As the sun began peeking over the valley’s mountaintops, Mike gnawed on the remainder of his cooked rabbit as he surveyed his campsite, which would have been fairly bleak for the average camper, but was an exciting challenge for him. Gone were his tarps, tents, most of his cooking equipment, briquettes, and other camping elements, and he was left with only his Dayton ax, Felling ax, a small cast iron skillet, a single sheath knife that he had personally made, and, blessedly, a small pouch of both salt and pepper that he usually cooked from. He had made the pouches from rawhide in preparation for this expedition, and for some reason they remained. Where his sleeping bag and tarp had once lain, there was only a small pile of rough fur blankets. Had they been like that when he awoke two days prior? He honestly couldn’t remember. He could recall his breakfast from that morning, quail eggs and acorn bread, which had required only the cast iron skillet, salt, and pepper to make to his liking, so it was possible that everything else had just missed that all of his other equipment was gone before he had rushed for the town. If nothing else, it was a testament to how shaken-up he had been when he had started seeing notifications, since he was usually very observant by nature and training.

As he eagerly planned out how he would survive with the few tools left to him, he decided that setting up a base of operations was the most pressing task on his list. He had spent the last month wandering around the valley, spending a few nights wherever caught his fancy, but now he needed a location that would allow him to dig in for the long haul. Gathering up his small pile of possessions, he began exploring the valley with a more critical eye. There was a small cave that would make a good natural shelter along the eastern wall of the valley, but it was unfortunately far from flat ground and good water. He also deliberated settling down near the small lake that was nearly central to the valley, but decided against it, not wanting to have too many run-ins with the bears that frequented this part of Montana. At length, he decided on a quaint quarter acre clearing with a stream nearby.

His location determined, he took to scouring the area in search of some local vegetation that he could plant and garden in the future.. He found that even though he no longer had his copy of “How to Survive in Montana: Plants and Wildlife”, he could easily recall passages he had only read once. This had made the foraging much quicker than he had expected. Unsurprisingly, his work here had gotten him the Foraging skill, which didn’t give any stat bonuses, but was satisfying nonetheless. The final hours of the day had been spent creating his garden. It was primitive at best, but hopefully there would be time to add to it later.

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Mike inspected his garden the next morning with a critical eye: three small rows of Nodding Onions, one row of Stinging Nettle, which required quite a bit of processing but was actually fairly nutritious, and best of all, a small patch of Huckleberry shoots that he had pruned from some larger bushes during his exploration the day before. Had the plants begun growing already? He couldn’t be sure, but the small plants seemed larger than the night before. If things truly grew faster than they used to, it could be a huge boon for his long term plan. He had originally thought that the garden would require a lot of upfront work in exchange for a small amount of extra food during the summer and then hopefully enough could be harvested to make it through the winter. Now he wondered if gardening could be one of the major food sources he relied upon during the summer, which would decrease the time he would have to spend foraging and increase the rate at which improvements could be added to his campsite.

Turning his thoughts towards the labors of the day, a huge smile split Mike’s face. He had always wanted to live off the land, and now he finally had that opportunity. Being essentially back in the stone age, Mike tried to prioritize the things he needed most. He figured he had some time before people found his valley, and during that time, he needed to get a sustainable food source, create a defensive strategy, and he needed to equip himself with better weapons.

From all of his survival training and research, he knew where he needed to start.

Not too far from his campsite, he found a deposit of clay along the river bank. Filling his arms with as much as he could carry, he excavated a large amount of the clay and moved it a dozen yards from the waters edge. Using his cast iron skillet to ferry water to his worksite, he mixed the clay with water and made a large ring, about 8 inches high and 2 feet across, leaving the ring unfinished for about 6 inches on one side. He then packed together clay into a flat disk that fit snugly over the top of the ring and, using a straight stick, he poked 12 holes in the disk. The base completed, he took more clay and formed it into a dozen thick snakes, which he then coiled around the edges of the disk, directly above the ring that formed the base. After all of his clay was used up, he took water and smoothed the structure out as best he could.

Stepping back, he took a good look at what he had created. The structure stood about four feet high, and the coiling technique gave it a beehive like appearance, especially with the hole at the bottom. It was perfect.

Scraping the bark off of a nearby branch with his ax, he stooped to collect some smaller twigs that he could use to start a fire. Next he created a hand drill with a couple of straight sticks and the strong fibers from some nearby grass. A hand drill was one of the more difficult ways to start a fire without hours of practice, but once perfected, it was more reliable than almost any other method that he had available. Within twenty minutes, a small fire glowed merrily inside the base of his structure, and a notification greeted him:

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Tinkering.

+1 stat point by assignment.

Keep testing the limits of your imagination.]

Not knowing where to assign the stat point, gazed idly at his creation until another notification appeared:

[Analyze item? (Y/N)]

After selecting “Yes”, a list of information appeared in his field of vision, not unlike his own Character Sheet.

