All things considered, Sophia thought, she would have been hard-pressed to find a more beautiful place to die.

This autumn forest was quite the sight and for all its wild and chaotic magic, it was a lot less flashy than the Spring Island had been. The leaves that levitated and danced in the wind were particularly soothing. And so were the few dead leaves that came back to life and reconnected to their trees.

Sure, it wasn't how she would truly die. Somewhere, her body lay as she was unable to wake up. And bad feys were tending to her bodily needs so they could feed from her as long as they could. But for her eternal youth, she wasn't immortal quite yet.

She wasn't immune to disease and her body could only withstand so much neglect. At some point, she would develop bed sores. And later on, those bed sores would cause blood poisoning that would kill her quietly within a few hours

She had no idea how long it would take. But she would be freed of that place sooner or later.

"You are quite rather calm for someone learning that their life is essentially over." The elf pointed out. "May I assume you are a returner?"

Sophia was unfamiliar with the term Ilbryen used. But she could guess what she was, dying and respawning. And so she tentatively nods.

"Soul-forged or Spontaneous?" He asked again.

And having no idea what the elf was talking about, she shrugged.

"It doesn't matter." Ilbryen dropped it before changing the subject. "Anyway, since you aren't going anywhere, would you care to learn something new for your next life."

Sophia had to admit. It was an intriguing proposal. But it was a Fey making the offer and so she expected he would make some pretty unreasonable demands in exchange.

"Interesting offer. But first, may I ask what you might want in exchange?" She asked prudently.

"Ah. Please don't be like this. You might be stuck here for what? A couple of decades, top. I've been there for three centuries. The only thing I want from life is the sweet sweet release of death, so I could get another shot in my next life. And that's not something you can help me with."

The elf did not know about her eternal youth boon. But three centuries? Maybe she grossly underestimated the Fey's motivation to keep them alive. But either a few decades or centuries, she would be screwed either way as the tutorial would not last that long.

She could last about fourteen years on this floor before the tutorial ended. But she had no idea what would happen to her if she was stuck on this floor, or any other floor after the deadline. And honestly, she would rather never figure that one out.

But that explained the system's advanced warning upon entering this floor. If that sort of misadventure was to be expected across the entire floor, it might be nigh impossible to escape from it.

But back to the questions at hand: could she trust the elf? And if she couldn't, what was she gonna do about it?

"Okay, what it is you have to offer?" She finally asked once she was done pondering.

"I'm glad you ask. And the answer is wood working." He said, passing for emphasis before pointing at the very trees surrounding them. "And you are gonna learn with the only kind of wood that can heal faster than you can cut it. Sound fun, right?"

And so they got right to it.

★☆★

That dream place Sophia was in? It did not follow the normal rules, nor the rules of the Feywild, actually. But it own set of rules that didn't make any sense.

Rule number one: magic was everywhere but they couldn't use it.

Rule number two: they could wish into existence any non-magical object they could think of for as long as they concentrate on it.

Rule number three: except for those three rules, any rules of this place would either bend or break to their will, if they tried hard enough.

And so, after Ilbryen was done demonstrating how to summon a wood axe and chop at the self-healing tree, Sophia proceed to summon a chainsaw instead and went to town on the damn truck. And even like this, with her clearly superior tool, she had to struggle against the tree regeneration for about fifteen minutes before she finally did it.

"Woohoo! Timber!" And then she turned to the elf was a sudden vision of horror in her mind. "Please tell me this dead trunk isn't gonna rise up and heal itself again 'cause I haven't done it the proper way, right?"

But the elf was still shell-shocked and looking between her now empty hands and the fallen tree he laboriously asked:

"How?"

And so understanding it was a shock of culture, she resummoned the chainsaw and carefully showed it to him:

"I don't know the specifics about how it works. But see those tiny blades? They are all making small cuts, but really fast. And rotating like this, they never stop cutting. So it doesn't matter that the tree could regenerate cause I just had to make the chainsaw work faster than it could heal. Still took all my strength and concentration. I'm spent."

"A portable sawmill." The elf finally said once he had recovered enough.

And thinking of it, he was kind of right. A chainsaw could do none of the precision cutting that a sawmill would do. And the mechanical principles making them work were completely different. But in a nutshell, a chainsaw was indeed a handheld miniaturized sawmill.

"If it makes you feel better, the chainsaw is still a fairly limited tech, and a lot of people in my world still use a good old woodaxe" Sophia tried her best to ease the old elf feeling.

"Make me feel better?" Ilbryen retorted. "I'm feeling amazing. Now if I could talk to the genius who invented those things, that would make me feel even better. But no point crying over what one can't have right?" He shrugged and then pointed out at two other standing trees. "Please cut those two as well as you are at it. And then, I would teach you the next step."

