I got twelve new attribute points from eating the monsters in my inventory and leaving ten of them for mana and health-restoring purposes. Due to the nature of gluttony, it was a slight increase across the board, but it was still a whopping 12 points, which was the equivalent of leveling up twelve times. The two points I got from actually leveling up I put into Wisdom. I had once again been reminded that MP was my most important resource during my last fight, and the crown on it meant that I’d get the most value out of putting the points there.

While eating I’d given some thought to how I wanted to proceed. Since I’d been heavily weakened, I couldn’t just prance around the entire layer anymore. To make it easier for me, I set three goals for myself. First, I needed to regain my strength. Second, I wanted to find the other fragments of the ancient civilization. Third, try and keep an eye open for the node mentioned in the other bonus objective.

The plan of potentially fighting a hunter of the fourth layer was put on ice for now. Trying to fight one of these… monsters would be suicide as I was now. Maybe I would put it back on the table at a later point.

Now, the easiest path to regain my strength would be to stay here and grind levels. The building and the tower were somehow protected by the system, which made it a safe space for me. There were barely any monsters up here, since the system didn’t seem to spawn any up here, and only the flying ones could even get here. While safe, it would also be boring, since I’d only be able to hunt whatever prey that came to visit.

I caught myself almost dismissing this option because it was boring. I had just decided that I wanted to use my brain more, instead of just chasing after the next battle high. So even if it was mind-bogglingly boring, I’d stay here for a bit and see how often new monsters came up here. It’d just be like back on the first layer, where I’d spent hours upon hours doing nothing while waiting for an opportunity to kill, or for my HP to restore itself.

I’d done it before, I could do it again. Easy Peasy.

It had been five god-forsaken days. Five days of utter boredom, occasionally disturbed by a relatively short scuffle with a monster. Every day I had to tell myself over and over again: “This is the smart thing to do. You got all the time in the world. It’ll pay off eventually. Don’t do something stupid. Resist the urge.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. The traffic up here was abysmal, and it sometimes took hours before a new monster came to settle on the mountain. It’s not like I could just spend the downtime glued to my phone or something, so I’d been bored out of my mind. By now, I’d explored the entirety of the island several times over and I could probably draw it from memory.

I felt restless and was looking over my status and skills for what felt like the gazillionth time these past few days. I gained another twenty-eight status points, as well as another four levels, over the past few days which was obviously a decent amount, huge even, but it still left a bitter taste since I was only restoring the missing amount. At least I was back to having more than a thousand MaxMP.

In other good news, all of this farming finally put me over the 20’000 DP threshold and I was finally able to buy the “Load of Cash” achievement from the store! This combined with the already quite high amounts of DP a tier 4 monster provided put me in a position where I could finally buy stuff to my heart's content. Of course, that meant I bought all of the essentials from the store.

So I’d bought four mutation points, five attribute points, five skill points, and even the second skill tree slot. I put the attribute points into wisdom, as always, and saved the rest. The skill slot only opened up a slot for later and didn’t immediately give me a new tree to invest in, just as I suspected. It was still nice to have an open slot, just in case.

I struggled with myself, I really did, but at the end of the day, my desire to do something won out. So I decided to move to the next island. I could see the next island from this one, and it wasn’t terribly far away. If I hurried and didn’t get into too many fights I should be able to get there in a day.

I also used some of my mutation points to buy myself some wings to glide with. Sure, actual flying wings would probably be better, but also more expensive. If they could glide, they would already help me out immensely. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to just go for it. If I could just jump off the island and glide down, I would not only be able to avoid a lot of monsters while covering a lot of distance, but it would also save me from spending my void mana to teleport down. Which meant it would be available if I got into a fight.

Turns out that the solution was, as always, a pair of specialized tentacles. The little buggers were really versatile, not to mention that they didn’t get in the way due to their retractable nature. I might even be able to swim with them, but that’d need some more testing. So I ended up spending three of my mutation points to get myself some fresh tentacle wings, attached dead center of my body. Each side was equipped with a tentacle that had been split in half, a membrane spanned between them.

I know I kept refusing the tentacle-focused evolutions, but at the end of the day, they were pretty neat.

So, before jumping down from the island, I took my new appendages for a test flight. The system had, as always, provided me with the necessary knowledge on how to use my new limbs, but knowing and doing were two entirely different things. And I’d rather not fall to my death because I was too confident in my own abilities. The windows of the tower I was staying in provided me with the ideal training environment.

At first, I jumped from the lowest floor and slowly worked my way up the tower. Gliding further every time, gaining confidence and control with every test. I also tried some maneuvers, like starting a glide after using leaps, sharp turns, and descending fast without crashing. Doing these exercises took my mind off the mind-boggling boredom for a while, and a few hours later I went for a last sweep of the mountain, which yielded four more monsters and a single point in agility, before proceeding to the edge of the island.

The other island in the distance beckoned to me, taunting me with the secrets it most likely contained, and I wanted to unravel them. I peered over the edge and once again realized just how far up I was. I was missing the familiar gut-wrenching sensation I usually got as a human when I looked down from high places, the fear of heights apparently not programmed into this body's instincts. Still, my human side recoiled a bit when I looked down anyway.

I ignored the twang of fear and got ready to jump and took a deep breath. I activated leap to gain some forward momentum and unfurled my new wings. For a brief moment I feared that for some reason they wouldn’t work now that I was this high up, but contrary to my fears, they worked perfectly. I looked down again and watched the ground pass me by as I gently glided along in the sky.

Floating Island #2, here I come!