Ander spent five days in the ravine, killing everything he could find. He felt a little bad after determining previously that he would only attack the creatures that got in his way, but he now felt that his levels were more important. The ecosystem would recover, it always did. The only reason it took Ander so long, is that as soon as he passed level 9 he found it impossible to find anything above his level. Several times Ander thought about going down to fight the Mutated Mariners early, but he did not like the idea of getting mobbed by several of them. And so he stayed the course. On day five, Ander sat down on his bear fur and opened his notifications.
You have leveled up! You are now level 15.
+22 Conductivity
+22 Wisdom
+22 Regeneration
+11 Beauty
+22 Presence
+220 free stats.
Ander had decided to wait to review his notifications until he was done grinding, which left him with a rather impressive number of levels. Ander opened up his status sheet
Ander
Level 15
Race: Exodari
Subrace: Oritol
HP: 260
MP: 140
SP: 140
Strength 40
Dexterity 20
Agility 25
Toughness 20
Constitution 18
Intelligence 10
Memory 10
Conductivity 40
Wisdom 40
Regeneration 40
Beauty 25
Presence 40
You have two hundred twenty free stat points, would you like to distribute them now?
Yes/No
Ander selected yes. He immediately placed a hundred points into strength, sixty into agility and then twenty into toughness, constitution and intelligence.
Ander
Level 15
Race: Exodari
Subrace: Oritol
HP: 260
MP: 140
SP: 140
Strength 140
Dexterity 20
Agility 85
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Toughness 40
Constitution 38
Intelligence 30
Memory 10
Conductivity 40
Wisdom 40
Regeneration 40
Beauty 25
Presence 40
Ander had felt the buildup of energy in his body as he killed more and more creatues. It had been a warm pressure suffusing his entire body. Now the energy raged and burned. The entire experience was over in a few seconds, but it left Ander feeling both giddy and woosy at the same time. He had felt something like this other times he had allocated stats, but now allocating 11 free levels worth of stats, It was quite the rush.
It was time to head back down into the ruins. Ander hoped to find a way out to the ocean. He hadn’t seen the ocean during his forced march, but since falling into the chasm the occasional breeze had carried the unmistakable scent of salt. That combined with the fact that the system called the creatures mariners made him hopeful. That said, they could have been pirates that fell into the chasm just to find something they were not supposed to.
Ander grabbed his shortsword, dagger, and bow and quiver, as well as his lightstone he had pried from the ceiling of the lab. Since that first couple of days he had not tried to preserve any food, which meant that he had none to take with him. If he got hungry he would return to the chasm and hunt something down. Fortunately, his hunger had tapered quite a bit over the last few days. He figured he would be nearly back to normal in just a couple more. That said, with the base so well preserved maybe there was something he could find in the kitchens?
As prepared as he could be, Ander set off back into the ruins. He moved fast. Way of the Wind was now level 10, as he had made a point of trying to level it up over the past week as he grinded for his own levels. It meant that he could move at a significant pace. The perception power now extended several feet around him, allowing him far more information about what was going on around him. In minutes he was to the stairwell. Without a second’s hesitation he jumped down, using the wind to guide and soften his fall. In seconds he was back to the lab door. Ander strode down the hall and through the mess of furniture in the big hall before coming to a stop in front of the door to the destroyed hallway.
The windows were dirty and hard to see through, but Ander peered through anyway. There seemed to be no movement on the other side, and so he drew his shortsword before opening the door slowly and carefully. The hallway was empty like it had been before and Ander’s eyes fell on the destroyed room at the end. Light filtered through like before, illuminating tracks that he had not seen last time he was here. The tracks were so numerous they were completely muddled, but he could vaguely discern the shape of bare feet traversing the entire length of the hallway. Whatever those things had become, they were hungry. He saw no evidence of the one he had killed, with neither blood or bone left behind to mark the area.
Ander moved down the hallway and carefully looked into the destroyed room. More of the same, and no mutated mariners. This gave him a clear view of the crack in the wall at the back of the room. Ander stepped forward in shock, coming to the edge of the crack without noticing. He was looking into a room that could have fit his entire apartment complex with room to spare. Walkways surrounded the edges connecting rooms that lined the giant room. A simple count of the walkways showed that the room was 11 stories tall, and was several times wider and longer. A massive gash in the roof allowed light to flood the entire place. But what really caught Ander’s attention was what he saw in the middle of the room.
Ander had watched plenty of pirates movies, and had always been impressed by the ships they had. From the small fast ones, to the giant ones carrying dozens of cannons. But what Ander saw in front of him was on an entirely different scale. A giant ship rested before him in drydock, looking like a pirate ship and an ocean liner had a baby. The scale of the thing was enormous, and Ander could tell that the masts would reach within feet of the ceiling if the boat had been sitting straight in the drydock. An enormous boulder the size of a small hill rested against the side of the giant ship, causing it to sit off kilter. Surprisingly, for a boulder that should weigh thousands of tons, it seemed that there was only superficial damage to the giant ship.
When Ander had finally gotten over the scale of it all he finally noticed the floor below the ship. It was covered with thousands of mutated mariners. They were meandering back and forth carrying what seemed to be horribly degraded tools and materials. There were a group of mariners trying to budge the giant boulder, but it was clear to Ander that the hundred or so mariners that tried this were unlikely to succeed any time soon. The others made a parody of trying to fix the minor damage to the ship, carrying their tasks out with mute incomprehension.
To Ander’s dismay however, there was no outlet to the sea for this giant dry dock, which made no sense. Ander thought at first that one of the walls were actually giant bay doors, but the walkways covered all four walls. Unless it was possible to move whole office blocks, there was no way for the giant ship to leave its dry dock.
Ander considered the problem for some time, staring at the beautiful ship before him. Eventually though, he looked to where several masts pressed up against the boulder, and then to where a minor landslide had created a ramp from the top of the boulder out of the crack in the ceiling. That seemed to be his way out. Of course, that would mean making his way through thousands of those mutated mariners. Way of the Wind was good, but not good enough to take on an army. That meant that he would have to whittle them down somehow, or distract them. Maybe he could swing across on a rope. On second thought, there were hundreds of feet between the walls and the ship, and there was no way to affix any sort of rope to that ceiling.
Suddenly there was a commotion on the ground floor as a group of ten mutated mariners entered the main room through a set of broken doors. They melded seamlessly into the main group, dissolving until Ander couldn’t track them anymore. But a few seconds later, another group budded off the side of the main group and headed out those broken doors. Ander watched this happen every thirty minutes like clockwork. Except that the groups didn’t always come through that same set of broken doors. There were many other sets of doors around the base of the room, and every one of them saw traffic from these hunting parties. Several of the hunting parties even scaled the stairwells in the platforms, though they rarely went above level three much less to level eleven where Ander was.