For the next several days, Jack continued to explore the forest and do bounties. At first, he was mostly focused on earning money. He knew that the Store would disappear in just a few days and he wouldn’t be able to buy stuff from it anymore, so he had to get prepared. He was planning to earn as much money as he could and on the last day, to buy enough self-heats to last him for a while. At least, such was his plan in the beginning before he finally found a way to get and cook food by himself.
Almost in every cave he ventured into, Jack found a treasure chest containing some useful items. He almost always found health potions, which was always good. These magical drinks seemed to be able to heal any wound no matter how severe it was. Besides potions, chests usually contained some other useful stuff like talent books or blueprints. The former gave him new talents, and the latter taught him how to craft various things. Jack learned how to build a small building similar to the one he’d bought on the third day of his survival as well as some pieces of wooden furniture like chests, tables, stools, and whatnot.
Every now and then, he also found identification scrolls. They were really a great help to him. Using them, he learned a lot about the alien forest, its fauna and flora. When he used them on plants, he learned what resources he could gather from them, and when he used them on monsters, he learned their weaknesses and strengths, which helped him a lot in battling them. The higher the level of an identification scroll was, the more uses it gave him and the more information about the target it revealed.
At some point, Jack also learned that the corpses of killed creatures were lootable. Aside from meat, he could also extract some valuable resources from them like furs, bones, fats, and whatnot. They could be used as crafting materials, but there was a catch—to extract some material from an animal corpse, he had to pay in gold, and the price usually was quite steep.
One time, out of curiosity, Jack tried it out on a freshly killed cave rat. He sat on his haunches beside the carcass and with a thought, brought up the list of all the resources and crafting materials that he could extract from the rat’s dead body. He chose the meat and confirmed when the system asked him if he wanted to pay a certain amount of gold. The price was steep, but he still agreed just to see what would happen. As soon as he gave his confirmation to the system’s question, a piece of rat meat appeared on the floor next to the animal’s carcass. The croc-rat’s fur now hung loosely on the bare bones, all the meat gone from them now. Jack didn’t take the meat, though. He didn’t know how to cook it yet, and he wasn’t keen on consuming rat meat. For now, he could just buy some self-heating meals when he got hungry.
Jack also learned that besides meat and crafting materials, from killed creatures could be extracted special items called components. For instance, from cave rats could be extracted their huge fangs. He learned that they could be used to craft some things like talismans, and they also could be used in some magical rituals like alchemy or enchanting. But for now, they were of no use to him.
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Later on, Jack acquired two new talents from talent books he found in a cave, Skinning and Butchering. So after killing cave rats, he set about skinning and butchering the carcasses with a dagger of common rarity he’d found in another cave. It wasn’t a very pleasant thing to do, but he needed his newly learned skills to go up. He couldn’t afford to pay the system a steep amount of gold every time he needed to extract meat or crafting materials from a carcass. He would be saving a lot of gold if he learned how to get what he needed by himself. So while he didn’t really want to engage in such bloody activities, he knew that he had to do it because it would pay off for him in the long run. So he set about working on the carcass of almost every creature he killed. As his Skinning and Butchering talents slowly but steadily went up, he felt he was getting really good at it.
At some point, Jack learned about something called Factions. He encountered more and more new types of enemies, and when he brought up his character sheet to check something, he noticed that there was now a new section called Factions. He checked it out.
Factions
* Beasts: 5% (Common)
* Monsters: 1% (Common)
Jack had already learned that creatures like cave rats were categorized as part of the beast race and overgrown insect-like critters like fatflies and bloodsuckers were classified under the insectoid race. However, they all shared a common affiliation, being members of the faction known as Beasts. He’d killed quite a lot of both insectoids and beasts by now. As to the faction called Monsters, he’d encounter only one type of creature that belonged to this faction—slimes. So far, he hadn’t fought too many slimes, and that’s why his infamy with Beasts was 5% while that of Monsters was only 1%.
As he’d learned, killing members of hostile factions earned infamy with these factions. He wasn’t sure what it gave him, though, and he didn’t know what would happen when his infamous reputation with hostile factions reached higher numbers. But he could make an educated guess. All the creatures he’d encountered so far were of common rarity, so maybe when his infamy with factions got higher, he would be encountering stronger types of enemies and getting more XP and better rewards for killing them. Perhaps, at some point in the future, he would get so strong and infamous that all the monsters he would have to fight would be extremely powerful and no less than of legendary rarity.
So far, all the factions he’d met were hostile. Were there any friendly ones? He didn’t know it yet but was sure that he would find out in due time.
Even though Jack had been surviving in this game-like world for a few days already, he was still learning and making new discoveries. And he had a feeling that there was still a lot more that he didn’t know about this game-like world yet.