‘Well then, let’s see what we’ve got here.’ Gunther thought to himself, while he was looking around to see anything that might aid him in his quest for shelter. The river was just about what you would expect from a river, a lot of flowing water. The spot Gunther was at just so happened to be a bend in the river though and that meant rocks of different sizes that were carried away by the river were abundant.

  ‘Maybe I can fashion some sort of tool out of them, he thought. I remember being told that people from the stone-age used to hit stones against each other until one of them broke, to create a sharp edge.’

  Suddenly a yellow screen popped up.

  ‘Well then, hitting rocks till they break it is. This is a handy way to check if I’m doing the right thing.’

  Gunther looked around until he found a decently sized stone, one a bit larger than his fist. He then walked to the largest rock he could find and began to hit it with the stone. At each hit, a bit of the stone splintered off. He kept going until he had something that could have been an axe head, if you looked at it from the right angle.

  ‘Okay, let’s be honest, this looks like shit…’

  Gunther noticed another yellow box had popped up while he was hitting the rock.

  ‘Seems like it will stay transparent until I’m no longer busy, neat.’

  ‘These screens really are pretty mean. Oh well, as long as I gain those juicy stat points, I don’t really care.’

  When he dismissed the screen, he saw another, blue one.

  'That's nice.'

  'Two for the price of one, I like it!'

  Gunther took another stone of about the same size as the last one and got to work. He noticed he instinctively held the stone a little different and used varying amounts of strength when hitting the rock. When it was done, the rock looked like a tool that could actually be used. It was still really rough, but that was to be expected. He noticed Crafting was now level 2 and Primitive Crafting even went up to level 3.

  ‘So there is some kind of item system. I really have to figure out how to use that Inspect spell William was talking about. Primitive Crafting got more experience than Crafting, huh. Maybe the more specific skills level faster because you have to perform one specific action to use them and the more general skills level slower because they are used more. That would make sense.’

  Now that he had a kind of decent tool, Gunther had to decide what to do with it. He could try to use the branches laying on the ground, but he really had no idea how to build a hut with them. Gunther kind of regretted not playing outside more often when he was a kid ‘Would really have come in handy right about now…’

  Then he thought about what the description had said about his axe blade ‘Can be used to cut into wood huh, it might be a lot of work, but it could work out.’ With that thought, he walked towards a particularly wide tree and began to cut into it.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  It was really a lot of work, as expected, but it seemed possible to cut out a hole large enough to sleep in. Given that the diameter of the tree he was working on was about three meters, he would maybe be able to carve out something that would in the end act as an actual house, albeit a small one, instead of just some form of shelter. That was an issue for another day though.

  As Gunther was working, he noticed he needed to rest less and less as time went on and the carving seemed to be going better as well. Curious he checked the notifications he had been ignoring because he thought they would distract him if he didn’t.

  ‘So this skill is not only for hollowing out trees, but also for creating little sculptures of wood, interesting.’

  That message was directly followed by another one telling him he had leveled the skill up to level 2, after which he got a nice stat point notification.

  Well, maybe the message itself wasn't so nice, but the boost was still appreciated. Now that he had stopped for a bit anyway, Gunther decided to check how much progres he had made. What he saw was disappointing to say the least, after all the time he spent he hadn’t even managed to carve out a cubic meter of wood.

  ‘At this rate I won’t have a place to sleep tonight…’ He thought, before realising the mistake he had made. He had been going about this in a similar way to what he would have done on Earth.

  ‘Now that I have access to mana, I should use it! First I have to figure out how I can use mana and then how I can apply it to my current situation. I should have thought about this earlier, instead of just mindlessly hacking into the tree like a madman.’

  Gunther decided to try to feel the mana inside of him. It took a couple of minutes, but in the end he felt some sort of energy flowing through veins he didn’t even know he had.

  ‘I guess I really didn’t have them before today. But if the mana channels are part of my soul, does that mean I am feeling my soul right now? Wierd.’

  He decided to just sit for a bit and get a good grip on this feeling he now had. After a while, when he thought he had a good grasp of it, he tried to force the mana out of his channels. The result was kind of anticlimactic, the mana went out of his channels and dispersed in the air.

  ‘I guess I need to actively control it in order to make it stay huh?’

  Gunther forced the mana out again, but now only through his hand while trying to keep it there. He saw a blue glow form above his hand, getting more and more opaque as he pushed more mana into it. He tried to touch it with his left hand, but his concentration lapsed and the mana dispersed again. When Gunther tried to form it a third time it went a lot easier and he managed to keep a little ball of mana floating above his hand for a minute or so.

  ‘That Mana Manipulation skill I got earlier must have only began to work after I managed to do it on my own first. I guess that’s fair, it starting at level 10 is enough of a cheat as is.’

  Only now did he notice his mana went down from 90 to 20 through all of that. It seemed like he would have to wait a bit before he could continue experimenting.

  ‘Well, back to work then I guess.’

  Gunther decided it would be best for him to make a new blade before he continued though. The old one seemed to have been blunted quite a bit. He got to work and some skill level-ups later he had himself a new weapon in his battle against the tree. The quality is still Very Crude, but it seemed a little bit better than the last one at least. Now that he was done crafting, Gunther’s mana had only recovered by 5 points.

  ‘Even though my mana regen went up by a bit because of the stat point in wisdom, at this rate it would still take me one and a half hour to fully regenerate it. Maybe I can try to get some skill to speed it up a bit.’

  He thought about it some more while more or less subconsciously hacking away at the tree. In the end an active regeneration skill or some form of meditation would most likely be his best shot.

  ‘I think I’ll try active regeneration first, since I will be able to keep working on my shelter as well.’

  While still steadily fighting his way through the tree, Gunther focussed on the mana inside of him. Once he had a good feel for it again, he tried to extend this sense of his outward. After some struggle he managed to feel something around himself, it was faint but seemed similar to the mana in his channels just less pure. Gunther attempted to force the mana inside, but it wouldn’t move. Since force didn’t work, he tried to open himself up for the mana, in the hope it would just naturally flow into him. This technique seemed to work, until his mana reached a certain point, about halfway to his maximum capacity, the mana stopped coming. His own mana appeared to leak into the surroundings.

  ‘So this way I can regenerate my mana up to a certain point. I would assume it works like pretty much the same as almost everything else in nature, flowing from a high concentration to a lower one, or from high potential to low potential as was the case with most sorts of energy.’ Gunther’s sort of scholarly mind took over, this was the way of thinking that had helped him with his studies and later his research. ‘If it really does go from a high to low concentration, maybe there’s a way to make it seem as if my mana has a lower concentration. Condensing could work. Or maybe I should try to create a semipermeable membrane that only let’s mana through one way. That would actually be a great defense too I bet. Also, trying to figure out how exactly my body generates mana could help too…’

  After this went on for some time, Gunther noticed he went of track and tried to return to thinking about how to improve his mana regeneration. Before he could get back to his experiments though, he noticed a rather interesting pop-up.

  “Hey, it worked didn’t it?” Gunther said to no-one in particular, a bit embarrassed. That wasn’t the interesting notice he saw earlier though.