The morning of the third day went very similarly to the previous one, with Frank taking a quick jog to the creek for water and warming up his body, before getting something to eat. It was from that point that the days really began to diverge from each other, as he now had actual tools to make use of. As he prepared to head into the forest again, though this time to get some actual lumber to allow for more constructions, he ran into the issue of not having anywhere to store his tools, and he certainly didn’t want to carry them both all the time.
He could of course just leave the knife and just take the axe, but that could still be annoying if he would need to carry something with both hands. As he pondered that conundrum, he realized that he may already have a solution, though he wasn’t sure. When he changed form, his clothes also changed, so unless they kept being destroyed and recreated, they had to be stored somewhere. Now, the question was just if he had any control over what would be stored, because he assumed that the affect would at least extent to new sets of clothes, as it’d otherwise be quite useless in the future.
To test it out, he pulled off his shirt and threw it to the side, before turning into Sylvia. Then she focused on the new shirt and thought about keeping it on as she returned to being Frank. And to his joy, the shirt stayed on when he transformed, though it was a bit loose on him, as he had no boobs to fill it out with. Now that he also knew that items could have stats, he pulled the shirt off and checked its status.
Name: Sylvia’s Shirt
Rating: Title effect
Quality: Uncommon (Mythical)
Restriction: Can only be equipped by Sylvia Hisprit.
A shirt made for Sylvia Hisprit through the owner’s titles’ effect. It will always fit Sylvia and if damaged or destroyed, it will slowly repair itself over time. Can at any time be reequipped through thought, as long as the upper body is free, though with a cooldown of 24 hours.
This status can only be seen if the title is visible, and the viewing person has the ability to see the title.
“Oh wow. That’s a really neat feature of the title, though if that’s the case, then it might actually be the case that it only worked because I tried the swap with something else the title made. But before I try anything else, I want to try the reequip thing, just to know how it works.” Frank thought about the shirt lying on the floor and wished for it to appear on his body, and immediately he had it back on again. With a quick look at its status, he saw that a timer had begun counting down.
He grabbed a random fruit and placed down Sylvia’s shirt for now. “Time to test this thing.” He focused on the fruit, but unlike with the shirt before, he did so with the intent for it to remain with the form. When Sylvia looked down at her hand that had been holding the fruit, it was empty. “Alright, that’s cool. Now I just hope I get it back when I return to Frank.”
She then took notice of her breasts, that she actually hadn’t peeked at until now, as the adaptation effect of the title and her current situation had kept her from really thinking about them. But now that they were only contained by a very simple bra, it was quite hard to at least not notice them. Her mind quickly wandered to some of the doujins she had read back on Earth, and she smiled at the thought of what could be done, especially when she thought about what some of her classmates would’ve done in her situation. But, with her situation as it was and her being in the middle of an experiment, she just pulled the shirt back on and turned back into Frank.
Just like he had hoped and sorta expected, the fruit reappeared in his hand. “Fuck yeah! This really increases how much I can get done in a single trip. Welp, time to go then.” He grabbed the knife and turned into Sylvia, before picking up the axe. She reasoned that it’d be best to carry it, in case she would need it for some self-defense, at least until carrying something would make it highly inconvenient for her to carry the axe as well. Then she set off for the forest, taking a quick trip past the creek to make sure she had gotten enough water.
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Inside the forest, Sylvia wandered around just looking for a tree that was small enough to fell and carry, but also large enough to be of actual use. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, at least in the out parts of the forest, where the trees weren’t as large as what she had seen further inside. As such, it didn’t take long before she had found something she deemed suitable and began chopping.
While she hadn’t exactly cut down a lot of trees before, she had at one point binged some lumberjack championship thingy on YouTube, and the main thing she remembered from there, was to not strike head on but instead at an angle. Though, she wasn’t sure how much that actually for trees with a diameter of probably 15 centimeters, so she instead went with the strategy she had seen in some videos where they cut down trees of this size, thereby shelving the other one for when she, one, had a better axe, and two, a large enough tree to cut down.
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After her first strike, the next ones hit a fair bit away from the target, so after a couple more swings, she lowered the power to increase her accuracy, which helped substantially. Once she had chopped a good couple of centimeters into the tree, she rotated around it slightly to continue the cut, going around the tree until it fell over. As she chosen tree was quite straight, it didn’t immediately fall over once she finished the chopping, but instead of going with more of that, she quickly wiped the sweat off her forehead before grabbing the tree and pulled it to the side with her full bodyweight.
