During the next few days, Jack built a new addition to his treehouse—a balcony with an overhanging roof. He also crafted a small table and a couple of chairs and put them on the balcony. He spent the next several days felling trees and collecting wood and then turned one of the empty rooms into a kitchen. His treehouse was becoming more and more comfortable and pleasant to live in. With every new addition to the Great Tree Cottage, he was falling further in love with his home.
In the evenings, he liked to cook food in the kitchen and then enjoy the meal on the balcony. Sometimes, after eating, he just sat on the balcony until nightfall, resting after a hard day, listening to the sounds of the wildlife down below and watching darkness gradually fall over the forest. He now only needed to create something like a bathroom with a shower cabin. And he also still had to do something with the elevator to prevent potential intruders from being able to use it when he wasn’t home.
Jack continued to explore the forest, fight monsters, and do bounties. During the next several days, he learned a couple more things about magic. He discovered that his Essence points could be used as mana. Casting a few spells one after another quickly made him tired. He needed to rest and recover his energy before using magic again, otherwise he could even black out from the excessive use of magic. And then he found out something interesting—he could use his Essence points as mana to cast spells, and when he did so, he didn’t get tired at all. But of course, his Essence points were also used for leveling up, so using them as mana meant he would need to kill more monsters before he could go another level up. So he avoided using his Essence points as mana at all costs. He was going to do it only as a last resort when his life was in serious danger or something like that.
After Jack put a few points into the Magic attribute, he was able to cast quite a few various spells without feeling too tired. When he used the Fireball spell to attack enemies, his Fire Magic talent leveled up, making the fireballs he cast more powerful and easier to control. During intense battles, Jack also used his Healing spell to patch himself up on the go. As his Healing talent leveled up, his healing magic was becoming more effective, taking less time to heal the wounds he received in battles.
One day, when Jack opened the list of available missions, he spotted a challenge. It surprised him a little bit. After all, it was the very first time he saw a challenge on the mission list. So far, he’d only done bounties and never challenges or quests. He got so excited he immediately accepted the challenge before somebody else could beat him to it. After that, he switched to the menu of his active missions to read the description of the challenge.
He found out that challenges differed from bounties a great deal. While the objective of a bounty was to hunt down and kill a strong monster or a certain amount of weaker creatures, that of a challenge was something different altogether. This particular challenge required Jack to fight monsters for several minutes while being severely wounded. So he needed to let some creature inflict some serious damage on him and while profusely bleeding, fight monsters for a few minutes.
It was risky as hell. It could easily lead to his death. At first, Jack even wanted to turn down the challenge, but then he saw what he would get if he completed the challenge. The reward was a perk called Tough-skinned, which would make his body more robust and resistant to damage. So in the end, he decided to try to do the challenge. He wasn’t going to put his life at risk, though. If it wasn’t working out all that well, he would drink a strong health potion to heal himself and then make another attempt to complete the challenge. So he created quite a few strong health potions in his alchemy laboratory and then set off on his mission.
It took Jack a few tries before he finally managed to complete the challenge. As a reward, he received the Tough-skinned perk. He had two available slots, so he put the perk into the first one. As he found out after a few battles with monsters, the Tough-skinned perk was totally worth all the trouble he’d gone through to get it.
Tough-skinned: Your body can sustain more damage of any kind and remain functioning.
The perk made his body so much tougher that the weaker types of monsters like cave rats couldn’t even harm him now, neither their sharp teeth nor their dagger-like claws being able to break his skin anymore. It was amazing. Many days ago, back in the initial cave, his encounter with the very first cave rat had almost cost him his life, but now those furry creatures no longer posed any kind of threat to him at all. Jack could only imagine how strong and powerful he would become when he leveled up a few more times and acquired a bunch of other perks, skills, and spells.
When he woke up in his treehouse another morning, he saw that there was a quest available in the mission menu. It was the very first time he’d stumbled across a quest. He quickly studied it before accepting.
Type Quest Objective Find out what is going on in the ancient catacombs. Difficulty Epic Recommended level 25-30 Reward An item of Epic rarity of your choice
It didn’t even tell him what he needed to do to complete the quest. The description was pretty vague, only telling him that he needed to solve some kind of mystery. Still, he was pretty much sure that solving it would involve fighting a lot of dangerous creatures.
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He noticed that the quest difficulty was epic. There were three difficulties for a bounty: easy, medium, and hard. As for quests, it seemed that they had a different system of difficulty ranking. Jack wasn’t sure if Epic was the easiest quest difficulty or if there were two more before it, common and uncommon. If it was the latter, it meant that the quest was going to be pretty hard. Still, Jack was going to try to complete it nevertheless. After all, the reward was quite promising.
Jack created a few different potions in his alchemy lab and put several of them into the pouches on his belt. He stowed the rest of the created potions away in his backpack and then checked out all his current stats.
Name Jack Nolan Level 28 Current Essence 3,550 Essence to Next Level 3,625 Available Skill Points 0 Gold 14,500 Survived 47 days
Strength 4 Constitution 4 Agility 5 Perception 3 Intelligence 4 Magic 3
Talents
Battle:
* One-handed: 27 [Agility]
* Dodging: 15 [Agility]
* Light Armor: 13 [Agility]
* Blocking: 10 [Agility]
Magic:
* Fire Magic: 24 [Magic]
* Healing Magic: 15 [Magic]
* Alchemy: 11 [Intelligence]
Survival:
* Crafting: 34 [Intelligence]
* Building: 13 [Intelligence]
* Hunting: 23 [Perception]
* Cooking: 35 [Perception]
* Felling: 31 [Strength]
* Skinning: 37 [Agility]
* Butchering: 43 [Agility]
Abilities
Active Slot: None
Passive Slot: None
Slot 3: Unlocks at Level 30
Spells, Runes, and Enchantments
Spells:
* Fireball (Level 5)
* Healing (Level 3)
Runes: None
Enchantments: None
Perks
Slot 1: Tough-skinned
Slot 2: None
Slot 3: Unlocks at Level 30
Resistances Physical Resistance: 5% Factions
Beasts: 17% (Common)
Monsters: 5% (Common)
Jack then summoned the map. The pin showing the location of the ancient catacombs he needed to explore was far away from his current position, way out in the Darkwoods. Moreover, the ancient catacombs were somewhere in the clouded-over area, which meant that he’d never been in that area before. It was a bit disappointing. It would take him half a day only to get there, and he had no idea what kind of dangers he would encounter there. Still, it didn’t mean he was going to reject the quest.
Armed with his sword and having plenty of various potions on him, Jack took the elevator down and set off for the Darkwoods.