> “Another thing to keep in mind is that the World System was designed to ensure that our Forefathers succeeded. If you don’t believe me, ask it yourself. There was one exception, but that is a topic for another time. Regardless, having the System actively helping them gave them a great deal of freedom in their choices, but it also bound them to follow certain paths. It may have been rather gentle in its bindings, but it is the World System. What it wants, it gets.”
>
> Excerpt from The Birth of Our World, 1006 A.B.
Christopher Leroy Knightsen
Now that the fight was finally over, I finally got a chance to actually look at Pam’s new form, and boy was it a doozy. She had gone from a rather small lady that was maybe 120 pounds soaking wet to a flaming bird that was roughly the size of a bus. Her torso, legs, and wings were that of an eagle, with a raven's head perched on top and a peacock's tail trailing behind. Obviously, her plumage was aflame, but she wasn’t just orange and yellow. No, the entire rainbow was present, from the hard to see red of hydrogen, to the almost emerald green of copper, to the dazzling violet of potassium.
Congratulations! You just named your entire world! Reward deferred until the appropriate time!
“Wait, why did I get that message? It was Pamela who did the naming,” I asked.
The pair of you are Lifebonded, which is the strongest Tier of Relationship Bond. Before you ask, no, that does not necessarily mean that two people will fall in love, though you two are already heading down that road. Generally speaking, Relationship Bonds are more likely to form platonic relationships than romances. It is entirely possible for one person to have multiple Relationship Bonds, but only one of them can be romantic at any given time. The price for attempting to have multiple romantic Relationship Bonds at the same time increases with the strength of the Bonds involved.
Relationship Bonds, especially Lifebonds, allow the people involved to share many things that would otherwise be unshareable, such as exp, health, mana, and quest rewards. However, different Bonds share different things in different ways, so you’ll have to figure out how your specific Bond works the hard way. That said, the higher the Tier of the shared item(s) and Bond(s) involved, the more likely they are to respond in… unusual ways. For various reasons, your Lifebond is more likely to share and/or duplicate rewards than many others.
Okay then. I’m not sure what to make of any of that. Going back to why I was staring, I have to say that your bird form is very pretty.”
“Can’t say I blame you for that one.”
“Alright. I’m not really hungry yet, so I’ll try and get the Camping Gear Set out and set up camp. Hopefully, there’s a stove of some kind in the camping gear.”
While she was doing that, I decided to look at my inventory to see what we had. It was only after I had pulled it up that I realized that I knew how without being told.
Mentally shrugging to myself, I saw that my inventory was divided into three sections: Equipped, Personal, and Lifebond. The Equipped section was self-explanatory, consisting of a 3D picture of me with tags for everything that I was wearing and a separate section for the weapons in my quick-select. However, unlike every videogame I’d ever played before, it also included tags for my socks and underwear, and it didn’t seem to have a limited number of slots. Instead, it only seemed to be limited by whether or not I could physically wear the item in that fashion.
The personal section of my inventory held everything of a personal nature that wasn’t equipped. This included the wedding jewelry I’d inherited from my grandparents, my journal, several keepsakes I’d acquired over the years, and, oddly enough, all of my spare underwear.
The rest of my clothing was in a subsection of the Lifebond part of my inventory. There was another subsection that was set aside for Pamela, but it was minimized by default. Sort of like how a married couple might each have their own closet in their shared bedroom, but wouldn’t look in the other person’s section unless they needed to access it for some reason.
The rest of the Lifebond section had a wide variety of things, the most notable items being the Camping Gear Set, Civilization Founder’s Set, and a pair of boxes, the first labeled as “Transferred Apartment Contents: Chris,” and the second was Pamela’s. When I tried to open mine to see what was in it, I got an error message.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Error: no long-term dwelling selected. To open this box, a long-term dwelling must be selected or constructed.
Shrugging, I mentally selected the Camping Gear Set to see what was in it and got an interesting list:
Custom Fireproof (2,200° F) Camping Gear Set
The set includes:
01 x Tent (10x10x8, auto-setup, contains all the other items)
01 x Cast-iron Skillet
01 x Stainless Steel Cooking Pot
01 x Cooking Tripod w/ Attachment Clips
02 x Bag of Holding (inventory system compatible, Soulbinds on pickup, Autoequipped)
50 x Clothing Repair/Replacement Kits
75 x 1 lb. of Assorted Spices
02 x Custom Sleeping mats
10 x 1-Year Toiletry Kit
02 x Cooking Polar-Gators for dummies - A Beginner’s Guide
02 x Foraging for Nincompoops - A Beginner’s Guide.
I looked around for a flat spot to set up the tent in between all of the corpses, bloodstains, and assorted craters of the battlefield. Finding one, I mentally selected the tent expecting to have to set it up manually. To my surprise, because I already knew where I wanted it, the tent simply popped into existence.
It was a ten-foot cube with a pyramid on top, the entire thing patterned like Pamela’s feathers intermixed with a wide variety of weapons, ranging from antique wooden swords all the way to the newest generation of machineguns.
