Ackster woke up with a splitting headache and an urge to smash his head against the nearest tree. He almost wondered if those two were related when he reached up and sensed that his forehead was a little sticky.
“Fuck…!”
Ackster groaned and looked at the afternoon sky through squinting eyes. With the trees blocking most of the direct light, it wasn’t too piercing, but Ackster still felt as if he had the mother of all hangovers, and he covered his eyes with an arm to try and recover a little.
He realized that he had gone a little overboard with eating an entire finger in one go like that. If he had eaten two at once, he would probably have died.
But at the same time, this was exactly what Ackster wanted. He wanted to push himself to his utmost limits, break through those limits, and go so far that he couldn’t even see the debris of his limits.
Almost dying was something he would have to get used to. The sooner, the better. He just wasn’t ready for the discomfort. Although the pain of the headache and the fever that had almost boiled his brain weren’t nice, the feeling of his mouth and throat being all prickly and it being almost impossible to swallow gave Ackster such a feeling of discomfort that was somehow harder to endure than good old physical pain.
But now wasn’t the time to lie around and mope about how much he wanted to sip mojitos on a sandy beach while watching the sunset, surrounded by women, perhaps?
He had a goal to accomplish, well, a bunch of goals he needed to accomplish if he wanted to achieve the ultimate one, which was to survive.
And before he ate the next finger, Ackster had to do one thing first. He fished out the Nomi from his pocket.
[Name: –]
[Profession: (Adventurer)]
[Stats:
[Strength: F]
[Agility: G]
[Fortitude: F]
[Mana: –]
[Spirit: F]
[Skills:
[Strong Body]
[Pain Tolerance: F]
[Poison Resistance: F]
[Keen Senses: F]
Ackster looked at the card with a furrowed brow. He had seen some growth since he last looked at it. But it wasn’t where he thought it would be. His Spirit stat had ranked up once, as well as Keen Senses. So now, everything except Agility and Mana was at F.
He could kind of understand why Spirit had ranked up since it might have something to do with will and willpower. And Ackster’s will had certainly been put to the test, both before he forced himself to eat the finger and while he endured the poison.
What he was most surprised about was Keen Senses. But Ackster could guess why. He had put his tongue and nose through a sensory hell. Even if he didn’t want to, his senses had been forced to taste and smell the finger. And it had made them more sensitive.
Although Ackster didn’t know how to feel about it ranking up that way, it was objectively a good thing. No matter what, his skill had become stronger, even if just a bit.
Skills were the easiest to level up at the lower ranks, but there was also the smallest difference in power between the different lower ranks. Supposedly, the difference and increase in effectiveness were exponential, which also meant the difficulty in ranking up was the same.
But, although slight, the growth still made Ackster satisfied. Even if it wasn’t in the areas he had aimed for, he had still become a smidge stronger.
And the fact that forcing his senses to endure the goblin’s finger had helped his Keen Senses grow also made Ackster realize that there were different ways to train his skills. There weren’t strict recipes he had to follow if he wanted to train. As long as he used a part of the skills, they would gain proficiency and eventually rank up when they reached the breakthrough point.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do with that knowledge at the moment since most of his skills were pretty straightforward.
Pain Tolerance just needed Ackster to endure pain. It didn’t matter what kind, so there were a million and two ways he could train it.
It was the same with Poison Resistance. There were countless ways to ingest or come in contact with poison, and no matter which way, they would all train Poison Resistance as long as Ackster didn’t die of them. Well, they also had to be dangerous and harm his body for the skill to react.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
And Ackster didn’t know enough about Strong Body to do anything specific to train it, to begin with. At the moment, he was just doing everything he could to make his body stronger since that should, logically speaking, make Strong Body stronger.
With his head clear and his body willing to listen to his commands, Ackster pocketed the Nomi and stood up while packing his bag again. The slime hadn’t fled for some reason, which surprised Ackster, so he decided to bring it along.
He was getting hungry and thirsty. And while he could eat the fingers, they did more to wean away at his supply of energy than they did to replenish it. And they did nothing for how thirsty he was.
So, finger in hand, Ackster continued walking through the forest in a southerly direction. He would nibble at it, bit by bit, gradually getting used to the poison and dizziness it inflicted.
He would also grab and eat anything that looked biteable and shove it inside his mouth. He found a couple of flowers with pretty succulent stems that helped ease his thirst. But they were poisonous, so he grew even hungrier.
Thankfully, they weren’t as bad as the poison goblin since they only made his throat itch. But they didn’t make Ackster hungry just because of the itching. It was because he scratched so hard at his throat that he almost tore it open.