And so, after taking a nice long break, Sophia went back to cutting those damned trees.

★☆★

Turned out that the wood kept regenerating no matter what. But there was still some limit to it. It could only recover one wound at a time so the trick was to remove the bark all at once, turn the damn trunk into planks and then, start sanding.

It was a particularly long and wasteful process but that way, the wood could not recover from it, as there were far too many particles of wood. So since it was a moot point to try to regenerate, the wood had instead put all its magic into resisting her assaults.

But again, thanks to the trusty sanding machine she had summoned, the task wasn't nearly as grueling as it would have otherwise been. Besides, she wasn't yet trying to achieve anything but to sand away as much material as possible from the planks.

As for the shape she was trying to achieve? The elf had told her to concentrate on what she knew best, hence she would make a bow for each of them, each with a different technique that Ilbryen was supposed to teach her.

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But so far, all she did was to produce planks and sand them, one after another into some long, thin, and perfectly smooth planks.

"Good job." Her old stern professor concluded. "Now is the time to coat them all in resin to protect the wood. This would give the wood a new stable form, making it easier to work with."

Sophia didn't understand the principle but indeed, the extra layer of protection was also turning the self-healing wood into self-repairing planks. And that shift had somehow changed the will of the material, from retaining its form at all costs to craving to be turned into a better object, even helping in the process.

"Now, it's time to make a composite material," Ilbryen explained. "You already have wood and resin so I would suggest these spidersilk fabric and bone paste. It would increase the poundage of your bow. As the wood already has you covered in terms of durability."

And indeed, things were starting to come together quite nicely, although her two future bows were still at the stage of composite planks. After two layers of wood, six layers of resin, three layers of spidersilk, and two layers of bone paste, the material properties were nothing like the sum of its parts anymore.

"What is it called?" Sophia asked, pointing at the material.

"I don't know." The old elf admitted. "I'm a luthier, not a bowmaker. I knew about it through hearsay but none of the specifics. Except that it was good and favored by our army." Ilbryen explained, returning her own earlier words against her.

"What was it like? I mean, your life, before all this?" Sophia asked getting curious as the old elf had started sharing personal trivia.

"It was... the nicest kind of boring, I guess? I was a third-generation master craftsman and I was good at it. Everyone considered me a genius and expected nothing less of me. Every crap I made was instantly labeled as a luxury instrument to be sold to the highest bidder. Even got recognition from the Elven goddess of arts, extending my life so more people could benefit from my work.

I now understand she wanted me to become a teacher, or at least, get children, so my craft would not die with me. But I was pretty self-centered at the time, and unsatisfied with what I had. So one day, I finally experienced a middle-aged crisis and decided to leave and go soul searching. And after only three years of adventuring... I ended up trapped here, in my own head, in my own dreams... And you can figure the rest for yourself."

Yep. It was one hell of a depressing story. The old guy had it all but couldn't appreciate it. Then he lost it all and realized his mistake a little too late. Except that in his story, a second chance wasn't an option.

But unlike her previous encounters with a tutorial sapient, this one felt a little too authentic for comfort like he wasn't just a pale imitation of a sapient but actually the real deal. Plus, he was somehow aware of her returner status and was seemingly bothered enough by the implications not to press the matter, in spite of his quite obvious curiosity.

Since then, he had been acting as if his life was already over and diligently taught her everything he could, in polar opposition to what his life presumably had been before all this. Even his stern and haughty mannerisms were all gone.

And so, Sophia had her own new hypothesis about the tutorial inhabitants but was too afraid to ask: were they all real individuals who had died in similar circumstances each floor had been mimicking? And if so, how would life beyond the tutorial be any different than within it?

"So, what's next?" She asked, trying to distract herself from her own darkest thoughts.

"Now, you do your own craft, turning this into a couple of bows. While I would do my craft on the leftovers there." The old elf pointed at the still raw wood that Sophia had discarded. "Just call me when you are almost done for the final touch."

And so Sophia was left alone to somehow transform those planks into a couple of bows. At least, she would not have to do it from a repurposed bookcase this time around. But heck, she was already missing Lono's help.

The Fighter input had always been invaluable.

But at least she could find solace in the fact he wouldn't face his last death in a place like this. Sure, it was certainly the most pleasant death trap they ever encountered. But knowing she would die and could not do shit about it. It sucked.

At least, she had a small chance of escaping with her last life before her time ran out. And if she did, the knowledge of how to make a truly good weapon might indeed help her rush to the floor exit.

And it was to prove she learned from her past mistakes.

