Eight: Chapter 29

The raid had gone better than expected, and I felt giddy all the way back to the lion’s cave. All the hard work, training, and adapting to this world had paid off. Almost too well.

Is there another shoe waiting to drop?

But nothing happened on the way back to the cave. The trip was blessedly peaceful, and I arrived just as the sky was starting to brighten. Billisha stood guard at the entrance, while Aluali tended to the fire deeper in. The ingredients for the day’s porridge lay next to him. Neither looked like they’d gotten much sleep.

We went through the usual, “Hey, I’m not a horrible plant creature pretending to be human,” routine, and once that was done, Billisha spun me around to check for injuries.

Her face anxious, she asked, “No hurt? No fight?”

Aluali found a streak of dried blood on my face. “Here hurt,” he said.

Our shared spoken vocabulary in Diaksh was still limited, but they’d taught me enough to communicate the basics, even if we all sounded like a bunch of three-year-olds. “I run tree.”

“You run tree?” Billisha sounded incredulous.

“Yes. Night dark. I run tree.”

She patted me on the arm. “You safe. Most important. Hunt bishkawi later.”

Ah, she was under the impression that I’d aborted the raid on the bishkawi. “No, no. I hunt. I—” I didn’t know the word for win, so I raised my arms in triumph.

“You win?” The incredulity didn’t leave Billisha’s voice.

So I opened the pouch with the bishkawi cores, and both kids’ jaws dropped. Alauli’s eyes grew as big as quarters, while Billisha was so shocked she fell back on her butt. Their reactions were priceless.

“Come see,” I said, squatting down to open the pouch for them.

Seven of the cores were the size and shape of wasabi-covered peas. The eighth core—the alpha’s—was as big as a walnut. The kids whispered to each other in awe.

Billisha asked, “You hunt? You poison?”

I nodded and showed her the bottle. There were only a few drops left.

She shook her head like she couldn’t believe it. “Where friend Ikfael? She hurt?”

“Ikfael safe,” I said. “She stay there. We go tomorrow.”

Aluali asked Billisha a question, and they conferred for a time. I heard the words for silverlight, level, and some of the numbers, but the rest was beyond me.

I let them talk. It’d been a long night, and I was happy to sit back and rest for a time. I also had some decisions to make. I had a total of 476 silverlight gathered after hunting the chishiaxpe, and there was a chance I’d reach Level 3 at 500. That’d only be true if levels came at increments of 250, which I didn’t expect, but it was a possibility I had to plan for. I needed to decide on where to put the free attribute I’d gotten at Level 2. It was still sitting in my Status waiting to be assigned.

After re-considering my options, I decided to apply it to Constitution.

I’d seen Poison, Infection, Concussion, Bleeding, and—most disturbingly—Lethal Wounds as conditions, and while I had healing magic now, what would I do in situations when I was out of mana? Or unconsciousness? Or the victim of a surprise attack?

No, I didn’t want to risk being unprepared, and the choice to invest in Constitution was in keeping with my foundation-building approach. Besides, it was one of the attributes on the cusp of a milestone. I might get a survival-related talent out of it.

The children’s conversation stopped when I picked up the smallest of the cores.

“I have question,” Billisha said. She grabbed a handful of rocks and stacked them on top of each other. As the tower grew, she pretended to get stronger and stronger. “Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level—”

I interrupted. “Yes, I understand.”

“Oh, you understand. Good. You level?”

“Two,” I said.

Both kids exclaimed. A number of emotions passed across their faces: surprise, disbelief, respect, and at the end relief.

“You waiise,” Billisha said. “Good, good. You axxil tuaa.”

I shook my head at the unfamiliar vocabulary. “I not understand waiise. Not understand axxil tuaa.”

“I understand you.” Billisha retrieved a stick to draw on the floor. She drew two people, one large and one small. The big one was waiise. The small one was daake. In other words, they were an adult and a child.

For axxil tuaa, she drew a mass of people, and then one person separated from them. This person held a staff and wore a headdress or crown, I couldn’t tell which. The others did what this person told them to do. They were the leader.

“I question—I Level 2, I adult?”

Both kids nodded their heads. Billisha was especially enthusiastic about it. She was technically the oldest among us and seemed relieved to not have to be responsible for our little group.

“We Level 0,” Billisha said. “We child.”

“Good, good,” Aluali said, pointing to the cores. “You take silverlight. You grow strong.”

“Yes, yes,” Billisha said. “Take, take.”

They looked at me so expectantly, I couldn’t disappoint them. I started crushing cores.

After three cores, I had gathered a grand total of 506 silverlight, but there were no notifications about a level up. A shivery feeling ran through my belly, though, of being connected to the troop. There was a sense that, while I could rely on its members, I also had to fight for my place among them.

