Chương 17: Welcome To The Jungle

Vin took a deep breath in through his nose, savoring the fresh air and swaths of open meadow before him. After discovering new world fragments and roaming the open landscape, returning to camp had almost felt like he was willingly walking back into that small cell the System had yanked him from back on Earth.

"It's hard to believe I've only been on this world for a couple of days," he mused, thinking over everything he'd accomplished as he took off toward the unknown fragment bordering the one he was beginning to think of as 'the sea of snakes'.

"How fast do people normally level up Alka?"

'It depends on a lot of factors of course. Give a Leatherworker endless high quality hides and they'll level up in the blink of an eye. Stop a Blacksmith from getting their hands on any metal, and their progress stops entirely. On top of that, leveling gets a bit trickier as you start prestiging and your class narrows. The journey from level 1 to level 20 tends to take anywhere between a few weeks to a few years, depending on a person's environment and how driven they are.

But the higher levels are far more complex.'

"Complex? How so?" Vin watched a family of sqerrets roll around and play in an open field as he ran past, marveling once again how he could maintain such a running pace literally forever. Alka was quiet for a moment, as though unsure how to answer his question.

'When you prestige and select a new class, you grow in power naturally, but your focus narrows. Take myself for example. I chose Fighter as my base class because it is more well-rounded than something like Swordswoman or the like. As you'd expect, with a class like Fighter, I excelled and grew with fighting. It didn't matter if I was fighting a greentail or some punk that looked at me funny, a fight was a fight.'

'However, by prestiging into the Slayer class, my class focus would have narrowed. Basically, to continue leveling I would have needed to focus my efforts more towards fighting monsters and dangerous creatures rather than people or animals. Or at least I think that's how it works. Again, I died almost immediately after receiving my new class, so I might not be the best person to ask.'

"Fair." Vin continued running, just enjoying the feeling of the wind through his hair as he ran.

"Do you have to prestige when you hit level 20?"

'I think so? That's like asking if you have to pick up a sack of coins you found lying on the ground. If it's even an option, you'd be a fool not to.'

"I don't know, what if I don't want to go from being just a general Explorer to like, an 'Explorer of Forests,' or whatever the System offers me?"

'Whatever the System offers you will be based on the choices you made going from level 1 to 20.' He could practically feel Alka rolling her eyes.

'I've never heard of anyone being disappointed with their prestige options. If you don't want to be an Explorer of Forests, don't spend so much time exploring forests. It's really that simple.'

"I guess." Vin spent the rest of the run in silence, thoughts of his future bouncing around in his head as he ran. What did he want to be an Explorer of?

'I hope you like swimming.' Vin tried to ignore Alka's cackling laughter inside his head as he stood on the border between fragments, staring out at the miles and miles of open ocean. Just like the other two borders he'd seen, it was as though a giant had carved an endless straight line into the earth, snatching away the preexisting terrain. But instead of placing a new chunk of land in its place, this time they'd decided to fill the entire thing with water instead.

"How does this even work?" Vin exclaimed, watching the gentle waves roll in and crash against the edge of their grassland fragment like it was a solid wall. The ground he was standing on should have eroded away by now, or crumbled at least partially into the sea. But instead, the two fragments looked as though they weren't even touching one another.

'Gods and magic,' Alka managed between her laughter.

'Don't think too hard about it.' Grumbling, Vin watched the crashing waves for a few minutes, trying to decide what to do. He was a pretty good swimmer, and he only could have gotten better with all the points he'd had dumped into endurance. But he still didn't think that made it a good idea to try and swim his way through this fragment. What if this world had sea monsters? Or poisonous sharks? Hell, he wouldn't put it past the Gods that be to have filled this one with snakes as well, just to mess with him.

Sighing, Vin stuck his head through the invisible barrier separating the fragments, careful not to fall forward into the water. Even just sticking his head through was enough to feel the salt in the air and the spray of water on his face. New fragment discovered! 500 exp gained.

"I bet there's some super cool underwater city down there or something," he continued to grumble as he stepped back, staring longingly into the water.

"You just wait, Atlantis!" He shouted, shaking his hand at the vast ocean.

"When I get some sort of water breathing magic, I'm coming back for you!"

'I wouldn't count too much on that,' Alka said as he turned and began running alongside the impossible border between meadow and ocean.

'Without a magic focused class or a teacher, few people ever get their hands on even a single spell. You got lucky with the stone village.'

"Then I'll keep making my own luck," Vin argued, not willing to give up on his goals of learning more magic now that he'd had a small taste.

"I have the Spellcraft skill, and I'm dumping points into magic like it's going out of style. All I need to do is find more runes and I'll figure it out for myself!" If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

'Whatever you say.' With Vin's speed, it didn't take them too long to hit the next fragment bordering his own, and he had to stop and marvel at his first glance of three worlds converging at a single point. The first fragment, where he currently stood, was a gentle meadow with small hills rolling off into the distance. The next, a massive ocean stretching as far as the eye could see. And adjacent to both of those, was what Vin could only describe as an impossible forest.

In all the time he'd spent bumming around back on Earth, he'd hiked through more forests than he could count. National parks, private property, even just random woodlands scattered across the country. He was pretty confident he knew what a forest looked like. And it wasn't this. Vin stared, bug eyed, at the hundreds of different species of trees all scattered throughout the edge of the forest. Bark color, leaf shape, trunk width, branch growth… It looked as though no two trees were even remotely alike.

