Time for some R&D, The woman thought as she had her spears and knife laid down on the ground in front of her.

She was sitting on a small pile of leaves she had quickly gathered as she inspected her arsenal just outside the burrow she had slept in that night.

The animals that I have so far encountered are squirrels, rabbits, and boars. The squirrels and rabbits are easily taken care of by [Leech] so it’s the boars that I have to worry about.

Picking up the knife, she began to carefully look over the weapon.

I’ve used this to kill, to skin, to cut meat, and to carve the spears. Yet, not a nick in the blade and as smooth and shiny as recently cleaned stainless steel. This metal, however, is clearly not stainless steel; that you could bend with your bare hands.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve heard about before. Let’s place this in the ‘magical shit’ category.

She had considered mounting the blade to the end of a long stick, making it a spear, but her non-violent use of the blade alone would’ve rendered that avenue far too inconvenient. Additionally, she’d prefer to expand her arsenal rather than simply modify it.

This leaves the spears. Or javelins, I suppose; they’re too short for spears and I plan on throwing them.

The main issue, apart from my abysmal aim, is that they didn’t penetrate deep enough through the hide of the boars. So, I need to upgrade the tip.

She picked up a javelin and brought the pointed end up to her eye.

Now, I don’t think I can get it much sharper than this. Not with a knife and some wood, anyway.

Naturally, that means I have to upgrade it. I’m advancing to the stone age.

Let’s think about what ways we could do that.

The way metal spears worked was by having the spearhead actually envelope the wood. That, however, is unreasonable when working with stone.

So, I have to do this a different way.

The most important thing was the spearhead itself. For stone spearheads, there were a selection of materials used, such as obsidian or flint.

However, the woman had decided to use flint; a handful of rocks she had collected in the forest were flint due to its commonality.

Tool-wise, what she needed was a sturdy, smooth stone; one that she could easily source from the stream just a little ways away.

After those was the wood required for the shaft of the spear. Relatively easy to find, all she had to do was look for longish, straightish pieces of wood of sufficient diameter she could comfortably grip them.

Using her knife, she hacked away at the base of the pieces of wood, as well as chopping off the branches.

With her material components primed and prepped, she got to work.

First, shaping the spearhead.

The flint chunks were somewhat large but not that strong; that was a downside in using them as a weapon since they’d break easily. At least, they were easy to procure and make more of to compensate for that.

While she was an avid camper, she wasn’t exactly proficient at making prehistoric weapons.

Resting the flint against her thigh, she smashed down on it with the hammerstone. A large section of flint broke off, flying to the floor, as the remaining section cut into her thigh, a thin line of blood appearing along with an according sting of pain.

Hissing out an expletive, she threw the remaining flint to the ground as she grasped her thigh, applying pressure to it before realising and focusing on a plant nearby.

Almost immediately, the pain eased into nothingness as the sliced flesh joined up like there was never a cut there in the first place.

Good that I won’t have to worry about papercuts anymore. However, I’d need something to cover myself with if I don’t want to keep healing myself.

Her mind quickly went to smiths and similar professions; how they’d often wear leather aprons to protect themselves from both temperature as well as sharp materials. Her gaze fell upon the corpses of the boars she had killed the day before, chunks of meat cut away from both but she had yet to dispose of them.

They were already dead and she knew their skin was thick--in theory, they should’ve been perfect places to procure some leather. The only thing stopping her was her complete and utter lack of leatherworking. She knew you had to tan or cure animal skin, removing the moisture and making it much more durable as well as less vulnerable to decomposition, but the actual way you went around doing that was unknown to her.

She had to make do with an alternative. The best she could come up with in a short amount of time was just layers upon layers of leaves. They weren’t the dry, dead ones you found on the ground but, rather, the moist ones she cut directly from the plants.

Hopefully, they’d be enough.

With the leaves covering her thigh, she rested the flint upon her leg once again and got to hitting, to a much better result. She could feel the flint push against her thigh but nothing sliced through the leaves.

Unfortunately, her inexperience at flintknapping showed itself as she quickly ended up with a much too small, thick, and bulbous spearhead than she’d have liked.

With an exasperated sigh, she threw it away and began anew.

It took her until her fourth go before she actually ended up with something vaguely spear-like.

It’ll have to do.

She wanted a complete spear to see if it was a viable weapon before she got to work on making more of them.

