Shortly after the end of my unarmed training with Horg, my birthday came and went again, and I turned six. I had been fully awake in this world for two and a half years. Over the rest of the summer season, Treepo had grown up almost to maturity, and while I still managed to keep him hidden from my parents, he mostly had to hide in the yard, where I had built him a stone burrow with a hidden entrance. Winter would mean time back at the beach, where my training was still plateaued but Treepo’s training could ramp up against jumpcrabs and braygulls.

Treepo was now level 6, same as me, but his own experience was slowing to a crawl. I wanted him to at least hit level 7, like Trotto the gremline had been, but it looked like we would have to head back into the jungle to push past this plateau together.

Some innocent inquiries at the town gates when visiting Horg and the guard during the day led me to believe that in the winter, ramhogs tended to move south towards the desert, toward the region Forn had mentioned gremlines were from. They only came back in the spring when the roots and shrubs they liked in this region grew back. That meant that I should be safer outside the wall.

I also learned that another creature, from the north, came south in the absence of ramhogs. I was hoping to get a look at those, and some juicy experience from the first kill.

I had seen a lot of weird and interesting creatures in this world already, at least from the perspective of someone from Earth. Though the sea creatures and birds seemed familiar and comparable to Earth, the other creatures rapidly started to diverge and get increasingly fantastic the larger they became. I had seen rodents with cervine and equine features, some kind of monkey-cat, the now-familiar rabbit-lemurs, and a surprisingly scary sheep-warthog, but what I found myself looking at that day in the jungle took me the longest to wrap my head around.

At first, I thought it was just a capybara. I had always liked capybaras. Then I noticed the legs. The long legs, much longer than one would expect to see on a capybara. It was like a capybara on stilts: a giant rodent with giraffe legs. Then it sat back on its rear, and I realized that despite the length of the legs, they operated more like a primate’s legs do, and had hands and feet at the ends. I watched as one stood temporarily on its hind legs to look around.

It was like a capybara slenderman.

I shook my head. After my initial reaction, I reconsidered the proportions and figured it probably wasn’t that far off from an orangutan, just a little stretched out, and building off a large rodent base. They only seemed so tall because I was still so small. The guards had called these, simply, ratmen.

I was pretty well committed to spending my life in this world studying magic, but if I ever felt like I learned everything there was to know about that and wanted something else to learn about, the beasts of this world would be it.

The ratmen were semi-intelligent beasts, though not so much so that I would consider them demihumans of a fantasy world. More like an ape from Earth. They didn’t make tools, but sometimes were seen using rocks and sticks. They didn’t coordinate well, but lived in medium-sized social groups, which deterred some predators. They came south when the ramhogs left, as the ramhogs were as much a potential threat to them as one had been to me. In the summer they headed north, where the jungle met savannah, and spent time in watering holes like capybaras from Earth. They were omnivores but mostly looked for some of the nuts that grew in certain jungle trees, like the kind Treepo had shown me.

I had left a pile of the nuts as bait and was watching the ratmen approach them carefully. Had they looked straight up, they might have noticed the rocks floating in the air in the tree canopy.

They did not notice until it was too late.

* * *

It had taken me a while to decide what to do with my level 7 skill points. Treepo and I seemed to be doing fine without pouring additional points into the taming skill. Perhaps he was just an easy to tame creature, and I would only need points for a stronger beast, but I liked to think it was because we had developed such a strong relationship.

If I didn’t need to advance taming immediately, my main two other options were putting my SP into inventory, as advancing that would make my life a lot easier, or putting my SP into 4-point magic, as I seemed to be hitting my limits with what I could do with elemental magic.

In the end, I decided to split the difference, putting 4 SP into inventory and 3 SP into 4-point magic, where I already had a single point towards advancement from level 2. Either one could be advanced when I next leveled with 6 SP, or I could split the difference again for small improvements in both and advance them both down the line.

