It is only a couple hours past noon but both Rosha and Jason decide they need to set up camp. With much pain Lily seems to be in neither of them want to stress her anymore. Courtney wanted to move somewhere without a corpse in it. Not that she bothers to mention this as it is clear they’d have overruled her. In the end she rationalizes the giant mantis should be the apex predator in the area so the corpse might keep other animals away.

While the two worry over Lily Courtney sets up camp. The first order of business though is to move said corpse out of the way. They had killed it in the center of the clearing but that is now inconvenient if this is their campsite for the night. A task that in normal circumstances would not be hard. Without Jason’s help it ends up a monumental challenge instead.

The mantis corpse now off to the side leaves enough space in the clearing to set their bed rolls out and light a campfire. Once that is done though she doesn’t have much else to do and wanders back over to where the other two are. With enough sarcasm to strip paint she thanks them for their help with setting up camp and moving the corpse.

Still distracted Jason mumbles your welcome and continues his worrying. Courtney sighs and asks him if he has any clue of what might be wrong. He responds that, “the only clue I have is in her status page the experience value is wonky. Instead of numbers it is a bunch of the number symbol thing.”

Courtney nods, “Yeah, the octothorpe or hashtag if you prefer. Now if you would kick your brain into gear that should hint to what the problem might be. First, there is something wrong with her experience. Since you said nothing about the level being weird, then it is not her leveling too fast. Besides, we just finished a fight, so the problem is the experience we received. Now there isn’t anything weird about the mantis. It wasn’t corrupted or some such so there is more to it than that. I never heard of a serf rabbit so it might have something to do with that. How did she evolve?”

Jason takes a moment to remember back on it, “honestly she just offered to serve me. When I accepted her service she evolved right there.” Courtney sighs, “and what were you doing before that?” Jason shrugs, “She woke me up and I fed her some energy berries.”

Courtney waves her hand, “I suspect serf is an energy-based evolution. The key to her evolution though was likely the whole serving you thing. It is called serf after all. My guess is not only does the evolution require energy, but a master who also is energy-based. That however brings us to her problem. Actually, if you get up close I suspect” she leans in with her nose almost pressed into Lily, “yep there it it. See? There are black wisps coming off of her right now. We have to turn off the experience share.”

“Or rather me and Rosha need to turn off our share to her. That and you need to turn off the team-based share as well. Most creatures can take whatever experience you give them. My bet is a serf rabbit require their masters experience which has been filtered by them to be energy-based. You with your crazy low experience gain might make you the only person capable of raising one. Since it exists in the first place, they must be somewhere. Likely at the center of the rabbit plains? Whoever is in control there probably raises them.”

Jason facepalms, “so we poisoned her with our experience?” Courtney shakes her head, “no no no, I suspect that is what happened. We won’t know until after we turn off the experience share. But yeah, tainted xp. Worse yet, all we can do is wait. She took in A LOT of xp from that fight. Sure the System has some stuff in place so she wouldn’t have rocketed right past level ten or anything but yeah. Those wisps coming off of her at least mean she is getting better. By tomorrow things should be fine though I foresee her not keeping much if any of the experience. Any experience that was pure enough probably mixed with the rest of it since the xp all went to her at once.”

With an actual plan the rest of the night goes by in peace. The team turns off the team experience split right away just in case they get attacked but besides that things crawl by for them. Jason is out of it and it takes Courtney reminding him three times to change Lily’s experience split from being his companion. Not into it he just sets it to 100% and 50% when she hits level ten. Though when he did that a future problem popped up in his mind.

Animals will level up as they grow even if they don’t do anything for experience. This natural level growth side steps the usual bottlenecks. Once a creature has enough sentience or reaches their species soft cap will the bottlenecks affect them. Lily fit neither of those but because of being a companion she technically was under that first one. After all, someone can only become a companion through their own conscious acceptance of it. What this means is that they will have to find a low level boss for Lily to beat up in the near future.

When he told Courtney about this she only laughed. Jason got the feeling that Lily might be stuck at level nine for a little while. Of course that might not matter if she is allergic to all experience she doesn’t earn herself. He was willing to hold her paw through fighting sub level ten mobs but he didn’t want to have to hunt them out. Sure you could find a large variety of different leveled mobs around but low leveled ones tend to be focused in more civilized areas or oddly enough the danger zones.