That meant the shaft was next up. Picking up a staff of wood, she first began by shaving off one end. This wasn’t to make it into a pointed tip like the Mark 1 versions of the spears, but was rather so the spear tapered down into the spearhead nicely. If it was flush, that’d hopefully mean the spear could penetrate easier and deeper.

Though, now that I think about it, there are specifically boar spears that are designed to not penetrate deeply. They’re meant to prevent a boar from charging along the shaft to the wielder as well as to stop the spear from breaking.

Shame that there’s basically only one type of stone spear.

Once she felt the spear was sufficiently thin at one end, the next step was making the hole for the spearhead. To begin with, she placed the wooden end on top of a large stone she had produced and then proceeded to repeatedly smash the tip with another, similarly size, smooth stone.

The goal here was to almost soften up the wood, making it more pliable to move itself. In the end, wood was just a collection of tubes. With a thin enough layer, the tubes were flexible, allowing the inner bark to be used like rope. Even without peeling the inner bark off, the wood itself could still be made flexible at one end by exerting enough force on it to get the tubes to separate, which was what she was doing now.

With her arm thoroughly exhausted, since hefting a heavy stone was tiring, she positioned her dagger at the end of the shaft and smashed down on that with the rock, like a hammer and chisel. This was to create the socket where the spearhead would enter. She purposefully left the socket a little narrower than the tang of the spearhead, or the equivalent she had shaped.

There were two ways the woman was aware of that you could use to fuse a handle to a blade; either use an adhesive such as glue to get them to stick together nicely or heat up the tang so it burnt into the handle. Naturally, with the materials she had at hand, she’d be doing the latter.

Just like she had done multiple times by now, she rubbed the spindle between her hands, generating the friction necessary to produce heat, lightning up the tinder and transferring that to a fire pit for a bigger fire.

With all the wood in place, she held one end of the spearhead and introduced it to the flame. She didn’t know just how hot it needed to be, but it needed to burn the wood sufficiently and since the same wood was already on fire, it was probably hot enough.

Though, just to be safe, she added more fuel to the fire and continued to blow into it, trying to grow a larger and hotter fire. She had already cleared the area of any dry debris, minimising the chance the fire could get out of control.

With such a hot fire, there was a chance that she could seriously injure herself but, with the abundance of plantlife nearby, she felt reasonably certain that all she’d have to endure is, at worst, a few seconds of pain before the issue resolved itself.

With the spearhead sufficiently hot, she quickly brought it over to the shaft--placed a distance away from the fire--and proceeded to squeeze it into the narrow hole she had dug out. Hand fully gripped around the head, she pushed and twisted with a lot of force as the spearhead slowly sunk into the shaft until it could go no further.

As soon as she was finished, she rapidly dropped the whole thing--the spear falling to the ground--as she flailed her hand around wildly, the heat a little too hot to bear.

After waiting a few minutes for the spearhead to cool down--and a quick dash to the cool, refreshing water of the stream--she returned and began her final step in constructing a spear; reinforcing the linkage between the shaft and the head.

To do that, she used some strips of inner bark and wrapped it around the shaft and the contours of the spearhead, tying it all together tightly when she felt like it was enough.

Finally having finished, a loud sigh escaped her as she fell onto the floor, her arms burning from all the effort they were subjected to. Sweat draped across her brow and her hands were quickly dirtied by the soil and earth clinging to her sweaty palms.

Once recuperated, she actually looked over her new weapon.

Yep. That’s recognisable as a spear. Hopefully, it’ll actually work as one.

She needed to do some tests, and had the perfect dummies for the job.

With any test, you needed a comparison; a control. This was the baseline and, for this study of hers, that would be her original, completely wooden spears.

First was a basic stab test. With one of the boar corpses in position, she thrust into it with her spear, putting all her weight into the attack and aiming at its belly.

The spear didn’t penetrate very deeply--no more than an inch.

Next, was the Mark 2 spear.

With the same level of strength, targeting the same section of body, the blade sunk much deeper than the Mark 1--at least two, and possibly three inches.

Consequently, it was much harder to withdraw from the body as well. However, with enough strength, and some worries that she’d break the thing, she managed to retrieve her weapon, surprisingly intact.

I guess it’s not that surprisingly when these were used to hunt larger creatures than boars back in the day.

And, for the sake of comparison, she tested her knife. It sank right to the hilt, which was to be expected. The stomach was the easiest place to attack; it was mostly fat with little muscle and lacked a protective skeleton. If the dagger could pierce a skull deeply, it could do the same with the stomach.

