Standing near where the big turtle was, but not near enough for it to come out of its hole, I started to slowly replace my fallen plates of chitin by opening my chest cavity and letting the plates inside fall down to the ground and then placing them on my harness, one by one.

Why was I doing this? Well, for 2 reasons really, the first being to just have extra protection, and even though I knew these plates would fall down really quickly in an actual fight... something is better than nothing.

And second reason being that I just wanted to give some time to the goblins to get away from the deer corpse as I wasn’t interested in giving the little dudes a heart attack or 2.

But thinking about them... I wonder what they are.

I mean, yes, they are goblins but, what are they really?

Are they some form of human species or whatever so, maybe home-vitris?

Or are they just their own species?

Then, no matter if they are humans or not, are they capable of making towns and cities? If so, is there a goblin town or village in this forest, or near it?

And if there is a goblin settlement of some kind, will the goblin shaman or the warlord order my death after it learns of me? If something like that exists, of course.

So many questions and so little answers... and while I am not sure of the goblins’ intelligence, I am sure they are at least in the stone age... assuming those 2 were not just some lower castes of goblins that had to use weaker tools and were just normal goblins.

Though I wonder if castes in the traditional sense would even exists in a world with magic and the system... I mean, who cares if you are noble born or whatever, or if your ancestors from a thousand years ago were bakers or something, if you have good skills, and a good rank, you’d be a higher caste than the others, no?

But that also opens the possibility of there being just super charged nobles as nobles would save all the good skills and such for themselves and just not teach the commoners how to get them...

Eh, who cares, I don’t plan on being near creatures who are terrified of me, whether they be intelligent or not, because the chances are that someday they will just up and kill me.

And I don’t think being able to communicate with them or not would affect their opinion of me as... let’s just say a talking demon deer from the forest doesn’t sound like something sane people would tolerate the existence of, at least I wouldn’t.

Though I don’t know if goblins can be exactly classified as sane... though all my prejudice about them comes from the literature of my previous world, which probably, hopefully, doesn’t hold true and I won’t have to go around the world being known as the goblin slaying deer demon or something stupid like that... though that does sound interesting now, doesn’t it?

But a deer demon would be just a wendigo or something so that part doesn’t really make sense, it’d be the wendigo goblin slayer, or the goblin slaying wendigo.

“Anyway, I should probably get up and go get the brain and the legs from that deer corpse seeing that I am done with replacing the fallen off plates...” I said to myself and willed up my system window to look at how much mana I had.

Mana Points: 160/362

... Ugh, I hope that deer has a lot of wisdom, or I am going to be in a bad spot... what am I talking about, my body and that deer has probably the same amount of wisdom, so while it will give me a lot more regeneration, I’ll still have a bad time.

Getting up, I let my lesser souls get control of the body, and started going towards where the deer corpse was, and where it hopefully still is.

Though I have to say... these lesser souls are really useful, I can just focus on improving my skills, and they’ll just do everything else for me!

Well... not everything perse, but most things. I still wish they could improve my skills, but all intellectual work needs to be done by the main soul...

Hmm... I wish there was a way to just graft the souls of other creatures to my lesser souls, so they could do intellectual work and manual work, but even if I could do that... I doubt it’d be a good idea to mess with my soul anymore, especially the grafting another soul to mine part would be... probably quite messy and possibly soul destroying.

Eh, I’ll eventually discover a way to be lazy, after all, that’s what progress is all about, no?

People didn’t want to hunt anymore, so they started agriculture. People didn’t want to do everything themselves, and they invent industrialization.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I mean... the industrialization part is kind of a stretch but, the idea holds.

So, eventually, I’ll either discover a way to make a machine do my job for me, or just find a way to use souls of other things to my benefit... though would that be ethical?

I mean, I have no qualms about killing an animal, but I am not sure what a soul exactly is, other than it being necessary for life.

So, while I have no qualms about killing things... maybe I should be careful of experimenting with souls?

Hmm...

While I continued to think, my body moved to where the deer corpse was by itself, and while I wasn’t paying attention, arrived there and the moment I had the chance to look around I thought if goblins were really bound to be imbeciles throughout their existence, be it be fictional or not.

Because, though I cannot even begin to fathom why, the 2 goblins I saw a few hours ago, had taken the corpse of the clearly sickly deer with them, and I doubt they knew about my plans to cannibalize the deer and make my body better, so only one option remained... those fucking wastes of air took the deer corpse with them, for some ungodly reason.

“ARGH, WHY, WHY THE FUCK!!!” I started screaming to myself... not really, but you bet if I had the capability to scream, I’d do that because... why the fuck man, why the absolute fuck?!

Why would you—why would anything capable of thought take the corpse of a diseased animal to eat?!

