Chapter 9: Chapter 9: Advancement

Poison tolerance advanced to level 4

I was in two minds about my poison resistance. On the one hand, being resistant or immune to poison would be very useful while working my way through my adventure. On the other, it would spoil my tasty pool of magical healing; I would be far more loath to feed myself to that tree if its nectar didn't ensure a quick and painless death. The skill hadn't had any noticeable effect so far, but that was likely because of how badly I was overdosing on the stuff.

Frankly, I was not doing well. This was already my fifth life, and the only monsters I'd taken out were three horned beetles, four wolves and a spider. And somewhere over a hundred munchers, but they didn't count. Admittedly, the beetles and spider were rather more substantial than their Earth counterparts, but nevertheless, any proper isekai protagonist would doubtless be in hysterics at my incompetence. I really needed to do better.

The question of how to do better was one I pondered while standing by the cavern's waterfall, trying to wash the me-soup off my precious chitin armour plates, so that I could wear them again without being sick. My skill list had grown a bit, but there was nothing particularly special in there. Nothing that gave me useful, new abilities. Just stuff that made me a little better at things I could already do.

Name: Katie
- Combat skills -
Unarmed dabbler: Level 5
Novice dodger: Level 2
Spear dabbler: Level 7
Novice blocker: Level 1
- Resistance skills -
Fear tolerance: Level 4
Pain tolerance: Level 6
Poison tolerance: Level 4
Corrosion tolerance: Level 3
- Crafting skills -
Makeshift crafter: Level 2
- Scouting skills -
Novice stealth: Level 1

Not that being better at stabbing and dodging was a bad thing. First, I needed to be more methodical in training my existing skills. If I came across another horned beetle, I shouldn't try to kill it immediately, but to goad it into a fight and keep dodging and blocking to see if I could raise my defensive skills, which were being far outstripped by my offence. Maybe I could sneak around it for a bit too, because stealth was sure to be useful. But I couldn't do that right now. I'd killed all the monsters in the area I'd already explored, aside from the tree. Actually, the tree did attack me while I was outside the pool... Maybe I could train defensive skills with it?

I would hopefully pick up another level or two of makeshift crafter when I remade my armour. I could do a bit of training with it too; there was more than enough silk to mess around with, not to mention the plants in the tree's room. I could make a bunch of random crap just for the levels.

Speaking of the tree, I could also try to deliberately train my poison tolerance skill by drinking its nectar in small doses, but with the way things had gone so far, I felt like it would be more useful to keep my quick and easy reset button. Which did raise another option. I could... train pain tolerance? Could I face what would effectively be torturing myself now in exchange for less pain later? Thinking back to my first experience with the spider, and the feeling of having my body liquefied... I really didn't want to go through that again, but what made it worse was the way I couldn't do anything about it. If I was self inflicting pain, I would know I could stop whenever I wanted, and I'd bet that would make it easier.

It was... an option. Wow, this was one hell of a messed up adventure, that I was even having thoughts like that...

I couldn't think of any way to boost my other skills without more monsters. Maybe I could get another level or two of unarmed and spear by killing munchers, but it didn't seem likely. The number I'd needed to kill for each level when I first trained unarmed had risen exponentially. There simply weren't enough of them around to get much further. That left new skills, and in particular the coloured smudges at the bottom of my vision.

Health was fine; it dropped as I got injured, hit zero when I died, then filled back up when I respawned. Perhaps it would recover on its own if I let it, but so far I hadn't had a chance. The other two had always remained full, never shrinking once. If the blue was mana, that was understandable, given that I'd never used magic, but if the yellow one was stamina, it made less sense. When I'd fled from the first wolf, or other tense situations, I'd ended up tired and breathless, but it had never dropped from full. My best guess was that both bars were only used for active skills, magical and physical respectively. In turn, that would mean that there were such skills available to learn. I needed to find them.

Of course, it was just as likely that no such skills existed. The interface just had mana and stamina bars because that's what an RPG interface should have, but they weren't actually linked up to anything...

Either way, I couldn't do anything about it right now. I did spend some time shouting out, "Fireball," and other such hopeful spell names just in case, but as expected, it did nothing except make me blush with embarrassment despite the lack of spectators. When it came to earning new skills, I simply had no good ideas for the moment.

Oh, actually... I drew one of the spider-claw knives I'd sheathed into the cord I'd tied around my waist, and sliced the nearest muncher with it. It probably counted as something other than spear or unarmed, right?

New skill gained: Dagger dabbler
Daggers may have shorter reach and less damage potential than their larger, heavier brethren, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous. Lightweight and easy to conceal, they are perfect for surprise attacks. This skill increases your competence when attacking with a dagger, and gives a slight damage bonus.

There, new skill, and since it was so low, I could level it by killing more munchers.

