Pilus Horgson (Lv 3)

HP: 29/29

MP: 27/34

Status: none

EXP: 44/300

Skills: 4-Point Magic, 5-Point Magic, 6-Point Magic, Appraisal(+), Cooking, Inventory, Literacy

Having achieved my goal of assigning my 3 SP, I started building a mental roadmap of how I wanted to proceed with my training. I had gained one more skill point this level than I had the level before, so for now I would assume that I would continue to get an increasing number of SP each level, which appeared to be equal to my level number. This suggested that, more or less, a person of this world might naturally and automatically assign 1 SP to any skill they used to earn 100 EXP.

I’m sure there was actually a lot more complexity to it than that, but if that were true it would keep them using up skill points in accordance with the requirements to level up, and it wouldn’t result in someone running out of SP as they grew, like I kept doing. I could clearly fast-track my growth, both with the metasystem but also my otherworldly knowledge, so I was gaining skills well before I had earned 100 EXP. Once I simply wanted to enhance my skills, I could also probably automatically assign SP to skills earned in my skills menu. For me, life would be peppered with distinct moments of gaining quite a lot of new power all at once, broken up with longer stretches of grinding for experience. I was ok with that.

There were other skills I wanted to get, and I had some ideas of gaining skills I didn’t even know about yet, but I could see the value in powering up 6-point magic first, in the short term. I had already gained a ton of experience just by getting hurt and healing, although some of my experience was also from the light spell and from cooking. Cooking, in turn, offered me a way to recover MP. If I fought more beasts, I would get more meat, and even if I got hurt, advancing my healing ability gave me the power to recover my HP, then I could cook to recover my MP. I could also gain HP back from eating certain other foods, although I would have to monitor how much food I was eating so I didn’t over-stuff myself and end up in a position where I had to cram extra meat into my face in order to use a necessary spell.

Of course, I wouldn’t skimp on my physical training either. All that extra food, packed with HP and MP recovery though it may be, would also be calories and protein. I would use that to strengthen my body. In turn, when I gained some levels and had more wiggle room, I could pick up some combat skills and should be in a position to excel with those. Short-term, I would likely have to rely on my elemental magic skills for combat, being careful not to deplete my mana too much. I had some plans with regards to that as well.

By level 6 I would be able to advance my 6-point magic, at which point I should be much more capable of healing and could more easily experiment with some of the other aspects of the magic circle, as my MP should also be relatively high. I would also only need 1 SP from that level to advance, if I put all the SP previously earned into that skill, assuming I gained 4 and 5 SP for levels 4 and 5 respectively, meaning that I could apply another 5 SP upon hitting level 6, either into my other magics or into some new skills.

All I had to do now was grind.

* * *

My father’s spring birthday arrived, and we again went for a beach picnic as a family.

I had noticed recently that my parents weren’t paying as much attention to me as they used to, and certainly not as much as I would have considered a child needing in my own world. On the beach, there was less playtime with my mother, and more free time for myself. While helpful for my goals, it still surprised me. I didn’t know if it was because I displayed too much maturity in the last year or if this was par for the course in this world.

In any case, I was able to wander off a good deal without my parents showing much concern. I let my father enjoy his more romantic birthday with my mother while I explored and looked for sea creatures I could grind on.

Unfortunately, now that I was level 3, the nodmice and singbirds rarely gave me any experience. That isn’t to say that I couldn’t squeeze a point out here or there, either from using a completely novel method or just from grinding a ton, but it was a lot of effort for little reward. I still did hunt them, for practice and for the meat, but I was seeking larger prey.

The fact that I could kill a handful of small critters and only gain 1 EXP after the final one suggested something to me, which I had been thinking about for a while. This was also something I wondered about with HP and MP. The integer nature of these values seemed like something that was too discrete to work in reality. Was I actually getting 0 EXP from the first few creatures and then 1 EXP for the last? More likely, I was getting 0.2-0.25 EXP under the hood from each, which only added up to a whole point when I killed 4-5 of them.

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This wasn’t a major problem with regards to experience, but it was something I had been thinking about particularly with HP and MP, and HP and MP recovery. If a whole roasted nodmouse restored 1 MP, and I ate half, was I getting 0.5 MP under the hood? If I then later ate the other half, would I get another 0.5 MP? What if, instead of eating the other half, I ate another half of a different piece of roasted nodmouse meat? Would that also give me 0.5 MP, unseen, and thus roll over to a full point, or would each wait in some kind of buffer for the original missing half? So long as I ultimately got 1 MP restored after eating a certain amount of meat, this was fine, but if there were partial numbers happening behind the scenes that would become relevant if I ever found myself casting magic that seemed to cost 0 MP, which I figured wasn’t possible otherwise.

These would likely become moot points when I was dealing with tens of points of MP at once, per cast and in restoration, but for now every point mattered, so I couldn’t help thinking about it while I wandered the beach, chewing on a piece of fire-roasted singbird meat to top up my MP for my hunt.

