After spending a small amount of time in the ambulance Jasper knew what his next steps needed to be. First, he would dig the shrapnel out of his behind, which was something that he was not looking forward to doing. Then he would use the new magical suture function to help stop the bleeding. During the time that he’d been out the wound had tried to partially scab over, so he pulled down his pants and ripped it off starting the difficult process. He whimpered pitifully as the scab tore away from his skin and worried about the next steps he’d have to take.
If just tearing the scab off hurt that much, then sticking his fingers in the bloody hole would not be fun at all. Taking a shuddering breath, he touched the wound feeling a stinging pain. He had the idea that if he lubed up his fingers with blood first it wouldn’t hurt as much when he went digging. He balled up his shirt and stuck it in his mouth not wanting to attract more monsters with any screams that may escape his lips. Finally, he steeled himself enough to get to the job at hand.
His fingers probed the open wound and already he wanted to back off, but he continued pushing two fingers in and twisting them trying to find the small piece of stone he knew was in there. His screams which he’d tried to tamp down still escaped his lips, but his makeshift gag muffled the sound. It also gave him something to bite down on which allowed him to focus on something other than the pain. His shoulder ached and his fingers kept digging until at last they brushed against something small and hard.
It took him another minute to get a good grasp on the pebble-sized shrapnel and pull it out. At this point, he was bleeding a lot, but it was dark and flowing instead of spraying. Reminding himself of a first aid class he’d taken in school years ago he knew that that meant that it was veinous bleeding and not arterial. It still wasn’t great to be losing so much blood, but he could handle it. As soon as the shrapnel was out, he slammed his hand down on the magical suture option and waited for it to kick in.
Small threads of magic flowed seemingly directly out of the magical barrier. They probed the wounded area before pushing themselves through his skin. Jasper let out a yelp of surprise and pain but continued to chomp down on the dirty shirt in his mouth. It took only a few minutes, but after a while, the flesh knit itself together. Glowing stitches stayed in place where the wound had been, and the bleeding had stopped. He hoped that that would be the end of that because he had more work to do. The next steps in his plan would take quite a bit of elbow grease.
The next item on his list was to create more of his makeshift grenades. He needed to make them quickly, but it would also help him to practice making them better. As he created them, he continued to get better and better. He worked on them for hours continuing to select no when his system notifications asked if he’d like to imbue them. It took him some time but he managed to create one that wasn’t labeled as poor or trash.
NOTICE: You have crafted an average rune of growth. The tool that you have used has low compatibility with the material used in this crafting. +200 XP, +2 Magic, +2 Control, +1 Dexterity. Would you like to infuse magic into an average rune of growth? Y/N.
Jasper still selected no but he was proud of his skill increase. All of his skills were making good progress and through his crafting, he’d even managed to level up a couple of times. In total, he’d made 15 prospective grenades. He shoved a few of them in his pockets then stashed the rest of them close to his ambulance. He looked over at his next goal. The one that was going to suck more than the crafting of his weapons. The monster’s corpse had things that would help with his survival in the future.
He was already hungry and thirsty. But he’d have to deal with that for a while longer. He sighed and began looking for the right kind of stones for him to use as tools. Thirty minutes later found Jasper whacking a larger flat stone with a thick smaller stone. He kept going like that until he had been able to make a jagged edge on one side of the flat one. It was poorly made, but each of the ridges was sharp enough to poke a hole in his fingers if he pressed hard enough. Now it was time to get to work.
Jasper began sawing at the joint areas of the reptile corpse trying to separate the limbs from the rest of the body. It took at least three hours of sawing and then reshaping the saw as it dulled to even get the first leg off of the corpse. Sweat dripped from Jasper’s jaw and his breathing was short and ragged, but as soon as the limb was hanging off only attached by the bone in the hip, he received a notification.
NOTICE: Through the use of a tool, you have crafted you have gained an affinity for Saw Category: Makeshift Stone Saw. Affinity level 1. As you raise your affinity level for tools it will affect the tool you will receive when you raise your Class Skill Summon Toolbelt. Increase your affinity level to increase the effectiveness of your use of a specific tool. +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Creativity.
