Not a sound swept through the eerily quiet clearing that found itself habitation to two current occupants; a squirrel-like creature and a woman carrying nothing but a knife.

The squirrel was running around on the ground in short bursts, travelling a few metres before pausing, standing on its hind legs, and looking for something. Whether it could even be called a squirrel was questionable; it was much larger than the woman was used to, as well as its dark green coat looking acidic and revolting though helping to camouflage it somewhat.

The short bursts of activity and speed would make the target hard to track normally but this particularly place in the bush found itself to mostly be devoid of foliage; there were tree stumps and dead, orangey leaves on the ground but nothing to occlude sight.

The woman, therefore, was tracking this squirrel, for that could be the only reason she was prone on the ground--her nude body covered in marks, scraps, and caked in dirt and mud--had a dagger in her left hand, and was as silent as a mouse.

Only the pattering of the squirrel’s tiny feet and the slow, almost painfully-quiet breaths of the woman could be heard. Even the squirrel did not seem to notice the latter--perhaps believing it to be wind, though even a gentle breeze was uncommon within this forest.

Finally, however, as the squirrel wandered within 2 metres of the woman, and paused, looking around once again. However, this time, its head swiveled side to side with such alacrity it was at risk of hurting itself. It’s previously iron-like posture--head held high with a ramrod-straight back--was nowhere to be seen. It was hunched over and over the course of the next three seconds, curled inwards, becoming a smaller and smaller target.

Similarly, it’s vibrant, saturated coat darkened with brown patches emerging like stains in a carpet.

And then it fell to the ground and died.

The whole effect felt like a timelapse; the rapid aging of a squirrel looking for sustenance, as morbid as something like that would be. One would expect the average person to look upon the creature with pity in such a circumstance.

The woman, however, nary moved a muscle. Even after the creature hadn’t produced any motion for a minute straight, hesitation was clear in the woman as she got to her feet, wary of some unknown and hidden danger.

The look on her face was impassive, as if she had been conditioned to be desensitised to this sight.

And, indeed, she had. This was her third day in this cursed forest and this squirrel was the fourth of its kind that the woman had watched wither away. She’d have seen more if she had found any more, for this forest was surprisingly sparse in fauna.

Of course, there were bugs living under the ground, underneath rocks, and even inside tree bark, but they didn’t provide experience.

Level up!

You have been awarded 5 stat points and 1 skill point

Experience. That was the whole point of what she was doing. Over the hours, she had experimented somewhat with this mysterious system and gotten a limited understanding of how it worked, as well as another level out of it.

For now, she had run herself dry of essence, the familiar headache creeping signifying that she was pushing herself harder than her body had reserves. However, she had a solution to that; in fact, everything was just a part of her master plan.

Whatever masterplan she could come up with in three days and knowing next to nothing.

After purchasing a 0th tier skill in the life tree, that seemed to unlock a list of 1st tier skills as well. But that was not all; there were originally only four skills but after completing the requirement of running herself ragged five times, this hidden skill had shown itself.

0th Tier

Heal (1/10)

Restore 5 points of health every second to a living entity

1m range

Cost: 1 es/sec

Leech (1/10)

Drain 10 points of health every second from a living entity

1m range

Cost: 1 es/sec

Cleanse (1/10)

Cleanse an entity from any toxin, disease, or contamination

Cost: 1 es

1st Tier

Sapping Curse (1/10)

Prevent a living entity from recovering health for 1 hour

Cost: 5 es

Animate Critter (1/10)

Raise a corpse smaller than yourself into a level 0 zombie

Cost: 1 es/sec

Life Sense (1/10)

Scan for either a general or specific form of life

1m range

Cost: 1 es

Last Words (1/10)

Extract thoughts from an entity that died within the last hour

Cost: 1 es

Hidden Skill

Run out of essence 5 times

Reservoir Stone (1/10)

Store essence in an object. The object loses 90% of its essence every hour.

Transfer rate: 1 es/sec

Cost: Variable

Her current goal was surviving (AKA, not dying). To do that, she needed food, water, shelter (this one was really important), as well as a way to cure herself of diseases. The latter was added to the list since she started feeling unwell yesterday, though it just seemed to be something mild. Never-the-less, it was slowing her down and in the forest, that could mean death. She hoped her enhanced power was helping her in this regard.

So, the most important thing on her mind the past few days was levelling up. The boar she had killed had enough meat to satisfy her for a few days and the squirrels were abundant enough food was no longer an issue.

It was unfortunate that, even cooked, nothing tasted nice. Every now and then, she felt her mind wandering, just imaging caves full of salt like that was paradise on earth.

She needed to level up. Surviving was looking to be easy enough; it was everything else that was more difficult. Water she had found by trailing a rabbit to a stream so clothing and shelter was what was left.

