It took the rest of the day, all night, and the following morning, but I finally got my skill. At that point I’d cut down dozens of trees and chopped them to pieces that were progressively less useless. None of them were good enough for my purposes, but my new skill would fix that soon enough.

Lumberjacking: 1

Part of me wondered why punching trees gave a combat skill while chopping them didn’t, but I suspected I knew the answer. When I’d been assaulting the wooden icons in my old home, I was doing my best to destroy them. God had given me trees, and I was determined to make lemonade, or at the very least maple syrup.

Here, I’d been entirely focused on getting wood rather than proper usage of the ax itself. If my suspicions were correct, then I could smash my head through as many skills as I had the time for, which I admittedly wasn’t tracking. I knew it was their summer and near the middle of it, but their date system was nonsense to me. I’d be sure to get the year at least, just in case I fell into another fugue state and lost track of all time. Hopefully the presence of a sun would stop that.

With my new skill in hand, I progressed more rapidly than before. Subtle instincts I’d never had before pushed me to make slight adjustments to my angles and grip, slowly providing me with a stack of usable wood. I picked up the heftiest piece I could find, a half log nearly fifteen feet long, and tested its weight. A few squats followed by other exercises revealed the same problem as before. Grip was always an issue when it came to irregular weights, and this was no different. I’d have to carve grips into it to make it really work, so that’s just what I’d do.

I still had my old knife, so I used the ax to make the initial cut before carving with the smaller, more precise implement. That took forever. By the time I could finally work out, I’d been in the forest for nearly a week. Time really flew when you were manhandling wood.

What I eventually did was make grooves near the end of the half log where I could rest the chains. Then, I used the ropes to loop through the chains and tie big, hefty tree trunks close to the wood. With the carved out grips near the center, I was then able to lift it all and do some barbell curls.

The idea was simple. I needed an exercise that would push a smaller group of muscles as hard as possible with minimum weight. I’d initially tried laying the weight in my chest and doing crunches, but it just crushed my ribs too much to be sustainable. My legs were too strong for squats and the same was true with other larger motion workouts. So, I settled on curls. Basically, anything that had built in stabilization without needing too much weight would have worked which was why I had a barbell. My plan was to use curls until they became easy and then graduate to reverse grip to target my forearms. It didn’t matter what muscles I hit after all. The stat would go up whether it was full body or just one portion.

The results were incredible. I genuinely had no idea how much my contraption weighed, but it was definitely a lot. Best of all, the log was sturdy enough to add more weight to in the future.

After a short thirty minutes, I started to feel the burn. At that point, I knew it was on. A full day and night fell away, focused entirely on working out and pushing my limits. When my arms nearly gave out, I settled for some squats. Once my biceps were recovered, I swapped back. The results spoke for themselves.

Lawrence Schlager

Classes

Brawler: 17

Pugilist: 6

Ability Scores

Health: 1380/1380

Strength: 132

Agility: 144

Resilience: 152

Awareness: 65

???

Passive Skills

Infinite Scaling

Unarmed Combat: 29

Pain Tolerance: 16

Masochist: 11

Lumberjacking: 5

Active Skills

Dimension Tearing: 6

Jab: 12

Straight: 1

After all this time, I’d finally increased my strength! By three whole points in as little as thirty hours, too! It was enough for a weaker man to celebrate, but I still needed to grind. Only strength and awareness had increased at all in the past couple weeks, and that wasn’t a good sign. Worse than that, I had no gym equivalent for anything aside from strength.

The best I could think of was an equivalent of tire running. I could chain some logs behind me for resistance and go sprinting through the fields, but that would draw an unreasonable amount of attention. Resilience would improve itself so long as I got hit in combat, which was guaranteed to happen eventually. I supposed that agility would get the same boost from dodging, so really awareness and strength were the odd ones out. Or just awareness now.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Were there dumbbells for eyes? Maybe I could try those horse blinder things and see if that helped. Or even just wearing sunglasses all the time. Admittedly, I could see just fine when working through the night, so maybe my awareness was as good as it needed to be.

No such thing as that. If it can be grinded, it must be grinded. That was the Law.

I spent the next few days pushing my limits and thinking of better awareness training exercises. Eventually, the curling stopped working and I swapped to reverse grip. When even that became inefficient, I realized it was time to move on. Nothing had survived a jab from me so far, and that was before I founded a gym. New enemies or not, I would be strong enough to kill them. Probably. I just needed to go find some.