I—I just cannot fathom the stupidity necessary for something ‘intelligent’ to take a diseased carcass with them...

Looking around the place, I could see a lot of splotches and a trail of blood, hopefully the goblins were just taking ‘their hunt’ away from me and weren’t actually stupid enough to carry something full of blood with them.

I could probably follow them but... I honestly just couldn’t care less, I mean, yeah, I wanted that deer, more specifically, I wanted its brain, legs, and eyes, but not like there aren’t any other deer around now, is there?

I mean... maybe I won’t find a hunt as great as this one, and with great I mean sickly and old because sickly and old animals tend to get hunted or die really quickly, so I might have to bite bullet and wait until I can justify killing a random animal in its prime.

But hopefully, another sickly and old deer will appear... now!

... I said, another sickly and old deer will appear!

...C’mon! It happened last time, why can’t it happen now too!

Then I stayed still for a few moments, waiting for the deer I was destined to have to appear and... it didn’t, and I could also hear the crickets in the background.

Could I actually hear crickets, or was I making a bad joke? Who knows, not you though, that’s for sure!

Accepting my defeat, I decided to just start walking towards the mountains, did I have enough mana that I was feeling safe to move again?

Nope.

Then why did I start moving you ask? Because there was quite a lot of blood here, and something was bound to appear soon, and I wasn’t willing to fight over just a few splotches of blood, so getting away, and maybe finding a safe place to rest at just made more sense than returning to my safe place near the turtle.

Though could you really call that a safe place if there is a turtle with gigantism or something, right next to it? No, probably not.

So, I just gave the control of my body to my lesser souls, and started back seating the journey towards the mountain, and while my lesser souls occasionally alerted me to the presence of other creatures, they were just normal animals, not even a hungry pack of wolves that wanted to bite into me or something.

...Well, there might’ve been a hungry pack of wolves watching me at some point, but animals just so happen to be much more intelligent than goblins, and don’t attack things that are clearly plague carriers... and the smell of rotting flesh also helps keep them away too.

Continuing my journey, I occasionally stopped and rested, trying to recover my mana whenever I found a relatively safe spot.

And eventually night came but... nothing really happened, there wasn’t any hybrids, or gigantic bugs bothering me, which was... actually quite nice.

Who would’ve known that not being attacked by crazy creatures with either gigantism or racial skills was a pleasant experience?

And as the night continued to progress, and dawn neared, I realized something, I could only hear the wind.

Which was, not something weird in on itself but, at this time of the day, when the sun was starting to rise, a lot of animals, especially birds, made a lot of noise, and even at night, you couldn’t call the forest quite quiet.

But I couldn’t hear none of that.

No birds, no bugs, not even the sounds of bigger animals, none of that.

“Should I just... go back?” I asked myself and... that was a more than understandable reaction to what was happening in my opinion as I didn’t think this absolute silence over the forest was natural.

But a part of me also itched to know what was causing this as this was probably another magical phenomenon, and most magical things I’d met were... underwhelming.

Goblins? Imbeciles.

Hybrids? Magical fish cats.

The gigantic tree? A tree with a weird aura.

The bear? I am not sure if it was magical or not...

The bees? Eh, mild.

The river bugs? They are really big but... that’s where it ends.

The turtle? Its just a big turtle.

So yeah... a lot of them were just kinda... meh.

And I was going to be in this forest for a long, long time, so it was better for me to know where the areas of danger were, right?

So, while this could just lead to another turtle situation with me escaping with the skin of my teeth... I am honestly willing to take my chances.

And I was near the foot of the mountains by now, and while I didn’t know if I wanted to climb up the mountains, mostly because I just couldn’t be bothered with traversing the entire mountain, I wanted to at least explore a bit of the foot of the mountain, so... where is a better place to start then here and now?

So, I started striding forwards, and paid attention to any and all noise... which there wasn’t a lot of.

And as the night sky became gold and then blue, I left the tree line and saw something unexpected.

On the open was a large gate made of rock, standing there with all of its glory, and the even though I wasn’t a geologist or something, I was sure that this gate was artificial in origin... or at least it seemed like it.

The gate was large, and it was... give or take 3 meters long, and 2 meters or so wide, and while it seemed artificial from afar, it also seemed to have... naturally grown out of the rock weirdly enough.

Touching the frame of the gate with my vines, I felt the roughness of the rock, but I couldn’t feel anything separating the bricks from one another, or the bricks themselves so... was this gate not artificial and somehow natural after all?

Hmm... now call me crazy but I am starting to connect a few dots...

A weird gate that is seemingly artificial in origin, in the middle of the forest? Check.

Missing wildlife? Check.

Then I extended a vine into the gate, going beyond the gate itself and felt the air inside.

A weirdly higher ambient mana than rest of the forest? Check.

Yup, found my dungeon.