NOVEL SIMPLE Ch-9- 2nd Quest
When morning came, I was still asleep until the light of dawn had already passed.
Usually, in this situation, I would get up with the light of dawn coming through my window, but this shack had no windows, so I did not know that dawn had already come and passed.
Finally waking up at half past too late, I began unraveling myself for my bedroll that I somehow got myself tangled in.
My tail was tangled in the bedroll, even worse than my body.
Once I was finally out, I started making breakfast.
This morning, I decided to butcher one of the rabbits I caught yesterday, which took longer than I would have liked, but it was still fast enough that I did not choose to do something else for breakfast.
While doing so, I set up a campfire just outside the house to cook the rabbit.
When I finished butchering the rabbit, I took some sticks, sharpened them to a point, and used them to roast the game over the fire. During this time, my stomach and nose were telling me to eat it immediately, whether it was cooked or not.
Persevering to the end, I lifted the fully roasted rabbit leg off the fire and began eating.
It was so good that I did not even know when I had eaten the entire rabbit, but it was clear that I did, as all that was left was the pile of bones sitting next to me.
The moment I realized this, I started to think that this might be a problem before shrugging it off, saying, "If the food is good, it doesn't matter if it's a problem as long as I don't eat too much."
Now, with breakfast over, I opened the crafting menu and set the wooden workbench to craft before checking the required materials for the other types of production facilities that I wanted.
Going through the blueprints for a few minutes, I saw that most of what I needed was stone, but I also needed some iron.
With this in mind and knowing a good spot for where I could potentially find some, so I took off toward the boulder field once more while the workbench was crafting.
On the way, I allocated one skill point to geology and felt the information rush in, so I would be able to identify the iron ore more easily. This particular skill point allocation did not provide much information because it was only a ten-point increase.
Half an hour into my walk, the wooden workbench finished crafting, and then, an hour after that, I arrived at the boulder field.
Walking around the outside, I started placing loose chunks of stone I found in my inventory while searching for iron. I was not having much luck finding anything, so I walked through the center of the field until I reached the other side of the field, where I came face to face with a sheer cliff.
Luckily, I was at the bottom of the cliff, but that still left me with the issue of where to go from here.
Originally, I came to the boulder field as there was a chance for some iron ore to be on the surface, making it easy to collect some if I could not abuse the system functions again. On the other hand, I could search along the cliff for any ore patches in the cliff face; it would be harder to mine them, but they would most likely be larger than anything I would find in the boulder field.
Deciding to take a quick look around for a few minutes as my luck in the boulder field was not great at the moment, I spot a cave not far from my position with a few bones lying outside.
This led me to assume that the cave was occupied by something.
Pulling out my bow and a few iron arrows from my inventory in case whatever it was that occupied this cave was home at the moment, I noticed that this specific set of arrows had what appeared to be glowing tips.
Taking a second look, I saw that the arrows were not actually glowing but had a strange sheen covering the metal, similar to the strange piles of metal I found at the bottom of the ship.
This reminded me that I had not actually checked what that metal was using the system.
All of a sudden, I heard a quiet growl come from the cave entrance, pulling me out of my runaway thoughts.
With weapons in hand, I begin to approach the cave carefully and quietly while knocking an arrow.
I then approached the cave's mouth before crouching low and peering around the entrance. Just inside the entrance was a cougar bigger than the one I fought in the meadow, with almost pitch-black fur and two tails.
The beast was sleeping at the moment and had not noticed my presence from the looks of things. However, every now and then, I could hear a low, quiet growl coming from it.
Slowly approaching the mouth of the cave, I took up position at the entrance and raised my bow. Pulling it back to full draw and lining up a shot for the cat's eye, I let go of the string.
The moment the string was released, the arrow launched forward as it flexed to the side. The bow finished shaping back into its resting position as the fletching glided across my hand, and the arrow began its sprint across from me to the cougar.
The whistle from the arrow alerted the big cat, which opened its eyes to see what had dared to attack it.
The only thing it saw was the arrow as it struck true and pierced the now-open eye.
For some reason, the shot did not seem to kill the cougar as it started to writhe on the ground, its strength shattering the stone around it.
Taking a risk, I sprinted toward the writhing beast and kicked the back of the arrow, lodging it in further and causing the beast to spasm before it started to slow down and finally succumb to the wound.
Watching the misery of the animal as it died caused a twisting feeling in my stomach, which did not sit well with me. It was not like the hunting and killing I did since I reincarnated was the first time I killed an animal, but even then, I never liked to make the animals suffer and preferred having a clean kill above all. Only if the animal was trying to kill me would I not care as much and focus on survival above all.
I then quickly placed the corpse in my inventory without looking too long at it as I had already seen enough. That was when multiple messages popped up in my vision.
[Congratulations, you have slain a higher beast, a Twin-Tailed Shadow Cougar that is over three major levels above you in cultivation and four major levels in strength. For how you have killed the higher beast, you have been rewarded with +1 (STR).]
[Congratulations, your title {Minor Lord of the Forgotten Forest} has been upgraded to {Middling Lord of the Forgotten Forest}]
[You have leveled up.]
[You have received the level-up rewards of +1 skill point and +2 tech points]
The first message explained how it survived being shot through the eye.
