As we walked I gathered as many herbs as I could. Every ten plants or so I gain a notification about the skill level rising, and I understood more and more the proper way to gather the herb. In this area each plant had between 2 and 10 leaves. The more leaves they had the older the plant was.
Eric was focusing on gaining skill with his dual daggers and so I had been mostly focusing on alchemy and herbology. Eric would use my potions to heal and if he got in trouble I would start attacking as well. My magic made things simple in this low level area. Though I needed the skill level to rise there was little to do other than attack everything.
Eric was using my potions so that we could empty the vials so I could reuse them to level my Alchemy skill. I was ignoring my mana potions for now, because he did use mana, and I had no skill to drain mana to require me to need the potion. Though I kept one on me just in case. There were 9 other vials that I would fill with potions. Having neglected the mana potions, I had gathered more of the Maltha leaves than Vasol leaves. It turned out they stacked in the inventory to a high number, I had 579 Maltha leaves and 246 Vasol leaves.
My Herbology skill had leveled to beginner 1 offering me an evolution choice.
Herbology Beginner 1
Increase the ease at which you gather herbs you are familiar with by 5%
Increase the chance of noticing an herb you haven’t learned yet. 10%
Gains .1% per level up.
As nice as it would be to pick herbs faster, it really didn’t take all that long right now. With rarer herbs, it would take longer, but the chance for finding new herbs couldn't be passed up. Alchemy had made it to novice 10 and should be at beginner in a night or two.
Meditation is the one that shocked me. I realized it had advanced to beginner before I had absorbed the soul crystal. So I was thinking it wasn’t attached to my level the way that my other skills were, it was similar to my two lore skills. I guessed it had something to do with the goddess blessing me with the skill.
With that I spent three hours every night meditating, to force the skill to a higher level. I gained skill progression for every five minutes in meditation. So I gained progression 36 times a night, for the last week. Which had brought the skill to
Meditation - Beginner level 7
Because of your in-depth knowledge of mana, when meditating you will receive an increase to your regeneration speed.
17% Faster regeneration speed (Out of combat)
13.5% Faster regeneration speed (In combat)
39% Faster regeneration speed (while meditating)
At this rate, I would need 8 days and 15 minutes to reach the proficient rank. I could shrink that time by meditating more, but there was still more I needed to do.
Eric had learned the dual dagger skill and had leveled it to novice 10 in the last week, and gained two levels for himself. At level 22, I had yet to gain another one, and we haven't seen any monsters above level 10 yet. Though we were getting close to leaving this area to head to the next one. Monsters there should be 15-20, we would stay there until Eric became level 20, then we would move to the capital. It would give us the best chance to level our skills before meeting others. I hoped to gain a level or two myself I would like to be level 25 before entering the capital.
Our Inventory was getting pretty full it was lucky that like inventory stacked. We were both loaded down with fur and meat. We didn’t want to waste anything though not knowing when we could need something. New weapons and armor were a must when we got to the capital, items to increase our inventory space were equally needed.
“Alex, I think it is time we move on. We have been here for a week, staying in one place too long isn’t a good idea.” Eric said coming back to the camp and handing me the empty vials.
Using wellspring, I washed the vials out and drank some water, giving him some as well.
“Okay, then we will move to the next area at sunrise.”
“Good,” Eric said nodding.
Alic kept watch while we slept, he would wake us if something happened. The feeling of his energy on my skin woke me.
“Alex, there is someone in the forest.”
Reaching over I nudged Eric, and whispered, “Someone is here.”
“I’m not lying it was a catkin, I saw him fighting against some animals. He seemed a low level and his gear was negligible.” the voice was quiet but carried. They obviously didn’t think much about us.
“You also said he downed red potions a lot so either he has a lot of money or he is an alchemist. So it's better to be careful.”
“Alic, can you check their levels?” I asked.
Alic vanished for a few minutes before he returned. “A level 10 hunter and a level 15 warrior. Neither have a class, I’m calling them that based on what they are wielding.”
They came close enough for me to identify
Hunter
Level 10
Health: 1070
Stamina: 2150
Mana:1070
Warrior
Level 15
Health: 1345
Stamina:1370
Mana:290
Their levels were not high but it was easy to see that they had chosen stats solely based on what they wanted to be. They both had a decent amount of health. Before bonuses, it would take 22 Arcane bolts to take out the hunter. 18 with bonuses if I couldn’t land any critical hits.
