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Chapter 5 by Left Hand Man Left Hand Man

An idea?

You have natural weapons, right?

You knew that adventurers used tools to harvest nodes like these. However, you also knew that the more stubborn or lazy ones sometimes used weapons to harvest. And according to your stat sheet you had natural weapons...

Well, no time like the present, you though. You got to your feet, lined yourself up with the tree, then reared back and smashed your horns into it as hard as you could.


Harvesting: Skill penalty, Tool bonus (improvised), Dexterity penalty


The progress bar was almost a forth full. Your head also ached and you'd taken a bit of HP damage. Wouldn't that be a fun way to die, you think through your sudden headache, bashing my brains out on a tree. Still, it was effective. So all you had to do now was find a way to harvest quickly without killing yourself. After a bit of experimenting, and about a fifth of your health, you figure out that if you smack your horns into the tree one at a time without rearing back, it doesn't do any damage. As a bonus, it doesn't make your headache any worse. It doesn't make it any better either, but you decide that's acceptable. It only fills the progress bar about an eighth of the way each time, but you can do it much faster than the other way, so it doesn't take too long for you to harvest another six units of Creeping Moss. You also manage to obtain something interesting


Walnut Wood, (uncommon) ???


You doubt you'll find a use for it, but it looks fairly nice, and you've never seen it before. So you put it in your inventory. Considering that the Creeping moss only takes up one slot out of five, you have room. Besides, you can always dump it if you have to. Right now, you had more important concerns. Namely, you hadn't eaten since before the update, and were starting to really feel it. Normally you'd just graze a bit on the way back, which was at least filling. But you were feeling emboldened by your harvesting success, so you were going to try to get something a bit tastier. The gods had made your species an omnivore, so you were going to go hunting.

But first, you needed some bait. After searching for a bit, you found it.


Sweet Grass (uncommon) ???


It did smell sweet, but you knew from experience that it didn't taste sweet, and was actually mildly poisonous. (You wish you'd known that before you ate it for the first time, but your intelligence stat had been a lot lower back then, so you didn't think to check.) Still, most of the animals around here couldn't seem to make the connection between eating it and the nausea that came afterwards, so to was an effective bait. You carefully pick some and bring it to a convenient clearing a little ways into the forest. After smearing it as high up as you could reach on a few trees (and considering you were shoulder high to an adventurer, that was decently high up) you scatter it around the floor of the clearing. Then, you settle in to wait.

For about half an hour, you see nothing except squirrel s and the occasional rabbit. They aren't what you're after (and you're not sure you could catch them anyway) so you leave them alone. After that, however, you see what you were looking for. The deer stepped cautiously into the clearing as you stayed absolutely still and held your breath. Slowly, it approched the center of the clearing and bet it's head to nibble at the sweet grass. As soon as it was completely focused on it's meal, you took a deep breath, lowered your head and Charged. You were astounded at how fast you closed the distance between you and the deer. The beast only had time to raise it's head in surprise before you crashed into it's side. The deer went flying away from you and smashed into a tree. It fell to the ground dazed. You stared at it in shock. Was knockback that effective? You put your thoughts asside, however, when you saw the deer struggling to it's feet. It only had about a third of it's health bar left, so you cast Charge again and rammed it backwards into the tree, killing it.

Now you had another problem. The carcass was smeared with sweet grass residue and you really didn't want to be vomiting up your meal tomorrow. You needed to do something, because you certainly weren't going to abandon the fruits of your labors. You finally decide to bring it back to your cave, and clean it off in a stream you remembered being on the way back. But how to get it there. Even if you dumped the Walnut wood, the deer wouldn't fit in your inventory. *Sigh* You really should have thought this plan through a bit better.

You need to get this thing back and you can't carry it in your inventory. But putting things in your inventory isn't the only way to carry something. You nudge your horns under the bashed up carcass, then lift it up and back so that it rests over your neck with the legs hanging down like some bizarre necklace. It's heavy, but not unbearably so, and you thank the gods for your strength stat. You trundle towards home, careful to keep the deer carcass balanced. You're about half way to the stream when you hear noises in the forest.

Whats making the noises?

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