Waking alone is what I expected to happen, but Aster apparently returned after I fell asleep last night and is now curled against my chest. While I do normally sleep on my side, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that he moved my arm so that I was holding him. The pup probably really misses his king and likes that I'm caring for him in a similar manner.
Sort of. I'm just cleaning him up after he gets sticky. As I stroke his fur and snout, I feel something sticky on his maw again. There's a chance that he got into my jams, syrups, and/or honeys. I'll probably need to wash my sheets and blankets now that he's gotten them sticky with whatever he ate.
The pup really needs to learn how to eat more cleanly, but I doubt that's ever going to happen considering the King of the Celestials put notes into his information to clean him up. If a being such as he couldn't get Aster to change, it's doubtful the pup ever will.
A gesture of my hand and a small use of [Telekinesis] pulls my phone to me as I pull back the blanket a little so Aster's visible. I snap a quick picture and upload it to my profile, but also send it to Ryan.
[Evan]: Morning! I think Aster got into my food during the night. His snout's still got evidence on it.
I slip out of bed without waking the pup and head to my kitchen to prepare breakfast. Exiting my room confirms that he got into my jams, syrups, and honeys.
All of them. Their jars are scattered across the floors of my living room, dining room, and kitchen, licked completely clean.
After moving the empty containers to the counter for washing or recycling, I take a picture of them to send to Ryan with a message letting him know I found further proof, then prepare breakfast. Aster comes out of my bedroom, stumbling around slightly in his tiredness.
"You should ask before getting into people's food," I tell him, and he gives me a small yip. "Did you have fun playing with the others?"
"Woof!" His tail starts wagging.
"Alright," I say. "I don't have sweets for you to eat, but I do have some minotaur meat. Want that?"
"Woof!"
I pull out the small cooler and look at the packaged meat within. The minotaur probably had two or three hundred pounds of viable meat and it looks like Ryan gave me around five pounds of his portion of it. After unwrapping a steak from the minotaur's back, I set it on a plate and set that on the ground.
"Hey, eat slowly," I say as Aster dives to the plate and begins tearing off a chunk of meat to eat, using his forepaws to hold the rest of the meat in place.
The rest of the meat is placed into my fridge with the cooler returned to my bracelet to later return to Ryan. I finish fixing myself breakfast and eat it, and as I'm putting our dishes in the dishwasher, my phone beeps.
[Ryan]: Morning
[Ryan]: He should get better at hiding the evidence
That's followed by a shot of him still in bed and on his back, his blanket pulled down to his stomach and left arm tucked under his pillows. It's a pretty nice shot and I want to stare at it a little more, but type up a response instead.
[Evan]: He liked the varyihn meat you gave me; had some for breakfast. Him, not me.
[Ryan]: Neat! Make sure to save some for yourself
[Evan]: Will do. By the way, I won't be responsive until lunch. Have some stuff to take care of in the morning.
[Ryan]: Good luck
With that taken care of, I head downstairs to prepare for my Daily Dungeon. When I check to take it on, however, I spot something surprising.
Daily Quests Daily Fitness Harvest Alchemy Rings Scrolls
There's no Daily Dungeon – but I have the maximum possible amount of Daily Quests. That means it wasn't sacrificed as a trade-off for the potential repeatable Special Quest I was given yesterday. From what I heard when I looked it up yesterday morning, everyone still had the minimum to maximum number of Daily and Weekly Quests when their Daily and Weekly Dungeons didn't show up.
If mine's gone as well now, that means even craftsmen under Level 5 have lost theirs.
My main reason for doing those was to obtain the reagents contained within, but I suppose that won't be possible now. I might need to do some trips out of the city to acquire some, though the Mythic Forest will help provide me materials as well once I've restored more of it.
Fortunately, I have everything I need for this week's crafting. That gives me time to restore more of the Mythic Forest I have access to and potentially find a location which grows reagents for mana potions and build that up some.
Aster didn't come down with me and I'm sure things will be fine if I leave the pup be, so I access my gate and travel straight to the Whispering Life Spring to check on its progress.
The plant growth here has spread a little bit but not massively. It's expanded maybe three more feet out rather than spreading all the way to the edges. Earth magic crystals will definitely be needed to make things grow faster. More water would be beneficial as well as the pond can only do so much.
My next stop is the Happy Butterfly hill, which is about the same as I left it, with maybe two or three more feet of growth out and a starry-furred otter swimming around in the river flowing past it. The soil for Pup Leisure Pond has improved in quality but isn't quite ready for plants yet.
None of the mythical beasts I've encountered seem to be anywhere right now. That's fine, though, since they have their own things to do as well.
All of my checks are done, so I access the Special Quest and immediately find myself standing in front of a fog wall in a ravine with a rocky bed and walls which range from ten to twenty feet in height. It's around sixty or so feet in width and has a sort of arched fog roof to it that stretches from side to side. The bed of the ravine has some slight slopes and dips, making it deeper toward the center than at the edges, and I can spot a few small holes in it as well.
