I awoke to another day. And I have to say, I miss coke, I miss couches, I miss comfy. So today I'm going to do nothing, and anyone who tries to stop me gets a mana bolt to the face.

So I spent my day lazing in a tree, a few boars and a bear tried to interrupt me, but as promised they got a personalized mana bolt to the face.

The next day I started walking again. It was really dark at this point. So dark I started using magic eyes (night) twenty-four seven, except when I was low on mana or sleeping. I did find a few new ingredients, but they didn’t do anything special, but I grabbed them anyway since they weren't poisonous. But I realized I forgot something. I wanted to learn magic to use water magic so I didn’t have to worry about water! But then I came across the stream and forgot about it! How do I do elemental magic? I mean it can’t be that hard, maybe it has something to do with affinities? I have two in water but nothing happened, so it might not be the most critical part of it. Meh!

*shoulder shrug*

It will come in time, I'm sure. Walking was getting boring though so I think I might stay in one place for a while in a few days. As I walk I see a bigger bear. It was about twice the size of the bears I bet before, not only that they had a silver marking on there head. It looked like a crescent moon and a thin one at that. I was hidden so I use identify monster.

Silvermoon guardian bear

Level 12

.Twelve? Harsh, i mean it was a level eight before this

Congratulations! Skill monster identify has level to beginner level two

At the sudden and unexpected notification, I jump a bit and scream a bit… in a manly way. Unfortunately, the bear heard my manly roar too, so I am forced to raise my arm and shoot a fifty mana mana bolt. The bolt hit its head and… got hurt. The fur was burnt, and I think it lost an eye. I was honestly surprised the other bears died in one hit, their head literally was gone after one hit, but this bear wasn’t even fazed… ok so it was but you get what I meant. After mana bolt failed I gave up hope and accepted my fate NOT! I did the only thing I could think of doing shoot a 70 mana (the rest of my mana) mana bolt, as I ignored the thumping headache I got from emptying my mana I looked over the bear, and think I it got knocked out. Time to finish it. I grab the boar tusk I had gotten from that first boar. Ah, i remember that boar. That was back when I didn’t use mana bolt to solve all my problems… I grab the tusk and after placing it lightly in the injured eye, and kick it! Of course, it died. No brain no life. Simple as that.

Xp +120

That is a lot of xp. I mean if I used a one hundred mana bolt I could have killed that bear so much easier. The first thing I do is walk back where I came from for a bit, and meditate in a tree to restore some mana, and surprisingly mana sense raised to beginner five.

And then it changed. I felt the mana in the… everything. If I had to describe what it looked like… well felt like, it was like the painting ‘starry night’ in case you've never seen it, it looked like a massive amount of swirls. Curling, curving and swirling around each other. I also saw it move into me slightly. It wasn’t much but I felt it seeping into me, the interesting thing is that the mana felt different in the air, kinda like my mana was orange soda, while the mana in the air is grape, not necessarily worse, but different.

The first thing I do is try to manipulate the mana in the air, it was hard about ten times as hard as when I first manipulated my own mana, but my mental fortitude had gotten stronger than it was back then, the only thing I could do was pull it into my body or move it over my skin slowly. But hey three good things came of this. The first was my mana regen soared when I pulled mana into my body. The second and third was that meditation and mana manipulation levels to seven and eight respectively. It felt good to make such leaps in progress. Tiring but satisfying. I also think I was ready to face those bears again

So I went back and saw no bears, but hey I never expected there to be another bear in the same place as the last, but I hadn’t expected to meet another bear two minutes after walking away. I send a hundred mana bolt, and the fur and skin were gone. The skull and eyes that miraculously survived (i think it closed its eyelids before the mana bolt hit) blood was pouring over the skull making it look about as pissed as a bear in its situation could be. So again I mana bolt with the rest of my mana killing it.

After that, i leave and meditate in a tree again. I meet a new bear and empty my mana killing, before meditating. It sort of became a routine, wake up find a bear, kill a bear, meditate lost mana back, sleep. I also was sort of getting used to what mana depletion felt like. Now I had a level up to apply and of course, i put all five in int, raising it to twenty. And the next day I found that this power was enough to kill one bear with one hundred mana. After shooting a bear with a one-shot I find a new kind of bear there too.

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Half moon elite (uncommon)

Level 20

I leave. This bear was bigger than the Silvermoon guardian but other than its size it also had a half moon where there was a crescent on the other. I’m not facing this at my current strength. So I do some boring repetitive stuff the next few days until I level up, and this is what it looked like after I leveled up.

Titles: rodent slayer

Name: ???+

Race human (100%)

Level 6 (24/3500)

SP:0

HP 120/120 (8/h)

MP 250/250 (16/h)

Str 11

Int 25

Dex 12

Wis 16

Agi 12

Will 11

Vit 13

Def 3

I pump myself up. What are you so afraid of? Death? You're a gamer you’ve experienced death more times than you can count. Yah! Why am I afraid of a low leveled bear? Having pumped myself up I dash deeper into the forest. Until I meet the elite, with mana bolt at a full two hundred fifty I fire it at the bear.