Dagger dabbler advanced to level 2
Dagger dabbler advanced to level 3
Dagger dabbler advanced to level 4

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With the chitin plates cleaned to the best of my ability, I considered my next direction. I still had a horn and shield left in the spider territory, but if I wanted to do skill training, it would be best to do that before adventuring further. Mainly it would depend on whether there were more spiders, but I had no way of knowing that without completely exploring the place. I decided to collect my equipment and whatever silk I could, and drag everything back to the tree for some proper training before moving on further. I'd go as far as the chamber I'd glimpsed on my first trip, then turn back.

There was now a rather substantial puddle of me surrounding the base of the first web, with a few bones poking out of the top, causing me to flare up with nausea once more. This time I managed to hold it in, and hack at the web until all of it fell in the puddle. I wasn't intending to collect any of that one, contaminated as it was.

I jumped forward, doing my best to dodge everything icky. My second spear was still on the floor where the spider had forced me to drop it, so I grabbed it to clean the cobwebs from the ceiling, creating an even bigger stick of candy floss than last time. I also carefully checked for additional wall channels hiding extra threads, and surprisingly found a few. The levels of preparedness of that spider were insane, so I made sure to break every thread I uncovered. If there were more of those things, there was no way I was letting them behind me again.

My stolen claws were amazing. Whatever they were made from, they didn't stick at all to any of the threads, and cut through even the thickest of them with ease. I'd have suspected them of being specialised for manipulating the webs, but they would also scratch my chitin armour, so they were pretty tough general weapons too. Back on Earth, I'd have much rather fought a beetle or a spider than a wolf, but it seemed like here, the wolves were decidedly low spec compared to everything else. The wolves hadn't been able to significantly damage my armour, after all. Just like the beetles, the spider materials were better.

At the next web, I dismantled it far more carefully, saving whatever material I could for my own purposes before moving on to the next. This time, with my slow movement and careful dismantling of the webs, it took hours to get back to the chamber where I'd first been attacked. My last spear and the shield were lying where I'd left them, but I'd long since run out of carrying capacity. I ended up needing to make several trips, piling up equipment in my respawn cave and the murder tree's room. I brought the wolf and spider corpses too, just in case, and then settled in to skill grind.

First up was something actually useful. With the supplies of sticky silk, I was finally able to make myself a water container, saving me a round trip back to the underground river each time I was thirsty. Not a great one, admittedly, ending up as more of a waterproof bag than a rigid container, but it was good enough. I could use a muncher shell as a scoop to drink from it.

Makeshift crafter advanced to level 3

Beyond that, I couldn't think of much I wanted that I could actually make. A soft silk mat to sleep on, and another as a blanket, was simple enough. A chair would be nice, but I was short on rigid materials. Maybe wolf bones? I did go through the trouble of dragging the corpses here, which given the narrow passage and the size of the monsters, had already involved some dismantling. It turned out that between wolf bones and copious amounts of silk, I could indeed make a decent chair, giving me somewhere other than the floor to sit while I worked.

Makeshift crafter advanced to level 4

Fire was still out, but I tasted a bit of wolf and spider meat, anyway.

New skill gained: Disease tolerance
Dirty water, contaminated food or infected wounds are all things that an adventurer needs to be wary of, even before considering even worse things like undead blight or magical plagues. This skill slightly boosts your immune system, helping your body fight off foreign living contaminants.

Foreign living contaminants? If undead blight is a living contaminant, does that mean this adventure has zombie virus? It also implies that the skill would aid against parasites, which would be a nice bonus. With that and poison tolerance at a high level, I would have to worry a lot less about what I was eating. It was... probably worth it. Especially since I gained the skill before any sort of symptoms of disease had kicked in.

The skill had come from eating the spider flesh, which tasted utterly abhorrent, but I was determined to skill grind here and wasn't going to let a mere bad taste stop me. The wolf, on the other hand, was tough, tasted worse than the munchers, and had no benefits whatsoever. Yet another way in which what should have been apex predators were inferior to this cave system's bugs. I tossed it all away into the tree's pool, where the roots hungrily grabbed it and pulled it to the bottom. "This isn't any sort of offering," I called to the tree. "I'm merely disposing of garbage."

The spider harboured other features of interest beyond the flesh. An organ at its rear contained what appeared to be unprocessed silk, a couple of spear holes in it, all stuck together in an unusable blob. I suspected some sort of magical shenanigans there, though, because the volume it contained was nowhere near enough to have produced the cocoon it wrapped me in. Another sack at the front had miraculously survived my frenzied stabbing, and was full of perfectly functional acid, or digestive fluid, or whatever it was. That would be far more useful; I could train both corrosion tolerance and... yes, pain tolerance with it. I shuddered at the thought, but did intend to go through with it. If I was ever going to do such an insane thing, next to a literal pool of painkiller was the place to do it.

But not yet. As a university student, I was well versed in the skill of procrastination already, especially over things I didn't really want to do, with no need to expend effort to grind it. So I carefully put the bag of acid aside, and started making a bunch of random stuff from plants and silk.

Makeshift crafter advanced to level 5
Makeshift crafter advanced to level 6

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