The next day when I awoke, I realized several things. The first was that dead dinosaur smells really bad. The second was that the smell was likely to draw scavengers. I had these realizations at almost the exact same time. The smell pulled me out of my meditation and the sight that met my eyes when I opened them was two huge heads poking out of the greenery surrounding my tree. They seemed to be a furred creature of some variety. I had never seen a skunk before but I imagined this was what one would look like if it was over a meter tall at the shoulder. The two skunks were staring at the three dinosaur corpses and drooling. They seemed to badly want to eat a meal but were hesitating for some reason.

As soon as I moved my legs which had become numb from staying still for so long, they turned their gazes towards me. There was a glint of joy in their eyes as they saw me moving under the tree. They ran forward in the blink of an eye but as the giant skunks got close to the bodies of the dinosaurs they froze and fell to the ground screaming.

I was at a loss as to what to do. I had just gotten the previous three intruders to be quiet and now there were two more raising a racket. After thinking for a while, I realized that there was really no other option than to keep pushing my dirt around. So I again got to work moving dirt. After the second giant skunk stopped breathing, the unintelligible voice sounded out once more. My body once again felt lighter and moving was much easier than before.

I checked my status window but nothing seemed to have changed. Come on goddesses if you are going to give me this horrible blessing at least change your descriptions of my stats as they go up. This was just lazy. Obviously my strength and agility had gone up but I was not sure about my other stats. Also it was basically impossible to tell how much they had gone up by.

I spent some time lamenting the fact that life was unfair and then decided to see if I was strong enough now to move the corpses. If I could just take them away from the tree I would let the scavengers come to get rid of the smell and use the tree's pain field to stay safe. Unfortunately, I was still nowhere near strong enough still. I could just about pick up the tail of one of these creatures.

I decided to sit down on the other side of the tree from the corpses and try to ignore their existence. I told stories to the bugs and generally did all I could to distract myself. Of course, that only worked for a while. About an hour after I started telling stories, another scavenger showed up. This time it was much bigger than the previous creatures. It looked a bit like a T-Rex.

This was the beginning of a seemingly endless stream of creatures making their way toward the smell. I was kept very busy just trying to deal with them one after the other. I heard the voice speak quite a few times as the day wore on.

By looking at the status window and counting the corpses, I was able to make a few deductions about how my achievements were working. Leech improved my stats when I killed one, five, twenty-five, and a hundred monsters. There were other achievements that related to a particular type of creature which appeared after I killed ten of one kind of monster. For example, after ten of the giant skunks died, I received an achievement called Badger Hunter. Okay so I was really not an outdoors person. They were black and white so it was close right? You probably can't tell the difference either.

The variety of creatures was not limited to just dinosaurs and badgers. There were vultures that came down from the skies and even a mole type creature that burrowed up from the ground. The sheer variety of wild life was bewildering really. The only things they seemed to have in common was that they were much bigger than any animal I remembered from Earth and they all moved at a speed I had no chance of following let alone keeping up with. After a while, I stopped paying attention to them all mostly because I was too tired to care anymore.

When I managed to kill a hundred of these things, there was a mountain of corpses in the area around the tree. They barely fit in the space. Luckily at this point I tried to move one of the corpses and noticed that I was able to pull it with not a lot of difficulty. Of course, with one problem solved, another cropped up. As I tried to pull the corpses, whatever part I was pulling on would almost immediately fall apart and leave me holding nothing at all. It was seriously creepy.

After a while I had to sit down and reconsider my plan of disposing of the bodies. I mean I couldn't really even move them as they fell apart too fast. The odd thing was that they seemed to be perfectly intact, minus the rotting, before I tried to move them. It was only when I remembered something from my status sheet that things began to make sense. I apparently was cursed in various ways. How I got cursed is still a bit of a mystery but it wasn't hard to guess that those terrible goddesses were at fault. I mean not only did they leave me here alone as a baby in the middle of a forest of death but they feel the need to give me a useless blessing and curse me a few times for good measure. How was this in any way okay?

At any rate, one of the curses was a curse of poverty. Given that I had such a curse and I seemed to be unable to carry these corpses for any period of time, it seemed like I was unable to carry anything with me. I tried holding some dirt in my hand but just like with the corpses it found various ways to fall back to the ground. I tried rolling around in the dirt to see if I could carry some that way. I was clean again within a few seconds.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Well at least I didn't have to worry about bathing. There was no water anyway so bathing was a bit of a dream anyway. I did try to take dirt baths regularly as I thought it was something elephants and the like did to keep clean so I thought it might work for me as well. I am not sure it worked very well but it did keep down the smell so I decided that was good enough.