There was also that message about a title that I did not understand as I do not know how to access the title page or even what they do.
{Error detected: Title sub-system not functional: Error sent to administrator}
That was unexpected.
Regardless, now that the beast was slain, I looked at the cave around us. Checking the cave walls and comparing it to the knowledge I now had in my brain to see if it contained iron, I stored my bow and remaining arrows in my inventory while pulling out my backpack.
Setting down my backpack on the floor and grabbing the pick off the side, I turned to one of the spots on the cave wall that looked to have contained the most iron.
Raising my pick, I strike it into the walls of the cave in an attempt to break a piece off.
Success answered by my third strike as a piece flew off the walls and toward my feet.
Picking it up and placing it in my inventory, I checked the chunk of stone and got the confirmation that the cave walls were indeed iron.
Without thinking too much, I put my hand on the walls and attempted to cheat the system by willing all the iron to enter my inventory like I had done earlier with the copper.
Immediately, the iron disappeared, leaving a massive cave in its place. This would have looked amazing if the ceiling had not begun to rumble, with small chunks starting to fall.
Fully realizing the mistake I just made, I grab my backpack and bolt for the entrance, jumping out to the side of the cave as the entire thing collapses in on itself.
When the cave finished collapsing, I thought I was safe, so I breathed a sigh of relief before hearing the rocks on the cliff start shifting.
Not even looking up at the cliff, I bolted up and ran into the boulder field as the sounds of crashing rocks filled my ears.
When the sound stops, I am in the middle of the field, trying not to trip and fall on the boulders. As soon as I got my footing again, I turned around to find that the cliff had now turned into a slope made of boulders and shattered stones leading to the top of where the cliff was.
Sighing in relief at not being caught in that, I turned around and sprinted home, not wanting to stick around and find out whatever was attracted to that commotion I just caused.
An hour and a half later, I arrived home and went to the side of my little shack. The ground around this area was just as flat as where I put the house, so it was also the area where I would be placing all of my workbenches for the moment.
Walking over to the side of the shack and opening my inventory, I place down the wooden workbench right up against the wall.
With the workbench placed, I looked at the bench, not seeing a pop-up in my vision, so I opened up the crafting screen instead.
Here, I am presented with the option to transfer over to the workbench crafting tab. Doing so, I was presented with options for all of the stone workstations I had unlocked, and once I saw them, a new pop-up overlayed my original screen.
[Quest: Mainline 1: Catching Up to the Rest of the World]
{Task 1: Construct and place all stone workstations.}
{Task 2: Produce your first refined resources.}
{Task 3: Build your first product requiring refined materials.}
{Reward: +1 free Stat point}
Since I was already planning on doing just that, I set the workbench to make a stone furnace to smelt down all the different metal ores I have. This would allow me to move on to the Iron Age proper.
This crafting will take a while, and metal is required for all the other workbenches, so instead, I walk a little ways away to practice my butchering skills.
After seeing my need for metal, I was reminded that I had some metal from the ship in my inventory that I wanted to check out.
Opening my inventory I looked for the large pile of metal and used the systems inspection function on it.
[Unkown Iron]
{This metal is a type of moderately refined iron with an unknown energy flowing through it.}
With this information screen, I was able to roughly assume that the large pile of metal was most likely what cultivation novels called spiritual iron. I already had plenty of thoughts on things like spiritual iron and the blacksmithing techniques talked about in cultivation novels, so I would rather ignore this and deal with it later.
Now that I was finished with my thoughts, I found that I had already stopped a little downwind from the house in and area that would be fine for butchering animals.
I then opened my inventory and started going through the animal carcasses.
I soon discover that defeathering birds is quite annoying and time-consuming, as, by the time I finish defeathering the birds, the furnace is ready to place.
Going over to the workbench, I took the furnace out and placed it right next to the workbench itself. I then opened the crafting interface and selected iron bars to be produced, which required a fair amount of wood to heat the furnace.
After I set the iron bars to be produced, I went into the forest to selectively cut trees and gather more wood for future use.
With a good portion of the outer edge of the forest somewhat near my clearing in my inventory, I returned to my home and checked on the iron in the furnace.
Over half of the iron I collected today was smelted and ready to be used, so taking that out, I went back to my workbench and set the other workstations to be built.
With all this done and the day nearing its end, I looked up to see the sun was getting close to the horizon.
Knowing this would be the end of my day with everything that I had gone through, I went inside and lit the fire in the stove.
With the fire lit, I grabbed a pot of water from the stream to make some more stew.
This time, I was using the birds I caught the other day with some vegetables for the stew today.
I then chopped up all the ingredients and put them in the pot before going out to the stream and stripping myself to bathe. Afterward, I grabbed my comb and went inside to watch the stew while combing my tail out at the same time.
When the stew finished, I took a bowl and went outside to sit and watch the sunset while eating dinner. I have to say that it was one of the more relaxing periods of time I have had in the past few days.
After the sun had set, I cleaned up everything from dinner.
I then went to check the workbench to see how much time it had left to make the workstations, only to see it would still take a couple more hours.
With this, I went to bed waiting for tomorrow to upgrade my house.