A bunch more months had gone by, adding up to little more than a year. I’d now been working for the Marrow clan as a junior groundskeeper for a little over two years. That meant that I was now thirteen, turning fourteen come fall. The puberty fairy, and the efforts of the Idle-Clicker system, had led to my growing taller and wider.

Conspicuously enough, I looked nowhere as big as my stats would suggest I should be. Though, considering that I now had 50 times the strength, constitution, agility, and dexterity, as the average adult, it was probably for the best. Especially if the alternative was me turning into the massive, feathery, thousand-league limbed, million-digited, abomination that I sometimes saw in my dreams. A nightmarish mixture of a jellyfish, an angel, and some kind of owl.

My other stats had also gotten pretty high as well. Wisdom had developed in tandem with strength and constitution. Perception was 40 times the human average, in terms of range and breadth. I legit saw color that didn’t exist for normal people, and heard sounds that were normally only perceived by certain beasts. My intelligence was 30 times the average human's. As expected it didn’t make me smarter, but it “did” help me think faster, learn faster, and remember better. With Charisma and luck lagging behind at slightly more than 20 times the norm, and no real perceivable effect thus far.

After more than a year of hard work, I’d finally reached a point where all my stats just constantly had talent invested in them. Now my goal was to permanently invest in all my stories. After that, any new talent I procured would be used to multiply my growth and study-rate. There was, of course, a second primary goal of getting more stories. Jack had helped by letting me borrow books from her family’s private library but besides the first two that I got, I wasn’t really seeing any returns for my effort yet.

Interestingly, I did unlock one more new story despite my lack of luck with the public library and the Marrow clan’s private library. Apparently, all that hunting Jack and I have done, unlocked the [Tale of the Hunter]. You know how I said that the tale of the Soldier was kind of a nightmare? The [Tale of the Hunter] was so...much worse. War is hell, but actual hell is also hell, and apparently, many of the hunter’s in the multiverse spent their time wandering in dark terrifying places alone, and meeting dark gruesome ends, at the hands of unfathomable creatures that literally broke my imagination to try to envision.

It wasn’t just people who could hunters. The term included the creatures that were often the targets of the hunts. Experiencing their side of things was just as terrifying, but in a different way. I knew what it felt like to wait patiently in a dark alley, for some unlucky person to take a wrong turn. I knew the orgiastic ecstasy of tearing someone’s chest open with my teeth and feasting on their innards, after hundreds of days of fasting. I knew what it was like to be the thing that’s made its way into someone’s closet, or under their bed, after a night of killing. I had all these experiences and countless more, and the very idea of those experiences, and feelings, supplanting my humanity scared me shitless.

I kind of wanted to quit studying that particular story, for my sanity’s sake, but the [Tale of the Empty Archivist’s Heir] wouldn’t let me. I’d developed this pathological need to finish the Stories I’d started studying to their conclusion, which felt like it could potentially be a pitfall if not carefully managed.

As a practical matter, I’d had to temporarily move out of the staff dorms the seventh night in a row where I woke up screaming. I’d tried gagging myself instead to, you know, muffle the screams, but that just led to me waking up, choking, and screaming. Plus between that and the screaming, people were starting to think I was either A) nuts, or B)possessed by something. I figured a few weeks of active-investment, or “clicking”, to boost my Wisdom stat would fix the issue, but for now I was living in a shed on the far end of the Marrow clan’s estate.

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“Let’s go to “that” place,” said Jack. Somehow managing to sneak up behind me, even though I had ears sharper than a dog’s.

My reliable wisdom stat kept me from jumping out of my skin as she appeared from somewhere within the shadowy boughs of a nearby tree.

“What about the rest of your family?” I said. Tacitly bringing up the fact that it was a weekday and we were liable to be noticed.

“Meh...Father and the Mothers, are all over at our neighbor’s the Orsino’s, sucking up...My siblings are all either at school or out cavorting with all the other rich brats...So long as we’re back by six we’re in the clear,” said Jack.

I rolled my eyes and did a bit of accounting my end, because she’d forgotten that I had my own stuff that I needed to do, and sad as it was to say, I was slightly more visible than she was, simply based on the fact that my superiors might well have some tasks they want me to do. I nibbled on my bottom lip a bit as I thought, then I grunted and nodded.

“Fine...I think we can do it. But let’s try to be back before five. Last time, we cut it pretty close,” I said.

“Noice...Okay, let’s go,” said Jack.

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The place we were headed to was the forest. Over the passing months, we’d gotten strong enough and adept enough to go deep into the forest. We still didn’t dare go into the forest’s heart but we’d done a fair amount of exploring. Last weekend we found a pond with a demon-frog in it. We killed it. I absorbed its body with my system. Jack absorbed its core with her grimoire. Now we had a nice cold pond, filled with spirit-energy enriched water, to swim in.

Speaking of Jack’s grimoire, it had changed again. The book was now an even darker shade of black, and its center held a glowing gray-blue crystal. It had gone from being the [Ancient Demoness’ Grimoire] to being the [Immortal Gluttony’s Grimoire]. According to my data-sampling that also meant that she was now a proper devil instead of just a fledgling devil, but besides getting more adept at using her shadow powers, and being able to increase the power of her absorbed abilities by consuming more of a particular creature’s monster-cores, I wasn’t seeing much change. I took this as a good thing. A sign that she “wasn’t” at the brink of some kind of mental, or spiritual, break-down.

In hindsight, maybe I’d been freaked out for nothing. Normal people’s core-treasures could change several times in their lifetimes. Especially if they cultivated and trained dedicatedly like we did. Systems were the only exception to this because it was the system’s nature to change the user, not the other way around. Then again, maybe I was being too optimistic, maybe Jack's troubled home life and dark mental state was further warping her core-treasure, but was it so wrong to hope my friend was okay?

“Cowabunga!” cried Jack. Laughing as she jumped into the water.

There was a splash. We’d come out here to swim. I blushed because Jack was wearing a pair of shorts and a thin tunic because her family never bothered to buy her a proper swimsuit.

I hesitated for a bit but eventually just took off my shirt before jumping into the pond as well. We splashed in the water for a few hours and enjoyed our youths, then four-thirty came around, and we both had a mad scramble, as we rushed to get home in time to avoid getting found out.