While thinking about all of this I realized I was in no better position to get rid of the mountain of bodies that surrounded me. The only plus side was that they seemed to rot very quickly and after about a week there was nothing but bones left. It was a very long few days while I waited for that to happen though. Thankfully no one was around to see that horrible mountain except for my bug friends. Well, they were flitting about like always so I did not think they minded.

At one point, I took a look down at my naked self and realized that this was going to be a real problem if I met people. Even if I was given clothes, it wasn't like I could wear them. Well my hair was fairly long as I did not have scissors or anything else to cut it with. I supposed I could just use it as a full body veil. I might look like Cousin It but at least my bits will be hidden.

Even I was disgusted by the left side of my body. Those scars from bed sores and the like were terrifyingly ugly. It might look crazy to cover myself with my own hair this way but it was way better than letting anyone else see that kind of horror. Looks like I was going to be single in this world as well. With this revelation I spent some time working on how I wanted my hair to fall. It was a bit difficult without a mirror but I am going to claim that I managed it fairly well. There was no one to tell me otherwise anyway.

After I had recovered from the previous ordeal, I once again decided to go exploring. As I approached the border of bare earth, a monster leaped out to eat me. That time it was a giant cat which looked something like a lion but much bigger. The next time it was a huge brilliantly coloured snake. After about the fifth time, I realized something strange was going on. It was unlikely that animals were just sitting at the edge of the area around the tree just waiting for me to come close. But it was also the case that every time I came close there was a predator waiting to eat me.

I should add here that being attacked over and over again by these predators was not good for my nerves. I started to break out into cold sweats just at the idea of going near the edge of my area. These things were no joke. They would have killed me before I even knew what happened if it were not for this strange pain barrier around the tree.

I spent a long time trying to understand how the monsters knew I was coming and why they were attracted to the area to eat me. It was not at all that I was procrastinating due to fear. I was just being thorough and detailed. Missing something would mean my life. That was absolutely it. I was definitely being rational and reasonable.

Around the time I would have turned two, I decided to begin training. Staying under this tree for the rest of my life was not going to happen. Instead, I needed to get out and find people. If that was the case, I needed to first get to the greenery around my tree without being attacked.

I came to the rather obvious conclusion that the creatures in this area must have very keen senses and they were able to easily notice my movements when I tried to approach the area outside of the tree's influence. So I needed to be quieter. I needed to be like a shadow that was unseen and unheard by anyone. Well that was the plan anyway.

The first attempt was a horrible failure. So was the second. I refused to give up and did my best to train to perfection before once more attempting to approach the edge of the trees influence. This continued for year after year.

I used my status window to check my improvement. There were no numbers and the description of everything remained unchanging but once I figured out how to do something I would be given a new skill. After a month of effort, I learned:

Stealth: A hibernating bear might not notice you if you are lucky.

I will not dignify the goddesses description with a response. However, periodically afterward I would hear that strange voice while practicing sneaking. This was the only real sign I had of progress but it was enough to keep me going.

Thanks to the endless supply of things trying to eat me while I was training how to sneak, my achievements continued to improve. This in turn meant my stats rose on nearly a daily basis. I would like to say that this was the start of my overpowered and free existence. I would like to claim that I had gotten used to the oddity of me lifting massive weights with my tiny body while I ran to far off places at impossible speeds like some anime character. However, that would be a lie. Obviously, lifting things wouldn't work with the curse of poverty and it wasn't like I could exactly run far without leaving the safety of the tree. It was seriously disheartening when I thought about it. This wasn't at all what was promised when reincarnating to another world.

I eventually resorted to other ways of checking my improvement, like how high I could jump, how fast I could run in circles around the tree, and so on. Coming up with ways to accurately measure this without equipment was difficult but ultimately doable. For example, I created a simple sundial by putting two marks in the dirt around a rock. Then I would count how many laps I could run while the shadow moved from one mark to the other. To test how high I could jump, I checked my height each time against the branches of the tree.

The biggest complication to the accurate measurement of my achievements was that thanks to my constant testing I ended up getting the skills:

Athletics: Who would have guessed that a coward like you would know how to run?

Acrobatics: Might be able to touch your toes one day. Keep trying.

It was difficult to tell whether increases in my skills or my stats were what was leading to my improvements. Well I was running faster, jumping higher, and all sorts of things so that had to be good. I still couldn't even see when the monsters attacking me daily moved but I was confident that someday that would change.