Soon enough, Ulric sat next to a crackling fire, sparks sputtering upwards as dry limbs generated impressive heat. The air had turned comfortable as he'd worked on the fire and he was now bathed in thermal joy. Even the cool breeze didn't pucker his skin any longer.
Finally allowed some breathing room with his position, he was able to reflect on events. Drunk, dead, reforged, and strolling naked through a bush hippy's wet dream. He had magic, at least theoretically. He had a working body. He had a goddamn status window which he opened mostly just because he could. Not much to see there.
He noticed his mana had upticked to 12%, which meant that in about two hours his core had somehow increased its mana by 10%. So. 5% per hour without any particular effort on his part. The Watcher had claimed that there were factors which would increase this, including active focus on certain techniques about which he remained clueless. He'd need approximately twenty hours to max out his core, something which he felt was important, but also so foreign a concept as to be functionally useless.
"Just how the hell am I supposed to do this?" he muttered.
Turning aside from that before he got frustrated and killed his new fire buzz, he inspected the other stats, trying to draw conclusions about what the numbers translated to in terms of his physical and mental well-being. His health, stamina, and magic had percentages compared to a theoretical peak condition he guessed but there were no discrete values for these quantities. Probably because health and tiredness were more of a continuous spectrum. The same should be true for the six key stats though and they had quantized values. Perhaps whatever magic was associated with generating these values had predetermined benchmark values….a fascinating train of thought. And while those values could be benchmarked, internal workings like health, stamina, and magic had so much mental component and individual variance that an external benchmarking system proved unworkable, hence the normalized relative values. His concentration broke as he became aware of a soft snapping sound near his head. It would appear that he had retained his previous life's habit of snapping the fingers of his left hand rapidly when he was intensely focused.
Loading another few large sticks onto the fire, Ulric compared the stats to his perceived performance. His body felt strong and, as he'd found breaking the limbs and starting the fire, was indeed strong. He was also fairly resilient, having expended probably at least 2000 calories during his first few hours, all on no food. He'd never been particularly graceful and couldn't dance to save any number of lives, but had a good sense of balance and hiked frequently carrying loads through difficult terrain. Not having been raised playing sports he'd probably missed out on considerable training in footwork or running/jumping. That made the lower agility score jive with the rest of the better than average results.
Without an average value for other people to compare to, the numbers lacked a precise conception but his gut said 10 was a baseline for adult humans and his stats were indicative of a relatively high level of fitness. The mental stats were somewhat more explainable. He was a 43 year old former engineer with a modern post-industrial society's educational infrastructure and 30+ years of mental training, of course his intelligence would be above baseline. His willpower was likewise undeniable, anybody who made it through graduate school was someone who could take obscene punishment and push through. As for dexterity, he'd always enjoyed working with his hands and the protocols he'd made part of his career involved fine machinery and a deft touch. Again, it would seem that practice bred perfection and this world's magic attested to it.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
In spite of the fire and the mid-morning light he chilled suddenly. And at that chill, next to a hot flame, he flashed back to the "tuning" of his core and the rush of volcanic heat alternating frigid cold in his body. He then reflected on the fact that despite a relatively constant motion through challenging terrain he'd consistently felt cold rushes despite a high tolerance for alpine and winter climates of his home.
A fever? He wondered. With a newly built body? Unlikely, no immune response was that fast and no microbial incubation would be short enough to trigger such response so soon. No this, Ulric decided, this was something more akin to that magic fuckery. It was possible that this was an effect of having a newly generated core which was naïve to the mana entering it. Maybe the magical equivalent of growing pains. In any case, so long as it remained merely a discomfort he'd shelve it and consider his next moves.
He had fire, he had a good spot for shelter, and he had water aplenty. He also had a fairly robust source of a variety of timber, including the shattered wood splinters big as a house that marked where the old Tree had broken its roots and limbs as it fell. So most of the pieces were in place, he just needed to figure out how to put them together. He thought he remembered seeing vines climbing the trunk of this monster, as well as all those flowering shrubs.
Poison. A mild spike of adrenaline shot through him like ice down his spine.
"Holy shit, how did I forget about poison?" He whispered. If he'd run through or touched some of those vibrantly, perhaps even aposematically, colored flowers, he might already be in toxic shock. How in the fuck had he forgotten poison?
What a twist to the story that would be, Ulric thought.
He'd have to spend some time and do a sensitivity test on those plants before he went and made a leaf and vine kilt. A virulent rash on the rod and tackle, followed by vomiting and paralysis, and capped off by multiple organ failure would be a rude beginning to what seemed to be a god's honest fucking adventure.
Ulric considered the presence of these plants and then the sporadic bird sounds he'd heard. But no animals. No insects, other than some kind of midges that didn't appear to serve any role except to scatter light and be slightly annoying. Truly, he had arrived in this world in the middle of a green desert. But maybe that would change, soon. This break in the forest canopy had vastly increased the diversity of life within a fairly large pocket of sunlight. It would follow that other organisms would be opportunistic enough to take advantage of such resources. However these kinds of resources would be relatively scarce and he'd traveled several kilometers with nothing but the barked pillars that held up the woven limb sky as far as the eye could see. It may well be that he'd not encounter any significant wildlife that couldn't fly until he left this most ancient and homogenous part of the forest.
Just as he started to relax thinking this solar island may be too isolated within the green desert to attract any attention he heard a guttural roar in the distance that sent instinctive terror lancing up his spine. It had to be at least 10 kilometers away, the way it echoed through the terrain. But that was too close by a continent to whatever the hell made a sound like that.
Spurred by the possibility of a roaming predator, Ulric climbed out of the pocket of ruined rock he'd planned as his shelter to explore around the grave of the arbor and find materials for shelter and clothing. The thought of facing some kind of massive tiger, wolf, or fantasy land horror wearing nothing but his skin and a sour attitude was not appealing.