----------------------------------------

The alliance building was the same uninteresting block as always, its interior just as bland. Yes, that even included the cookie cutter adventurer types inside. I perused the map in hopes of a relatively new or uncontested DL5, preferably one that wasn’t impossibly dark and part of some inter-group deal. There was one that was perfect, if a bit stronger than I’d like. A DL6 had popped up a couple weeks ago and had been avoided like the plague. No one was willing to brave it first and some light bribery with the nice men in the room told me why.

A group had gone in after it opened, but only one person came out. The whole party had been known for clearing DL5s whenever they popped up in the area, so the alliance upped it to six and called it a day.

Alright, maybe let’s not pick such an obvious death trap.

I spent another few minutes looking through my options and, frustrating as it was, nothing else here met my needs. I spent a full silver’s worth on information to suss out which of the available dungeons were functionally off limits and the results were disappointing. The flesh caves were fair game since they were basically empty, and no one cared enough to clear them. The dark caves were all part of some agreement that the highest leveled groups came to, going in to retrieve silk without killing the residents. My dungeon, the beehive, was off limits because some out-of-towner showed up on occasion to sneak in and steal honey by the boatload. Every other dungeon had a similar story or was cleared within a day with only the single spooky exception.

Wasn’t the alliance supposed to close dungeons? Why were there nearly a dozen of them that just got farmed for money? Clearly, the organization that I’d joined and had immediately treated me like shit wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Yea, in hindsight that was pretty obvious.

My options were pretty limited then. I could wait around until another portal popped up like all of these chumps, or I could go try out the spooky dungeon of death. Now that I knew the bees were supposed to be off limits and I wasn’t getting much from fighting them anyways, I wasn’t too excited about going back to my previous grind.

This sucked. Why was there so much competition to do this shitty job that there were over a dozen people literally just standing around waiting to jump in. Even after dying, I still found myself working for an organization whose policy was best described as hurry up and wait.

There was no choice then. I couldn’t afford to waste time when I had a deadline at some point, and no one knew how scary the dungeons could get. Supposedly, there were DLs in the teens as close as the capital, wherever that was. If that was the case, then gods were a lot stronger than level one hundred. Meanwhile, I was stagnating at level twenty three or sixteen, depending on how you counted it. Considering the DL’s didn’t go based on total level, I was guessing it should be the latter.

Groaning all the way, I wandered back to the board and did my best to memorize my next location. It was totally out of the way. I normally headed out through the southern gate to visit the Rift Plains, but they stretched out for miles to the east and west as well. This new location was about halfway between our city and the next one to the east, presumably also making their money off of dungeons. Now that I knew about the farming going on in them, these cities made a lot more sense to me. I’d be willing to bet the out-of-towner that stole honey was just running a circuit, going city to city and hitting all the biggest money makers before leaving to do the next one, giving each the time to respawn.

That was smart. Honestly, if I had a stealth specialty, then I’d do the same thing. Not that I could, the gods weren’t likely to be snuck up on. Or maybe they were? Whatever, no way to know that now, so I may as well keep pushing forward.

With my destination in mind, I headed out for my next challenge.

----------------------------------------

We watched the newbie leave, chuckling as soon as he was out of sight. Every time it was the same thing: some monsterkin crawls out of a dungeon thinking he’s the gods’ gift to stabilizers everywhere. He’d be dead within the week.

Normally, he would have died already, but the fucker made such a crazy entrance the first day that everyone was spooked. Surviving his first few dives just proved he was slippery, and no one knew when or where he was going. Finch found him in the spider’s lair, but the monsterkin bolted before they could learn more. People were suspecting that he went out at night, but everyone knew he spent all day in the market. Nobody could go that long without sleeping a little, even a monsterkin.

Still, no one could find out where he bunked either. The newbie was a total ghost, coming and going when he pleased and disappearing for days or weeks on end. Worst of all, he’d apparently gotten pretty wealthy.

Not that any of us would turn down some free coin, especially for information so easy to get. But if he had enough to pay for the basics, then he had enough for some light robbery.

“Let’s ready the welcome party.”

Our not-so-fearless leader, Jenson, had come up with the scam himself. Sit around, wait for people to show interest in the dungeon he escaped, and then tell his story with as little detail as possible. Best of all, he acted like he didn’t know who the survivor was. Everyone knew the alliance representative, Emory, was too shit at her job to give anyone, let alone a monsterkin, enough information to sell him out.

This would be our second pull in as many days. Another punk thinking they have what it takes to be a tier six stabilizer when even the mighty Jenson himself couldn’t do it. Not that I cared; I was in it for the coin. If we got to kill a monsterkin in the process, then that was just a bonus. Looking around, I knew I was in good company.

We all stood up, grabbed our stuff, and headed outside. We had work to do.