Chapter 15: Road or Gauntlet?
“Ugh, this brick road must be the highway to hell.” Sam muttered to himself as he finished dispatching the seventh group of goblins. Also he wasn’t sure if it was just him but it felt like the goblins must’ve been chugging creatine in secret because he was almost certain they were getting stronger and more muscular.
He’d been walking down the brick road for the better part of a day now. The frequency of goblin packs wasn’t unmanageable but it happened often enough that he wanted to find a good tree to climb so he could sleep with a modicum of security. It was a good thing that the goblins seemed to have just barely enough grey matter to eat and enact violence without any room left for much else. He didn’t know how to feel about the little green critters, sure they were trying to kill him but at the same time it almost felt like he was kicking dogs. They kind of reminded him of really pissed off really big chihuahuas, if chihuahuas were bipedal, green, and recklessly willing to attack things bigger than itself instead of being cowards. Still he understood that the scope of the wider world didn't care as much for individual life as it did for the survival of a species. Predator and prey relationships developed all the time in ecosystems and were integral in maintaining the cycle of energy that kept the entire thing functioning. But it was hard for Sam to remember the bigger picture of everything when he was participating as an individual by cutting down the things in front of him in order to live. Moral and scientific quandaries aside, the constant fighting was good for some things– like the fact that they led to him finally getting some skill levels.
[Heal (Basic)] → [Lvl.3 Heal (Basic)]
[Improvement (Common)] → [Lvl.2 Improvement (Common)]
[Prayer/Meditation (Common)] → [Lvl.4 Prayer/Meditation (Common)]
[Passive Regeneration (Uncommon)] → [Lvl.1 Passive Regeneration (Uncommon)]
His intuition had been right, many of his skills required combat or perhaps some level of danger in order to improve. The improvements to prayer though may have just been because he only happened to check now since he felt a shift in his soul when his other skills leveled up. He did recall feeling something similar after praying a few times during the tutorial, especially that time when he felt the skill use some qi and mana. At the time though he wasn’t as intimately aware of how his soul interacted with everything compared to now. Regardless, there was something satisfying and almost addictive to the feeling of watching those numbers go up. It reminded Sam of the elation he got whenever he achieved a new personal best when lifting weights.
He decided to slow down his pace so that he could take in the surroundings better. He did need a tree to spend the night in. The terrain around him at the moment wasn’t exactly the best for finding shelter. The road where he was carved into the side of the mountain, with steep forested ground accompanying it on either side. Sam didn’t want to traverse the road at night, something about that felt ominous. While it may have just been fear and nothing else, he preferred being comfortable with his journey. This did mean that he had to find a tree around his general vicinity and the issue he was finding with that was that regardless of which tree he decided to settle in, there would be higher ground above him. That too gave him the heebie-jeebies. He did find some humour in his current predicament considering he was completely fine with the total darkness behind the pink door but fear wasn’t always rational so he didn’t let it bother him too much. Realizing he wasn’t going to find anything that fully satisfied him regardless of the effort, he decided to pick a tree a little ways away from the road on the more elevated side.
From his perch atop the tree, he could still see the road if he tried hard enough. That is to say that the foliage was dense enough to fully obscure the road from his regular sight but not when he actively pushed soulsight. He quite liked the trait, but it was still demanding on him if used while pushing the trait to give more detail. Sam supposed that might be because the human brain just wasn’t meant to perceive things in that way so the amount of stimulus took an effort to manage. He found that if he used the enhanced vision for too long while focusing on a wide field of view that he started to get migraines. He shuddered at the thought of what it might have felt like if he gained the trait before his improved stats and physique. The description of the thermos did just say it improved the body and there was no reason to believe that it excluded the brain as a body part. With that assumption in mind, he figured that soulsight might have been debilitating were it not for all of his efforts and successes before gaining it. For that he was quite thankful. Having given things more thought it felt more and more that the grove and that pink door were meant for him. He couldn’t even imagine what someone who ran into that trial would do if they didn’t have enough overlap with Sam’s experiences prior to entering it. Come to think of it, Sam didn’t even know if there was a way out from the cavern without completing the trial. Regardless he made it out and stronger at the end which is what mattered. He made sure to thank God for the help so far. Considering all his luck in the process of the tutorial, he decided there must’ve been some kind of divine intervention involved. Too many things lined up perfectly and it’s not like he was the protagonist of a serialized web novel.
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In this time of quiet contemplation before bed, as the sky fully darkened, Sam thought about his older sister. The only thing he knew about her was that she existed and was around three years older than him. He didn’t know much because it was always a touchy subject to talk about with his dad because it inevitably brought up the topic of his mother and there seemed to be a really painful history there. He had an unopened letter from his father back in his apartment that probably contained the information that he would need to find his sister but now he had no way of knowing if he would ever find that letter again. He had not been able to read it because it always felt like if he opened it that it would finalize the fact of his father’s death. It was a painful truth to face and one that he was thankful this shattering of reality proved as a great distraction. Still he did cry at the cherry blossoms, it was nice to cry sometimes, especially because of how rare it was for him. Processing his emotions in a way that didn’t intellectualize it and let himself actually feel the feelings was a difficult thing for him. He wanted to be able to meet his sister at some point, maybe there was some magic now that would be able to help with that. She was now the last living connection he had to his father, and he felt like she deserved to get to know the man even if it was just through Sam’s recollection of memories.
Allowing his thoughts to come to a lull, Sam pulled out his two new favorite possessions, the gourd of magically cold water and the thermos that fed him. That gourd really was a life saver, and the food from the thermos was so damn good.
Sam woke sometime into the night because he heard and then inevitably saw something pretty cool. At the base of one of the trees nearby there was a giant boar looking creature that had glowing green moss covering its back, eating some shrubbery. This was his first time seeing something alive that moved and wasn’t goblins– in the tutorial at least. It was also his first time seeing magical fauna, or at least he assumed as such. To be fair there was a chance that the mossy stuff on the creature’s back could just be bioluminescent through a mundane process instead of through magic but it was more exciting to think that it was glowing because of magic. Also the thing was eating some of the berries he had pocketed before and those did feel like they had some magic in them so it stood to reason that because the boar ate magic that it too would be in some way magical. It would be nice to be able to get an encyclopedia on the multiverse, that would probably be enough to fuel his reading addiction for the rest of time. He didn’t even know how many universes were part of the system and already he barely had enough time to read about all the knowledge from the planet he was from, much less entire universes of literature.
He admired the animal, it looked incredibly content just munching on those berries, it would’ve been kinda cute if the thing wasn’t the size of a horse and twice as wide. He wondered about its role in the ecosystem of this mountain range and whether it had any natural predators. He never did see the source of the roar that he heard before he reached these mountains, perhaps that was what ate these glowing pigs. He couldn’t tell because of the light from his surroundings but it seemed like the hide of the thing was gray, funnily enough its soul did have some similarities to the bricks from the road that he himself did not share. “Hehe, that thing is literally built like a brickhouse.” He accidentally said outloud. For a second he was afraid that he would scare it away, but it seemed like the thing had even less brain cells than the goblins. Not wanting to miss his chance before it left, he reached out to his Archivist of Creation trait to record the thing. It would be pretty cool if he could share this archive with other people in the future somehow. The description did say that it had a lot of other functions, he would just have to figure it out over time.
[Verdilunis moss Stone Boar recorded in your Archive of Creation]
Well the stone in that name would explain the similarities to the bricks that he saw. He would have to take a closer look at that later, it would probably help unravel some of the intricacies of soul metaphysics and it was at the very least a good place to start.
