Getting Meta
Many more months passed after the troll repulsion. Summer became fall, and then winter. The trees withered, their leaves fell off and shriveled. Snow glided down from the sky in waves, blanketing the world around me.
It hadn't snowed last winter. Good thing my Cold Mitigation could handle it.
I ended up getting rid of the snow on my branch with Firebending. There was lots of steam.
Said steam made me realize something. I hadn't bathed or showered in... probably at least a year now. I'd barely been getting by via the cleaning skill, which, while preventing too much grime from building up on me, still left me pretty dirty.
It probably wasn't designed with personal use in mind. Assuming that skills were 'designed'. Hmm...
That brought up a very important question. One I hadn't considered before.
What exactly was my system?
I began pondering this question after the first month or two after the troll repulsion.
What was the system? Who created it? Why did they create it? Why did I have it?
It had been unquestionably beneficial to me. It allowed me to use amazing abilities. It enhanced my strength and intelligence. It prevented me from dying in the cold, or being stabbed to death by Greenskins.
But although it had been beneficial, I still didn't understand it. And that meant that I was effectively using the services of some entity I didn't know the intentions of.
That was almost always unambiguously a bad thing. After all, no one gives their support for free. Only altruistic idiots did, and those never lasted long. Only those who gained something from a relationship would want to build or perpetuate that relationship.
So the question was: What was the system-giver gaining from me?
Data for future systems? A powerful pawn down the line? My loyalty? My knowledge?
What could it be?
Eat the cheese, but keep an eye on who's feeding you. That's how the saying goes, but what if the feeder is invisible?
I shook my head. I had many questions, but no answers.
And thinking hard about it wasn't going to get me anywhere. At least not until I had more data to go off on.
So I stopped thinking about it, but kept it in the back of my mind.
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The days continued sedately. Harvesting mushrooms, hunting speedfowl. Building more of my tree-branch home and growing my garden. My level had stagnated, but I wasn't too worried.
From what I'd seen so far, skills increased differently from level. Level increased through killing things, but skills only required me to use them in order to grow.
That meant that leveling my skills was much more risk-free than raising my overall level. So I focused on it.
Every day, I depleted my mana on my skills. Mostly Firebending, Culinary Arts, Cleaning, and Garden Arts. I was already using Telekinesis and Teleportation fairly often, so I didn't see a need to focus on them.
I once spent a whole day watching birds, like my Grandmother used to.
She had cultivated a veritable jungle in her backyard, full of weird trees and ferned plants with large leaves. Bird feeders hung from every other branch, and wind-chimes were constantly jangling on the porch. Birds of red, blue, brown, and sometimes even white, would swoop down and fight over the seeds spilled from the feeders.
Every morning, I'd sit down at the breakfast table with the old lady, and together we'd watch the spectacle through the window.
The forest I was in now reminded me of those days I'd spent with her.
It had the plants. It had the animals. It was very... nature-y. Though this time, I didn't have the luxury of experiencing it through a glass pane.
But the birds of the forest, while different from the ones at my Grandmother's house, were still pretty.
These weren't speedfowl. They were just birds. Colorful ones. They had little meat on their bones, so I saw them more as entertainment than food.
They'd flap, squawk, and then chase each other between the trees, becoming little flashes of color in the otherwise black, green, and brown forest.
Sometimes, I'd follow them using teleportation just to see which one 'won' their little play-fights.
There was a specific blue-white bird I had been calling Lenny. He had the most ridiculous face, with one eye higher than the other and an especially flat, green beak, making him easy to notice among all the other birds.
The birds would migrate for the winter, so I'd seen Lenny... two or three times.
Lenny was a frequent enemy of a group of red birds, always singling them out to steal food from.
I'd set out bird-feeders of my own, using 'cleaned' killshrooms as food. Not many of the birds went for them though, even if they were no longer poisonous. I guess all the forest creatures had learned to avoid killshrooms.
Well, that just meant there was more for me.
Was it weird that I was using my own food as bird food?
Nah.
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An idyllic life was nice. Peaceful. But simultaneously boring.
I wasn't going through the whole analyze and plan thing I did for the greenskins.
Sure, I had my own projects here at home. Things like developing my garden and whatnot. But they didn't hold the same intensity as war with greenskins did.
I wasn't saying I wanted to slaughter and kill for the fun of it. But I couldn't deny that there had been an element of mental stimulation that went along with the experience.
What I was trying to say, was that fighting the trolls and Greenskins had been a bit of a thrill.
But I could find entertainment elsewhere.
Namely, my territory.
I hadn't been expanding it due to not really wanting to defend a larger area, even if my teleportation could theoretically keep up.
After all, the reason I kept territory in the first place was to make it somewhat clear to predators that my area was off-limits. Predators like trolls, for instance. And also because having a designated hunt-gather area was better for my daily life's structure, allowing me to be a little more sane than if I didn't take territory.
My life may be game-like, but I was no murder-hobo.
The area I'd taken over was enough to sustain me indefinitely. Killshrooms grew and animals thrived here. There weren't any creatures stronger than me (Green Bean) in the area either.
So I was content with my territory.
I didn't mark it in a traditional 'leave scratches on trees' way. I wasn't a complete savage.
Instead, I'd focused on the ecosystem of my territory.
The plants. The animals. The cycle of predation and decomposition that subsisted upon the Earth.
As with any ecosystem, it started with the sun.
Light streamed down from the sky, where it was immediately snatched up by the giant trees above, casting shadows on the forest floor. Due to this darkness, there were few photosynthetic plants down there.