The woman wasn’t done with all her tests, however. The weapons were spears second, javelins first, and so she prepared to throw them.

Predictably, this took some time; even for stationary targets, her aim still needed to be worked on. It took her six throws until the wooden spear hit the target, eight until it stayed inside the body and didn’t just fall out due to the angle.

Doing the same with the Mark 2’s, they comparatively sank deeper into the flesh but were much harder to land accurately. This was probably due to the added weight but it may have just been variance and her own bad aim, she reasoned.

Well, they’re a clear upgrade. Three or four should be enough; I’d make them until I no longer feel like making them.

But one is enough for today. My arms are beat, my back aches like an old grandmothers, and I feel like lying down for eterntity; though, I doubt my stomach will agree with that decision.

She had worked through lunch, the collecting, manufacturing, and testing of the Mark 2 spear taking much more time than she’d realised.

The boars were hefty in weight and all of that was edible. However, they’d been left out overnight; as much as she hated wasting the meat that she had killed, her body was disagreeable with the idea of eating meat that came from two stinky, beginning to decompose bodies.

The best she could do was quickly dig some holes in the ground for them, not that deep, and cover them in a mixture of clods of earth and dried leaves. It did little to disguise the smell, but hopefully, they would be hidden enough to not attract as many creatures as they would’ve otherwise.

Just to be safe, she buried them a far distance away from the hill. She was surprised she didn’t lose any health from that, with how much her arms felt like they’d fall off her body at any moment.

All a part of exercise. You can’t improve if you don’t push past your limit. The thought was little consolation over her aching limbs but it was better than nothing.

I can go a little hungry; the rest is well worth it.

Lying down against the hill, so the sun wouldn’t be in her eyes and her back had a nice rest to lean against, it was time to explore the other method of getting stronger; the interface.

I levelled up after the last fight. That means I’ve got 1 skill point and 15 stat points to spend. First, let’s look at that skill point.

Life

0th Tier

[Heal] (1/10)

Restore 5 points of health to a living entity

Cost: 1 es/sec

[Leech] (1/10) -Learned

Drain 10 points of health from a living entity

2m range

Cost: 1 es/sec

[Cleanse] (1/10) -Learned

Cleanse an entity from any toxin, disease, or contamination

Casting Time: 1 sec

Cost: 1 es

1st Tier

[Sapping Curse] (1/10)

Prevent a living entity from recovering health for 1 hour

Casting Time: 1 sec

Cost: 5 es

[Animate Critter] (1/10)

Raise a corpse smaller than yourself into a level 0 zombie

Casting Time: 5 sec

Cost: 5 es/sec

[Life Sense] (1/10)

Scan for either a general or specific form of life

1m range

Casting Time: 1 m/sec

Cost: 1 es

[Last Words] (1/10)

Extract thoughts from an entity that died within the last hour

Casting Time: 1 min

Cost: 5 es

Since this is some kind of game, I probably won’t be getting a refund for these points. Gotta spend them carefully.

What do I need right now? The dagger can kill the boars quickly, so damage isn’t a problem. Ranged damage may still be an issue; a 40 damage [Leech] doesn’t kill the boars and I don’t think even the Mark 2 spears will either.

However, looking through other trees, the 0th tier skills there do comparable damage to [Leech] or, if they deal more, it’s not worth a whole skill point.

So, let’s say that ranged damage is a weakness of mine. That means I’m fighting up front and personal. Therefore, survivability is important.

The most important thing there is healing, which [Leech] also provides me. [Heal] doesn’t [Heal] as much, for some reason, and I don’t want to risk spending a point to find out why. None of the other trees I have looked into have any healing skills that I can see so it seems that this is all I have.

This means I need skills that amplify or allow me to use [Leech] for longer.

Life has nothing that can help with this so I must look to other skill trees.

Primordial Magic

0th Tier

[Well of Essence] (1/10)

Essence is multiplied by 1.2

[Well of Spirit] (1/10)

Spirit is multiplied by 1.2

Metamagic

0th Tier

[Alteration Mastery] (1/10)

Control the strength of an active essence skill with finesse

Cost: Variable

[Seeker Mastery] (1/10)

Multiple range of an active skill by 1.2

Cost: Variable

[Maximise Mastery] (1/10)

Multiple intensity of an active skill by 1.2

Cost: Variable

Both of these could be useful. The former enhances my stats while the latter enhances my skills. There are also skills that boost the other primary stats as well, but they don’t help with healing.

