First, identifying my tree. Well the one I was sitting in, I looked at it over my shoulder and pushed the mental button for [Plant Identification].

“Not toxic” was technically a kind of edibility I guess. Technically. Hopefully it would be more specific if I looked at some berries, but then I guess if it simply said it wasn’t toxic that would mean I could eat them. I guess I could try eating some pine needles, didn’t exactly sound appetizing though.

It was interesting that it listed a celestial resonance of 0. I had only ever heard of celestial in reference to the dungeon, was that the only reason it said 0? Because I knew that resonance existed? Or was it because the tree was next to the celestial dungeon?

The information had cost me 2 aether, but besides the level, the mundane marker (my [Worker] job had the same thing, but neither gave me any further impressions), the resonances, and the Western/Northern monikers it was all information I already knew. I had already known it was an evergreen pine, and I had already known I could probably eat the pine needles and use it for fires (though I was pretty sure that showed up in the box from my [Improvised Tools] skill).

Had my adaption gone up? Oh! Yes it had (by 1%), and I had also gotten 2 level experience! Both [Plant Identification] and my experience had gone up by 2. And I had spent 2 Aether. Well alright then, method of leveling without dungeon diving discovered. Using my core resources through skills gave them and me experience equal to the amount used, basic enough. I just had to do that… 1954 more times and I would be level 2, which at 30 aether a day would take… like 4 months. Ok maybe not a viable method of leveling then.

But I would probably keep identifying trees when ever my aether reached 49. It would ensure I had a decent clock: at 30 a day I would regenerate 10 points every 8 hours, or 1 point every 48 minutes, though I was rounding down to 45. Each usage of the ability was an hour and a half distant to the next one.

I spent the next two and a half hours (two identifies) reading through all the skills once and then I began to mentally organize them. An exercise that would definitely take a while. At that point the sky had began to brighten and I was ready to not be stuck in a tree.

It had gotten chilly, but not cold enough that I had shivered, thankfully. The distraction of reading skills had helped both with the cold and the existential dread. It was going to take me a while to get over the existential dread of being transported to another world (or even just going crazy in my own mind). But for now I had a plan, and I was going to work it. Make some improvised tools, try to find a way to level, and then make some shelter before dark.

Though maybe I had gotten ahead of myself. My coping method had prevented me from doing the obvious: check for civilization. Maybe in video games the obvious answer was always go punch a tree and make your own fort. But if this was real then those assholes had to come from somewhere. They had gone towards the mountains.

This tree was kind of tall. I could climb it and check for smoke.

Upon getting halfway higher up in the tree I decided this was probably a bad idea and stopped. But I was high enough to see over many of the trees, and we thankfully seemed to be on a bit of a hill. I didn’t have a perfect view, but I could see decently far, I could even see to some of the lower hills in front of the mountain.

And what I saw was no smoke, no signs of industrial logging, no signs of civilization anywhere. I checked the other directions too, but a lot of it was blocked by trees up the hill, and I didn’t see anything promising. Also I had no clue what time it was, maybe there were no fires at this hour. I would check again later.

I began to climb back down the tree.

Besides I didn’t speak the language, and those people did seem like assholes. Better to figure out this whole level thing out on my own for a while if I could. If the monsters weren’t too much for me to handle… but if they were then I would probably die trying to find civilization by running through an unknown forest anyway.

At least the trees were all level 0.

Once I dropped to the ground I waited for a moment in case anything was waiting for me. I was ready to scramble back up the tree. But nothing happened besides a bird tweeting. Seemed like the forest was waking up, though it was still dark down here.

I decided to activate [Improvised Tools] with a hand axe in mind. I got the same rejection that I wasn’t ready to move. It took a few tries of being more prepared for motion before it finally activated.

I went running and then sliding down the hill, on my feet. My body wasn’t my own, I was just along for the ride. I grabbed a rock on my slide down, that I barely even noticed, before ending the slide a few dozen feet down the hill. I banged the rock into another rock a few times as hard as I could, before grabbing a stick, putting it on the ground, kneeling on it, and then slamming the rock into one end of the stick a few times.

And now I had a crude hand axe. I stared at it in my hand a bit dumbly. What in the world was that. It was certainly worthy of being described as a skill or an ability I decided. If I hadn’t been taken by surprise I might have noticed sooner that I could cancel it at any moment. All for 15 energy, not a bad price considering I also got the experience and 3% adaptation out of it.

Well then, time to explore. A hand axe was going to be as good of a weapon as I was going to get unless I wanted to try making a spear with no help.

First, I went back to my tree. And from there I began to explore in a bit of a spiral. I did this for 3 hours, learning the land marks and identifying any interesting new plants.

