Chương 20: Chapter Twenty: The Long List of Things She Did Not Know

Alice had several scratches, particularly in the forearm and the shoulder but they were all shallow and she managed to clean them and bandage them quite quickly. There was nothing much she could do for the bruises but they were nothing that would trouble her after some rest. She cleaned the knife on the grass and looked at the body. This was the first Marsh Boggart that she had ever killed on her own initiative.

Considering that she had fought two other Lesser Boggarts before it and come out doing quite well, she felt satisfied with her progress. Still as she looked at the System notifications, she couldn't help but stand there for a moment and think about games. In every game she had played, and they were few for she hadn't been much of a gamer in her past life, killing a creature generally resulted in some sort of reward. If you killed a wolf, you got a wolf pelt out of it. The boar dropped its tusk.

Sometimes there was a coin or a potion, which made no naturalistic sense but was comprehensible as game logic. The point was that the System rewarded you for your efforts. You killed the thing and you were given what the thing was worth. Then you moved on. Alice had killed many of these beasts so far and she only now began to wonder about the implications. She knew this was not a game. This world had made that clear in basically every way available to it.

But she had to admit that there was more game logic in this world than she had initially thought. Perhaps… There was a dead Marsh Boggart in front of her, its iron-burnt tissue discoloured at both wound sites, and she started thinking… maybe not drops, but… body parts? Dr. Hyde had quite an extensive library and Alice had been fortunate to read from his selection often during her stay in the surgery.

One of the books that she had skimmed, that had not been of particular interest for her at the time, had been a book on medicine and tonics. That book had a chapter on creature-derived ingredients. She had not read it carefully at the time, but from what she understood Hyde had used something from magical creatures and herbs in the tonic that had treated her. In retrospect, creature components, properly harvested, had medicinal applications, and as such were likely worth quite a bit.

She examined the body with this in mind. The long fingers first, because she kept noticing them, three joints where a human had two, the last one angling back at a direction that was anatomically peculiar and explained at least some of the reach she had consistently misjudged. The claws at the ends were not horn, not quite bone, some third category she didn't have a name for. Durable, clearly, given they had caught her shoulder through the coat. She looked at its wounds for a moment longer.

Iron damage presented differently from ordinary injury to these creatures, something responding to the contact as though the iron itself were an active agent rather than just a sharp piece of metal. She did not know if this meant the tissue retained any useful properties post-mortem or was simply tissue that had reacted unusually and would now decompose like anything else. The fading discoloration around them suggested the latter, but she was not certain.

The hide was thick, with bare scarred patches along the shoulders and forearms she had noted during the fight. That might have value. The claws might have value. Its meat might be delicious and a rare tonic, or poison to anything human for all she knew. She had no way of knowing which, or how to extract any of it, or what condition it needed to be in, or how quickly anything degraded. She had never watched a butcher work.

She had passed butcher shops in Aldgate and noted the smell and the hooks in the windows and taken a different turning. In her previous life she had been a vegetarian for four years, which had not in any meaningful sense prepared her for this. Yes, she consumed meat occasionally now but…

The practical gap between knowing that a creature probably had valuable components and knowing how to retrieve them without poisoning herself, contaminating them, or producing something that would not survive the journey home was, she was sure, significant. She took a few steps back and did not touch it. Even if she knew what to do, she could not sell anything at the pitch. That was obvious. A flower seller arriving with the forearm of a fey-adjacent beast was not in any way going to be a good look for her.

She could perhaps approach a physician? She did not know any physicians other than Hyde and while Hyde had clearly used creature components, she did not know how he sourced them, and asking him directly would require explaining how she came to have a Marsh Boggart forearm in her possession. Yes, he had his suspicions but there were things like suspicions and then there was evidence. Was harvesting creatures even legal on the license she was about to register for? Almost certainly not.

She had planned on a freelance forager's license. It covered plants, berries, wild herbs, fungi. It said nothing about creature parts, which were almost certainly a different category with different requirements and different fees and different declarations. She would need a book, or Hyde, or someone who knew the practical side of this rather than just the theory. Although she needed to know the theory too.

It was mildly infuriating that the system had given her a [Forage] skill but apparently saw no need to follow up with anything useful about what the creatures she was sharing the marsh with were actually worth. Weren't there games where the gamer's questions were easily answered? As in a tutorial? Where was her tutorial? She stood looking at the body for a moment longer, and then noticed something that was going to embarrass her. She had used [Notice Detail] actively during that fight.

And it had been incredibly helpful. She had used it and [Observe] on everything she encountered: terrain, plant clusters, the underside of suspicious awnings, books, buildings, even random rocks. She had not used it on the living. Or the dead. In one of the games she had abandoned at the third hour, there had been a wolf. She had killed it and afterward, she had not examined the wolf because she had not thought to and the game had not prompted her and apparently she had missed out on loot.

She saw now that this was a problem of hers." Observe," she said, looking at the Boggart. [Observe] – Active. The physical details overtook her first, the specific structure of the long fingers, the exact angle of the last joint's doubling-back, the distribution of its wounded tissue, which was broader than she'd noted during the fight. And then, overlaid in a corner of the body, a small golden rectangular notification symbol. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Alice did not curse, but really, really wanted to. She focused on the symbol and… Marsh Boggart Race: Boggart Type: Marsh Beast (Subtype: Imaginary) Evolution: Tier II (Uncommon) Level: 12 Attributes Vigour – (Deceased) Acuity – (Deceased) Spirit – (Deceased) She had prepared herself for it and still was surprised. Type? Evolution? New, but she could understand what they meant based on context clues and pop-culture osmosis from her past life. But what on Earth was Spirit? And why was it listed under Attributes?