There were patches of shrubbery, some occasional grass, and sometimes flowering plants, but mostly there were just decomposers, or dirt. Moss, mushrooms, various fungi, et-cetera. They all did their best to survive in the shadows.
But they were predated upon by insects and birds. Magical, insectoid, fairy-like creatures liked to chew on fungi, while birds such as the Speedfowl, pecked at the plants. And of course, the Speedfowl ate insects too. I'd seen the fairy-bugs get torn apart by beaks and talons before.
There weren't just birds though. There were all kinds of various mammals and reptiles scurrying around too. Most of those, I just ignored though. Iridescent lizards were fun to look at, but not so fun to eat. There was something in them that made them taste horrible, no matter how many times I used the effects of my Culinary Arts skill on them.
Tasting bad was probably an evolutionary mechanism.
Those creatures ate insects and plants too, for the most part. There were some carnivores I'd observed as well. Badger-like creatures that behaved like ambush predators, tirelessly building trapdoor burrows.
They were like those trapdoor spiders. But bigger, furrier (maybe), and with fewer legs.
I was extremely glad the forest had no acromantula colonies. I liked spiders, but only when they were small and unable to rip my head off.
Those carnivores were interesting enough, but there were tertiary consumers to be wary of. Large venomous snakes, big-cat-like creatures, and of course, Trolls. The Greenskins didn't count, as they were intelligent.
But finally, above those, were the apex predators. And so far, I'd only seen one; maybe two.
Goliath the troll was one. The other was Green Bean.
But neither of those two were in my territory. Unless one counted Goliath's corpse.
So yeah. That was what the hierarchy of predation looked like. Or used to look like.
My presence had changed my territory from what it once was.
I hunted Speedfowl (and sometimes other creatures). I gathered killshrooms and flowering plants. I made an effort to spread killshroom spores and create gardens around the tree I lived in.
And that had an impact on my surroundings.
The first, was that there was a higher concentration of poison-tolerant creatures in my territory. This was due to the killshrooms that grew everywhere, constantly spreading their spores and creating purple 'clouds' of pure toxicity.
The second, was that there were way fewer non-secondary predators. Those big cats and venomous snakes either died off to the killshrooms, or got out of my territory. As a result, the more poison-tolerant herbivores and secondary predators thrived, and grew in number. Normally, this would have devastated the plant-life, but my Garden Arts skill combined with teleportation and a desire to make gardens meant that there were new plants growing all the time.
That was another effect. There was a fuck-ton of flowers. I liked flowers. They were colorful. They brought interesting insects to pollinate them, and made the forest a little less bleak. And growing them gave me something to do. I had, like, thirty different designated patches of land across my territory that I grew them in.
So compared to the surrounding forest, my territory was more toxic, more colorful, and had a much smaller number of predatory inhabitants.
Quite the change.
I'd even gotten a title out of it.
<Gained Title: Ecosystem Engineer>
Nice.
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I was exploring. Teleporting around the treetops, letting Widevision tell me what was going on below.
Even without teleportation, my average speed was rather quick. 48 Str did that to a person.
I'd initially thought it odd that I didn't have a speed stat.
In my system, speed was some combination of Str and Dex, mostly Str. It made sense; acceleration was required for velocity, force was required for acceleration, and muscles used chemical reactions to generate force. Therefore, the more force your muscles could generate (Str), the faster you could move.
The flip side of that was control. Being able to move fast in wasn't very useful if you couldn't change your direction. Dexterity was about control. It gave me an instinctual awareness of myself. Hand-eye coordination, how much force to use to get the results I wanted, and spacial awareness.
If I had 100 Str and 5 Dex, I'd be unable to control my movements. In that way, my stats complimented each other. The mental stats (Int and Dex) would let me use my physical stats more effectively.
But to have higher physical stats than mental ones would result in clumsiness.
I guess it was a good thing that Int was my main stat.
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My time of peace was about to come to an end.
As I moved through the forest, I heard something.
A roar. A scream.
A flash of fur and claws.
It was Green Bean.
The bear was moving into my territory for the first time ever.
And unlike all those months (years?) ago, I wasn't powerless.
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System Status:
Name: Harry Potter
Titles: Hardened Rock, Firebomber, Unhinged, Fugitive, Survivalist, Hunter Hunter, Destroyer, Territorial, Ecosystem Engineer
Race: Wizard
Level: 26
HP: 2700/2750
MP: 2983/3300
SP: 2300/2300
San: 39%
Vit: 70
Str: 48
Dex: 68
Int: 90
Cha: 50
Skills:
-Mana Manipulation Lv.5 (Lets Harry manipulate Mana in order to create new spells)
-Firebending Lv.9
-Telekinesis II Lv.9
-Teleport II Lv.8
-Culinary Arts Lv.6
-Garden Arts Lv.7
-Cleaning II Lv.2
-Widevision Lv.4
-Stealth II Lv.3
Resist:
-Heat Mitigation Lv.2
-Cold Mitigation Lv.2
-Cutting Resistance Lv.6
-Impulse-Force Mitigation Lv.3
-Pain Mitigation Lv.4
-Fear Resistance Lv.9
-Poison Mitigation Lv.9
-Hunger Mitigation Lv.4
-Suffocation Resistance Lv.9
-Faint Resistance Lv.9
-Paralysis Resistance Lv.1
Buffs:
Debuffs:
-Claustrophobia (-50% to San when in enclosed spaces)
-Cursed (Horcrux)