Sophia's bow was a training one, made for beginners. It was intended to sacrifice poundage for ease of use. But the first bow she made? It had been copying that design without a clear understanding of what she was doing. And as a result, her first bow was significantly worse than even a training bow.

Now, she felt like she understood better. Recurves were made to pack as much of a punch in a compact design. It did sacrifice a bit of sheer power compared to a longbow but it was made to outclass any other shortbows.

So what she had to do was to distance herself from her original design and reverse engineer through trial and error what a true war bow was supposed to be.

And if anything, she had plenty of material, enough for twenty bows at least, and more time to kill than she could possibly dream of, no pun intended.

Another room for improvement was that she would not try to transform a quarterstaff into a bow this time around, but get straight to bow-making this time around. So it would be a one less flawed design too thanks to the system boon helping her instead of actively working against her.

Within minutes, she had cut the planks into twenty and immediately summoned a boiler to work on her first design.

She had no idea what she was doing. But she figured out the best way to benchmark her future progress was to compare it to what she was already familiar with. And so, for her first try, she was kinda trying to reproduce her first failure on purpose.

She had some ideas about what went wrong with the design. But to test them all she had to establish a baseline she could easily reproduce and modify with each iteration. So that was that.

You have crafted a basic composite shortbow. The item's material quality is exceptional, its crafting quality is meager, and its durability is good. It has a self-repair special characteristic.

Once she was done, the system notification did not keep her hanging. But its content startled her nonetheless.

Even as she tried to reproduce her first failure as best as she could with this new material, the bow description was nothing like her first.

Her crafting had shot from abysmal to meager. And it seems like her new and improved 'meager' skills had not downgraded the material quality as much as she thought it would.

And of course, the bow had somehow retained the wood's self-healing properties, which was insanely good.

If her guess was correct, skipping the quarterstaff step was responsible for the lack of "primitive" in the weapon description. In her hand, the weapon felt more balanced and though it was still a low-poundage bow, she could tell that from the material alone, it was an improvement from even her training bow.

But the description also dropped the "recurve" mention, though her shortbow definitely qualified. Was it supposed to be implicit? And if so, why mention it in her earlier design?

She shrugged. The only way to respond to those questions was to do more tests.

And so she started to work on a heavier design, on the assumption that a bit more thickness would increase the bow poundage. But she realized the error in her judgment when the second bow snapped before it even got through the system assessment.

Learning from her mistake, she proceeded carefully with her third design, carefully testing and sanding it until she was able to draw it, albeit barely.

You have crafted a basic, recurve, composite warbow. The item's material quality is exceptional, its crafting quality is abysmal, and its durability is good. It has a self-repair special characteristic.

Yep. So the improvement in the crafting quality of her second design was a fluke. It also was qualified as a warbow instead of a shortbow, just because of the extra mass and poundage. But this time, the system had mentioned the recurve again, as if to say it was unusual for a warbow.

What the hell was she missing?

But instead of pondering the question further, she went to work on her next design. And this time, she wanted to experiment on the recurve property. On the assumption that if a crafter wanted to make a low-poundage bow for training, making it purposefully less efficient was probably better than just making it smaller.

After all, a lot of material properties changed with thickness as she had just experienced. And it was probably easier to just make the curve of a bow more or less pronounced as needed.

But this time, she was simply unable to put a string on the bow and even after she summoned a mechanical aid to help her, the bow broke in two once again.

She urgently needed to learn the value of temperance and learn to take baby steps instead of trying to run before she could even walk. So on her fourth design, she only modified the curve slightly, so she was sure the difference in draw weight, if any should be minor.

You have crafted a basic composite shortbow. The item's material quality is exceptional, its crafting quality is abysmal, and its durability is good. It has a self-repair special characteristic.

But again, it was a failure, the system evaluating her attempt as significantly worse than her second.

So for her fifth attempt, she decided to go back to her original design. Only this time she was not trying to reproduce it, but to slightly improve upon the design, not to improve its performance, but its ease of use.

She took her time, obsessing over the finer details, trying hard to remember how her training bow felt like compared to her second attempt. And in the end, while she could have made five bows in the meantime, she was fairly confident that this bow had to be better.

It had to be.

You have crafted a basic composite shortbow. The item's material quality is exceptional, its crafting quality is average, and its durability is good. It has a self-repair special characteristic.

Yes! Average was definitely better than meager. So she was on the right track.

Without a teacher to tell her what she was doing wrong, minute improvement upon her design was the way to go. And so she went back to the drawing board for her sixth attempt.

Unless she made significant improvements, she would keep with the baby steps, always within a 1% margin.

She might need more than fifteen attempts though. But she had time to kill and nothing else to do.