Jasper looked at the crude stone tool in his hand and a small smile spread across his face. He wanted to immediately begin sawing again, but he knew that he needed to get some rest. Although his vitality was working well to keep the hunger and thirst at bay, it wasn’t going to last much longer though. His hunger and thirst status effects were already at 6 and 5 respectively. He needed to at least eat something soon then hopefully it would give him enough energy to search for a water source.
Reaching down he wrapped his arms around the massive leg and twisted disconnecting the two bones with a sickening pop. It wasn’t his first time doing work like this about a year ago he got lucky working with a butchering shop that specialized in monster parts. The problem with monster meat and the like is that it’s not edible unless it goes through a purification process, at least not for regular people. But for those with classes, it’s doable if they have a high enough vitality.
Some people have cooking classes that offer buffs and even permanent stat gains. They often use rare monster meat and offer their services only to the most wealthy or famous people in the city. Jasper carried the meat over to the ambulance and crawled inside dragging the leg along with him. The ambulance had an automatic cleanse function which he’d used quite often now so he hoped that it might work on the monster meat as well. He didn’t know for sure if his plan would work but he had hope.
A few seconds after getting the entire leg inside the floating platform he let out a sigh of relief as all of the toxins were pulled out of his body as well as the meat. While he waited for the meat to finish its cleansing, he summoned his toolbelt grabbing his pen and another rock. He needed to learn more about runes if they were going to be his means of survival after all. He picked another rune at random and began copying it to the best of his abilities.
Jasper was careful and deliberate with his drawing this time. After having hours to practice the growth rune this one seemed to come a little easier to him. Fifteen minutes later Jasper received a notification of his success.
NOTICE: You have crafted an average rune of direction. The tool that you have used has low compatibility with the material used in this crafting. +200 XP, +2 Magic, +2 Control, +1 Dexterity. Would you like to infuse magic into an average rune of direction? Y/N.
Jasper stepped out of the ambulance deciding that if this one was going to explode as well then, he’d rather not have it done inside the thing that had been saving his life for days now. When he entered into the white space the magic was again ripped out of his body, and Jasper couldn’t help but wonder why that only happened with his own crafts and not the ambulance. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to think about it because he was afraid the rock would explode at any time.
He tossed it a few feet away then quickly hid behind what was left of the raptor corpse. After a few seconds of nothing happening, Jasper peered out from behind his cover and looked at it. It didn’t seem to be doing anything. It wasn’t exploding, floating, or doing anything at all. Jasper pulled together his bravery and went to investigate it. Walking up to the stone he circled it and found nothing wrong, of course, nothing was particularly right about it, so it just left Jasper feeling confused.
He picked it up and turned it over in his hands a couple of times wondering what to do with it. “Should I just scrap it and try a new one?” he asked himself. Then he felt a small tugging on the skin of his hand. He opened his hand and just held the stone in his palm. As he watched it the stone turned on its own and then suddenly stopped. Jasper tried turning it completely around, directing it straight to the sky, putting it on the face of the rune itself but no matter how he turned or manipulated it the stone turned straight back to the spot he had thrown it at when he’d begun his experiment. After a few more minutes of playing with it, which was exactly what he was doing, finding some sort of amusement in the stone, it crumbled leaving nothing but dust. He was slightly disappointed that his new toy broke but decided it was fine.
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“After all I can just make another one, right?” He chuckled ruefully and went back to the ambulance. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to build a fire, not that there was much to burn in his immediate area so this next bit would not be fun. Jasper grabbed the leg and using his stone saw cut a piece of meat off of it. He separated the meat from the scales and then sank his teeth into the gross monster meat. Immediately Jasper felt sick to his stomach, although the ambulance had done the job of cleansing the meat it still had the acrid taste usually associated with monster meat when not cooked properly.
Even so, he did his best to keep himself from gagging and chewed his food swallowing it down. He wished that he could just open his throat wide and swallow the slab whole, but that wasn’t an ability he had, unfortunately. So, he continued to eat until he was no longer suffering from the hunger status effect, and he felt full. The monster’s blood satiated a couple of levels of thirst as well, but there was no way it would do the full job. Jasper needed to get going again and find water.
Jasper finished cutting the meat off the large bones as best as he could with his stone saw. If he was going to go out there, he was going to have a weapon this time. Jasper wanted the femur for a club but once he got it out, he decided it was too heavy for him, so he grabbed the smaller tibia instead. It was still covered in blood and meat that Jasper couldn’t get off with the tools he had on hand so he rubbed it in the dirt until it was dry enough that it wouldn’t slip out of his hand on the first swing.
