Ch11: A Bright New World

Krvavy winces as she emerges from the cave into the blinding light, where she loudly groans in annoyance as soon as she takes a look around her. She is in a ravine. A rather deep ravine. She was hoping that she’d be able to explore freely now, but it looks like that isn't the case.

Turning away from the river that she followed out, which cascades down into the rapids below, Krvavy continues along the path. While it is noticeably leading upwards... this ravine is really quite deep. So she has quite the way to go before reaching the top.

At least she isn’t just surrounded by boring rocks, like in the last section of the cave. There are a bunch of plants along the path and clinging to the edges of the ravine, from mosses and shrubs, to vines and even small trees. It gives her a bunch of things to idly use Inspect on, though none of them seem particularly special.

While Krvavy does like the large cave that seems to be completely hers – if there were any animals in there they were scared and smart enough to hide – she is kind of annoyed with the rest of this starting area. She chose not to go treasure hunting in the mountains because she didn’t want to deal with the boring mountain terrain. But it looks like that is what she gets anyway.

After some time she reaches the top of the ravine, and while it opens up a fair bit Krvavy is still surrounded by rocky and hilly terrain, albeit with more evergreen trees scattered about. The sun is high in the sky, though not directly above her. She can’t tell if it is just before noon, just after noon, or if the sun is just at that angle because she is, presumably, in the northern hemisphere.

Either way, she has quite some time until dark, so where should she head off to? The canyon that her cave is hidden away in is itself pretty noticeable, so doesn’t really have to worry too much about getting lost. Though it does narrow her options down, as from where she is standing there aren’t any places to cross it. Looking up at the rocky hills around her, Krvavy decides to make her way up the tallest one. That way she can get a good look at the surroundings, and hopefully find the forest and plains that she was promised.

From the look of it, the tallest hill is the one behind her, which would contain her large cave. Calling it a rocky hill like the description for the wildlands does feels like a bit of an understatement though, as this is definitely a mountain. Maybe not the tallest mountain, but a mountain nonetheless.

It isn’t too steep, but it does look like she’ll have to do a bit of climbing to get to the top. So, she’d better get started and stop wasting daylight.

“Whew...” Krvavy breathes out as she settles down to take a break, munching on some of her tough jerky. The canopy of a rather wide tree hangs close above her head, providing a fair bit of shade, and some decently comfortable moss covers the rock that she is sitting on. This tree is a Thunderberry Rowan, according to Inspect. Not that it looks particularly special.

It took her at least an hour, probably a fair bit longer than that, but she has now made it pretty close to the top of this rather rocky ‘hill’

She saw quite a few animals on her way up here, and she used Inspect on as many as she could. Most of what she saw were birds, mainly Rockwing Pheasants, Ruffled Moss Grouses, and Frost Scaled Quails. While she isn’t the most knowledgeable about animals, let alone birds, she is pretty sure that those are all just fantasy versions of normal birds. Kind of lazy of the developers, but she honestly can’t blame them. It’d be a nightmare coming up with thousands of completely original animals.

But she didn’t just see birds. For one, there were quite a few mountain goats around. Or as Inspect called them, Rocky Hill Goats. It is like the game is mocking her... But beyond those she also saw some Sicklehorn Sheep and Flat-Eared Rock Hares.

It is pretty good that there seem to be so many animals in the area, as her jerky won’t last forever. Though considering how realistic everything is, she’ll probably have to look up some videos on how to butcher and cook the animals first... It’d be annoying if she gave herself food poisoning, and embarrassing if her first death was from eating bad meat.

Honestly, if she’d thought about it sooner she might have taken some kind of hunting skill during character creation... She really didn’t need an axe skill and a two-handed skill. Sure, she’ll be better at fighting, but that is useless if she is just going to starve to death.

Shaking her head, Krvavy checks her stat sheet. Her stamina only seems to go down when she is exerting herself, so the casual walk out of her cave was fine, but as soon as she started climbing rocks and steep hills it started going down. Granted, it didn’t drop all that much, and with how fast it regenerates taking a minute or two is enough to fill it back up. Though the fact that she has to carry her axe around the whole time does make all of this a little difficult.

Speaking of climbing, a few minutes before she stopped for a snack Krvavy got a new passive skill.

Climbing: The skill of ascending and descending vertical, or near-vertical, surfaces and planes. Associated attributes = Endurance & Dexterity.

Hopefully that’ll be useful and keep her from falling to her death, but the best thing about it is that getting a new skill gave her some experience. Fifty experience, to be exact. She has no idea how much she needs for the next level, but she won’t say no to some free exp.

Using Inspect on near everything around her also caused it to level up, though nothing seems to have changed and it only gave her little bit of experience. The popup was kind of annoying though, as it just congratulated her on getting Inspect to level six and repeated its description again. It will get old very quickly if that is what happens each time she levels a skill up.

“Hmm... Okay. System, or whatever,” Krvavy says out loud, “don’t show me any info boxes regarding levelling up my skills or abilities unless they contain something new. Now, will that do anything...?”

