I felt a nuzzling under my chin and a wet piece of sandpaper running across my face. “HOTS FISH, HUNGRY, YOU LAZY,” Blink sent my way across our bond.

“Alright, Blink, I’ll get up!” I snapped at my friend. Then, I sent calm and understanding across to her, trying to smooth things out.

“FISH” I got back across the link along with a sizable portion of “you are dumb like a rabbit”.

I was glad that Blink could talk with me now that we had a deepened bond. What I wasn’t so joyful over was the way that she chose to use it. Granted, typically, I was the first to get up, but she didn’t need to yell at me across the bond.

I had things that I needed to do. The old shaman had taught me what I needed to do to create a shrine, and while I understood the gods on this planet might not be all-powerful, I didn’t want to piss off the sisters by not doing what they told me to do.

So I was going to build a shrine in the storage room, and then I was going to go find Lannah. I wasn’t super happy about the delay but all things considered, I was alive, and so was she, so it wasn’t all bad. I just needed to find her to make sure that it was her dad’s rescue and not something else.

The process of making the Shrine itself was easy enough. Part of what was going on was all shrines had to be covered by a roof of stone. It had been thought they needed to be in caves, but it was just stone on top. So if I climbed to the top of the cliff and built a shrine, it wouldn’t count at all.

This all led to the idea that when the sisters told me to build the Shrine here, they meant in the storage room. Now the problem was the storage room was half the size needed to construct the minimum requirements, and the old man suggested that I prepare for this to be a temple. It seemed like many of them had been through this process in the past, and Chaos seemed to like to drop things in stages.

When I had built the storage room, I did it by dancing and clearing it out using my hands. This wasn’t going to work if what the old men had told me was true. If this was going to turn into a temple, then not only would it need the Shrine built correctly, but it would also need other rooms and more access than free climbing a rock wall.

When Lannah was taken, she had with her both her seax and the wand. Which meant that I would want to replace both of those things for their usefulness. However, the wand, while helpful, was horribly underpowered. It provided an action but not a power source, and so I would have to have powered the dumb thing. It also was the wrong form.

According to the shaman, magic flows through intent. So a wand that turned stone to dirt could work; however, a rock hammer that turned rock to dirt would work far better. The issue was the size, which is why wands happened to be common.

It took me a few days to get the tools that I needed made. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to Lannah’s Mana any longer, but my willpower had gone up, so it only took me around two hours to recover all of my mana.

So with the much faster recovery on my mana and the low-level nagging feeling that once the flood ended, the orcs would be back, I took a day to make cores for much of my equipment.

Iron Knife

Sleeping fur

Plate

Bowl

Conditioning hammer

Left Moccasin

Right Moccasin

Bed

Rope

Shelf

Ink jar

Quill (this one was as odd as the sewing needle)

All the cores being the world’s first meant that they could level up without end. The bowl, plate, and ink jar all would generally cap out at level 2, the Conditioning Hammer, Moccasins, Sleeping fur, bed, and rope would usually max at level 5, and the shelf and quill would max out at level 10. All of them picked up durability, and in general, the appearance became more stable. A few odd things happened, like the plate and the bowl picked up a glazed look, and the quill became a peacock feather with the core in the eye of the feather (not sure how the rachis held it up and why it still moved like a feather).

The sleeping fur picked up the trait of the perfect temperature for those who slept with it; my bed improved my night’s rest by 10% and would keep bugs out, and the plate and bowl were now self-cleaning.

My conditioning hammer had a .01 percent chance of adding toughness to the impacted area. This meant that I would be hitting myself all like a crazed man.

My shelf now could hold extra weight and reduced the aging of anything on them.

My rope went from a grass rope to hemp looking line and could be fed to both grow in length and, depending on what it is provided, would become stronger. My ink jar picked up the ability for the ink not to turn foul, and the quill wouldn’t drip.

The changes weren’t earth-shattering when it came to what the cores were doing for my everyday things. I could see good things from each of them as they leveled and got stronger. The odd thing about most of them was that they had requirements of use as part of the leveling.

They still needed materials and mana but also required use. It was like the items were skills. This was different from my larger things like my house and my staff, which I could just feed enough, and they would level.

Where things got fun was when I looked at my moccasins. They both had the same status window asking if they were part of a set. I thought about it for a while, if I selected that they were a set, then they might be treated as one item, and I would be out of a core; however, it might be that like in games I had played, set items were more powerful.

The risk at this point was minimal for me, with the returns great. I selected that they were a set, and then the system asked me for the name of the set. I called the set the “Wild Shaman’s moccasins.”

Item core created

World first!

Footwear core!

As your footwear core is the first it is uncapped in level

Normal footwear cores will be capped at level 5.

As your footwear levels its helpfulness increases.

I opened up the interface to see what this footwear core could do.

General

Showing up in all gold.

Arn’s Footwear

Level 0

Type item core

Class Ultra Rare*

Durability 100/100

This is the (L/R) moccasin. It goes on your foot to keep it protected. As there is only one you want to make sure you wear something on the other foot. As your footwear core levels it will increase in usefulness.

*This is part of the set “Wild Shaman’s Moccasins” equip more then one item of the set to see the set bonus.

This only had two tabs.

>Growth

To level your item core you must use it for its purpose and provide for it material to level to the next level.

Wood 0% Leather 0% Mana 0% Stone 0%

>Traits

These are the abilities or traits that your footwear has.

Dry- This moccasin will keep your foot dry both from the inside and outside. Durable- This item is durable, it will not wear out from normal use durability will only decrease with targeted attacks.

***Set Bonus***

Dancing feet: When wearing both parts of the set reduce time for Ritualistic spells by 10%

I made my knife just like Lannah’s Seax, as it seemed to have worked just how I wanted it to. I might end up making some more weapons like it because it worked so well. However, the knife made me worry a bit about other weapons out there. I knew there were magical weapons as I came across two already, and mine weren’t world’s first weapon cores.

It made me think that my armor might not help me as much as I would like it to when I faced off against a more prepared foe. Which meant it was time for me to look through the armor that had been collected after the battle. While my fur had saved my life several times, I thought I had seen the orc’s mail shirt.

I knew that the orcs would be back. Even if all of them who knew where I was had died, they were around here, and I had a feeling that when I created this shrine, I wouldn’t just be making two goddesses happy; I would all start to piss others off, perhaps even the one that brought me here.

The past encounters had shown that I was playing the wrong game. While I liked being alone and living in the woods, I didn’t get to do so in a tame forest. I needed to be ready, and I needed to make sure that the next time I fought, it was on my own terms.

I never understood the ideas that heroes in books had about fair fighting, and while it was fun to read about a hero who almost didn’t win, it sucked when that person was you.

I didn’t want close fights and hard-won victories that I could tell tales about. I wanted a complete walkover of my enemy. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t get hurt but that I won, which meant I needed to win by a big margin. Since I couldn’t level up myself, I had to have better equipment and better planning.