CHAPTER 58 UHHHH…. YEAH…

I could really only hope that my antics didn’t come back to bite me in the butt. But in all fairness, they shouldn’t have tried to scam me. As the saying goes. You snooze, you lose. Simple as.

As I ran through the countryside, the road I was traveling on branched off several times. In the distance I could see villages down the roads. I wasn’t particularly down on food or anything so I wasn’t really interested in stopping at them. As it was I could probably make it pretty close to Verdanst before I fully tired out.

I took the time to make use of [One With Nature] in my time out here though. The skill gave me a wide range of vision. It was an odd sort of thing, the skill was more akin to [Mana Sense] than anything like regular eyesight. I wasn’t seeing people or things, more presences and the absence of such. I wasn’t sure how well that lended to being able to hear sounds, but it’s not like I particularly had a chance to test that out fully.

But it did serve as a good aid for seeing things far out. Assuming there was stuff like grass or trees nearby. I wonder if there are plants I could utilize better over things like grass. I’d be interested in seeing the different effects different types of flora have on the skill.

While I was using the skill I made sure to push my senses to the absolute maximum. The more I pushed myself on it the more of a workout [Accelerated Thoughts] got as well. If that leveled up, it became slightly less stressful to manage more information being poured into my head. The better that got, the more I could see, the more I could see the harder I would be to surprise or take down in a fight.

As they say, information is half the battle. Well, I guess more accurately it was ‘knowing’. But who’s being a stickler for that? Not me, nope.

I idly hummed a tune as I powered along the dirt road. I had only just started to feel a bit of strain building up from how far I’d run since the border. Several hours at speeds over… 100 mph? It’s hard to gauge speeds while on foot honestly, given that usually a person is only going this fast on a vehicle, it’s hard to say how fast you’re going when your perspective is suddenly different.

Well, what matters is that I’m going fast. And I was only just starting to feel it. It brought a wide grin to my face, I loved the enhancement the system provided. I wanted to go faster and further than I was already going as well. Hell, if I could, I wanted to encroach on lightspeed. The human dream, seemingly forever unattainable because of the laws of physics. I wanted to become the first person to breach it if no one had already.

Would I just turn into energy once I broke that barrier? Would the system keep me together? Hard to say. Now that I thought about it, maybe I didn’t want to break that barrier. If I exploded into energy particles and died just because I went too fast? That’d suck. Big time. It was not something I was interested in having happen to me.

After a few more minutes of running I slowed down to a walk. Before eventually coming to a stop. There was a nice little copse a little ways off the side of the road and I was bored of running… Well, not bored per se. More just I wasn’t interested in being in such a hurry to get places. I had time, and what was time if I didn’t use it to relax.

Something about the little cluster of trees called to me and by golly was I going to answer.

I skipped over and found a nice spot to sit down on. Now that I was here, I realized that it’d be nice to have a blanket. Something maybe to acquire when I got to Verdanst perhaps.

I situated myself comfortably and broke out some of the food I had packed for the trip up here. I had some mystery jerky. It tasted slightly like venison, but it clearly wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure if they had deer here. They had cows and pigs interestingly enough, but some other staple farm creatures just didn’t exist. Sheep for example, I hadn’t seen any since coming here. Chickens as well.

Obviously they had their replacement creatures, I never actually found out the names of them. But their sheep counterpart was the size of a horse. Absolutely massive. Their ‘chicken’ was similarly enlarged. It looked more like the cross between a velociraptor and an ostrich.

Long legs, with a strange ovular body that instead of wings ended in talons on the front. But still incredibly feathery. Also the maw full of teeth. That was something to take note of. They also seemed just as vicious as normal chickens, except these ones were actually big enough to eat you.

I also had some bread. It was surprisingly fluffy still. Skills really were a blessing, the higher the chef the longer their food tended to last before it went bad. Preservatives in this world weren’t fully as prevalent due to skills lengthening foods lifespan. In some instances they were still used, but they hadn’t fully taken hold the same. I was fine with that personally.

Not that realistically there’d be much of a difference honestly. But there was just kind of a natural aversion to the concept after having lived in America and seeing just how much of the shit they crammed into our food. I could understand some of it in some cases, but the amount of the stuff, among other things, that they put in say our meats? Absurd. I wasn’t entirely sure what the purpose was behind making our food so unhealthy. Probably some government scam I didn’t understand.

Yeah yeah, give me the tin-foil hat.

I happily munched away at my food, swaying slightly back and forth in the breeze with the tree’s enjoying the feeling of nature around me. I could feel it buzzing in the back of my mind pleasantly. There definitely was something that was altered about my mindset. I had a sneaking suspicion on the culprit, but I couldn’t find it in myself to be particularly angry.

Maybe I should be, maybe I should care… I frowned. My mind was being altered. That was a cause for concern. If it was willing to alter in this instance, where was the line? Actually… It had already crossed that line hadn’t it? I’ve noticed several times that I enjoyed combat. I was never particularly interested in the whole blood, gore, and killing other people to prove my superiority. I was a vengeful person originally, but not murderous. Not without good cause. But I had reveled, to a degree, in the bloodshed in the skirmish with the Alixian forces back last week.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Hmmmm… This was deeply unsettling. The main problem was what could I even do about it? I needed the heart to survive at this point. I was fairly certain trying to pull it out would just result in my death, kind of like pulling out anybody's heart normally. It would kinda just kill them.