I already felt a bit lighter with the extra points in my inventory, but I still had a lot of ratman meat to deal with now. I wasn’t particularly interested in eating it myself, despite the guards’ excitement at the prospect of hunting them, though I recognized I probably already had eaten ratmen from Horg’s previous winter hunts. I still wanted to find a way to offload it, but wasn’t confident I could convince Bosh I was selling this much meat for my father.

The skill points I put into 4-point magic had ended up being worthwhile for that, as it so happened. I had applied the points so I could wield stone magic as weapons more easily, but the real benefits came by way of water magic. When I was practicing on sea water, I found I could vaguely feel the salt in the water. Shaping a stone bowl, I filled it with sea water and focused on pulling just the pure water out of the contents, instead of all the liquid, which included the salt. I was only partially successful, but that gave me some salt to work with.

Being a seaside town, salt wasn’t terribly expensive here, but it was still more than I wanted to spend so getting it for free was a big win. Storing it in my inventory was a bit of a problem, though. When I dropped the whole stone bowl in my inventory, it stored the bowl and salt separately. My inventory was filled with countless individual salt crystals, almost none of which stacked. Since I hadn’t figured out how to use magic on salt, I couldn’t shape them into stackable objects.

Fortunately, I had an emptied bottle from the MP potion I had used. The MP potion was stored as a singular item in my inventory, not as a separate glass bottle and then loose liquid, so I pulled all the salt out of my inventory, grinded it up with a stone pestle I made using the bowl as a mortar, and poured the salt into the bottle. I was able to store that in my inventory. I would have to look into purchasing closed containers for storing liquids and powders in the future.

The salt was for curing the ratman meat. When I figured out that I could pull just the water–imperfectly, but mostly pure–out of the saltwater and leave behind the salt, I figured I could pull the liquid out of the meat and dehydrate it. From what I could recall from Earth, one would dehydrate meat with some heat, with or without smoking it, and the slow time it took preserved the meat in some way. Magically rapidly pulling all the liquid out of the meat would leave me with something withered but still raw. In my inventory, that was technically fine since it didn’t age and I could later rehydrate and cook it, but my goal was to develop a product.

I knew you could salt cure meat which would render it somewhat shelf stable. I wasn’t entirely sure exactly how, so I basically just covered the meat with salt while slowly pulling the liquid out with magic. I needed much more salt for this, but I could make as much as I wanted from the sea water.

After all that, I wasn’t sure whether or not the result was sufficient or not, so I ended up constructing a stone chamber and attempted to cold smoke the meat as well. All said and done, I did a taste test and the result seemed acceptable, and I waited to see if I would get sick, reasonably confident that I could cure myself with 6-point magic if I caused myself a foodborne illness. The real safety test would be if the food was still good to eat after sitting outside of my inventory for a while, which was harder for me to solve. I didn’t want to show it to Bosh, who would have too many questions, but I wasn’t confident enough to try to sell the meat as it was to sailors at the pier, which had been my goal.

I ended up keeping a piece of meat hidden in a perforated stone box in my room for the next month, under my bed. I could smell meat when I slept, but I ignored it and pushed through the planned waiting period. I suffered the weight of the rest of the meat in my inventory the whole time, opting to leave a bunch of my stone items hidden at the beach, but in the end I was satisfied enough with the end product which didn’t make me sick.

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In mid-winter I finally sold it all to sailors at the pier, telling the men that my father had hunted the ratmen and mother had home-cured it to sell for some extra income, which was believable enough. It sold quickly and readily to those who were setting back out on a longer voyage, freeing up space in my inventory while adding back some weight in coin, with the whole experience bringing in a little bit of EXP. Selling the cured meat to the sailors fetched a much better price than selling it fresh to Bosh, but it had been a hassle and was really just a way for me to keep my secrets. Bosh never had to know about the ratmen, and moving forward I had some other options for my unexplainable meats in the future.