"How does a forest like this even happen?" He muttered, stepping across the border and laying a hand on the closest tree; a thick one that reminded him of the classic oak, other than the fact that its leaves were nearly a foot wide, and the trunk seemed to split into four separate trees at head height. New fragment discovered! 500 exp gained.

'I don't like this world,' he felt Alka shudder, somehow pushing herself even further inside him in an attempt to escape the wall of trees.

'Trees mean danger to my people. This is like walking into a living hell.'

"It's certainly weird… but I don't think it's that dangerous. No creepy, super thick canopy above us at least like in your world, just a regular one," he pointed out. While looking up, he spotted a striped lemur hanging from one of the nearby trees. The lemur gave him a curious look, almost as if it was wondering where he had come from. A sudden thought popped into Vin's head.

Carefully watching the lemur and dismissing his experience notification for discovering a new species, he took a slow step back, exiting the forest fragment. Immediately after crossing the border, the lemur's eyes widened and it looked around, as though trying to figure out where he had gone.

"I don't think animals are able to cross between fragment borders," Vin said, watching the lemur panic at his sudden disappearance.

"Hell, it looks like they aren't even aware of them somehow."

'Gods and magic,' Alka repeated. Vin continued watching the lemur until it eventually gave up on trying to find him and darted away, swinging between the different types of branches. Maybe it was returning to its family to warn them of the scary, vanishing human it had found.

"That's another thing," he said, venturing back into the forest and beginning to navigate through the dense tree line.

"Each fragment is only like 12 miles long at its widest point. I'm no biologist, but I'm pretty certain these fragments shouldn't be able to maintain their ecosystem's as well as they have. Especially with random monsters roaming around."

'What part of 'Gods and magic' are you struggling with here exactly?'

"All of it I guess," Vin snapped, nearly tripping over a squat tree with branches that reached down and dug into the ground like roots.

"My world didn't have Gods and magic. At least, it probably didn't. If it did, it certainly wasn't as noticeable as this. I'm just used to there being fairly simple, easy to understand explanations for most things."

'I don't know what could possibly be simpler than Gods and magic.' Sighing, Vin shelved the argument, not in the mood to leap into a theological debate with the ghost inhabiting his physical form at the moment. Obviously she was right, as what else could you possibly call beings capable of weaving fragments of entirely different worlds together besides Gods? But it still irked him to a degree when he was curious about how something worked and the only answer he received was 'Gods and magic.'

Maybe that's why magic interests me so much? I obviously can't just become a God, but nobody can stop me from studying magic. Vin contemplated his minor revelation as he continued deeper into the forest, stopping periodically to admire a particularly wacky looking tree or observe a new species. He found a skilled chameleon blending in with different colored bark as it hunted some form of hummingbird darting around too fast for him to make out.

He watched a family of moles that seemed to burrow through wood as if it were dirt, setting up colonies throughout a few of the different larger trees. There were even a handful of foot-long centipedes that spiraled their way up the thinner trees like a snake, disappearing into the colorful canopy. He didn't like that last one all that much. Or at least, he wouldn't have if the System hadn't sent him a much-anticipated notification immediately after he spotted it. New species discovered! 100 exp gained. Level up!

Explorer lvl 7. +3 Attribute points to spend.

"Well that makes the new nightmare fuel worth it at least! Shame some of the levels only give you attribute points and nothing else."

'Oh no, only free Godly power beyond mortal comprehension; woe is you!' Vin rolled his eyes and dropped the three points into magic, finally bringing his new favorite attribute into the double digits at a respectable 12 and enjoying the sensation of his plasma-like mana thickening. He still didn't exactly know how much increasing his magic was doing for him as he hadn't found another spell to try and learn yet, but he felt confident he was making a good choice!

"Man, seven thousand experience to hit level 8," he muttered, eyeing his next threshold as he ducked and crouched his way under a series of low hanging branches.

"I'm starting to see why some people take years to hit level 20."

'You have no idea. You've basically had most of your experience handed to you on a silver platter up until now. We combat classes actually have to work to level up you know!' Before Vin could reply, he emerged from the cluster of low branches he was walking under and stood up. And found himself staring at the very sharp looking tips of six arrows.

A half dozen archers, each wearing clothing and armor that looked like it was made from woven leaves and strips of bark tied together, had arrows nocked and trained on his chest. Vin knew next to nothing about weapons, but even he could tell that all of the short bows his ambushers held looked to be exceptionally well cared for, and he had no doubt that all six of the archers knew exactly how to use them. The strangest thing, however, were the archers' features.

They had ears far thinner than a regular person's that ended in points, and their eyes were narrow like a cats. Their faces were sharp and angular, and despite looking like a mixture of men and women, each of the archers had long hair secured in a thick braid, some of them reaching all the way to their waists. It only took Vin a second to realize what these people reminded him of, and the System confirmed his suspicion. New sentient race discovered! 5, 000 exp gained.

While Vin took in the hunting party of what had to be elves, he slowly raised his arms over his head, hoping he wasn't about to be turned into a human pincushion. Holding his breath, he heard Alka mutter begrudgingly inside his head.

'Alright, maybe your class comes with some risk to it.'