The only way she can test that would be to level up one of her current skills, but that is easier said than done. Ever since Inspect reached level six she has been absolutely spamming it on everything she sees. But it hasn’t levelled up again yet. If she had to bet, then she'd say that Inspect only gains experience when she uses it on something new, which is a bit of a shame as she can’t grind it to max as easily... And it is her easiest skill to level up...

But enough of that. She has finished her snack of jerky, which really just feels like eating dried leather strips, so she’d better continue. There is just a bit more for her to climb before she is truly at the top.

It seems like Krvavy was right about this being the tallest hill, though it doesn’t look like it is the tallest by all that much. It has been a few hours since she left the cave, and with the sun making its way across the sky Krvavy is able to get a rough idea of the cardinal directions. Assuming that the sun sets in the west, at least.

From what Krvavy can see, the rocky hills extend much further to the south before being swallowed up by dense woodlands, which seems to thin out towards the south-west. She isn’t quite sure due to how far away it is, but she thinks there might also be a mountain range in the south beyond that forest. The west, north, and east all seem to be dominated by the expansive plains that the description mentioned, though it seems to be separated by a river a little to the west.

“Well, at least it isn’t all rocks and hills...” Krvavy mumbles, taking in the view. She can’t really make out any details, but there don’t seem to be any obvious settlements anywhere that she can see. Not that she was expecting any, what with this being a supposedly untamed wilderness and all.

It doesn’t really matter if there are any settlements or not though, just as long as she doesn’t get bored. After all, she is using this as chance to relax and unwind, for the most part. Just exploring and wandering around this admittedly beautiful environment will be enough for her. At least for now.

And speaking of exploring, Krvavy is left wondering which direction she should head off to first. It would be hard to get lost in the plains, provided she doesn’t go far enough to lose sight of these hills, but there also doesn’t look like there is all that much to do out there. The dense woodland is the complete opposite of that, as there is a good chance that she’d get turned around in there, but there is bound to be something beneath the thick canopy. She could also just stay in the hilly area and continue exploring here, as it wouldn’t hurt to get better acquainted with her starting area first.

Taking a few moments to consider that, Krvavy ultimately decides that she’ll head north to the plains. Not to explore the grass-covered expanse, but so she has a point where she can start exploring the hilly area from. After all, it goes much farther south than it does north, so she might as well start with the smaller section closer to her cave.

Though from the look of it she might not be using her cave all that much, as this place is far too large for her to fully explore if she returned there every night to sleep. She can still use it to store things, and of course bathe there, but she’ll probably be camping outside most nights. That does sound kind of nice though, especially since she should be able to handle the cold, if her temperature resistances are anything to go by.

Well, she’d better get a move on and see how much progress she can make before the sun sets.

Settling down into an alcove, Krvavy takes out another strip of jerky and begins eating. They are surprisingly filling, so Krvavy figures that she has enough on her for breakfast and maybe lunch tomorrow. After that she’ll have to head back to pick up more. Or go hunting.

But for now, she just has to sit on some moss and watch the stars. It really is beautiful here. She has never seen the sky so full of stars. Back home she was lucky to even see the sky past all the buildings and clouds, and when she did see the night sky it was always a murky grey colour without a single star visible. Far too much light pollution.

She doesn’t know her constellations, but she is pretty sure this sky is completely different. There are a lot of colourful stars, mostly purples, blues, and whites, but there are a lot of greens, yellows, and reds as well.

It almost makes her forget that she levelled up just a little while ago. It seems like her attempt to only see notifications when she gets something new worked, as Climbing levelled up twice and Inspect levelled up again without her realizing it.

Level Up! You have reached Level 2. As a Drakling blessed by a divine power, you have 5 attribute points to allocate and have gained +2 to Might & Toughness. If not allocated by the time you fall asleep it will be done automatically.

There seems to be a timestamped log with all of the notifications that she has seen, so its no problem if she accidentally closes one. Now, where to put those five stat points? She hasn’t really had a problem with stamina yet, as she hasn’t even seen it drop past half, and other than a few bumps and scrapes she hasn’t really needed all this health either. So no point in adding more to Endurance or Toughness right now...

Maybe she could use some Dexterity though? It could help her with climbing, which would be nice. And some more Might wouldn’t hurt either, as she seems to weigh quite a bit and pulling herself up isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do. And lugging her axe around has only made that harder. It does feel like a little bit of a waste to put points into Might when she gets some for free every level, but it also seems to be her main attribute so... it can’t hurt to shore that up some more.

Making up her mind, Krvavy decides to put two points into Might and three into Dexterity.

It looks like her Mana is increasing just from levelling up, even just by a little bit. And it is nice that she can increase her Health by a decent amount just from the free stats, though putting some extra points into Might also helped with that.

Well, its about time for Krvavy to sleep. It has been a long day of hiking and climbing, and she should probably exit the game already.

“Alright. System, save and exit. Is that all I have to–?”