I sat and thought on the topic a little more before pushing it to the back of my mind. There was only so much brooding I could handle. I was also in a good mood so I didn’t want to bring it down fully with pessimistic thoughts.

I was sitting in nature, with a warm breeze at the height of spring approaching summer. I could hear birds chirping and the leaves rustling. This wasn’t a moment to be distracted. After I finished eating I laid back in the lush grass and just looked up at the sky. The clouds lazily crossed over the sky overhead as I just laid there and rejuvenated my mind and spirit.

I felt completely unburdened at the moment. There was nothing pressuring me to get up and do anything or be productive for the day. Just like my times at the hotspring, I was able to just stop and enjoy myself as I appreciated the world around me.

Definitely a well-earned moment for myself.

‘Ping’ [Accelerated Thoughts] Has leveled 2 > 3

I gave a content smile as my skill leveled up. The strain in my mind died down a little as my mind sped up. I stretched my awareness just a little bit further to account for the increase in capability. I needed to burn through a lot of levels on this skill. I think before I ascended to tier three I wanted all of my skills to be max level with me. So tier two level fifty. For some of them it was going to take a lot of effort. In fact I don’t know that I was ever going to be able to realistically get [Rest] up to that point.

It just took so much effort to level up there. Maybe constantly doing it between fights would make a difference? Something to maybe test when I could reasonably guarantee fights I could beat and knew another one was coming up. Didn’t want to kill myself cause I tried to rest in between fights against something that would be able to just kill me in a single hit.

There was lots of work overall I was going to have to handle once I started leveling. Should I focus equally on raising my general skills along with my levels? Or should I just focus on one or the other until something caps out?

Probably a better idea to vary my focus. Working on general skills sounds like it’s going to be relatively boring since it’s just going to be me standing in place essentially and practicing a specific set of actions until the skill levels. Whereas fighting monsters and stuff is gonna be a lot more enjoyable. So I should intersperse my general skill training with leveling my classes so I don’t get too bored doing this.

I nodded my head approvingly, this seemed like the best course of action. [Rest] was still going to be a bitch to deal with. But I’d figure out a way. Maybe I would end up just ignoring it in favor of ascending when the time came. I guess I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

Other skills like [Sword Apprentice] would be pretty easy in all honesty. All I would have to do would be to spend several hours a day just practicing sword technique. Except I don’t really know any sword techniques.

This was going to be a lot more troublesome than I thought, wasn’t it?

I let out a sigh from where I was laying on the grass. I hated time crunches. Even if it wasn’t so much a crunch and much more just a distant nebulous deadline. I frowned to myself, why was I particularly caught up in this anyway?

It was something Penny had told me to do, sure. I did love her. At least I felt like I did. So I was doing this because I wanted to be the one to be with her. She had very clearly said she felt the same way about me.

The difference was that she wasn’t interested in either being with someone that started trouble they couldn’t finish, or that the person that was supposedly interested in her wasn’t interested in taking the extra step to be with her.

That seemed slightly out of character for her… But maybe not entirely. She had pretty wide mood swings from what I’d seen of her so far. When we first met in the guild she had at least seemed polite, the next time we even had a chance of a proper conversation she threatened to push my shit in.

Such was the way of life. I wasn’t particularly bothered by it at the time. Why wasn’t I bothered by it though? I was extremely bothered by Raylith’s words about me.

I let out a long groan while massaging my temples, why did I have to be so confusing even to myself. This was getting ridiculous. I really needed to get myself sorted out. Too much of my behavior seemed to be off the rails recently. Whatever. I just needed to pump my levels to the point that it didn’t matter.

On that front I also needed to make sure that the classes I was grabbing were actually worth the effort. I needed to be careful with how I went about doing this. I’d read enough litrpg’s to know that if I carefully took my time to gather prestigious achievements to my name then my classes would be way stronger for it and then I could face off against people, supposedly, much stronger than me.

Although it seemed like I wasn’t the first kind of person to achieve that apparently. Seeing Queen Ashendra fight had been awe-inspiring. I couldn’t even track her speed, it was like watching a dragon ball fight. All I saw were super-sonic booms as she darted around launching skills at The Harbinger.

She even had addressed the capital the day after, she had apparently lost her arm in the fight along with her armor being significantly damaged, but she was perfectly healed and her armor repaired in less than 24 hours.

Not too surprising overall considering she was the Queen of a country. So naturally she’d have access to much better resources, they definitely wouldn’t leave her missing a limb if they had the capability to heal it.

I let out a sigh before standing up and brushing myself off. I was getting too caught up in all of this I think. I just needed to focus on me and what I could do for the moment. Maybe make some more friends. More friends is never a bad thing ever.

My first step is Verdanst, once I get there I can focus on how I want to progress after that.

Nodding approvingly to myself I set off back to the road and then took off at a steady run, the distance getting eaten up by my strides. The sun was starting to dip in the sky already, but I still had a few more hours of light. I had spent far longer than I had wanted to, sitting in that copse, but it wasn’t a particularly big deal overall.

Once the sun finished setting, I would camp for the night. I didn’t think I was going to make it to the next city on my travels before then.

‘Ping’ [Accelerated Thoughts] Has leveled 3 > 4

Nice.