The beach was home to a few creatures which, like the nodmice and singbird, were somewhat familiar from my old world. I knew that the nodmice weren’t exactly like mice from Earth, which made me wonder about how my metasystems were naming things and translating from this world’s language to my native language. When I looked really closely at a nodmouse, I discovered that some–I presume the males–had tiny nubs, like premature antlers, on their foreheads. I was pretty sure mice didn’t have horns or anything like that back in my old world, but then again, I never saw any nodmice with fully formed horns or antlers either, so maybe I was reading too much into some small nubs. The nose and eyes were different, too, more deer-like and less like those of a rodent. Of course, mice weren’t light blue in the wild on Earth, which was probably the biggest obvious difference, but pet fancy mice came in different colors. The singbirds just seemed like brightly-colored birds with green feet, but I was never much of a bird guy before, so I honestly didn’t know how unusual that was on Earth. The fish I saw at the market also just seemed like regular fish from my old world, but I also wasn’t that well-versed in fish.

On the beach, I came across a few new beasts which I had not yet defeated. Like the pier, there were the gull-like birds that would scavenge and snap up small sea creatures. Aside from the sounds that they made, which were kind of donkey-like, I couldn’t really see a difference between them and seagulls from Earth, but I would study once closer after I got a chance to add it to my inventory. The bigger surprise were the sea creatures themselves.

The first thing I saw were the crab-like creatures. They seemed to have fewer legs than crabs from my old world, only two pairs which they walked on, so instead of crab-walking they moved more like a quadruped would. They also jumped–pounced might be more accurate–and would use that to land on their prey and use their final third pair of legs to grab the unlucky creature and stuff it into their mouth. These dexterous front legs didn’t have the large, pincer-type claws, but did seem to have some grabbing mechanism which they used to shove food into their mouth, which itself was fairly reminiscent of a crab claw. They strictly hunted creatures smaller than themselves, including smaller crabs, but ran from me.

The other creatures I saw were large, turtle-like beasts. There were fewer of these, and they seemed to be coming to shore to nest, which lined up with what I knew about turtles back home. They were substantial in size, especially compared to my small child body. The thought of killing mother turtles who had come ashore only to nest didn’t make me feel great, but I shrugged it off as best as I could. I needed the experience. Unlike the turtles I was familiar with in my old world, these turtle shells seemed rocky, as if they were coated in minerals. Despite being sea turtles, they had feet instead of flippers, and the feet looked hooved, which was peculiar. They also dug more like a dog would than what I thought a turtle would, in order to make a nest to lay their eggs. I watched where they were making nests so I could retrieve the eggs when they were done.

I had been brainstorming the best ways to hunt without drawing attention to myself and without draining too much MP like the stone bullets did when I launched them with enough force. I had several new designs in my inventory I was looking to try out. I had formed several small stone bullets into a needle or arrow shape instead of a small ball. The ball-type bullets worked with sufficient force, but needed too much force to pierce. These stone bolts pierced with much less force, like a bow instead of a gun.

Both bolts and bullets were for distance targets. If I could get closer, there were more options.

I had shaped some larger thorn-type stones, like rudimentary nails. Since I could hover these–I tried not to think too much about why magic could so easily defy gravity–I was able to move them to wait, suspended, over a target's head. Then I could use a larger, heavier rock, as a hammer, simply dropping it from a sufficient height over the nail. I could also use magic to hammer in the nail, but it cost more MP than using another rock and gravity as the force. In theory I could use the nail alone, with gravity, and drop it from a large height, but it did cost more MP to move rock objects higher and higher off the surface and the accuracy of something like a nail would drop, especially on a windy day. The nail-plus-hammer method was more accurate, although the magic hammer method was the most accurate.

After taking stock of my surroundings and watching the little beasts for a while, getting a sense of movement patterns and behaviors, I started taking out some gulls with bolts, tucking them away into my inventory once collected. Soon enough the gulls were dispersed and were in the air, circling, so I changed my target to the jumping crabs. If I could get close to them, I could just smash them with a rock, but since they would jump away from me, I alternated between dropping larger rocks and trying to pierce their faces with bolts. I had to keep manipulating the MP cost for each to get it right as force and accuracy was hard to lock down with these creatures, so I stopped after collecting three and added them to my inventory.

Finally, once the two rock-shelled turtles I had been monitoring were done nesting, I hovered a large stone nail above both of their heads and plunged them down using magic, a hammer blow to the nail and to my MP each time. Throughout the whole hunt, I ate meat until I was full, and in the end I managed to wrap up the turtles without completely draining my MP. I collected the turtles and dug up and collected their eggs. I also collected some more rock to replace the rock I lost from bolts which went astray or nails which shattered. I could repair the shattered nails and bolts, but it cost less MP to shear off pieces of stone and form them new from a larger rock than it did to combine smaller pieces back together and shape that.

Feeling heavily weighed down mentally by a significantly more full inventory, I trudged back to my parents to stuff my stomach with yet-more food for recovery and to take a nap.