The dizziness from the goblin fingers and the itchiness wasn’t a very good combo since Ackster didn't even realize he was bleeding from his throat before he noticed it got even harder to breathe. But at least he could slurp his fingers to temporarily alleviate his thirst.
Ackster had stopped doubting his sanity by now. It was clear it had left shortly after he transmigrated.
After nearly mindlessly scraping his throat out due to the combined poison of the weird flower he ate and the poison finger, Ackster took a break. Fortunately, he found a small stream nearby with clean enough water that he could drink.
Ackster sat down on the ground next to the stream after splashing his face with water.
This spartan training probably wouldn’t last very long. He was feeling mentally and physically exhausted after a day of it. If he could endure, he would probably become pretty tough by the end of it. But if he couldn’t, he would simply collapse and die in the middle of nowhere without anyone knowing about his fate.
He would have to come up with something more sustainable. But until then, he would simply have to do his best to endure. Maybe if he could find something to eat and fuel his Strong Body with, Ackster would have greater chances of success.
Quenching his thirst and taking a break from munching on poison had only told Ackster exactly how starved he was. With some food and energy in his system, he could probably find it easier to endure the pain and the poison.
When he thought about it, Ackster was almost a little surprised that he hadn’t encountered a source of food by now.
Although he was technically in between two relatively major cities of Badhurst, and the forest he was in wasn’t special or dense with mana, Ackster was far from the road, and no matter what forest it was, there would still be beasts and monsters in it.
Ackster had been in the forest for the rest of the night following his escape from the Phileam Estate and Degrest and the day following that. And the sun was beginning to set, so it wouldn’t be long until he had spent an entire day-and-night cycle in the forest.
However, he hadn’t encountered a single living being other than a couple of pesky insects.
If anything attacked him, he would be able to fight back and train his combat skills through live practice while also securing a food source. Being attacked was actually what Ackster had counted on to supply him with a more reliable source of nutrients that could sustain his consumption better than random plants and berries or fruits he found despite his faltering consciousness.
As he took another bite from the third goblin finger, Ackster haphazardly realized why nothing had attacked him.
He was practically a walking poison packet. Even he, with Poison Resistance F, almost died from eating one of the poison goblin’s fingers in one go. And until his body fully worked through the poison and eradicated all of its effects, that poison would linger inside his body. There was also the finger he held that reeked of poison and things living creatures shouldn’t eat if they wanted to stay alive.
In this relatively low-level forest, there wouldn’t be a lot of beings with high enough Poison Resistance to boldly charge and attack Ackster. Even if they did succeed and killed Ackster, if they couldn’t handle the poison that his presence exuded, they wouldn’t get anything. They might even end up like the hound-like beast that had tried to eat the poison goblin’s corpse back at the Degrest Forest.
Ackster was a little comforted since it meant he could rest at ease, knowing he wouldn’t be attacked out of nowhere. But he had to reproach himself for that thought. He wasn’t supposed to rest and lower his guard. He had to be ready at all times and become as strong as possible.
Good reflexes and a constant awareness of his surroundings that would let him respond to any ambush, no matter what, were vital if Ackster wanted to reach far. Otherwise, no matter how strong he was, he could take one wrong step and enter a pitfall where he could get trapped and starved to death or attacked or something.
However, if no one and nothing wanted to attack him, he would simply have to flip it around and find something to attack, both for food and combat training. The searching would also help him improve since he would have to learn how to find tracks and what traces belong to what kind of being.
It probably wouldn’t be easy without anyone to teach him or without a source of base knowledge to extract information from.
But the information and teachings of how to track wild animals and monsters had to have sprung up from somewhere. Ackster would just have to learn it all himself the hard way from the very beginning. Another good opportunity to train and grow stronger.
Ackster did his best to cheer himself up as he stood up and began looking for signs of living beings that he could track down, fight, kill, and eat.
Since he was going to focus on another aspect of his training, Ackster temporarily decreased how much poison he munched. It was just enough to keep his tongue tingling but without interfering too much with his senses and clarity of mind.
Although pushing himself to and beyond his limits would be the quickest way to grow, Ackster had learned from his mistakes by now. Even if it made him, forced him, to grow stronger faster, it would be useless if it only led to his death.
Before he started training his Poison Resistance, he should, at the very least, make sure that he could survive a fight with the local wildlife without debuffing himself. And then, once he had found the limits of what he was capable of, Ackster would slowly start tearing them down, brick by brick.
Maybe it was thanks to cutting down on the poison, or maybe it was because Ackster had a better eye for this thing than he thought, but he pretty quickly found an animal trail with relatively fresh hoof prints. It looked like two sets, so if he chose to hunt the animals down, he would be up against two beasts at the minimum.
‘Great.’
Ackster forced an excited grin onto his face as he started following the tracks.