Benate was not alone, and that was a problem. He tried to ignore the annoying message which flared periodically in the back of his mind. It said:

[Stealth] unavailable

But there was something which felt right about crouching behind the thick tuft of grasses which obscured him from the flowing cricklet. Really, it was only a tiny dribble of liquid running over gravel, but water was such a simple, low danger pleasure that Benate had truly been looking forward to enjoying it.

Unfortunately, that was probably the same thing which had attracted the two creatures ahead of him.

“😖😬,” he said in the general chat. As always, the log of the channel was filling with his own dialogue, and a few system messages, but no one else.

Back in his first and second life, he’d made more of an effort to talk with the system. He’d been particularly delighted when it had finally replied back to him.

“AutoMod->Spam Filter Triggered: Chat disabled for 30 minutes.”

That had been nice, even if he had to be quiet for a half hour after each time. But a person had to grow out of childish courtships eventually, and AutoMod was never really particularly emotionally supportive in general. Eventually, AutoMod and Benate had drifted apart until their relationship was purely professional. But regardless of their history, and out of respect for the gravity of the current danger, AutoMod had the maturity to be laser-focused on pure business. Benate deeply appreciated their input now.

[Stealth] failed. Aggro Gained.

[Stealth] failed. Aggro Gained.

Aggro Lost.

Aggro Lost.

With a squeak of rage, the pastel yellow ball of fur leaped into the air, its ears quivering and its cute teeth bared wide. Its [Bite] attack tore viciously into the purple scaly noodle with which it was locked in mortal combat with.

Benate had been on the receiving end of [Bite]s like that too many times before. He winced as the noodle cried out in agony.

“Owie!”

A tiny number floated away from its head like a ghost with regrets. 6.5, it said. Benate felt a sudden chill come over him. These were heavy hitters he’d stumbled on. But the noodle was not out for the count yet, its tail lashed out and Benate noticed the wicked looking blade on its end. The protrusion of dangerous scales were shaped with all the lethal promise of a butter knife, and as it scored across the squishy-poof’s face, it wailed as the 5.8 left its body. Captivated, Benate could only watch as the creatures danced together; as if death itself stood on the sideline, waiting to cut in.

On one hand, it would be wise to run. These weren’t ordinary spawn animals, they were low-mid tier 0 beasts. A minimum of 0.3. Ordinarily, it was nearly impossible for them to appear and feed to such heights so quickly after he’d revived. What was going on?

“🎰🌾,” it suddenly dawned on him.

The grasslands around him were practically a cornucopia. They weren’t just feeding existing beasts to stronger levels than he was used to, it was almost like a threshold had been reached that changed their root behavior entirely.

[Bite]! “Owie!”

It was clear that the squishy-poof held the advantage in damage output, but unless Benate could have [Inspect]ed the vitality pools of the two beasts directly to be sure, he knew from experience it was still possible the slinky-noodle would pull through.

Honestly, he had to admit that if he were pushed to it, he still could have defeated either of the beasts on his own. It would be a hard and painful fight, though. What he couldn’t trust himself to survive would be stumbling into a second fight before recovering from the first. And even if he wanted to take that gamble, he couldn’t guarantee that a third beast wouldn’t sniff around to aggro him right after.

Benate needed to think hard, and he had to start thinking fast. Unfortunately, he couldn’t [Run] now. Several bad experiences had left him suspecting that he attracted much more aggression running than walking. Beasts were perfectly capable of setting a death grudge aside to team up against him, if he was stupid enough to give them enough reason. He circled back, away from the water the way he came. Watching the general chat, he saw that his [Stealth] failure notifications had stopped. Once he was safe he continued on, fairly secure in knowing that he wouldn’t suffer any surprise attacks in the tall grass without getting an aggro notification first.

Vitality: 35.2/35.2, Stamina: 32/32

For a moment, Benate considered abandoning his plans. He would feel much safer if he could simply glut on cereal-0s. A vitality pool of 88 would carry him to a dominant advantage against practically any number of beast-0s. But he knew that wasn’t going to be a real solution in the long term. All he would be doing would be to escalate the local deltas worse and worse until a tier 1 threat appeared and brought him to his knees.

Again.

