Sorry about the late chapter. My PC got f*cked up and was gone for repair. It came back today and posting this chapter is the first thing I do!

A few days passed with same same routine. I hunted and tried new ways to get skills, then took any items I obtained to the village merchant(the shopkeeper) and the meat/herbs to the innkeeper.

I managed to obtain the following skills in the meantime.

Jump LVL 4

Increased max jumping height by 40%

Soft Landing LVL 4

Decreased damage by 40% when falling from a height less than max jumping height.

Dagger Mastery LVL 1

Increased change of critical by 1% when attacking with a dagger.

Dig MP 10

Dig out a herb from the ground.

The first two were probably gained due to jumping too much. The next, Dagger Mastery, as the name suggests, was gained because of using daggers to fight. These 3 were different from every other skill that I had obtained yet. They were passive. Also, they were level based, so they had to be grinded. Well, the dagger master was useless to me. Each level gave me 1% increase in critical hit chance but I already had a 100% critical hit chance. I had already changed my weapon to an ordinary claymore I purchased from the village merchant, but had yet to obtain something like a Sword Mastery skill.

The last skill was pretty similar to Gather, just that it worked on herbs rather than fruits. The only benefit to this skill was that I could get the herbs with the roots intact.

Now lastly, let me tell tell you more about Shirley and what happened to her in the last few days. (Yeah, I found out her name, finally.) Apparantly, the meat I used to give her many a times contained rare pieces which the villagers had never even seen before, much less tasted it. So she advertised the fact and about a dozen people had come to try it during this time. I don't know but I'm pretty sure that this was the most customers that the inn had ever had. The reason I'm so sure is because one day when I came back, she started crying and hugged me. Obviously, those were tears of joy, which was pretty evident from the fact that she kept saying "thank you" continuously and asking whether she could do anything for me while burying her head in my chest.

I saw this as a good opportunity and asked her to teach me about the stuff that every pubescent boy of my age wants to know about. She pulled back her head from my chest to look at my face. Her face was red, whether due to the earlier excitement, or due to what I said, I wasn't sure. Seeing the seriousness in my eyes she looked down and whispered "if you're alright with me......". Frankly, it was pretty cute. She had put on some skin due to her better meals and looked quite young. She was definitely older than me, but probably not that much. Due to the situation, she looked younger and this situation kinda remined me of a certain incident with Pauli. That brought another thought to mind.

(No no. What I'm doing here is not cheating on Pauli. This is merely to get experience so I can impress her next time.)

I convinced myself by saying things like that. The fact that I was going to going to do it in virtual reality probably wouldn't change the fact that I did it and the experience would carry over with me to the real world. Either way, the experience is what matters and if I'm able to become good at it, the skill would become indispensable.

This all happened yesterday, and tonight was the night were it all went down. She had suggested that we could also do it in the day, but I was resolute. At night, we could go on uninterrupted. There was no chance of anyone coming in and demanding 'a piece of rare meat that everyone is talking about'.

As soon as night came, she took me in the back where she lived. To the right was the bedroom and to the left was the kitchen. She went right to the bedroom and I went left to the kitchen. I let her prepare whatever she needed before we start. Meanwhile, I looked around in the kitchen. Since it was so quite, I could easily hear the rustling of clothes from her room. My excitement was reaching its peak knowing what was to soon follow. Soon, she was done and appeared in front of me with an apron on. Why, you ask? Well, obviously because she was going to teach me how to cook. What else did you think?

Every teenage boy loves to cook, doesn't he? xD