* * *

Baiting and trapping had been such an enormous success, it became my primary method of hunting in the jungle for experience. I couldn’t always avoid being snuck up on or attacked, but by spending more time badgering the town guards for information I was developing a better picture of the jungle ecosystem which put me in an increasingly good position to avoid surprises.

Despite almost being killed by a ramhog, I still considered myself really lucky. I had yet to meet a proper jungle predator.

Treehoppers, as it turned out, did have multiple children per litter, and multiple litters per tribe. The tribe I had encountered when I found Treepo was being hunted by an aggressive predator and he was the last surviving child, which partially explained why they had been so aggressive with me, although that was also partially just hormones and instincts.

When I heard what hunted treehoppers from the guards, my guts twisted up. I was not looking forward to meeting one of these. If one had surprised me, particularly trying to hunt Treepo, I don’t know what would have happened. That was the reason I decided to bait one in the first place and kill it before I encountered one in an uncontrolled situation.

My method of fighting with magic was already somewhat similar to using traps. If I had to form my stone weapons on the fly, with the resources around me, I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish all that I had. It was only the combination of my earth magic and my inventory system that allowed me to succeed. I spent a lot of time and MP beforehand preparing my stone items and storing them, so that in battle I was only using MP for control. That already gave me a big advantage. Preparing an area and using bait further increased my efficacy. Finding exploits for specific beasts increased it yet again.

The particular predator I would be dealing with was called a “striking vipis.” To compare it to an Earth animal, it was basically a dog-sized mantis with the body of a snake. Like a boa constrictor, except instead of being long and killing with constriction, it was about three feet long and had legs for movement and raptorial claw arms. It would leap and pounce, striking its prey with its forelegs, often paralyzing or killing its prey, and then consume it whole, slinking off into the canopy to digest until it was hungry again. Their creepy antennae could pick up sound at quite a distance.

It was toward the end of winter when one had been sighted by the guard, with treehopper breeding season again approaching. After learning all I could about the vipis, I put my plan into action.

Treepo and I were buried in dirt and covered in loose foliage, something halfway between being in a hunting blind and wearing a ghillie suit, with a small pile of ratman meat a short way away in front of us. I had a rocky shieldback shell over me, hidden by the dirt and leaves, just in case. I whispered to Treepo, and on command he chittered loudly, a baiting call. I had him do it twice more, then cast a cone of silence over us so that we wouldn’t give away our position if my heart beat too loudly. Then we waited.

I had almost decided to drop the silence spell and try again when something slammed into the ground in front of us, violently slamming into the meat. I let out a startled cry, or at least would have if I didn’t have the benefit of magic silence. Up close, the vipis was even more terrifying than I was expecting, especially seeing the explosiveness with which it could move and attack.

I watched the beast's head swivel, its eyes visually taking in what it could. There were no treehoppers here that it could see, but it had heard the sound. Instead, it found this meat, which was a hard prize to resist. I stared and hoped as much as I dared that it would take the bait. The giant snake-mantis prodded at the meat experimentally, its antennae swiveling. It cocked its head, then in a blink of an eye, it had grabbed a piece of the meat and shoved it down its throat. I started to smile. Shortly after that, it grabbed and ate a second piece, and then the third and final piece. Its eyes half-closed, the meal already slowing it down. It would crawl into the treetops next to digest this meal.

At least, it would have, except that’s when I forced all the sharp shards of rock I had placed in the meat back out of the vipis’ body, straight up and out through its back. The vipis made a horrible sound as its spine was mangled. The creature fell to the ground. It was still slow from a belly full of meat and now couldn’t use its legs, and wasn’t going anywhere. I brought the rock shards back down, ruining its forelegs. While this striker was a vicious killing machine, it wasn’t well armored at all. It was fairly easy to mangle the thing if I were safe from its attack.

Treepo and I waited until we were sure another wasn’t coming. They almost always hunted alone, but a second hunter could appear unexpectedly. When none did, I pushed off the shell and we approached the dying killer. I pulled the pre-prepared stone ring out of my inventory, and floated it around the beast’s snout, resizing it until the mouth was locked closed. The dying creature didn’t have much time left, but better safe than sorry.