He also took the large, curved claw and put it through the same process before sticking it in his pocket. He probably wasn’t coming back to this area so while he waited for the ambulance to run out of power and shrink back to size, he used his new club to knock some teeth out of the raptors scull for later use. He also picked up all of his grenades and stuck them in his pockets. By the time he was done with cleanup, his pockets were bulging.
“I’ve gotta figure out a better way to carry around my stuff.” Once he picked up the ambulance, which he now carried in the hand that was not brandishing a bone club, he set off again this time in the direction that the raptor had come from. His reasoning was simply that even monsters needed water so if he went in that direction, he might find some.
Jasper’s feet crunched softly against the dirt as he walked, and the wind blew against him. The wind was doing him a favor today because it cleared a lot of the poisonous clouds away from the area making it easier to see, and harder for debuffs to level up. The landscape began to change after a few hours of walking from the flat desert-like area to a rockier terrain with extremely large boulders. It made Jasper feel slightly safer. He’d been lucky enough not to run into any monsters so far, but that luck could run out, and it would make hiding much easier.
Most crystal fields were in desert-like areas, so it was most likely that he’d been dropped in an area outside of where he’d been working on and off for the last few years. Jasper wished that he’d paid more attention to the area during that time instead of just trying to get the work done and get home. Maybe if he had he’d know if there was a water source nearby, or he’d have been able to find shelter because he knew where to look. “Hindsight is always perfect though, isn’t it?” He thought to himself not wanting to talk for fear of drying out his tongue even more.
He would need to rest again soon his thirst debuff already reaching level 8. It had been shown in studies that people without classes could often only survive for around three days without water. For people with classes, it was usually longer, and as long as their vitality was high enough around 60-70 some could last up to two months. That didn’t mean that it was fun for those people though, around thirst level 12 the body starts to experience extreme fatigue and if it reaches 15 many people have reported no longer being able to move. Once it hits level 20 your organs begin to shut down and you will die.
Having a higher vitality was important not only because it allowed you to take more damage from monsters, but it also affected how quickly status effects level up and how much they affect you making you more resilient in dangerous environments. If a person with ten vitality begins getting sick at radiation level 5 then a person with 20 wouldn’t begin getting sick until radiation level 10 and it would take longer for them to reach that point. Jasper knew that training his vitality was critical for his future so even when he began getting sick again, he allowed his poison and radiation debuffs to continue leveling. Right now, it was his fastest way to gain large amounts of vitality.
This time if he could do it, he’d have to get radiation to level 12 and poisoning to level 8. Because of the wind though his poison debuff was leveling slower than it had the day prior so it would be likely he’d reach radiation level 12 and cleanse that before the poison got bad enough, he’d gain anything from it. Once he raised his vitality, though it would be easier to stand the pain of thirst and he could continue his search for water longer. Jasper breathed through his nose only, but his tongue was already so dry it didn’t matter much.
He had to stop to relieve himself after a while and sacrificed part of his shirt for cleanliness’s sake. He could have tried to do it in the ambulance and hoped that the instant cleansing would work for that, but he wasn’t at radiation level 12 yet, so he didn’t want to test out that function just yet and risk missing out on a large stat boost at an inopportune time. His pants had already gotten small holes in them from scrambling over large rocks or tripping and falling and that didn’t even count the holes he’d already gotten from fighting the raptor. He smelled horrible, his clothes were speckled with blood stains, and he was missing the bottom portion of his shirt but the worst thing of all was that he was so thirsty. Desperately thirsty the kind of thirst that burns at your stomach and your throat. It was the kind of thirst that would make even the toughest man weep, and Jasper certainly wasn’t the toughest of men.
Part of him hoped that when he wept, he might produce a tear and catch it on his tongue just to wet it slightly. But the tears wouldn’t come, there would be no release from this, his body was no longer producing sweat and he was kicking himself for not squeezing any liquid out of his clothes before they’d dried. His thirst was at level 12, and he’d already become so extremely tired. He got sick again from the radiation and found some relief when his vomit came out slightly wetting his tongue.