The feeling grew stronger: the troop meant everything, and at the same time it was a place of pettiness and struggle. My teeth began to chatter.

System-Eight had said that absorbing silverlight was safe, and I trusted him. The children looked on, their expressions concerned, but only mildly. To my eyes, it seemed that what they were witnessing was normal. Still, I waited for the feelings from the previous cores to dissipate before trying the last one, the biggest among them.

A feeling rushed through me: of authority, of a relentless determination to dominate all creatures great and small, and of seeking those that were powerful in order to tear their power from their bodies. My fingers trembled from the intensity of it.

I grinned. If I were to imagine the level chart thus far, it took: 50 silverlight for Level 1, 250 for Level 2, and 750 for Level 3.

Hmm… the rationale for the amounts wasn’t immediately obvious, especially the difference in jumps from Levels 1 to 2 and 2 to 3. There were a couple of different formulas that might explain it, and my best guess was that it would take either 1,750 or 3,000 total silverlight to reach Level 4. There’d be no way to know for sure until it happened, though.

Still, I grinned.

“What? What?” Billisha asked.

I cleared my throat. “Level 3.”

The kids screamed, and all the numbers flew out of my head. Billisha and Aluali jumped up to dance. They began to sing, the words a celebration. I even recognized the ones having to do with paths and levels. They clapped in rhythm to the words.

Then Billisha pulled me to standing, and the two of them did a kind of skipping step around me. The song changed and became more of a story. The tones alternated between highs and lows—the children’s voices didn’t seem to do the lower ones justice—but their enthusiasm made up for the lack of range. This lasted a good ten minutes before the dance ended with a tired laugh from both children.

“We must ikhamtocahe,” Aluali said, breathing hard. He went to the fire to gather all our food and prepare a feast.

“I help,” Billisha said.

Oh gods, it was good to sit again. I was glad the kids were excited for me, but I was genuinely exhausted. I made a note to ask about the song later, though. The story behind it was sure to be interesting.

For now, I was anxious to look at my notifications. “I—” I pointed to my head.

“You work,” Billisha said. “We prepare feast.”

I clicked on the notification from System-Eight first, and a series of celebratory tones rang in my ear. Di-ring! Di-ring! Di-ring!

Hi, System-Eight. It’s good to see you again.

Thanks for looking out for me, System-Eight. I appreciate it.

I sighed, happy for the chance to chat, even if it was fleeting. What next?

Wait, what? I have several attributes above 10. Ah, but Constitution is the first to grow into ten. Is it a freebie? Meant for children when they hit this stage of their development? That’d make sense, since the first attribute to hit 10 would likely be a child’s strongest. They’d be almost guaranteed a talent that matched them. If I’m right, then it’s a nice quality-of-life System feature.

I took a quick look at my new talent.

Yowza! This is really good, right? Well, all my talents were handy, but the part about resisting fatal injuries really caught my eye. It was exactly what I’d been looking for.

The section about the Path to Perfection was weird, though, and didn’t sound like me at all. The System was supposed to be integrating with me, so it was probably natural for the text to read differently sometimes.

One more notification to go.

Oh, that’s a nice haul. I saw increases in several key skills and picked up two new ones: Survival Caves and Knife Arts. Both then immediately ranked up to 3 and 2 respectively.

For Survival Caves, the extra ranks were the result of complementary skills in Survival Forest. No surprise there. The unusual one was Knife Arts. When I checked, the memories under the skill were of me in the kitchen and in the backyard. In them, I was butterflying chickens, quartering deer, butchering pigs, and doing any and everything else involved carving into an animal. Those were good times.

All right, Ollie. That’s enough nostalgia. What are the other big changes?

Woohoo! The level-up bonuses to my secondary attributes increased my qi capacity to 34. There was also the potential to access more through the uekisheile, but it wasn’t something I wanted to do often—taking food from other people’s plates was a big no-no in my house. The option was there for emergencies, though.

With a mana capacity of 21 and spells costing approximately four points each, I could now trigger five consecutive mana-based spells. That still wasn’t enough, though. Not by a long shot. It was just too easy to burn through my mana before, during, or after a fight.

I needed to cultivate my mana similarly to how I cultivated my qi. The problem was that I wasn’t as sensitive to it, which made it challenging to manipulate and experiment with the energy. That was why I decided to add the free attribute point I’d just gained to Spirit. The attribute not only directly contributed to my maximum mana capacity, but it would also hopefully help with the sensitivity issue too. Or maybe trigger a related talent. It shouldn’t hurt, anyway.

In the meantime, Aluali had finished making a stack of corn cakes, upon which he poured stewed blueberries. The lion skewers Billisha was grilling were also just about done, and she added the crispy meat to a mash of corn, roasted onions, and salt.

Holy hells, that smells amazing. “Let’s eat!”