She only had the first two of those. Did the lack of it make her special or did its addition make this Boggart special? Too many questions, too little answers. Then she looked further down. Skills (RESTRICTED) Traits (RESTRICTED) Weaknesses (RESTRICTED) Quests (RESTRICTED) Alright, so beasts had skills and traits and weaknesses. Understandable. But why did they have Quests? Or were Quests more common than she had thought and dependent on the person/creature?

She couldn't imagine its Quest being the nonsensical title of a 19th century book. She tried to expand its Skills, although she did not have much hope. A notice appeared in the same corner of her vision: RESTRICTED. Further information unavailable at current skill level. She tried Weaknesses, because knowing a creature's weaknesses before fighting it seemed like the kind of information that would have been useful several weeks ago and she was feeling petty now. RESTRICTED.

Further information unavailable at current skill level. Resistances. The same notice. Traits. Again, no difference. It was silly checking each one, but she would have regretted it more not doing it. She looked at the stat block for a moment. And it was a stat block quite obviously. It was a very tidy way of telling her she had access to the information a student might find in a basic taxonomy book. Classification, level, broad threat tier.

Nothing about what the creature feared, what it resisted, how it worked, or how to kill it more efficiently. She had killed it anyway, which was something, but she would have appreciated knowing if there were more weaknesses other than its fear of iron. They could end up useful in future fights. Unavailable at current skill level. [Observe] was at level ten. Whatever came after, and she still didn't know exactly what that was, it apparently came with considerably more information than she currently had access to.

She added this to the long list of reasons why she needed to work out what upgrading skills required. She looked back toward the section where she had killed the regular Boggarts earlier and felt a retroactive and somewhat pervasive embarrassment at not having checked those either. She made a note to use [Observe] on everything from here on. Every corpse certainly. Every creature, ideally while it was still alive and the attributes would mean something useful. Every suspicious being. Pets.

Even humans, if she could get away with it. She may not gain much from practicing [Observe] currently, but it would help build her knowledge base and [Notice Detail] could certainly do with a few level-ups. She picked up the basket and found a dry patch of bank above the reed line and sat down to rest.

Attributes Vigour Lv. 5 (10/50) Acuity Lv. 7 (23/70) Both low. Lower than she usually let them get. She had pushed hard and the numbers reflected it. She found her bread and cheese at the bottom of the basket and ate slowly, looking at the marsh, listening to the reeds, keeping the knife where she could reach it. Twenty minutes passed. Your attribute has leveled up. She looked at the notification. Then she looked at her bread. Then she thought about the surgery.

She had been at Vigour 12/30 when she woke up in Hyde's surgery, which was less than half. That had not leveled up anything. She had lain there for four days recovering and nothing had moved. She had been at Vigour 1/30 after the first Marsh Boggart fight, which was nearly nothing. Hyde had treated her, the tonic had done some extraordinary healing, and the level-up had followed. But that was an external intervention. Without Hyde's tonic, would the level-up have happened? She genuinely did not know.

On normal pitch days, the status screen in the evening usually showed Vigour somewhere around five or six points off maximum from standing and carrying and arranging flowers for seven hours. That had never triggered a level-up either. There had been another instance she had thought about repeatedly without being able to resolve it.

A couple of weeks ago she had killed four Lesser Boggarts in a single run, more than she had ever managed before, more than she had planned, and come back with Vigour considerably lower than usual. The level-up she had only noticed the following morning, with Vigour reaching Lv. 5. She had had some ideas about it including needing to simply exhaust an attribute to level it up, but that had likely happened during the first fight with the Flicker Demon and she had not seen anything about Attributes back then.

But now, sitting on the bank with cheese in her hand, Alice thought she had figured out the pattern. Too little depletion: nothing. The body had barely been stressed. Too much depletion: probably nothing, or worse. After the first Marsh Boggart encounter, she hadn't had her attributes level up until she had healed some. So likely, the system didn't just reward keeping her body in genuine crisis, depleted to the point of severe injury or incapacitation. She was too busy keeping herself alive to even think about it.

The sweet spot was somewhere in between. Around a fifth to a quarter of the maximum value of each attribute, most likely. Close enough to register serious effort. Far enough from critical that recovery was not a matter of survival. And the type of depletion mattered as well. The surgery Vigour had been lost to injury and blood loss and staying upright. That wasn't the same as using skills actively, pushing the physical system through deliberate effort. Like being ill, the body was tired, but not in the right way.

There was no growth in it. This reminded her about what she knew about muscles from her own world. Similar to strength training. Too little effort: nothing to repair, nothing to strengthen. Too much: injury, regression. The point was to apply the right amount of stress, then give the body (and in this case, the System) time and resources to adapt and to grow. I can plan for this, Alice thought as she finished the bread. Knowing the approximate target range, I can organize the runs around it.

This would require more testing, but overall, the theory was solid enough to act on. She looked at the orange-tinted sky. It was not long until sundown. It was a good, productive day, but she'd better end it soon and hurry home. She packed the basket and stood. It was as she was covering the strawberries, when– [Threat Detection] – Passive. She didn't think, her body just moved. [Dodge] – Passive.

Something came out of the western reeds fast and low and passed through the air where her head had been a half-second before. She landed two feet to the right in a crouch, knife already in her hand, basket dropped. Her heart was loud and sudden and she did not move anything except her eyes. The western reeds were still. A foot, leather boot, definitely human, connected hard with the side of her ribs from behind, and the ground came up to meet her.