Clay Kiln

Quality: Shoddy

Durability: Medium

Rarity: Uncommon

Attributes: Earth Attunement-small chance to grant items fired in this kiln an earth affinity, higher chance at high luck. Uneven Heating-Small chance of ruining items in the firing process, especially if the item is of crude quality, lower chance at high luck.

“Is shoddy better or worse than crude?” he wondered, eyes moving from his ax to the kiln. “At the very least, the kiln won’t hit me in the face when I use it.”

Knowing that it would take a few hours for the kiln to get hot enough to make the clay harden, Mike turned his attention to making some clay vessels that he could use to cook and store items. As the sun reached its peak, his first ceramic creations since high school were already heating up in the fire. The first piece was a small bowl, a kind of test to make sure he could still remember what he had learned about pinch pots. The next piece was a quart sized jar that he made from coiling clay in a spiral to get the walls high and even. The final piece was a gallon sized jar that he planned on using to carry water.

Keeping the kiln going required his presence around his camp, so he spent the afternoon tending to his small garden, setting up some racks to dry out reeds on, and looking through the Menu. Though the Menu was very intuitive to use, it had an overabundance of options that made getting lost or distracted almost impossible to avoid. After some time, he found out he could bring up notes on his various skills. The notes all related to how to get to the next level. He had to kill 10 people from 20 paces away with throwing knives to level up Knife Throwing. He had to amputate a limb for First Aid. Probably the weirdest one of all was that he had to correctly recover from an accidental fall of 10 feet or more to increase the Tumble skill. It seemed that every single skill that would help him be prepared for combat, required him to actually be in combat… except for Hardened Skin. He had initially passed by the requirement of being involuntarily hit 100 times by a blunt object, but after seeing how hard the other combat skills would be to train, he had circled back to it. He had an ax that regularly rebounded and hit him, and with his low Luck score, he figured it wouldn’t take him long to test out his theory to see if he could move the ticker on the level requirements without an opponent.

Mentally preparing himself, he walked over to the nearest spruce, pulled out his Dayton ax, and began testing. After about 20 minutes, Mike reviewed his findings. Yes, the rebound did count towards his Hardened Skin requirement. No, he couldn’t swing the ax softly, it had to be a swing capable of injuring something. No, the ax wasn’t very predictable in how it rebounded, his broken toe was proof of that. Yes, the Hardened Skin did make breaking his toe about 10% less painful than he would have guessed, which is to say, he still screamed aloud when it had happened. Overall, he only had to hit himself 94 more times with the rebound. It had taken 20 minutes to get 6 rebounds, so barring any serious injuries, he would need to keep up this activity for roughly five hours. Just as he had resigned himself to taking another beating, he was greeted with another notification:

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Pottery.

+1 to Dexterity

Art is what separates society from animals, too bad you have no society as a monster]

Even with the jab at his predicament, he couldn’t help but feel happy at the extra point to Dexterity. As he had planned out his strategy for self preservation, he felt that speed would be key. That is what had allowed him to engage so well in the last battle when he had to face many opponents at once, and if he could sharpen this edge even more, he might just survive this ordeal.

Suddenly realizing what the notification meant, Mike happily put off beating himself til the following day and went to check on his pots. The fire had died down and he was able to look inside to see the results. Only the quart sized clay pot remained. Both the pinch pot and water jug had broken during the firing. Analyzing the clay jar didn’t help him cope with the loss either:

Clay Jar

Quality: Crude

Durability: Low

Rarity: Common

Does the System just hate me or something? Surely my pots aren’t that bad. Thinking back over the last few days, he couldn’t remember a time when the System had actually praised him for doing anything, and he began to suspect that the System may actually dislike him for some reason.

Looking back at the pots, he decided that they could indeed have been better, and he had originally thought it might take him a few tries to make them correctly. Besides, earning a new skill wasn’t nothing. Opening the Menu, he checked the requirements for Pottery level 2. He only had to make a usable pot of shoddy quality or higher. That was definitely something he could attempt tomorrow… along with trying for Hardened Skin level 2, Foraging level 2 and setting up some traps to add some meat to his diet.

As Mike drifted off to sleep that night, he couldn’t help his thoughts thinking towards the future, and sleep came slowly. A comforting thought cut through the clutter of his task list: when the pots were finished, he could progress from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, which meant cooking pots, which meant pot roast.

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The next three days flew by in a dull blur. The first day he had managed to get his Hardened Skin up to level 2, gaining another point in toughness and an increase to his resistance to blunt force trauma, now 20% less damage, but the progress had ended there. The next requirement for Hardened Skin was 1000 involuntary hits, which left him wondering how anyone ever leveled up this skill without a rebounding ax and a low Luck score. It would take him 50 hours of chopping down trees to get to the next level. If we went all out, he could put in about 8 hours a day, which left him broken and bleeding and barely able to function. Surprisingly, with just a little care each evening, using a paste he created from local flowers, his body felt whole again each morning.

