> First off, if you want to avoid becoming monster snack, your best bet suitable shelter. Depending on whether you're somewhere in the city or stuck in the boonies, this will look different. There are three things that all good shelters will have in common: access to resources, reinforced walls that can take a good beatdown, and decent escape routes. Once you've secured a location, your survival rate goes up. But not by much.

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> Excerpt SYBI, Chapter 2: Staying Alive When The World Wants You Dead

We spent the next couple of days cleaning up the destruction. Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as I first thought. Most of the plants were unharmed and only three beds were beyond saving. It pained my heart to pull them apart and scavenge the planks for the wood resource. It quickly became apparent that we had to make an expedition to the end of the forest to gather more wood.

"Tobi, you will stay behind, " Laura said. The kid looked like he wanted to argue, but his mom was still angry about him choosing his class without talking to us first, so he just nodded and sat on the porch. Cloud laid down on his side to keep him company.

"We'll be back soon, don't worry, " I told the pair.

Laura and I left the safety of our boundary, each armed with our weapon of choice. I gave her my hatchet as we figured she'd be better all that tree-felling business with her fancy new class. I was sad to give it up, given how many times it saved my ass but it was for the greater good.

I kept watch as she hacked away at a medium-sized spruce tree.

"This is going too slow. The wood is too fresh and this hatchet isn't up to the task," she said. We were there for all of five minutes.

"Should we walk in there and see if there are any old trees?" I asked, pointing to the forest.

She swung at the tree one more time and huffed in frustration.

"I guess we would have to, " she said, putting the hatched away in her inventory. It was still freaking seeing items appear and disappear out of nothing. "But we will only go in there a few meters and keep an eye on the cabin."

"Let's do it," I said. I don't know when I developed a taste for danger, but I squared my shoulders, tightened my grip on my weapon, and stepped among the trees.

"Let me go in front," she whispered.

I did what she said and we walked a bit further in, ensuring we could still see the cabin through the trees.

"There," Laura said, pointing at a tree that had fallen over, perhaps another 50 meters away. The woods were quiet and noisy simultaneously with the rustle of leaves in the wind and calls of hopefully non-monstrous birds.

The fallen tree seemed to find its way to the ground relatively recently, given the lack of moss and rot. The recent rains were quick showers that didn't stay on the ground for long, so that must have helped as well. It had scorch marks, suggesting that its demise was orchestrated by a lightning strike.

"Keep an eye out," she ordered, and I obeyed as she started chopping the treetrunk into more manageable pieces.

The sound of the hatchet hitting the bark echoed all around us. I kept my whip at the ready, as I was getting nervous we would get ambushed. Then I noticed a bush of ripe forest blackberries, a few meters away. It had the faintest glow of green around it. I figured my Foraging skill got activated. It was confirmed when a description box popped up.

Blackberries (edible)

Blackberries are berries with a sweet-tart flavour, found on thorny bushes on Earth. Pretty boring. Pretty tasty too. Compatible with your biology.

"Laura," I whispered, trying to catch her attention between the hits. "Laura!"

"What?" she hissed. She had already disappeared a few lengths of wood into her inventory.

"We should grab those!"

She followed my pointing finger with her gaze and nodded.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"We'll get on that after we're done here. I'm almost at my capacity, so you're next."

She finished her work and I put away some wood as well. I must have miscalculated the weight of the wood because the breath got knocked out of my lungs and my internal organs felt like they were tied in a knot.

Warning: You have been encumbered.

Please remove excess items from your inventory.

Focusing on doing just that was extremely difficult with not having the ability to breathe properly, and I found myself on my knees, clutching at my chest.

That's when Laura screamed. I managed to remove the last piece of wood from my inventory and looked up to see a yellow spider the size of a dinner plate hanging just above her head, having somehow sneaked up on her. She grabbed the creature with her bare hand and threw it away with a pitch that would have had many baseball teams come knocking at her door. It happened so quickly I couldn't even identify the monster.

She was still screaming when she pulled me up to my feet and dragged me back to the cabin.

Cloud and Tobi rushed over to meet us as we crossed over to safety. Laura just plopped on the ground hyperventilating.

"What happened?" the kid asked.

"S-s-spider," she stuttered.

"Ah," he turned to me. "Mom has arachnophobia."

"Will you be okay?" I asked the woman kneeling in the dirt.

"The phobia is not so bad, but she still hates them."

I wouldn't call the display I just witnessed not so bad, but I guess it could have been worse. She could have just frozen and got herself killed.

Laura took a few minutes to calm down. But as she seemed to get it together, she screamed again, this time in frustration.

"Fuck!"

She lifted her palm to show us the thin dark yellow hairs sticking out of her skin. The skin itself was also tinged yellow around the puncture points. It was pretty gross.

"That thing poisoned me."

"Is it bad?" I asked.

"Only 10 HP lost, " she let out a sigh and got up. "I'm going to take this out and then I'm going to lie down for a bit.

She deposited the wood from her inventory and disappeared inside.

Tobi and I just shrugged, and I started the process to repair the damage. That meant making a lot of wood resource.

Having Tobi unlock Energy was pretty helpful with the restoration, even if he only had 30 to use. By the time Laura came outside a few hours later, we only had 3 beds left to repair.

"How are you doing?" I asked her.

"I'm okay. At least I got a free point in Constitution," she said and rubbed her temple.

"That's awesome!"

"Yeah... I was thinking. We should set up traps around the cabin," she said.

"That's a good idea."

"I have some idea on how they should be made and where they should be set up. I assume that's from my class or something. But I would like to buy a few books on different traps so I don't stumble in the dark. Can I use your reader?"

"Of course. Knock yourself out."

She came back out not even five minutes later, with the reader in hand. Her face showed just pure defeat.

"Mom, what's wrong?" Tobi asked.

"Only Dee can use it because she linked it up with her. "

I was starting to feel some of that defeat itself. We couldn't escape capitalism even in an alien apocalypse.

"Just... Just buy yourself one. You'd have to do it at some point anyway."

She gave me a weak smile and went away to do just that.

We pooled our credits together, having opened something called a provisional joint account. The notification just popped up on the Shop Terminal one day, letting us know about the possibility. Somehow my having the land claim token unlocked it.

The contract we signed was denser in legalese than a neutron star was in matter. But we managed to glean that we could open a full account once we had enough funds pass through our account. Then we'd be able to access all kinds of services and there was even a possibility of making an annual interest on the banked credits.

That was something to think about a lot further in the future. But the account was handy so we didn't have to juggle our credits around whenever one of us wanted to buy something.

Once Laura was done, we bought our first expansion to the homestead, making it 50 square meters bigger. Then Tobi bought the blueprint for the barn that we would make into a home for him and Cloud.

"Thanks, Dee," he said once I confirmed the expansion in my Property tab.

"No need to thank me. This is your home, Tobi. And we can start building tomorrow. "

Name: Diana Mond

Age: 25

Class: Homesteader

Level: 2, 43/300 exp

Strength: 4

Constitution: 6

Intelligence: 6

Wisdom: 4

HP: 60/60

Energy: 4/60