The former wasn’t something she’d be able to accomplish by herself. Therefore, she needed to find civilisation and that meant getting out of the forest. She had no idea where to even begin there.

One thing she did know, though, was that there would undoubtedly be more of the boars around and, consequently, she’d need to be strong enough to kill them.

Close-quarters fighting was out of the question; though the dagger was surprisingly effective, leech healed her hit points but not her physical body, and so her wound was still present and severely limited the intensity of her movements lest she’d injure herself more. The dagger was wedged pretty deep and, frankly, she did more harm than good when she ripped it out of her.

That left her main offensive weapon, unless something terrible happened, leech. The limiting factor here was her essence, which was only a measly 4 points. It took three seconds to kill one of the rabbits with leech, meaning they had under 30 points of health. Currently, she could only take out one rabbit before needing to regenerate, and that means she wouldn't be able to take out a boar with leech alone.

All-in-all, this meant that to get through the forest by killing anything that threatened to harm her, she needed more essence to use leech more often and more longer periods of time.

And that meant levelling up.

All this thinking back her back to her love-hate relationship with arithmetic.

After some thinking, she discovered another part of the system which showed her how fast she regenerated her stats.

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

These were interesting results. 100 per day seemed to be a baseline for the three stats which would explain why with her terrible essence and spirit, she was regenerating 100 essence a day. That was 25 times her total essence! She felt confident that unused essence was wasted essence since she’d probably notice an influx of 100 essence having an effect on her. Power links with health, endurance with stamina, and essence with... well, essence. That would mean she'd have a default of 100 in regeneration and every point above got 20, such as sher 6 in vim giving 120 stamina regeneration per day.

This brought her back to her main stats:

Name Unnamed Level 2 Health 180/180 Stamina 81/100 Essence

0/4 Power 9 Constitution 4 Endurance 5 Vim 6 Essence

1 Spirit

1 Stat Points 5

With all that said, she now believed she understood how the stats worked: every point in a stat increased their respective stat by 20. She wasn't quite sure how essence and spirit worked with that but she was ready to find out.

She felt she had a solid grasp of her stats and understanding your enemy was always the first step.

Next was optimisation.

Upon her level up, she gained 5 stat points and a skill point. Her goal was more essence. Judging by the layout, she presumed spirit increased her regeneration while essence increased her total essence. (It annoyed her that they had the same name). Upon her discovery of the hidden skill, everything came together.

She would focus entirely on spirit.

Constitution just wasn’t important for her since she had a healing skill anyway and since leech consumed essence and not stamina, both endurance and vim were also not important. Power was similar; it didn’t make leech stronger.

Actually… I don’t know how to make leech deal more damage.

That meant that more essence was how to deal more damage.

So, the question was down to whether she wanted essence or spirit. This question was answered by the skills in the life branch.

Skills consumed essence every second. In theory, her regeneration could get high enough that it would be higher than how much she consumed it. Being able to use leech all the time rather than merely a very long time was much more appealing to her sensibilities.

That settled up. With minimal hesitation, she placed all five points into spirit, bringing it up to 6. She checked her stats again. Pleasingly, the system acquiesced to her preference of shifting it so her stat block also included her regenerations.

Name Unnamed Level 2 Health 180/180 Stamina 81/100 Essence

0/4 Power 9 Constitution 4 Endurance 5 Vim 6 Essence

1 Spirit

6 Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

120/day Essence Regeneration

200/day

This was completely unexpected; she expected essence regeneration to stay at 100 per day until she reached 5 on spirit.

Maybe 5 isn’t average? Or, 1 is actually average for spirit. Spirit and essence do act a bit differently from the other stats, such as how they didn’t show themselves until I leveled up and got my life aspect.

Shaking those thoughts from her head, she refocused her mind and finally bought her next skill; reservoir stone.

Now, she had finally finished with her level up. What was next? Well, the answer is experimentation.

She plonked herself down on the dirty, dusty ground without a care in the world as she picked up a loose stone. With her essence regeneration being what it is, and her only having a measly 4 max essence, it takes her seven and a half minutes to regenerate 1 point of essence, and thirty minutes to regenerate to maximum.

What she wanted to do now was to experiment with her new skill, but that was a difficult thing to do, not only because she didn’t have much essence but it took so long for her to regenerate even one point.

She collected a bunch of stones, small and smooth so they felt nice in her palm, and travelled off back towards the stream where her makeshift camp was--being, really, just the burnt-out remains of a fire.

The trip itself took long enough for her to regenerate all of her essence and then some, so she began to use the skill.

Firstly, she imagined the same thing she did when using leech; picturing a closed system created between herself and the pebble and, instead of health as particles, she imagined essence instead. She saw how she was filled to the brim with pure essence, and opened herself up to the void that was a pebble.