The weakened foundation and sudden pull of multiple tens of kilos were more than the tree could handle, so after a bit of bending, a loud “SNAP!” sounded out when the fibers at the cut broke in a chain reaction. When the tree snapped, Sylvia almost fell over, but she barely managed to move a foot in the way to prevent that. As the canopy impacted the ground, a small cloud of dust welled up, only to quickly settle again.
“Phew. That was quite hard,” she moved her hair back behind her ears and back to get it out of the way. “Hmm. I could probably just drag this back home, but if I can avoid it, I don’t want to need an entire trip for each log. Ah, maybe I can abuse the item storage of transforming; it’s at least worth giving it a shot.” Sylvia promptly turned into Frank.
When he had pulled the tree down, part of the hurdle had been to force the tree’s canopy through those of the other trees, which now sadly meant that the three-meter-long tree wasn’t really held up by anything. So, instead of being able to attempt putting the weight onto his shoulder and spine from the start, he had to instead try to lift the tree with his hands first. Taking a squat, a bit to the canopy side of the middle, he got both arms under it thanks to the canopy making the log slant ever so slightly.
“1… 2… 3… GO!” As the last word left his mouth, it was quickly followed by strained groans of frustration. ‘Come on up, you dumb log.’ With a lot of effort, he did manage to lift the log a fair bit from the ground, and quickly did his best to think of it as equipment to stay with this form, as he changed back into Sylvia. “Ahhh…” A sigh of relief left her as she fell on her butt. “Geez. I’m so happy that worked. I need to increase my strength more, or at least work out more.”
She took a look at her axe and thought about how it increased her stats, when a loud grumble from her stomach diverted her attention. The workout from swinging the axe a lot, pulled the tree down, and barely lifting it, had apparently been enough for her stomach to chow through most of its contents. A small smile spread on her lips when she heard it. “Guess I need to find some food, lucky I’m an elf.” She giggled lightly at her own statement as she got up and went looking.
While the racial ability certainly made it easier to find food, it didn’t mean it was an instant find. It still took her an hour to find some, but what she did find, turned out to be a new patch of carnips. Quite happy to find something familiar and well tasting, she quickly ran over to them and began extracting them from the ground.
As the patch seemed quite large, she didn’t stop until six had been pulled out, as carrying any more a large distance would probably end with her dropping at least one. Once she was done pulling them up, she went to work cleaning up an entire half of one, which was enough to fill her stomach and leave her satisfied. She looked down at the carnips at her feet. “Welp. Guess I’ll only be taking one log back, but I’d say that good food is enough to make up for that.” She gathered the five and half carnips and began to head home.
It hadn’t been many hundreds of meters, before something that sounded as if a dog’s squeaky toy had tried to growl entered her ears. When she turned around, her first thought was that a bunny stood before her, but it was then that she noticed the unusual things about it; it was at least half a meter long and at the end of its gray tail, a rock-looking appendage was. No, upon closer inspection, it didn’t look like a rock, it was a rock. To hold on to it, it appeared that the creature’s tail had spit into three prongs that inserted themselves into the rock. Small pebbles could also be seen in its fur, enhancing the gray color.
The creature didn’t look particularly happy about confronting Sylvia, but it looked like it was intent on attacking. Then, there was no more time for thinking. The bunny set off towards her at full speed, ready to swing with its tail, seemingly aiming for her legs. Without a care for the carnips in her arms, she released her left hand’s grip on the axe, breaking the circle that held up the veggies, making them tumble to the ground, a couple breaking apart.
As the carnips hit the ground, the bunny's target seemed to change from Sylvia to one of the broken vegetables. But Sylvia herself was far too focused on making sure she’d hit the rat with her swing, to even process what the change implied. Having regripped the axe with her left hand, she made sure to stand close to the animal’s predicted path, and when it got close, “CRACK!” sounded out as the axe came down like a golf club and split the bunny’s head in two. As the axe left the head, the bunny just slid across the ground, ending up with its relatively intact mouth practically biting the dust.
Killed Bunniv lv. 2. Gained exp.