As he backed away from the hulking mass of fur and muscle, he felt hair all over his body stand on edge. Sweat ran down his back. And every muscle began to twitch with an unrequited attempt to run the hell away as soon as possible. Between fight and flight, it was clear which he chose unconsciously… But there was also no way he could logically make that choice.

Slow, steady steps back attempted to move him back towards the yellow bark forest.

At the same time, the snarling monster took heavy steps forward. Each reverberated through the ground, and he knew that just a single arm might as well break every broke in his body. Not to mention those claws.

It wasn’t worth fighting such a beast, but he just might have to.

Fight and die that is. Lose another life, in what he begged to be a painful death for once, just so he learnt a lesson. For a split second he considered climbing a tree, but then thought about how some bears could climb them anyway, and this beast with opposable thumbs could never struggle with such an act. Running appeared fruitless as the thing’s size alone dwarfed him, not to mention the fact that its roar was so powerful only cemented that all aspects of its body had to be that strong. The safety stone?

Of course that would likely work right now, but a problem remained. Could he enter his inventory, grab it, and use it before that thing reached him and killed him?

At this distance, definitely not.

Joey took several steps back, and just as he thought the sasquatch lost interest in the scared, little human… it burst into a sprint and aimed right for him with sharpened teeth ready to bite and claws swinging already.

Without hesitation, he threw his body to the side from its charge, unsure if the sudden change in direction mattered, but immediately pushed himself from the ground and stood up in a single, fluid motion. To his side, the sasquatch charged past and turned around. Turned around very slowly that is, like each little rotation took an inordinate amount of strength, to the point it appeared defenceless.

There was no way those arms couldn’t still swing though…

But this was a chance, wasn’t it?

The shield vanished as he took the cube out, but dropped it into his brigandine and held a sword against the giant. One of those runic spears would’ve been a pretty damn good investment about now.

With its body spent turning, he quickly approached, but remained outside its range, spinning around. Like this, it couldn’t face him, therefore it couldn’t kill him. And this seemed to work. It appeared frustrated by the prey which easily evaded it, and the monster growled at him. Why would it do that unless emotional in some way, and he hoped that emotion was anger.

As its arms remained locked for a moment, he swung the bronze weapon with all his strength at its back, not really sure what he expected.

But certainly, the option he hoped for least was what he received.

The sword brushed against the beast’s thick, brown fur and failed to cut ever a single hair. Maybe its bushy fur was just naturally slash-proof? It wasn’t outrageous, which meant pushing a bit deeper, and harder to directly hit its skin, which hopefully resisted slashes worse, for whatever reason

Obviously, that made no sense.

But slimes which repeatedly blew up and whose innards made accelerant also made nose sense.

Or zombies who instantly died when their brain or heart were damaged sufficiently.

Rhyme or reason weren’t necessary, as long as it worked.

“It’s not fucking working!” More and more frustrated, he risked things more and more to cut deeper and truly slash into the beast… But nothing worked. Nothing could penetrate the beast’s skin or fur, and it seemed that he truly had no way to kill this thing.

A single native to this forest.

He stared up to its pitch black eyes in rage, pissed off that he might have to die just to escape as the thing easily outran him in any direction. As he stared into those thick eyes, he wanted to know just how durable the lumps of jelly flesh were for a monster like this. Soft like cream cheese, or hard like diamonds, not that the latter would surprise him in the slightest. In a split second, he deposited the sword and retrieved the copper spear from his inventory. He kept it around purely as a safety measure.

And today proved that decision correct.

Before the sasquatch even registered how he changed out the sword for a spear which previously didn’t exist, he already jabbed towards its large, glossy eyes. Just like his training to pierce a zombie’s eyes, he accurately jabbed it towards this sasquatch’s whilst standing securely in place. However, this felt far too risky in his mind as the possibility of it slashing back remained.

And a single one of its claws looked a hell of a lot worse than any threat he posed.

As he gave the spear one solid thrust, he felt immediate resistance as the monster screamed out in pain, roaring endlessly as his spear clearly met with an unreasonably thick liquid which seemed to cling to the spear, almost holding it in place. Although not truly, as he still managed to twist the spear ever so slightly whilst dragging it out from the beast’s eyes.

When had he become someone so willing to spill blood and wound an enemy like this?

Even if a monstrous-looking sasquatch…

He never truly hunted before, although butchering hadn’t particularly scarred him as a child. While some remorse remained for the death of those bulls and cow, it still felt necessary and almost right for him to take those lives.

If not for the sasquatch with a gaping eye hole and blood pouring down its face, he might have given the thought a bit more time to process itself. Unfortunately, he had to jump backwards, falling on his back, just to avoid a slash from the monster. Trying to roll to the side and jump away before it reached him, that failed miserably.

It already reached forward, and slammed downward with its open hand on his back, like one would swat a nauseating fly down. Marking his death in one move.

All feeling below his chest instantly vanished, it was as though his legs no longer existed. At the same time, he felt the literal shockwave of its simply slap pass through him, and its effects made him choke instantly. Not just from the air being smooshed out of his lungs, but the two sacks instantly collapsing from the sheer impact.

To make matters worse, he could feel how they’d been eviscerated from the blunt force trauma alone, and coughed out blood constantly, each little push left his entire chest aching.

Not just his spine and lungs, but also his ribs.

Nothing felt right. Perhaps that one move literally shattered every single bone in his upper body, and for once, he felt that being eaten alive wasn’t actually so bad.