No, he would rather take this opportunity to make an earnest attempt to do things right this time around. Benate kept an eye out for movement, and an ear out for the idling noises which beasts could make sometimes. He made a short detour across a relatively clear patch of gray dirt, making note of the small brown stones scattered across it. The pebble-0s weren’t very strong, but a few of the larger stones would probably count as cobble-0s. A cobble was a little heavy to be carrying around all the time, but he’d learned a trick which let him [Discard] one of them in a way that had pretty nasty base damage.

It was kind of similar to a Tool Arte [Throw], really. He just had to aim the rock a lot higher, and maybe guess a bit at where it was going to land.

But the rocks still weren’t the objective. Benate stalked close to the ground for a while, until he finally admitted that it was doing more to obstruct his own line of sight than to prevent anything nearby from finding him. He was back to looking for ripe cereal again. But this time, he was going to try something new. Any individual stalk of seeds he looked closely at would almost always be the lowest possible grade, which was a flat 0.0. He had come to terms with that. However, things were a little different if he took a step back and tried to [Inspect] the fields at a distance.

Cereal patch (small):

“👍,” Benate sighed in relief.

He looked over the small patch of grasses he had chosen. Mostly, he had just picked a spot which looked like it had more seeds than usual, but he couldn’t be sure if it was true or if it mattered. He was surprised to discover that he has actually spent a few points of stamina just to look out and survey the field in this way, but decided it was worth it. The little symbol near the cereal quality was called a sigma, and it was the value he was counting on all along, ever since he’d discovered it a lifetime ago.

He wasn’t going to pick blindly anymore; this time he was was going to [Filter][Search]. Benate strode into the grass, checking each stalk as he went. As he looked closer at the seeds, some strange variances started to occur. Several grains that should have been perfectly serviceable appeared on closer inspection to simply be bad. These husk-0s were useless, and couldn’t even be used for food. A few kernels still counted as cereal, but were marked with {flaw}s that reduced their potency or had other negative effects. But each substandard seed he found seemed to make it possible for another one to turn out to be just a little better. He plucked a 0.05 cereal off of a stalk with a growing sense of excitement. But that was just a minor quality improvement. The next grain reached a quality of 0.12.

“😄! 😎👑, 😆.”

Even if his results so far weren’t impressive, Benate still had most of the patch to go over. And he had only started with an area classified as {small}. He was already thinking about what would happen if he started from a {medium}. If that could start him off with a larger sigma, maybe [Filter][Search] could lead to even more dramatic results.

He continued on, discarding bad seeds as he went. Occasionally, he would discover strange and unexpected roughage, like a caterpillar marked as a bug-0.01{*}, or a broad, sturdy leaf-0.1 which didn’t seem to count as an herb. Benate ate the caterpillar absentmindedly.

Meat (Bug) 0.01

Physical::log + 2, {fast-digest: 12%}, Durability 4/4

“😜. 🍀.” Benate was lucky. Fast digestion was a pretty good food perk for restoring vitality, even if it wasn’t optimal on a stats food like meat.

In good spirits, he continued harvesting until he had a small pile in his hand that nearly looked it would spill.

stack::cereal x 14, tier 0.08 (σ 0.6)

It was an encouraging haul. But his secret, game-changing technique was that this was only the first step. By some coincidence, Benate’s other hand gripped a short stick-0.0 {thorn}. It had been growing off of a weird little woody thorn-trap plant and poked him pretty bad a couple of minutes back. He had almost left it behind, but there was something immensely satisfying about swishing a good stick through the air.

Whoosh! Whoosh! The stick went.

It barely affected his stamina as he swung it. Even better, he was pleased by how stable its durability seemed to be, even if he hit it against some grass. Its base damage had to be pretty impressive, the green-mulch-0.2 left behind from a destroyed cereal was nicely pasted and had a higher quality than its original plant. Benate felt kind of guilty, knowing that he was risking some weird deltas from playing around too much.

He was so pleased with his progress, so preoccupied with his new toy and growing collection of grain, that he never really stopped to check back on his chat logs for system messages.

If he did, he probably would have seen a little notice that said Aggro Gained. He might have seen that the newly tier 0.41 squishy-poof had recovered from its battle. He could have deduced that it had ruthlessly devoured its enemy, feasting greedily on 0.6 quality, 2-slot meat.

He would have sensed its bloodthirsty determination to floop to the top of the food chain at any bitter cost – and run. Instead the predator was already arcing through the air, its wide, adorable eyes filled with malice, and its puff-ball tail wiggled with battle-madness. It was on a direct, collision course with Benate’s face as he turned in its direction.

“💩,” he said.

[Bite] it replied.