Not wanting to waste any of the fluids Jasper did something he hoped that he’d never have to do again and licked as much of his sick backup as he could. He could no longer travel instead waiting for his radiation to get bad enough. He sat with his back pressed to a rock, not feeling strong enough to lift his head and just watched as his status effects leveled up. He was going to die, Jasper felt almost sure of it.
He was about to just let himself fall asleep and give up but right before he did the level-up, he’d been waiting for happened. With a great force of effort, Jasper managed to stand and imbue the ambulance. He stumbled over to it and fell into the basin shape of the runic item. His body and mind couldn’t handle the strain of the itch this time as he was cleansed so he fell unconscious. When he woke again, he was lying on the ground and the sun had gone down once more. He did feel better though and quickly searched under him for his runic tool and after he found it, he checked his notification.
NOTICE: You have recovered from the status effect radioactive x12. +12 Vitality.
The thirst was still there, but it felt much more manageable now that he’d gained so much vitality. He finally had the strength to walk again but he didn’t have much light to see by. There was no way he could get through this rocky terrain without some kind of light source, and he didn’t want to attract any nocturnal monsters with the light from the ambulance. Jasper decided that he’d rest where he was until the sun came up. The influx of vitality had bought him a great deal more time, and now he could work on his poison status effect.
He only needed to get that one to level eight after all. The wind was still pushing most of the poisonous fumes away but that didn’t mean he wasn’t getting any of them. Jasper curled up around himself hiding from the wind behind a rock and waited. He must have been knocked out for a long time because it was only two hours before the sun crept up along the horizon giving Jasper enough light to travel by.
He decided that he needed to pick up his pace as much as he could because if the thirst got that bad again, he didn’t know how he would handle it. The pain and shame at what he’d gone through the day prior pushed him on. Two days passed as he walked and climbed through the rocky area. He’d been getting so much exercise that the system even rewarded him with +2 in strength and he’d managed to get another +8 in vitality officially overtaking his magic as his highest stat.
He finally started running into smaller monsters in the area but between his grenades and his bone club, he managed to survive those fights, even gaining more meat and another level. They were mostly small goatlike monsters that had evolved into man-eating creatures with razor-sharp horns and fangs. They weren’t very tough so throwing a grenade at them did the trick. At night Jasper would study the runes and do his best to create new things even though he couldn’t see well.
So far, he’d managed to make a trash rune of floating, which immediately floated into the sky before plummeting back down a minute later barely missing Jasper. He decided not to make any more of those at night. He’d also made a trash rune of control which didn’t have any effect that Jasper could see just puttering out after a few seconds. Still, he was sure that it did something, he just wasn’t sure what it was yet.
It wasn’t until the third day that he began to see signs of hope in his search for water. Yellow and red moss began appearing on some of the stones and plant life meant that there had to be water somewhere in the area. Another day passed and plant life became much more common. Ferns, grass, and even some bushes sprouted up in between rocks and where the ground was soft. When he got hungry now, he would just eat one of the plants he could find or grass. It was all poisonous in different ways of course.
Some of them gave him horribly painful stomach cramps, some made him vomit uncontrollably. The grass was his least favorite because it causes temporary blindness. That of course terrified Jasper the first time it happened but after the effects were cleansed it was doable if he was extremely hungry and had nothing else. He had tried to cleanse it using the ambulance like he had with the meat, but nothing happened. It was like it only recognized fleshy things but since it worked on monster meat and humans Jasper came up with the idea that maybe the ambulance had been used for pet emergencies as well.
He liked the idea of ancient people caring about their pets so much during the end of the world that they wanted to give them the same kind of care humans got. It was only a guess on his part though. Jasper was thinking about ancient people and their pets on the fifth day of his journey when he noticed that the ground had started sloping upwards. Not only that but the hill was almost covered in the short blinding grass as he’d started to call it. When he looked up he saw a single tree at the top of the hill.
It reminded him of the night he’d gotten his class sitting under the tree in the park with his two best friends. The leaves rustled and the branches bowed slightly as the wind pressed against it. He was excited enough to see the tree but the next sound he heard set him off running toward the top of the hill. When he finally reached the apex of his climb, he thought he might start crying again. There on the other side of the hill was a large river flowing through the biggest forest he’d ever seen.