This.

This was utter hell.

The sasquatch didn’t care to end him, it huffed at his broken body and left with its wounds, perhaps it took some pleasure in knowing that the bug which injured it would be forced to die a miserable death. It was then that a thought came to him, and if not for his arms refusing to move he might have rubbed his face over and over.

What about the safety stone? It might have saved him here…

However, he didn’t sit and mope about the horrible situation he found himself in. At the very least, he could speed this up. As not a single part of his lower body felt pain any longer, he quickly pulled out the copper knife from his inventory and cut whatever arteries were in his lower body as soon as possible.

If it didn’t hurt, he went for it.

One might consider the scene of a physically broken man slicing away at their body to hasten their death incredibly morbid. And to any thing watching, it was precisely what they liked to see.

But that was all it took, as not even half a minute later, with several large slashes across his legs and belly, Joey fell unconscious for the second time…

And he died. For a second time.

* * *

Some hours later, Joey twitched and gasped with all his body as to refill his lungs with air. The sensations of this death felt a lot vaguer than the extremely well-remembered one from before, but he still checked every part of his body before hurrying to collect the copper knife and spear before running away. His circlet told him that roughly another third of the day passed whilst he was dead, and this confirmed that the ‘resurrection’ either took some time or only worked once anything deemed a threat left the surroundings.

This one removed the markings on his other arm though, leaving them both barren now. At the very least he found the symmetry more appealing, not that it helped the fact that he lost a second extremely precious life.

He escaped from the excessively tall forest but continued further back until the gravel trees surrounded him once more. This was all precisely what he sought to avoid by staying away from the swamp, but who knew that the first thing he’d meet was such an excessively powerful monster!

He wanted to learn precisely where his low magic region started and ended to avoid such disasters next time he explored.

The tower alone made up for this death though.

Probably, it presented a fount of magical knowledge which exceeded outside the villages.

If its value couldn’t be understood easily, then consider it from an alternate point. How did the native wizard stay in their tower? Did they have their very own tablet?

How unbelievable must a single individual be to be able to either take or gather their own tablet?

These were the questions he considered, and when he entered it might be the first real sense of magic he gained since arriving. Not the naturistic magic he encountered so far, but the sort of things that he grew up with.

At the very least he hoped to find some sort of stuff on alchemy, as well as magical plants for him to grow.

“I should really just ask for some ivy, it’s ridiculous that I’ve found none after all this time.” It wasn’t as though he just walked randomly through the woods. He often used the cube to test a variety of plants all around, but he found that like 80% of them were just called ‘ferns’ or ‘grass’. Clearly, it only cared about specially naming an item if they held a use. What this meant was a whole matter on its own as well.

‘Useless’ meaning a lack of recipes, or quite literally holding no uses? With the cube, either could be the case.

Eventually, he passed back to the prairie, and eventually reached the oak tree once more. It’d been a horrible day, and with every step he realised that some of the plates in the brigandine’s back had been mangled by the sasquatch, but none felt shattered.

A hammering ought to fix them, he thought to himself.

Back at the tree, he exhaustedly picked up the five sun slivers and moved under the tree where his spare clay plates remained. Along with a few pieces of quartz from the crates, he jumped into the cube and did one last check for the sun well’s recipe.

“I should’ve made more… Already don’t have enough to make that droplet. How important is it anyway? Does it change me physically? Or is it just something to feed to plants and stuff?” The relatively simple recipe always led to an assumption of the latter, but it was truly impossible to know without testing. Though, would he be in danger for swallowing something laden with solar energies…

Well, not that it mattered for now. He clicked the crafting grid and took out the creation.

The sun well… Well, it kind of looked like a canopic jar’s base. A clay outer body, with the quarts forming a sort of rim over its opening like a lens. The outer parts curved far more, and he believed that this simply focused more light into the well’s interior. Inside which, the two sun slivers had been transformed into a flat disk, a rather strange sight.

But from this angle he saw some strange rings engraved into this disk of crystal. Whatever the rings did, they likely held some special magical power like the sun channeler’s ability to improve slivers into shards.

He left the thing upright in the evening sun, hoping that it gathered enough light for him to understand its ability before night fell.

But with the sun well crafted, he took another look at the recipe tree. Something new could be crafted now, as expected, and he guessed that it used a sun shard, or else why would the channeler have been given so early on?

“That’s… Just– Just what is this thing?” At first he’d been surprised by the two sun shards required for this recipe, thinking that the first use of them only required a single one. But then he noted that it required an iron ingot, and then a cup of blood.

That wouldn’t have been too strange. But it specified ‘User’s blood’.

His blood very specifically.

Was this tool something which only worked for him then? Or… As he stared at its sharpened chromatic tip, and the rings of orange light engraved into its surface. The thing would be stabbed into him, wouldn’t it?

Perhaps being too inquisitive only worked against him now. As he now completely thought about the solar spike stabbing into his chest and into his heart, ignoring if his assumption was wrong for even a single moment. His mind focused on the fact that so much of all this magic was incredibly painful!

And damn did he hate it.

Of course, some calming down did bring about that seed of questions. But the assumption remained steadfast.

Well, it requited an iron ingot, so he ignored its recipe for now. Instead, Joey placed one of the new sun slivers into the channeler and then cut out another set of sources of darkness for transformation under the sun.

Time to just gather all his wood pulp and start batch crafting dynamite.

He wanted to get some iron.