After her many uses of leech, the whole process--the whole visualisation--was quicker and easier to do. Again, a strange feeling enveloped her but, this time, she felt an ever so slight drain on her. Like when you run yourself ragged through physical exercise, the fatigue and accumulated lactic acid eats at your endurance.

Her mouth twitched into a slight smile of bemusement, thinking about how her endurance was actually quantified.

Like a gentle suction on her body, lasting for only four seconds, she had filled the stone with 4 points of essence.

As loath as she was to wasting essence, with how much of a valuable resource it was, she believed that, in the name of science, what she was going to do next was worth it.

There were multiple unanswered questions that she still had--such as, how did fractional points work? 90% of the essence in that stone was 3.6, leaving only 0.4 left in the stone. Would that round down to 0 essence? If so, why? And what happens to the essence if it no longer exists by the system?

This could just be an example of the system lacking precision; if you're measuring something in kilometres, something only a few centimetres long practically wouldn’t exist.

Another experiment was to know whether the drain of essence was continuous or discrete; did the stone lose 3.6 points of essence over an hour or after an hour. This was really important.

And so, over the next few hours, the woman placed numerous, similarly sized stones lodged into the dirt while she trawled the forest, looking for large leaves or anything suitable for bedding, as well as firewood. Some stones were abnormally large while others could barely be called stones; the size of the object didn't seem to affect either capacity nor transfer rate.

Before an hour had passed since the first filling of a stone, but still long enough for there to be a significant essence drain, even if it followed a logarithmic curve, she picked up the first stone--after filling up another stone with essence, draining herself dry--and reabsorbed the essence inside it. This brought her up to full--a total of 4 out of 4 points of essence. That confirmed it; essence was lost only after a full hour had passed rather than a continuous drain throughout the hour.

Her next experiment could only occur an hour after this one; she had two stones, each filled with 4 points of essence thirty minutes apart from each other and now they both should’ve drained to 0.4 points of essence each.

Once again, she filled another essence, setting herself back to 0--a control state, for her. She withdrew the essence from one stone, seeing her essence bar in her vision shift ever so slightly while her stats reported no change, and repeated the action, the results similar. Then, she waited around one and a half minutes to regenerate 0.2 points of essence, seeing both the bar move and, finally, her stats go up to 1 out of 4.

Another confirmation; essence existed in non-discrete chunks but the system only treated it as an integer when displaying the stats. Whether this was useful information, she wasn’t sure.

Next was the experiment of whether she could use reservoir stone on more than one object at a time.

In one hand was an empty stone and in the other was a filled stone. Again, she imagined a close system encapsulating the three of them, the same thermodynamics that were foundational to the universe. Whereas essence is a metaphysical concept capable of doing what should not be feasibly possible, thinking about it like just another type of energy, intrinsically connected to mass, made utilisation far more intuitive.

The bridge was built and, once again, essence flowed out of her and into the stone only, this time, essence flowed from one stone to another. When both her and a pebble was drained of essence, she was starting to feel a slight strain overcome after all this mental and spiritual exertion.

But when has fatigue stopped anything in the name of science?

The mental construct in place, she felt the drain on her again, filling one stone. Just like she had done before, the stone that theoretically should contain 8 points of essence drained out into the two other stones.

Immediately, she withdrew the essence from the stone, putting her back up to full. She had pulled up her stat block by this point, checking the fluctuations in her essence. When the number read 4, she filled up another stone, sinking back to 0. Again, she withdrew from a stone, then filled one up, then withdrew, then filled one up. And then, to her surprise, there was still essence left over in the stone, causing her to repeat the process again, though this process only lasted for six seconds rather than the eight it should've.

She was momentarily stumped, wondering where this extra essence came from, before realising that she must've regenerated a whole three points during the whole thing.

But, never-the-less, this whole thing here was to confirm that the stone that should've held 8 points of essence, double her actual essence pool, did indeed hold that many.

This was a monumental discovery. Her plan was to carry around a lot of small stones so she'd be able to sustain herself in combat but that wouldn't have worked that well; she'd need pockets or a bag to hold them. Instead, all she had to do was fill one stone with a lot of essence.

Her plan in place, she found the two smoothest stones she could and dumped her last 4 essence into one of them, resolving to do so every half an hour to fill it up with as much as possible.

These were going to be her essence stones, she decided. And they were going to be vital to keeping her alive.

Finally, she thought, as she fell onto her back and sprawled out on the ground; I'm finished.

Pleased to finally be rid of this monotonous testing and able to actually start progressing towards her other goals, she stood up with sudden alacrity, satisfyingly stretched all her stiff and tired bones, and picked up her essence stone.

After all that thinking, she was hungry and thirsty, and trudged off back towards the stream she had found the other day.