And miss… why? I know why i got overexcited and didn’t aim properly. I also noticed something I forgot earlier when I said I died before it was in a game, you know where you can respawn. But sadly this game has no respawned. But in other news, this is bad, while running I passed some bears so I have some chasing me from behind and one in front of me, so I do the smart thing and run to the right. I hook around another tree flinging me to the left when I see another bear over there. I am lucky though, these bears are strong and tough but they are slow, so even if they are a higher level than me I can still keep my distance from them. Speaking of distance, I've gone quite far into the woods, the same as before, trees are bigger, the place is darker, etc.

He stopped running, why? Because he knew he had blown it. He had run into a big clearing, and sleeping in the moonlight was a big bear, the biggest bear he had seen it was pure silver, except for a circle of black on its forehead, but for some reason I knew that it wasn’t really a black circle, as much as an outlining for the full circle on his forehead.

He didn’t need to identify it to know that it was massively stronger than him, but he identified it anyway.

Moon blessed bear (rare)

This bear was blessed by the moon goddess giving it great strength.

Level 35

It was also in that moment that he realized that there was a rating other than level there (rare), and wasn’t that half moon elite (uncommon)? But those were thoughts for another time, the bear was level thirty-five, and he knew he was dead. It was a guardian, one of the few exceptions to the level limit.

{Author: I don’t remember what I made the level cap, but I'm changing it to twenty if it wasn’t already that}

Guardians were beings who rule over a territory, they were allowed to stay because they needed to maintain their territory or risk a large change in the ecosystem, that would endanger the new races massively. But they weren't allowed to get near the new races yet, unluckily for him though, he was the one that came to the bear, not the other way around.

At that moment the bear woke up and looked into my eyes. I stopped completely. I wasn’t able to move my body, or my head, even my eyes, and lungs, stopped, trying anything it could to lose that bears attention. I was scared, I had never felt fear in my life, you must think I'm joking, but I'm not, sure I've had my fair share of surprises, but never have I felt terror.

The bear raised an arm and slashed at me. The claws slashed my torso, cutting three deep grooves on my chest and stomach. The impact had thrown me against a tree. And just as quick as it had arrived, my fear left, and replacing it was dread, and acceptance. I will die here.

They say that when you die, you see your life flash before your eyes, and they were right, my brain was looking through all my experiences to see anything that could keep me alive, that I could use to claw myself out of the jaws of death. But there was nothing, my days of gaming, reading, sleeping, watching tv, laughing, none of it could save me now. I always thought that if I died I wouldn’t mind, because life was boring, that whatever afterlife or void that I went too would be more interesting, but now? Now I want to live… I want to live? I realized it, I WANTED TO LIVE! I started getting goosebumps, my hairs sticking up on edge. Not that it meant anything, the bear’s slash left me bleeding and dying, my body was going cold, my vision started to blur But… I… want… to… LIVE!

3rd pov.

The bear had lazily swiped at the furless thing that had disturbed its rest. But it was almost dead, he thought it was strange that something so weak could get past his kin, he would have to retrain them later, but back to the intruder, it was just staring off into the distance, before its eyes closed, he had thought it to be dead, before its eyes shot open, they held a more primordial look in them than before. And the bear felt this could be anything but good, he in his (relatively) long life he had seen this look before in the eyes of many animals, animals willing to throw anything away to live, even much weaker animals who had this look, had injured his kin.

But any though the bear might have had beyond this point, was cut off by our main character's actions. He raised himself onto his feet of the ground, and did something stupid (not that he hadn’t in the past) he charged at the bear.

Being wary at this point, the bear struck at the intruder seriously, his claw moving several times faster than before, with a faint shine to them that was not there before. But the intruder moved his body in an almost impossible way, twisting his body like a serpent to dodge the bear’s strike. Getting up close to the bear, the intruder swipes his hand in a clawed manner towards the bear, and surprisingly enough, he had claws! The bear distinctly remembered the intruder not having claws, and furthermore, as he discovered moments later when he was struck with them, that these claws were sharp. The claws ripped the bear’s face off, literally. What was left what some fur on one half of the bear’s face, the other half, had the skull fractured, with some pieces missing, and a missing eye. Needless to say, the bear was pissed, and in pain, but with its pain overpowering its fury, it chooses to run, not that it would get the chance. The intruder grabbed onto the bear’s skull refusing to let go. And furthermore, the blood pouring out of the skull was pulled into the intruder, through the various injuries he had. The bear was desperately flailing around as he felt his life drain from him. And his last thoughts before dying was shame, at seeing his kin flee in terror at the loss of him...