I identified seven interesting new plants. Two were “toxic”, though only one had berries, the other a sort of fern, the other five were “not toxic”, though again only one had berries. I thought one of the others might have some sort of nut but I hadn’t stopped to figure out how to harvest them yet. The berries were not dissimilar to black berries, and I had been happily picking a handful when ever I came across them. I was pretty happy with my food solution so far, snacking on berries all morning had left me feeling only slightly hungry after missing lunch (and probably dinner by now).

Most importantly, I hadn’t seen any monsters. I had seen plenty of animals: deer, squirrels, birds. I even saw a lynx, but it seemed perfectly normal, and more than content to just hang out on it’s tree branch. Which was a good sign to me. First, it meant hiding in the trees was probably a good idea if it worked well for the lynx. Second, it meant if there were monsters in this world they probably weren’t out here in the middle of nature. Or maybe they just didn’t eat the nature?

Either way, whatever had happened with the wolves and their glowing eyes… well I hadn’t seen anything weird since then. Besides the whole episode with the hand axe.

The forest was pretty normal. As far as I could tell no one was out here. I saw no human paths, no markers on trees, or roads, or anything like that. Besides the ruins of course.

I had even walked quite a ways in roughly the direction the assholes did and came upon nothing.

I scouted from the highest tree I could find near the top of the hill on which the ruins were built (I had kept my distance from them) and saw nothing on the horizon. Either magic meant that civilization didn’t need fires, or there was no civilization around here. I was opting for the latter since my perusal of the first two tiers of skills didn’t bring to mind an easy way of avoiding smoke, unless everyone was just [Heatbolt]ing their food and metal and chemicals warm. Or unless I had misunderstood something, which seemed more likely.

I had a new home spot. My first tree was great and all, but I had found a little clearing, right on the top of the hill, between the roots of five large trees. From here I could look down at the ruins, without having to climb a tree, from the safe distance of like half a kilometer. There was a little cliff towards the ruins—which felt like a natural barricade—that allowed me the good view of them through the trees.

More importantly there were like five berry bushes nearby, one of those maybe-nut trees, and my tall scout-every-direction tree was only a little ways away. In theory it was high enough up not to have issues with rain, though it had been a while since I had gone camping.

This forest definitely felt like the ones I had gone camping in during my childhood, and that had really helped me feel better about the situation.

It was still a fucked situation though.

I was going to have to purchase a new skill soon, especially if I was going to make progress on leveling. Ideally something that let me get resources to spend quickly. So far all of direct options I had found just shifted the problem around, or increased the numbers a little bit (5% more regeneration on one stat was not going to improve the time this was going to take). But, as soon as I realized that [Improvised Tools] would allow me to make a “cooking bowl” (just needed fire and some wood) a skill had jumped to the top of my list.

The goal was to be able to create edible energy and aether ‘mixtures’ that generated more than they cost me to make, or gave me a lot more times the investment in health, so that I could level quicker.

There were a lot of risks involved though. While nearly everything around here (up to about a mile out) was aetherically resonant with celestial energy (at 0?) I had no clue what mixtures that might allow me, if any? Or if I would need other materials? Or if I would be able to harvest them or not? Or if I would need tools besides a bowl and fire (despite it not saying Tools on it)?

On the plus side it was both a labor skill and a crafting skill, which would work with my current job.

I decided to take it for a spin. I spent the skill point.

Nice! It had 16% adaptation to start with. I still had no clue if that meant anything, but it still felt nice when every skill I got was higher there than the last. Even though in this case it probably just came from doing chemistry as a lab science and cooking on a regular basis.

And it felt closest to cooking. The knowledge that came with it would let me sort through the plants I had already seen, and would let me answer my questions. But first, fundamentally what was interesting, was that any method of cooking would work with this, heck I could technically make a salad out of the necessary materials—though unlike boiling them together in certain combinations that wouldn’t remove the toxicity from them. Really it supported any way that humans were used to making concoctions to enhance themselves. Hence it was really closest to potion making, without the dour instructor being necessary (the reference making me smile). Most notably it seemed to imply that a boiled mixture of the relevant materials, or a crushed powder of them, were the two optimal forms if one just wanted the effect. Since, for full effect, one needed to either bake the powder into a bread, something I was not equipped to do, or snort it, something I really did not want to do, I was going to be doing potions.

On the questions of what I could make with celestially resonant materials the answer was aether restoration potions. It seemed like it would be better if I could get materials of other specific resonances (notably dark and force), but I could do it with just celestial resonant materials. Oh, and as it happened there were 12 energy resonances, of which celestial was one, and the plants in question probably just had the celestial resonance, some minute—sub 1 unit—amount of it (no knowledge about why that was though). The skill knowledge seemed pretty trusting that identify skills were a source of truth when it came to what resonances did and didn’t exist. And for the most basic restoration potions, any amount of resonance would work.

