So. A full week of being on this bizarre -- and likely Lovecraftian -- hell-rock and life was … alright. The only thing keeping me marginally sane at this point was also, frankly, likely also the very same thing that will drive me completely bonkers, assuming I wasn't not already there. An assumption I was just not willing to make at this point.

I was worried, before, about how much further I could advance that Technologist "racial feature", and how I might unlock other features, especially after that Arcanism "nastygram". It sort of stood to reason that the earlier or simpler technologies might be easier to unlock -- like the lower experience levels of RPGs -- given that's standard fare for gaming venues; as you get more advanced it gets harder to keep advancing. How that worked with the General tech levels, though, was rather headache inducing.

I'd spotted the underlying flaw with advancing the "ordinary" way right off of the bat, though: there are steps that simply cannot be traversed by solo actors. The Eldritch Awakening thing just confirmed I wasn't locked into one path, but as par for the course it didn't give me a new path forward once I reached the stumbling block of the Chalcolithic/Bronze eras. I not only did not, but could not gain access to metals with the means currently available to me. At least, not enough to actually go any further, and even then not without immense amounts of tedious effort that might not even succeed.

So instead I just kept trying random thoughts that popped into my head. And I'd had a little success there, albeit not all in ways I'd even want to succeed. For example, the Primitive Sanguinism unlock. I now knew all there was to know about how to bleed on stuff. Yeah. Except that actually does things.

By leaking out one tenth of my total blood -- which it turns out my "health bar" seems to be -- onto a batch of ten to fifteen carrotatoes, I could force them to be fully grown in the same amount of time it would take me to heal up; about a third of a day. So at least now I wouldn't have to scrounge so much for food, right? Of course I had to take that a step further with my Primitive directed agriculture. Three generations a day, a dozen trials per generation. It took six generations to tame the silver fox. Plants, it turns out, are somewhat more recalcitrant. After twelve generations I was maybe a quarter of the way there. I'd doubled their size so their taproots were now half-again the size of an ordinary carrot and quartered the poisonousness of their wild breed. They were still oily and not exactly pleasant, and I was still working on a monoculture. In a month's time? Yeah.

The sanguinism thing I could just accuse of being related to my funky healing ability. The kind of quality-of-life adjustment that comes with having a built-in HUD display as a stone-age primitive. What absolutely did not work for me however was the knowledge and expertise that came with the General tech level: Early Stonepunk era.

I mean, how I got it was bad enough. It had come when I threw that damned spiderzilla into the firepit to, y'know, achieve the only way to be sure. Or, rather, the next day when I discovered that its exoskeleton had not burned in the fire, but had melted and obtained a consistency similar to copper. Wondering what to do with that aloud by the firepit dinged my brain with all manner of utter nonsense.

The upshot of which was that I was now systematically hunting down every last spiderzilla in reachable vicinity in order to obtain their sweet, sweet, "chitinite". Which -- it's as crazy as it sounds -- if one happens to melt first and then toss in any other animal's bones, will give you "ossium". And ossium? Ossium is stonepunk for bronze. It's like being trapped in a real-life version of modded Rimworld, damnit. I never picked up actual materials science but I know enough to know that bone does not melt. Let alone alloy with chitin.

Whatever. I may be degenerating into gibberish delusion but at least I get to be a little more comfortable about things now. Having a proper postholer and spade has made farming much easier. I've even gotten a recurve bow with an ossium leaf spring because of course what animal you get the actual bone from affects the ossium alloy. I got to unlock Basic Stonepunk Armaments as a result of that creation. Which in turn also began to inform me of the tiering framework my oh-so-helpful system uses: basic is better than primitive. Who knew? As much as I don't want to admit it, I'm going to wind up making myself an ossium scale breastplate and bracers at some point. Even though the stuff literally looks like shaped bone out of a Lovecraft novel.

It's not all bad, though. I've got that fireplace in my hovel now. And a proper door, with an ossium latch handle and deadbolt. Did I mention that I've been systematically expunging those spiderzillas? Because as it turns out… I apparently had found myself in the position of needing to literally farm the bastards.

