campfire, but far enough away that they wouldn’t burn if she forgot about them—which was a possible occurrence because Kaltyr took out The System Wishes You Good Fucking Luck, lied down, and began writing.

The knowledge that she could record her thoughts in the guidebook had stuck with her since she read the last of its pages that informed her of such. She’d simply not done so because she was waiting for what felt like the right time to record all of her relevant thoughts and the useful information she’d gathered.

Kaltyr quickly skimmed over the first four pages in case she previously missed anything important, like a clue as to how to survive more easily, a hint of knowledge that could assist her in battle, any hidden info, or even the smallest suggestion to an idea that explained how she got there in the first place.

Nothing.

Having lost hope in learning anything new about the world from the guidebook, the lass turned to the fifth page, where the most important experiment she could think of took place—drawing. While imagining holding a pencil to the paper, Kaltyr scribbled all over the fifth page, successfully drawing lines, shapes, and words. “Hurrah!” She’d said upon making her discovery, because if drawing in the book with her mind was possible, then drawing a map was the obvious next step!

However, before she got to mapping anything, Kaltyr mentally erased her scribbles and jotted down everything she’d learned and done in the past two days, beginning with her discovery of how the Magic Sense skill functioned, magical essence, and mana, all the way to learning the Stealth skill, killing a bunch of beasts around her territory, and speculating about the looting of pelts.

By the time she finished writing—and cooking and eating the fish fillets she skewered—night had fallen, bringing her to the present, where she hugged her legs and stared at the campfire.

“I guess…” Kaltyr glanced at the multiple notifications incessantly flashing in the corner of her vision. “I guess I feel good enough to finally read those.”

The girl yawned before pulling up the single notification that stood out among the rest.

Congratulations! You have leveled up!

Your current Life Level: 1