Well, constitution does but the increases are too small to be a tangible benefit in combat. At least, not at this level.

Let’s do some maths on this; increasing my essence by 20% brings my total amount I can use to 120.

Increasing my spirit isn’t helpful if my essence limit means I don’t appreciate the increased regeneration. It’d only be helpful if it’s high enough I can notice the regeneration in real time.

Basically, if I want either of these skills, they’d have to be in conjunction with increasing their respective stats.

Therefore, metamagic seems to be the way to go.

Firstly, I’m not quite sure what controlling the strength of the skill does. Perhaps it means I don’t have to use it at 100% power? Don’t know and it doesn’t matter.

Since I’m fighting in close-quarters, the range won’t matter either.

Therefore, increasing the intensity of a skill is the most useful; if I’m interpreting it correctly, [Leech] would do 12 damage instead of 10. That’s 240 for all my essence instead of the usual 200.

Okay; [Maximise Mastery] is the most appealing skill so far.

Up next is the stats.

The immediate thing to think about doing is bringing every stat up to 5, which will cost 10 points. My health will be 100, able to take three grazes from a boar instead of just two; my essence will be at a whopping 100 which is so much better than before, able to [Heal] me 10 times over by that point; and my essence regeneration should be at 180.

Before all of that, though, something has piqued my interest.

I can distribute stat points but I actually have to confirm their placements before I lose them--I think, anyway. However, I can see what effect they have. By applying one point to power, my health goes to 100.

Therefore, the question is, does my health actually increase to 100?

The woman eyed her current health that was sitting at a nice, neat 80. Her health regeneration was too slow for her to see it increase to 81 within a reasonably amount of time so she had to use [Leech] instead.

Focusing on a plant, she entered the mental paradigm she had begun to get used to. The skill activated with minimal effort and though she saw her essence draining, all the way to 0, her health remained stagnant.

Okay; I guess that’s a no. I suppose it’s merely visual, then, the increase; I’d have to actually accept it for it to actualise.

Just like skill points, I doubt stat points are refundable either.

Spending a few minutes thinking it over, arguing about whether she really needed the increase in power, whether nice, round numbers were aesthetically more appealing, and whether the loss of points in the future may be worth it, she confirmed her selection and felt… Nothing.

Name Unnamed Level 3 Health 80/100 Stamina 51/100 Essence

0/100 Power 5 Constitution 5 Endurance 5 Vim 6 Essence

5 Spirit

5 Stat Points 5

Her stats had changed in a blink of the eye but they were just numbers on a screen; she didn’t feel any different.

What the fuck?

Health Regeneration 100/day Stamina Regeneration 120/day Essence Regeneration 100/day

Health and essence regeneration haven’t changed one bit! Is it some kind of bug? Seems strange if it is; stamina regeneration clearly reflects my stats.

With an annoyed expression on her face, she applied a single ghost stat point to spirit, seeing the reflected increase in essence regeneration.

Is the preview wrong? I’ll try it again, but with only one point, She accepted the placement.

Health Regeneration 100/day Stamina Regeneration 120/day Essence Regeneration 120/day

Oh; regeneration can only increase when the respective stat is higher than 5? That’s… Weird. I have to say, I don’t like it; feels like I wasted a bunch of points now. Should see it as investment in the future, I guess.

With new, higher stats, would that change her opinion on what skill to get next? [Well of Essence] meant she’d have 120 points of essence while [Well of Spirit] meant she’d regenerate 144 points every day.

Meanwhile, [Maximise Mastery] doesn’t change at all.

In an ideal world, she wanted all three skills. But, right now in her current situation, was there a best option?

Another question; should she even spend her skill point? She hadn’t checked out every tree yet, if that was even possible; there may be a more useful skill that she’d want instead.

Running her hands through her hair, she closed all the windows, too frustrated to continue. The numbers jumbled around in her head, and even her exhausted body felt energised.

Too much thinking and not actually getting any results. Should be stronger in one fight, over multiple fights, or over multiple fights in one day? She hated questions without a singular, correct answer.

Fuck. I’ll fight a boar and judge it based on that.

And so, with a nearly enervated body, an annoyed and frustrated mind, and with a new and improved arsenal, she got off her arse and wandered on back to the stream.

She was hungry.