Before I could open the tent to look at the interior, Pamela landed next to me, shifted back to human form, then passed out and flopped on her face.
*****
Pamela Josephine Daniels
When I finally woke up from my nap, I discovered that Chris had moved me into the tent and placed me on what was clearly my sleeping mat. His was black with a glowing sword embroidered in the middle of it, while mine had the top half of one of my tail feathers covering it, which was nice. I would have expected something like this to be rather gaudy, but somehow the colors worked together well enough that it was a thing of beauty.
The odd thing was that my sleeping mat and I were in the middle of the tent and the cooking tripod was set up above my head. There wasn’t anything attached to it, it was just sitting there.
Well, I’m not going to find any answers in here. I guess I better go find Chris.
“Oh good, you’re awake!” said Chris as I stepped out of the tent. “Are you cold at all?”
“No, why would I be cold? Also, why was the cooking tripod set up above my head?”
“Would you like the good news, the odd news, or an actual answer first?”
“Uh… Let’s go with the good news first I guess.”
“The good news is that I don’t think you’re capable of freezing to death. Or at all really.”
“Huh?”
“We’re in some sort of frozen wasteland. Ish. We might just be in the middle of some kind of frozen lakebed. Either way, it’s really cold out, you’re wearing snowshoes, a pair of gym shorts, and a very modest sports bra, and you just told me you’re not cold.”
“What!?” I looked down at myself and sure enough, I was wearing far less than I should have been, yet I wasn’t cold. What he hadn’t mentioned was that I could see sweat slowly steaming off of me as I stood there. “You could have at least tried to put one of your shirts or a blanket around me!”
It was only after I started yelling at him that I realized I was only yelling out of habit and my outfit didn’t really bother me. This was partially because Chris was a complete gentleman, keeping his eyes on my face except when he was pointing at the various pieces of my outfit, and partially because of what we’d shared during the Transition. I may not be entirely sure where our relationship was going, but it was blatantly obvious it would not be platonic in nature.
“I did try. I got a warning about your Elemental Body Control Level being too low, whatever that means, and then it took whatever item I tried to put on you and deposited it in the shared section of our inventory.”
“What? Why would it do that?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but I do have a good guess, which brings us to the odd news. I think the World System deposited us here because of the control issues that you’ll be having with your body temperature and such, as evidenced by the fire-proof rating of the camping gear and the fact that I was able to use your head instead of a campfire to cook my lunch.”
“What!? Why!? How did it even occur to you that might be a thing!?”
“When you switched back to your human form, you passed out before you could light the campfire, then started melting your way through the snow at an alarming rate. Fortunately, I’d already set up the tent and our sleeping pads, so I was able to just pick you up and carry you to the tent without too much difficulty. I had to pause and set you on several of the larger polar-gators so I had a hand free to unzip the front of the tent. When I came back to pick you up, you’d started burning your way through their fur in several places and I could hear them sizzling under their fur. After that, I set you on your sleeping mat and went to take a closer look at the burned sections."
"Huh. Well, there's another advantage of being Lifebonded."
"Oh? And what might that be?"
"You're immune, or at least highly resistant, to my body temperature. Actually, now that I think about it, you seem to be comfortable wearing less than you should in this climate. I mean, your outfit looks good for a particularly cold day back in Kansas, but that's a far cry from the Arctic temperatures around here."
"True. Love the color pattern on your sleeping mat by the way.”
“Thanks. Wait, where did all of the corpses go? I know I ate a bunch of them, but there should still be several hundred, if not several thousand, of them laying around on the ground out here. The only one I see at the moment is Papa’s.”
“I was getting to that. You slept through the night, and I’ve only been awake for about an hour today. In the meantime, it occurred to me to try to test the storage limits of our inventory, so I decided to try to create an emergency food supply.”
“In other words, you spent several hours running around in circles picking up corpses.”
“Yes. Surprisingly, after the first fifty or so an entirely new section of our inventory opened up, and it appears to be reserved for the civilization we're going to found. While I’m sure it has more limits somewhere, so far the only one I’ve found is the size of the individual objects it can hold.”
“Ah. Are you sure that we're going to found a civilization? That seems like a pretty audacious goal to have right out the gate."
"I don't think the World System is going to give us much of a choice. We haven't even been in the world for two days yet, and it's already given us the Founder's Set and the reserved section of our inventory. Heck, we're in a LitRPG world and it hasn't even given us levels at this point, yet it's already hinting at founding a civilization."
"That's fair."
Warning: Global Leveling System startup occurs in three days. I recommend finding a safe place to call home for quite some time before this happens as the monsters won't be scared of you anymore once the Leveling System is online.
"Um… ok. I guess we've got a goal now. The question is how do we know where to look?"
"Let's check out that Crystal mountain thing I noticed yesterday. You can show me what you've learned about the inventory system along the way."
"Let's see how fast we can travel first, it'll be kinda hard to teach you anything while we're running, but otherwise that sounds like an excellent idea. Let's do this."