“Ok Treepo, like we talked about,” I said. The treehopper approached the dying vipis.

* * *

Familiars gained experience in four different ways, as far as my experiments could tell. I had learned a lot about it while hunting ratmen over winter, trying different things with traps and with Treepo. The first, and most obvious, was killing something. This was part of why predator beasts were so much stronger and more dangerous than prey beasts. When survival meant killing and eating other beasts, most adult predators had an unavoidably high level.

The second was eating, although I think that was just a subset of what I considered “new experiences.” When I learned something truly novel on my own, or did something I had never done before, I usually got some experience. It wasn’t a lot, but that was a big part of how people got through their first level. For beasts, novel experiences tended to revolve around food, as they lived a simpler, survival-based life. When I fed Treepo new foods, especially foods he could never have eaten while living a normal life, he gained a bit of experience. Almost all beasts were opportunistic scavengers in order to gain experience this way. I also suspected that in this world, magic kept the worst effects of things like rot away, so beasts didn’t need as much disease resistance in order to scavenge like animals on Earth did.

The third way familiars gained experience was shared with their tamer. This was small, a fraction of a percent, but if Treepo did absolutely nothing and I gained hundreds of EXP, he would eventually get a point from that too. I actually wasn’t sure if he was siphoning off some small percentage of my experience, somehow duplicating a small percent of experience without siphoning it from me, or if the tamer bond itself was generating experience slowly which simply mimicked this shared experience, and I wasn’t willing to stop earning experience to test that last one. I wasn’t even sure whether or not I was misinterpreting this, and that the mechanisms for gaining experience from eating and the experience shared weren’t both just subsystems of the “novel experience” system that humans had. In a way, it seemed more elegant to combine those and call it that, but the difference in how much EXP a beast got from eating something new compared to how much I got made me think of it as its own system.

The last way that I knew for a familiar to gain experience was to damage a beast that their tamer killed. This was worth less experience than killing the beast themselves, but more than the usual fractional percent of shared experience. By doing even 1 HP of damage, the beast would give the tamer slightly less experience and give it to the familiar instead. I had no idea how this worked, or what the exact formula was, because each non-novel kill had diminishing returns, and the numbers were too hard to track, particularly without something to record all my data on. I was doing my best, but I really needed a notepad and a pen.

Stronger enemies would give more experience, as one might expect, but for beasts, taking part in killing a stronger enemy gave a lot more experience. My rock blade pierced the vipis’ brain, and I looked at Treepo’s stats screen, letting out a low whistle. “Wow,” I said. Treepo chittered happily.

* * *

It turned out vipis meat was actually quite tasty and delicate. I wished I had some kind of sauce to marinate it with. A teriyaki or sweet chili sauce would have been perfect.

Treepo and I had gained lots of experience from a winter of hunting ratmen and other smaller critters, and even more from killing the striking vipis. Treepo had actually pulled ahead of me. I was now level 8, and he was level 9. I had opted to split the skill points between 4-point magic and inventory, getting minor benefits in both, rather than advancing just one. With more aggressive hunting through trapping, I was able to kill many more and much stronger beasts. Level 9 for myself would come quickly.

Treepo danced excitedly around the fire as I cooked the vipis meat. He loved eating, but he seemed especially excited to eat today. The fire crackled and the meat hissed as some juices dribbled out. I quelled the fire and whipped up a small air current to cool the meat off to eat without burning our mouths.

We munched away as I deliberated. I had all my menus open, an increasingly common occurrence as I further experimented with the metasystem trying to unlock new features and figure out new exploits, so I immediately noticed as Treepo’s experience shot up after eating the vipis meat.

“Dude, you just hit level 10,” I told the little rabbit-lemur. He ignored me and kept eating.

I guess killing and eating your natural predator was a big deal for a beast.