Roaming about in the ravine – or rather, the bed of the river – are goblins and trolls.
Since I have a few more minutes after examining my surroundings before the semi-transparent Quest-start barrier around me fades, I look at the notification floating in my vision.
Slay monsters within the special zone. Goblins: 0/100 Trolls: 0/10 Boars: 0/5 Time Limit: None Reward: 5,000 EXP Note: The reward will be received each time a threshold is met.
That confirms my suspicion from last night – that it's a repeatable Quest.
Whatever the boars are, they're probably a fair bit tough and fast considering they're monsters rather than normal ones. I should avoid taking them on until I gain another Level at the minimum. It would be better to gain two or three before then based on my knowledge of weaker boar monsters, but I might not be able to avoid them.
That said, they're probably further upriver as I don't see any right now. With the light fog and the curvature of the riverbed, I can see about two hundred or so feet away.
I step through the barrier and cast [Magic Missile] straight into a nearby goblin, ending its life immediately. The next goblin requires two [Magic Missile]s to slay, but the one after that only requires one.
Trolls will take too much effort for me to take on right now so I focus on the goblins. It's a pretty good thing the trolls have terrible eyesight as that makes it easy to avoid drawing their attention.
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Running through the dry river might not be a bad idea, except the rocks in places make it a little bit unstable and it's not completely flat, either. The small dips and scattered holes would easily twist my ankle and while I could just drink a health potion to fix that, I don't want to need to so I walk as I work.
Almost an hour after I begin, I've slain enough goblins to meet the threshold three times.
Special Quest completed! +5,000 EXP
You have reached the EXP threshold to reach Level 3! Your Level 3 Awakening Quest is now available! Would you like to participate? Yes No
If this Awakening Quest is anything like my last one, it'll take place here in the Mythic Forest so I won't need to worry about my bracelets being destroyed by the mana in the air during it. There's still that risk, however, so I put them into my [Dimensional Storage] along with my phone. My clothes won't survive if the Quest isn't in here, but that's acceptable.
Though I'll definitely need to acquire new gear again. I wasn't expecting to need to already.
The moment I accept my Level 3 Awakening Quest, I find myself on a stretch of land around a thousand feet long and about four hundred feet in width, though more oval than rectangle. As with all of the zones of the Mythic Forest, it's surrounded by dense fog walls. As with my Awakening Quest and Level 2 Awakening Quest, there's no fog within the zone itself.
This zone seems to be segmented a little bit. What looks like a pond stretches a significant portion of its southern half, with slopes along the sides around three-quarters of the way north, going from north to south. It also slopes down into the pond's bed as well.
At the slopes up, the pond area itself is split, with the northern quarter about fifteen feet or so taller, and the two sections of the pond narrowing at the join so that it's only about seven feet in width. The upper section's water would cascade down into a small, rocky basin about three feet lower than it, which then flows into the lower pond in a fall around two feet in height, judging by the ground to the sides.
I can just picture this place when it's alive. Trees and bushes growing densely close to the part where the two pond sections meet, more of them growing scattered throughout the zone. Grasses, flowers, reeds, and more growing around the pond in the other areas with a small clearing to the forest on the northern end, which slopes up a little to a higher elevation than the pond for the northern quarter.
Right now, however, there's none of that. It's just dirt and rocks and fish-like monsters I recognize as icthinios swimming through the air.
They're about two feet in height and three and a half in length, not including their fins. These ones have greenish-blue scales and fins with a paler underside. If there was more than just the grey light filtered through the fog wall ceiling, those scales would shimmer lightly.
Your Level 3 Awakening Quest will begin in 5 minutes. Fail to complete the task, and you will not progress to the next Level. Slay all lake icthinios: 0/200 Time Limit: 3 hours
Lake icthinios are the weakest of the water-type icthinios, and this Quest was probably chosen since I'm strong enough to handle them.
I get to work on killing the icthinios, blasting a [Magic Missile] into the head of the nearest one as I draw close. That's not enough to kill it and the beast turns to face me, an orb of water forming in front of its mouth. A second [Magic Missile] soars forward and punches through the orb, bursting it before slamming into the floating fish's head.
My third [Magic Missile] finishes off the last of the monster's HP, the beast dropping to the ground.
+1 lake icthinios slain!
The alchemist in me doesn't want to let valuable material go to waste, so I hold off on taking on a second beast until I've harvested not just the fist-sized essence crystal from within it, but attempted to salvage their gills.
Unfortunately, the gills on this one were destroyed by my attacks, so I'm a little bit more careful for the next one and manage to save one of the organs.
[Lake Icthinios Gill] Tier: 9 A gill from a lake icthinios, the water and air magics within allow the beast to breathe both water and air.
I can use these to make water-breathing potions. A single one of these can make around ten of those potions and it's difficult to get my hands on more than three or four of them at a time. The potions won't last too long as they're just from the lake variant, but even ten minutes is plenty of time at times.