Eric snuck out of the cave and around them. Before making noise to make them turn, though he was already gone from that spot.
The hunter had to be taken out first. I aimed at his neck. And launched my attack, the Arcane Bolt slammed into him, knocking him onto his face.
Arcane bolt hit for 420 damage, opponent weak against spell type.
Sneak attack X2
Critical hit X2
Vital spot X3
Smiling, I loved getting combo bonuses, I launched two more attacks. But they were without the combo bonus, they still hit in a vital spot, even if I felt slightly bad about it. Dealing another 600 damage, Eric appeared and slammed his daggers into the man's neck and yanked decapitating him and jumping away. The warrior looked like he was going to fight for a moment before he turned and tried to run away. Eric jumped on him and using a skill took the man's head. I would have to ask him about it.
He brought both bodies back with him. “How did you kill him so quickly?”
“It's a skill called behead. It removes my enemies head, but they either have to be immobile or fleeing from me. Most things cannot live without their head.” he said smiling.
“They were going to try and sell us to slavers. This continent is so backwards.” I said shaking my head.
Progression
You have killed two Wanna be slavers. Rooting out darkness little by little, the goddess has noticed.
The two bodies started to glow and they vanished leaving behind soul crystals.
Soul Crystal
This crystal was from a level 10 Slaver. Through your hard work and defeating this foe, even though he was injured. Ridding the world of him is a good act and has not gone unnoticed.
Experience: 5,500
Soul Crystal
This crystal was from a level 15 Slaver. Through your hard work and defeating this foe, even though he was injured. Ridding the world of him is a good act and has not gone unnoticed.
Experience: 12,000
17,500 experience points, that would allow Eric to grow to level 22, or me to grow to 28. It made more sense to hand them to Eric so he could be in the 20’s as well.
“This is highly unusual. Finding three of these crystals so quickly.”
“I’m wondering if the demon dropped one, but we didn’t go back to look.”
The look of shock and horror on Eric’s face matched how I felt right now.
“It has to be the goddess rewarding us for destroying people aligned with a dark god. Anyway take both of these and get to level 22.” I said handing him the crystals.
“No, I couldn’t you need to get stronger.”
“They will only give me a couple of levels, but you will get to be the same level as me. So it makes more sense to help you get stronger so that we are a better team.”
“Take them, level up, and you can check your stats in the morning.”
“Okay,” he said taking the crystals carefully.
Laying there, the thought tempted me we could rush to the capital now, yet our skills were still under-leveled. Even with both of us in the 20’s we should work on leveling our skills. In the morning we moved to a new campsite where monsters were stronger. We gathered herbs and corpses while we moved.
To say nothing eventful happened would be an understatement. Eric was able to kill anything in one shot at first when he got a sneak attack and stabbed it in the neck. We found a valley about a week and a half from the capital that had monsters who were level 20. He worked on his dagger skill and I leveled my bolt gaining experience. I only leveled my fighting skills while it was day time, at night I worked on alchemy, cooking, and meditation. I lacked proper night vision, unlike Eric. so he would use the time I was cooking to kill anything that wandered too close to our campsite.
Grinding had always been fun, even though I hunted less, I got 20% more experience than he did, so his extra hunting helped him keep up with me. A week passed and we both gained 1 level. Bringing Eric to 23, and me to 24, I had forgotten I had gained a level.
During this week, Alchemy reached Beginner rank 2. At the beginner rank, I had been offered to either make my potions 5% stronger or to increase their duration by 5%. Since I didn’t have any duration potions I chose the strength option, so that it increased the potency of my potions by 17%.
Meditation reached Proficient 2, I put the evolve option in combat regeneration speed. Bringing my in combat regeneration up 21%. My skill was leveling nicely. I would love to get more of the lore to work on those skills but that wasn’t possible yet.
My arcane bolt had leveled to beginner rank 5 with all of my casting. Not it had a base damage of 70, since reaching the beginner stage it seemed that it gained 5 damage instead of 2 that it had at the novice stage. Racial abilities were amazing just like Alic had told me. I wondered how strong it would be at the next rank. This time I would choose to have the extra bolt. Though I still needed to fire it a handful more times before then.
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