Which would be how I had come to in turn find myself sitting in the canopy of yet another greatoak, attempting to carefully expunge the life of a mature female spider without also killing the egg pouch attached to its abdomen. The idea here being to sequestrate the various eggs into separate containers and allow them to hatch near enough to detect each other, and killing off any that make aggressive moves. This clutch being merely the fourth of many I'd need to pull this off. Honestly I couldn't even tell if I should be happy about my Sanguinism working on the physics-mocking arachnids.

Anyone who ever told you that it was impossible to miss a stationary target the size of a cat as an expert marksman from less than twenty feet away, by the way, never anticipated the cat like object being in the shape of an ambush spider. Only thing that would make the shits worse would be if they could somehow fling their silk around like a weapon. Which they can't, by the way. I checked.

It took me three shots to kill the momma nightmare fuel before I could get one in that counted… because my target was currently inbound directly to my face on a straight trajectory. … Yeah, she was big one, alright. Damn was I glad these things aren't eusocial.

Once I had the corpse and its cargo secured in my burlap carryall bag, I took the opportunity to look around out over the canopy again. Still not much really worth seeing. What looked like another, larger, pond or lake in the southwest. It would be a day or so's solid hike to get there. Three days' hike for the me that first woke up here and didn't have expert-level navigational skills. Either way, not really worth the effort except as a possible fall-back in case something goes very pear-shaped in hovel town.

~~------------~~

First thing I did once I got back from my little trip to the westerly greatoak was to set the latest spider's corpse in the stone crucible I'd created in order to melt it down. I still had some rabbit bone I could use to make enough ossium to replace the arrow heads I didn't bother to retrieve. The meat would be going to the spiderlings I was rearing in this little experiment of mine. I'd worry about the number of animals I was killing off but considering how I'd also killed one of the more profligate predators in the area, it was almost like a deer-hunter thing. Kill off all the wolves and the deer will feast themselves into famine. Only here it was rabbits and rats.

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I had yet to find any big game trails but my survival knowledge told me that there were bears and wolves and some kind of big cat in these forests. Honestly I wasn't too worried about them at this point -- the fencing and fire smell would keep them away and if not, they were much poorer at dodging than damned spiderzillas. Looking at my little patch of carrotatoes reminded me, however, that my domestication projects could take much longer than I really wanted, so while I tended the firepit, I wrote down some thoughts about how the sanguinism stuff might work a little better for me. I knew that it seemed to work on the healing properties of my blood but was that really all it could do? Old myths of the properties of blood make it clear it inherits or passes on traits. Could I do something similar, here? Take for example the degree of domestication I've put the carrotatoes through and do, maybe, some sort of alchemic essence gathering from their juices to catalyze my blood into that direction? I would need equipment obviously… I drew out on the scrap bark sheet a depiction what I was imagining an alchemist's lab to be for a while and was starting to get a feel for the concept when I got a special delivery all my very own.

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Basic sanguinism. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Primitive alchemy. >>

I… really should have expected this. The new information hit me with migraine intensity right in the ol' pineal gland, and I couldn't really say it was all that surprising. Just… extensive. What was surprising, however, was that much of what I was learning seemed to be lumped into three real categories: the 'conventional' alchemy, a.k.a. the ancient precursor to chemistry; the 'Stonepunk' alchemy, which was honestly more just weird than really bizarre; and the 'obviously incomplete data that will kill you if you try it' alchemy.

I at this point found myself with a great deal of information to sort through but the happy news was that it all came together -- the directed agriculture, the alchemy, and the sanguinism -- to make what I was trying to accomplish feasible in days rather than weeks. Most of that time spent, of course, on constructing a laboratory. Eldritch abominations help me but this was going to push me into the Middle Stonepunk era, wasn't it. There was just no way that couldn't happen. I mean… this thing I was going to build would look like it came out of the Flintstones almost. Or more like a Conan movie.

The things I do for creature comforts like regular food that won't kill me, medicines for diseases, and a way to protect myself in case I'm attacked by the goblins or orcs or bugbears or whatever the hell I was convinced had to also be out there.