The gill is placed into one of my bracelets, after I slip the three of them back on. I return to slaying the lake icthinioses and harvesting their essence crystals and gills until I remember that I'll likely just end up back in the Mythic Forest.
With no time difference occurring after, I can just return here to harvest stuff.
Some of them manage to fire their water jet blasts before I can burst their bubbles, but I have enough warning to move out of the way in time. This would be a different story if there were two of the monsters close enough to force me to take them on together, but I don't need to worry about that.
I pick up the pace a little and finish off the lake icthinioses a little before the three-hour mark is up. It's a good thing I stopped collecting parts, or I wouldn't have finished. This Awakening Quest might have been partially testing my ability to resist the craftsmen nature in me.
Rather than being teleported away, I just receive the notification alerting me to the end of the Quest and a location notice.
Congratulations on completing your Level 3 Awakening Quest! Your stats have been increased and your HP and MP have been refreshed!
A new area within the Mythic Forest is available to access via your gate: the Floaty Fish Pond!
Now that I know about the King of the Celestials, I'm fairly certain it's him naming the different sections of the Mythic Forest. This one has a name which indicates icthinioses normally live here, except Mythic Forests shouldn't have monsters.
A non-monster version of them, then? I doubt mythical beasts in their form would simply reside here. Aster made it clear last night that the Celestials don't reside here, so I doubt a mythical beast would outside of Mrow, who may only be here because of the free monsters.
Speaking of the lifeseed worm, it pops up out of the soil just as I think about it.
If it was able to arrive so quickly after… that means it was aware of my presence doing this. Why did it wait until after the Awakening Quest ended?
Because it had to. The System must have kept it from entering until after the Awakening Quest concluded.
"Hey, Mrow," I say, and the lifeseed worm looks at me. "Can you hold on? I want to harvest their kills, scales, fins, and essence crystals. Not all of them, though, as that would be far too much. Just the ones on this quarter of the zone, alright?"
Mrow looks at the icthinios it was about to consume, then at me, then at the icthinios again before sinking back down into the ground. It rises up out of the soil closer to the pond and consumes the remains of the monster it popped up by.
While the mythical beast gets to work on that, I get to work on my own harvests while checking my Status to see my new stats.
Name: Evan Rethe Rank: 5 Species: Human Sex: Male Level: 3 EXP: 0/66,389 HP: 9,300/9,300 MP: 9,300/9,300 Strength: 17 Constitution: 22 Agility: 17 Dexterity: 25 Magic: 31 Mind: 28 HP Regen: 5% MP Regen: 5%
These stats would have made killing the lake icthinioses doable with a single [Magic Missile], though it wasn't impossible at my stats as a Level 2 Rank 5. As the Rank 5s I know said, the Awakening Quest is fully possible as long as I try. I could have completed it in less than half the time had I just run through the area, firing off [Magic Missile]s as quickly as the one-second cooldown would allow.
I take a step toward the last of the monsters I took down but don't make it to the beast as a shimmer forms in the air around fifty feet away. A moment later, an ichtinios with teal, blue, and green scales with a silver shimmer swims out of it, its eyes silver orbs. Water lightly sprinkles from its fins as it swims through the air toward me, the mythical beast giving me a curious look as another swims out of the shimmer in the air.
That must be an entrance/exit for one of the passageways Aster told me about, though I doubt these are the "floaty fish" the King of the Celestials noted about this place as they're mythical beasts rather than normal ones. The second mythical beast to exit the path looks at the dead itchinios and gives a wiggle of happiness while I inspect the first one to see the System information on them.
Springscale Icthinios Category: Mythical A mythical-class creature whose scales and fins generate a small amount of water as they swim through the air.
"Hello," I greet him. "Your name is… Elacs?"
The springscale icthinios in front of me – which is about fifty percent bigger than the others – gives a nod before swimming around. He then promptly opens up another passageway and leaves through it, the others following him out. Five of them in total came through the first one, which fades after the last exits it.
That was… strange. They must have come here for a reason.
To kill the lake icthinios. Since the local monsters were already taken care of, they promptly left after.
"A shame, really," I say. "The water coming off their scales would probably help fill this place up over time. Don't you think, Flow?"
"Woof!" Flow responds, then gives me a confused tilt of his head when I look down at him.
"What?" I ask.
"Woof?"
"It was just a guess that you'd shown up," I tell him. "Did you have fun hanging out with Aster?"
He sends me an image of him in his adult form being climbed on by the pup while trying to shake him off. That's filled with a sense of annoyance but resignation. It seems to be a recurring incident between the two of them and he's given up trying to stop the pup.
A mythical beast versus a Celestial… not a great matchup. I feel a little sorry for the guy.
"Good luck," I tell him. "I'm going to harvest some materials before heading home for lunch. You can hang out if you want, Aster's probably off doing whatever it is that pup does. He was an otter at Happy Butterfly Hill a few hours ago, but I'm not sure if he's still there or not."