I was running towards the beetle menace down south, but I was more focused on the sky where Goose was flying circles around me even while I was going at the top speed that the current terrain allowed me. Goose was like a living fighter jet especially now since he was first rank. The more his ability to control air improved the faster he started to improve his stats allowing him to rank up.
The reason I couldn't stop looking at him was because something was bugging me, and I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. Eventually, I got so curious that I had to stop running and called Goose back to me.
When he landed on my shoulder, I scratched him and started to inspect him. I didn’t find anything wrong, but something was still off. I finally used my animal inspection ability hoping it could shed some light on the situation. What I found surprised me.
Name: Goose
Species: Stone Mountain Eagle
Gender: male
Age: 2
Health: excellent
Diet: meat
Evolutions: Gigantism, Air manipulation, Stronger feathers, Energy efficiency.
When Goose first hatched all of his evolutions were locked but as he has been maturing they have been slowly unlocking and finally even his gigantism evolution has been unlocked. I was glad that I finally could figure out what was bothering me, he was growing again. “Goose, good news, you have finally unlocked your last evolution. You will start to grow a lot bigger and soon you will not be able to perch on my shoulder.” For a moment Goose looked a bit saddened at that news.
“Don't worry soon I will be the one who will be sitting on your shoulders.” I gave him a big smile which made him happy again. My moment of happiness was interrupted by my brain visualizing Goose supersized.
The picture was pretty scary. A huge eagle-like bird that can control air and fly at ridiculous speeds. Yeah, that sounds like a scary opponent. I was lucky that Goose's mother wasn’t anywhere near first rank when it attacked me otherwise, I don’t think I would be here.
My worry over Goose extinguished we continued our run. I was able to now pay a lot less attention to my foot placement and that was thanks to one of the new traits my recent level-ups have given me.
Wisdom made it past 160 stat points. The trait it gave me was a legendary pull. The name was 6th Sense, and it was incredibly powerful. The trouble-sense ability that I have is good, but it mostly only works when I’m going to take serious damage or die. This trait works on even the smaller things like foot placement while I’m running.
It is a bit distracting getting a chill down my spine the next wrong move I was making. I’m still getting used to it, but I must be careful, so it won’t distract me at the crucial moment. It also seems to get overwhelmed giving me stronger feedback that could have been debilitating. Luckily my willpower seems to be strong enough that it doesn't really affect me too badly. But it will still be a distraction. When it does get overwhelmed, it also doesn’t work for quite some time. If I get too reliant on it and it stops working, I would be quite fucked.
I tried to find a way to disable it but all I have been able to do is lessen its effect by a small margin. The traits that I have been getting all seem to have positive and negative aspects which I’m not a fan of.
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Recently I’ve also gotten two more traits, but these are a lot more significant ones. My dexterity and vitality passed 1280 stat points. If I had to rank the traits, I would have to also put them in the legendary column. They were powerful but I didn't like the vitality one that much.
The vitality trait was called Vicious life. Why does it have such a weird name even though it’s an organ from a creature? It’s because this organ is the most important organ for the most hated sea creature in the shallow seas.
Without this organ, it would just be another creature but with it, it's a terror that no person wants to meet. It looks like a mix of a sea turtle and a snapping turtle. It can usually grow to the size of a Pitbull and it’s incredibly ferocious to anyone it sees. No matter how small or big.
They are immortal creatures as they don't die from old age, but if you can do enough damage, you can still kill them but doing enough damage is difficult. Trying to break their shell is a stupid idea and even its weaker parts are incredibly tough to damage. The organ that’s called vicious life is responsible for its immortality and incredible regeneration that can quickly repair even the most grievous wounds.
Now at first, I was incredibly happy being immortal and having incredible regeneration sounded overpowered as hell, but that turtle has a very different biology to humans, so the organ does not work on me as it does on the turtle.
Basically, what it does for me is keep me healthy and extend my life but to what extent I do not know, but whatever the case is I already have a feeling that it would be too long. Even my previous life expectancy of 300 to 400 years sounds a bit on the long side.
At first, when I learned that vitality could help extend life, I was excited as 70 years for a normal human sounded a bit too short but getting it over 300 years starts to sound a different kind of unpleasant. Then of course there’s the problem of me gaining more and more strength. That means that my life gets longer the stronger I get, and I have confirmed that there are people who focus on energy builds that live more than a 1000 years. That sounds more scary than exciting but before I started to think too deeply about this, I needed to talk to a person who is that old so I could understand what this means better.
The dexterity, eidolon serpent muscles trait was a lot better for its usefulness, but it still had a drawback of expanding a lot of my stamina. It gave me extra muscles of a powerful serpent species. The muscles kind of looked like a flat rope that was stacked on my regular muscles.
When I flex my biceps, you could see two parallel flat ropes underneath my skin. Those muscles didn’t add any strength to my normal movements, but they did store up movement energy while I moved normally.
When enough is stored, I can activate it and the last action that I made will be copied almost instantly. That means if I make a sword attack, I could make another attack right after that, that would be a bit stronger than the original.
This would however strain my normal muscles depleting my stamina, but I think with enough training I could mitigate those problems. But no way in hell was I going to add that training to the current training I was doing. I already didn’t have enough time and I didn’t want to burn up the few free moments I have with more training.
My skill and ability levels have also gone up but not by a lot. The more important thing is that my strength stat is well past the 1500 mark and my dexterity is really close to that mark. Vitality needs a bit more time until it gets to 1500 but when it does, I will be able to gain access to the second-rank energy. For that, I will need to reach the level 20 milestone in my classes. There might be a chance that I don’t need to reach that milestone with all my classes as I don’t know what rewards I will get when I reach the level 20 milestone.
After a few hours of thinking about my achievement page and running towards the southern border of the grasslands, I finally spotted a purple brownish large dog-sized beetle. This was a low-rank one, but I still stopped and looked over my two-handed mace.
The sheer deadliness of the weapon made me smile and I started to approach the beetle who quickly noticed me and took a defensive stand. Before I could close in Goose swooped down and bisected the beetle with his air blade attack.
That sight made me stop and my brain couldn’t think how to respond. When I got amusement from our bond, I understood that Goose did that on purpose to annoy me. “You think you are hot stuff now that you are at first rank. Well, let’s see about that little bird.” I yelled at him while trying to stop grinding my teeth. The amusement from our bond didn't stop and after a moment I chuckled a bit.