~~------------~~

It wound up taking me two full days' worth of effort to make the new alchemy shack. The construction of the building itself was relatively rapid, actually -- I had built it as a fairly basic square, directly opposite the firepit from my hovel. Even the part where I used more stone than wood in its construction somehow managed not to take that long. One of the odder benefits of the Stonepunk tech tree was an uncanny knack for knowing exactly how to choose when and how to place stone or chisel it to get exactly the right shape from anything built with it. I was certain for example that hand made stone wheels were never actually used for carts or wheelbarrows, yet I knew how to make them to a better performance than even an ossium-bound wooden wheel… and quicker, too. The stone geared windmill I built adjacent to the alchemy lab was a particularly 'inspired' touch, though. I'd needed some reliable form of ventilation for the brewing area so of course the correct answer is physics-mocking river rock derived gears. At least the actual fan blades were burlap on wood.

The interior of the lab was, of course, quite well lit all things considered. Even though I knew exactly how and why the polishing techniques I used on the limestone rocks I'd chosen as diffuse reflectors for the basic sconces I had installed worked, a small corner of my mind refused to believe hand-executed techniques using bone could accomplish what I was seeing. And seeing it all put together almost had me wanting to move my hammock into the lab instead of the hovel.

The only challenge there would then be that there wasn't enough room inside the lab for just that, what with the stone desk and chair, the stone alembic and ossium brazier and piping -- for the heat transference of course. The ossium cauldron tucked away in a separate corner with a stone wood-burning furnace to heat it, itself represented several dozen dead spiderzillas, a feat worthy of celebration in my mind. The fact that the cauldron could only be used for more basic reactions and brews was offset by the fact that they would be able to be done comparatively speaking in bulk.

It was a thing of beauty, however, to draw out the alchemic "essence" of domestication in my carrotatoes by neutralizing the carrotato essence with it's negated feral tubers' essence. Said final result honestly looked like little more than a milky-white sludge in its reflectively polished granite vial when I finally separated it, but the results truly spoke for themselves when I applied the first batch to the latest generation of carrotatoes. The twelve new tubers I produced roughly half a day later were almost indistinguishable from orange potatoes, and were completely non-toxic.

If anything I was a little surprised the process worked as well as it did, but considering I'd just gone through two full days of "tinker fugue", I wasn't going to complain about finally having a staple food source. The next bit would be tricky, though -- domesticating an obligate predator into a docile farm animal. I'd need to mix things up with the domestication essence and the closest I could get to "herbivore" essence from the rabbits I was still trapping for feeding purposes to the juvenile spiderzillas.

Yeah. I'd need to tech up before trying that one for real.

I went to the firepit with my sketchbark in hand and immediately received a prompt I was worried I would receive:

<< Research station insufficient. Please designate new station. >>

At least I was prepared for this. I walked back into my newfangled stoneage genetics wizardry lab and sat down by the as yet unused second desk, furthest from the entrance. On the work area there was a trio of comparatively thin reed-paper stacks bound by rings of ossium, a glassy-finished granite vial containing a mixture of fish-oil and charcoal, an ossium-tipped quill, and a large clay "scratch" slate, with a wooden ossium-tipped carving stylus.

I began writing out my thoughts about the potential uses for clear quartz and directed/stored light as I understood it from the little was available in the Early Stonepunk Era infodump. How it could be harnessed via reflectors for cooking, how it could be used for long-distance communication using grown-quartz emitters and Morse code from towers or especially tall trees. I began writing about how mirror-finished precision quartzite gears could perform superior mechanical power transference, and even sketched out a full windmill-backed water pumping solution. It would rely on shaped quartz solar concentration to fully disinfect a small water tower without ruining its natural alkaline balance.

It wasn't, however, until I began to transfer these sketches into the reedpaper books that I began to receive the notifications I had anticipated… and then some.

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Middle Stonepunk Era. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Basic Deciduous Survival. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Standard Deciduous Survival. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Basic Alchemy. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Primitive Quartzite Manipulation.>>

<< Requirements met. General tech level unlocked: Late Stonepunk Era. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Standard Alchemy. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Basic Quartzite Manipulation. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Primitive Optics. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Primitive Sanitation. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific tech field unlocked: Basic Sanitation. >>

<< … >>

I fell to the cobblestone floor as the wave of information overwhelmed me, a groaned half-expletive escaping my lips just before I blacked out.