Upgrading his Foraging skill had also been a bust. The next requirement was to find a sustainable source of food from a plant. Apparently his small onion and berry plants weren’t good enough.

On top of that, he had been unable to successfully make a jug, or anything for that matter. He had tried to make a better quart sized jar, but even those had blown up. Apparently his Luck score and kilns didn’t work super well together.

Despite all of these setbacks, Mike was committed to persevering, and the fourth day was different from the instant he woke up.

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Gardening.

+1 to intelligence

Plants regularly grow on their own, but you lined them up well]

Having learned that skills tied to an accomplishment, he went to check on his little garden and was shocked to find that the small berry shoots he had planted were now small bushes, bedecked in clumps of berries. He had noticed that they were growing much more quickly than normal, but yesterday there had only barely been buds on the bushes, and now there were full berries. The harvest was small, but adding in the small fruit to his breakfast of fish and water was a real treat, and somehow made him more optimistic about his pottery prospects for the day.

Walking over to the now ravaged river bank, he gathered his daily load of clay and took it back over to the kiln. His happy attitude had him rethinking how he usually coiled the pots, and this time smoothed out the clay after the coiling process was complete. The now familiar task took barely an hour, and the results were two pots of the finest quality he had created to date. Setting the fire and leaving the pots to fend for themselves, he moved on to his most dreaded task, smacking a tree with a now very dull axeblade.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t sharpen his ax, he was in fact very adept at sharpening almost any blade under the sun, it was just that he had found he got more consistent rebounds from the tool when it was dull. At this juncture, that was way more important than safety when chopping firewood. More importantly, it decreased the risk of him taking a sharp axeblade to the head if a rebound went extremely south.

As he passed the large piles of logs that his self destruction had created, he marveled at how much wood he had managed to chop. It was a testament to his changing body. The changes were hard to see from one day to another, due to his exhaustion and the deco of bruises that covered him at the end of each day. But comparing himself to a week earlier, in the light of the morning and with a happy outlook, his progress was self-evident. His aching joints felt young and new again. His shoulders and arms were getting bulkier and his waist leaner.

“Now if only there was a way I could fix my bald spot,” he sighed to himself, rubbing the smooth surface with his off hand.

Two hours later, Mike was approaching the 500 hit mark when he received a notification that his Pottery Skill had advanced to Level 2, gaining him 2 additional points to Dexterity. Putting his ax away, he eagerly went to inspect his work, hoping that the Iron Age was finally just around the corner.

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The clay jar would have been considered worthless before the integration, but Mike’s eyes shone as he looked at what his hands had made. A quart sized jar of shoddy workmanship, or so the System said. To Mike, it represented the key to smelting.

Leaving the jar to cool, he headed down to the riverbank and slowly walked along it, examining rocks as he went. Every so often, he would bend down and pick up rock, until his arms reached capacity. Almost all river rock contains a small percentage of iron, he remembered reading, so he had tried to pick the rocks that seemed to shimmer just a touch more than the others. Setting the rocks down by his kiln, he once again went to gather clay so he could put his bushcraft and loose apocalypse theory to the test. He first made a smaller version of the kiln, standing only 2 feet high, but he left two holes in the bottom of the ring. From one hole, he created a small tunnel that connected to a second cylindrical tower. He then took his knife and carved a branch down to a usable sized pole and wrapped a bit of rawhide from his blankets around one end of the pole. Smashing up the river rock between some larger rocks took time, but he eventually had the kiln side full to the top with chunks of rocks no bigger than his fingers. Using the second hole, Mike lit a fire in the bottom of the kiln and covered the hole with a clay plug which he had designed for that purpose. Moving over to the other tower, he began pumping the wooden plunger, made from his rawhide and pole, up and down the tube, pumping air into the fire and causing his kiln to reach higher temperatures.

[Congratulations! You have leveled up your skill Tinkering, now level 2.

+3 stat points waiting to be assigned]

He hadn’t been sure that the blast furnace would be enough to level up the Tinkering skill, which was the only skill that didn’t give him exact instructions on how to increase in level, but he had hoped that it would.

It took hours to heat up the rock inside the kiln until it glowed white. A week ago Mike was sure that he wouldn’t have been able to pump the bellows for that long, but it was almost relaxing compared to chopping trees. Eventually, the rock was too bright to look at and he had finished another task. Moving back over to the kiln, he unstopped the hole and used two sticks to dig the rock out of the kiln, separating it into piles based on color. As the rock cooled, one pile shone a dull gray in the evening light, proof of his success. The process had worked and he had managed to extract a small pile of iron from the river rock.

[Congratulations! You have learned the skill Smelting.

No rewards available for level 1

You’ve managed to do what mankind has done for thousands of years]

With or without new stat points, this process had been every bit rewarding as he had imagined it would be, and seeing that small pile of iron brought even more hope to his heart than the berries had that morning. It was the perfect end to his fourth day of nonstop toil.