Blue screens filled his vision, and Conall lurched as a strange sort of energy spread through his body. He felt surprisingly good. His left arm was hanging on by a thread, and his shoulder wasn't much better. Not to mention, he could see five of his ribs. Pretty sure those were supposed to stay out of sight.

He should have passed out by now. He knew that. Even if the wounds themselves weren't fatal, the blood loss definitely should have been. Yet, here he was, admiring the way the pool of his blood glittered in the rising sun. To his amazement, he started to feel better. He barely moved, letting the first hour of the day pass by as he simply waited. The smaller wounds had started to close, the scraps and friction burns he got from writhing around on the ground.

The slashes from the raccoon were still there, but they didn't seem to be killing him. Why?

The screens.

One of the screens had said something about healing. Moving for the first time in a while, he swept his head around looking for them. As the dried blood and dirt that had caked onto him fell away, he began to lose hope. The screens were nowhere to be found. As if to prove him wrong, a new screen appeared, just materializing about a foot from his face.

SYSTEM STATUS NAME: Conall Jeffries RACE: Human TITLES:

LEVEL: 6 PROGRESS:

5/70 XP SKILLS: Tough Skin Lv.0, Quick Healing Lv.0 SKILL POINTS:

5

There.

Quick Healing Lv.0, that had to be it. A 'Skill' was the thing keeping him alive. And just barely alive at that. But he could make it better.

One of the other screens had explained it. He had five 'Skill Points', and with them he could make the healing better. It might even be enough to let him live through this. If just Lv.0 was enough to stop the blood loss from killing him, getting more levels would likely start him on the path to recovery. Staying alive was nice, but the mountain of pain still radiating from the wounds was not.

But should he spend everything?

As amazing as the healing would likely be, it was still only turning days of healing into hours. If he ran into anything slightly stronger than the 'Demented' raccoon, he was as good as dead. Putting Skill Points into Quick Healing was obviously necessary, yet he couldn't deny the appeal of Tough Skin. Anything that made him harder to kill in the short term would increase his chance of survival tenfold.

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He raised his head from where it was slumped once again. He coughed up blood, the red liquid quick to join the puddle he was lying in. And then, in a raspy voice that wavered with weakness, Conall made his choice.

"Three points to Quick Healing, and two towards Tough Skin."

Quick Healing Lv.0 upgraded to Quick Healing Lv.3!

Tough Skin Lv.0 upgraded to Tough Skin Lv.2!

The effect was immediate. The energy that had trickled through him before flooded in, and everything became clearer. The edges of his vision lost the fog that had been covering them, and he could actually feel his legs. With all the strength he had left, Conall dragged himself into the tent with his good arm, finally leaving the blood puddle behind.

Actually, come to think of it, where was the raccoon corpse? He had killed it, he was sure of that. And even in his state of delirium, he would have noticed if something else stole the body. So what happened to it? Peeking out of the tent flap, all he could see of where it previously had lay was a red stain of the dirt. Not another blood puddle, but a stain, the exact color of the mist that had been drifting off it. Had it just dissolved?

It didn't matter. All that mattered was surviving. So, with the bare minimum of safety acquired inside the tent, he studied the effects of his Skills.

Tough Skin was rather simple. His skin was tough now. He tested it out with the edge of one of his knives, finding skin to have the resistance of a leather glove. Interestingly, there was no visual change. His skin didn't get thicker or change colors, it just got harder to pierce. Another intriguing aspect was that he lost no flexibility. He would have thought that the extra resistance would have made it harder to move around, but he remained unimpeded.

Besides the energy boost, Quick Healing was also having its desired effect. It was very, very minor, but he could see the beginnings of scabs forming over his injuries. If he survived this, he was going to have some brutal scars. The injury to his torso was definitely the most severe and painful, but the others were nothing to scoff at either. Even with the effects of Quick Healing, it would probably be a few days before he was back to working condition.

Right as he was about to succumb to the desire to rest, a new feeling entered his mind. Hunger. Biting, greedy, ravenous hunger. It only got worse as the seconds passed. Conall threw himself across the tent, leaving a smear of blood in his path, desperately reaching for his food. He shoved granola bar after granola bar into his mouth, and the hunger finally started to go away. As it did, a small pulse came from Quick Healing. Its pace increased ever so slightly, but the hunger came back even stronger than before.

Quick Healing was doing this. And he thought he knew why. It wasn't magically making him better, or regenerating his body from nothing. It was just, as the name implied, making his natural healing quick. And by extension, increasing the amount of energy his body needed to be healed. He was trying to heal wounds that would take months to heal in days, of course he was hungry. That brought up a new danger. What if he ran out of food before he was fully healed? What if he didn't have enough to make it back to town?

And after only a few minutes of salvation, he was right back to his death being inevitable. Now desperately wishing he had saved a Skill Point, Conall stepped outside the tent once more. The food he had with him, at the rate he had just gone through it, would last less than a day. He needed to either find a new source of food incredibly fast or get a new Skill. The System had said something about 'taking user wishes into account', so if he got another Level then he could hopefully unlock some kind of nourishment skill.

His arm, shoulder, and side were still nowhere near healed, but Quick Healing would stop the blood loss or strain from killing him. He could only hope that Tough Skin was enough to protect him from enough monsters to either level up or find food. Preferably the latter.

Taking in one last raspy breath, Conall grabbed his remaining food, some rope for snares, and a knife, before setting off into the forest.

Wish me luck.