The skill knowledge, for all that it gave me some rock solid fundamental pointers, especially when it came to the actual mechanics of mixing things, seemed obviously incomplete. It didn’t really answer any of my theoretical questions beyond the basics, it just seemed to be giving me a basic framework to study. All it gave me theoretically were three very basic recipes and some axioms to follow, in this case: Aether restoration mixtures were a very open ended recipe that combined any of celestial, dark, and force resonant materials and an axiom of ideal proportioning implied it would be best if I had all three. More useful were the practical questions it answered, could I mix celestial berries and celestial bark for the mixture? Yes, if I added some celestial ferns. How good of a mixture would that be? No clue, that was a theoretical question.

So, since the skill knowledge didn’t want to give me concrete answers about this potion, it was time to do an experiment.

First, I needed a fire and a bowl. I would need to save some energy for the potion making, which meant getting wood and making a fire pit by hand. Not something that was terribly difficult, though the [Improvised Tools] skill knowledge did help me to pick the fallen trees to chop up for the bowl and firewood. A half hour of chopping later I had my wood.

About an hour later I had my shallow firepit, ringed by rocks, and cleared of flammables around it. Most of that time was just getting the fire going. I could probably have activated the skill, but I wanted to get a feel for actually doing it myself. And scraping a rock against a log until the shavings started a fire was way more difficult than it sounded. I had also placed some rocks inside of it [Improvised Tools] helpfully giving me information about “heat rocks” that would work.

Now that I had a decent fire, I activated [Improvised Tools] to make myself a “cooking bowl”. It involved a lot less jumping around since I had prepared the materials. The method of making a burn bowl was basically to use coals from the fire to burn a hole in a piece of wood. I was actually able to convince the skill to make me 3 at the same time in the same piece of wood. I would need one to clean off the rocks I was using for heat anyway. 15 minutes of burning, 10 energy (1% adaption), and a bunch of obsessive sanding with a piece of porous volcanic rock later I had my bowls. I was really beginning to love this skill.

And now to make a potion I only had the problem of water left. I hadn’t found any rivers, or even creeks, though this seemed like a pretty wet environment. Clouds had been forming all day actually, rain was on the horizon, though I would still need to figure out a way to capture it, though I did have a fire I could at least boil it in.

But for the moment I had a trick up my sleeve, quite literally. Ok well, in my jacket. I was going to fill up my water bottle at lunch, and I still had it and it was a little less than half full. I had been avoiding drinking from it as berries had been enough moisture for the moment.

With clouds and the promise of rain I didn’t feel like I would be waisting the resource. Besides, I had theories about energy’s relation to water.

I poured a little water in the center bowl and then one of the side bowls. I had collected the necessary materials from plants, and even used [Plant Identification] on the bark, ferns, and berries to ensure they all had the celestial resonance as the [Restoration Mixture] skill knowledge encouraged me to do, like a little nagging “you forgot to actually measure the flour properly” voice in the back of my head. Everything ready, I activated the [Restoration Mixture] skill, the button in my mind resisted a lot, giving me lots of vague feelings about how poor my tools were, my heat source was, how sub-optimal my ingredients were, and how deficient in quality they were, but the button sort of haphazardly clunked in the end.

Not unlike [Improvised Tools] my hands went their own way. I could easily talk, pay attention to other things, even use my hands most of the time, but the skill would drag me back every 20 seconds or so to adjust something. Turn that bark over, add another berry and crush it with a heat rock, twist the fern around my finger and then wave it around in the mixture, rotate the heat rocks. Some of it, ok most of it, seemed like nonsense honestly. But after half an hour, and a brief shimmer of light, it was done.

I didn’t have the skill to inspect the potion directly, but I could expand the line item in the crafting complete message (going back and attempting to do that with encounter report gave me a fuzzy response, like it was successful, but dissolved into background noise).

So two of them, 12 aether total, for 10 energy and 10 aether. Ok, not a great trade. But if I could improve the quality maybe? Or the level? Or the amount I make in a batch? And make energy potions as well… Yea, this could work. Eventually.

But for the moment I would take it as more aether to spend.

And I got extra experience besides just the skill experience, 16 crafting experience, which would 8 per potion? Seems strange it’s not a multiple of 3 due to my [Worker] bonus. Oh! Because I got 48 level experience from it! The message just says the craft experience. Makes sense.

Level 1 (Soft Cap 6) Experience: 209 / 4000 Job: Worker

Attention: ⚠️ 1 Skill Points

But still only the 20 experience for skill. Just for the energy and aether I spent for the actual skill itself, and not multiplied when added to my level. So then skill experience is it’s own category? Seems so.

Now the looming issue was just converting aether into energy so that I could do this non-stop. There were some skills for that, some more efficient than others. But even then, with just this, I have already improved my leveling rate to roughly 250 experience a day (48 a craft 3 times a day plus 30 skill experience times 2 core resources plus 36 extra aether). Which was 15 days. Half a month to level 2 was already a much better rate, even if it would take me like 3 years to complete level 15 this way.

And it wasn’t even noon yet.