With a hesitant step Blake crossed into the medium density region. The pressure from his surroundings was not as extreme as the high density region but it was still noticable. Every action he made took just a bit more energy and was a tad more difficult.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected but no monster jumped out of the bushes to attack him. Blake slowly moved through the forest as silently as possible. It was difficult work when he had no training in stealth and the spirit realm was so quiet already.
As he moved he recalled what he knew about monsters in higher regions. Nothing was certain in the spirit realm, what was thought as absolute could change on a whim, but there were patterns to monster spawning that were consistent across all but a few of the realms humans had explored.
Low-density regions had one or two weak monsters in them. Medium-density regions had the same type of monsters as the low density but there were more of them. A low-density region might have somewhere between one and five monsters that spawn while a medium region was looking at 20 to 100 monsters per region.
There was also a monster in medium-density regions typically labeled as a sub-boss. This monster was a superior version of the standard monster spawned in the region and acted as their leader. It depended on the type of monster but many created dens that they concentrated.
If there was a den the sub-boss would reside there. Blake did not plan to assault this region’s den, at least, not yet. There were benefits to doing so. The dens were centered around places with lots of energy which meant natural treasures. Dens also concentrated more energy in the area just by having so many monsters close together.
Clearing out a den was a great way to gather rare resources and lots of monster parts all at once. The higher monster count of medium-density regions meant Blake would not struggle to find opponents as he had in the low regions but a den was on another level. It would be easy to find and have many monsters all in one place to fight.
If Blake ever wanted to clear out a den there were a few things he would need to do first. First was the reason he wanted to fight in the first place. He needed to bring his fighting style together in a more cohesive manner. Having a strong weapon that he could swing around was great and all but there were other aspects to fighting that he hadn’t been able to practice yet.
With multiple enemies, at a time Blake would finally be pressed enough to make some progress on his fighting skills. Killing monsters in one hit did not make for an effective training regiment. Multiple monsters might not help press his attacking skills but it would make him move and think about his positioning.
The next thing he would do once he had a handle on fighting was create a base in the medium region. This step was a little more fluid when it came to timing. If he felt safe enough in the higher region he might work on clearing the den before establishing a more permanent base, he hadn’t decided yet.
Before attacking the den he would need to weaken it. While the region would keep respawning monsters he killed that took time. If he worked fast enough Blake could decrease the amount of rabbicorns available to support the den.
While monsters concentrated around their dens there was still a lot of roaming. Supposedly monsters, especially at lower tiers, tended to space themselves out around a region only grouping up with the den. This only applied to low and medium regions and high and peak regions would have pack monsters but that didn’t concern Blake right now.
If he cleared out the rabbicorns surrounding the den more would leave the safety of their group to fill the empty space. It wouldn’t work forever but he hoped to get a good chunk of them. The only part Blake didn’t know how to plan for was the sub-boss.
Sub-bosses varied widely in strength but they were always stronger than the average monster by a good degree. They were called sub-bosses because peak regions had a similar setup with one monster being stronger than the rest. Those were bosses.
Without information on how strong the sub-boss was or any special abilities it might have Blake would be going in blind. Monsters at his tier did not have magic or any real level of intelligence but boss type monsters were known to break those rules.
The generally accepted rule of thumb was that monsters gained magic at tier 4 but bosses could gain it at any time and sub-bosses could starting at tier 2. Not all bosses would have magic and not all sub-bosses got magic at tier 2 but it was possible and not the only worrying factor.
Monsters were typically mindless. This wasn’t in the way humans were compared to normal animals no this was more humans to a basic computer program. There was no animal cunning or survival insticts for monsters, when they saw prey they attacked. Everything that was not a monster of the same species and from the same region was prey.
Bosses and sub-bosses on the other hand had an animal cunning from the very beginning. If retreat was the best option they would retreat, if organizing their den to attack in waves would let them win they would.
They still had the aggresive streak of their weaker brethren but it was tempered but a malicious intellect. They would do anything to kill there enemies even if it meant sacrificing their own kind or retreating to attack another day.
Blake suspected regular monsters would gain the same type, or at least similar, form of intelligence at higher tiers but anything above tier 5 was considered restricted information in the NER.
He didn’t know why that was but he trusted it was for a good reason. He might not always agree with the government’s decisions but they had been good to him following his parent’s death. Not once did the school or police try to force him into an orphanage when they found out he had run away to prevent such a thing following his parent’s death.
So, if Blake wanted to clear the den he would need to fight an intelligent opponent of unknown strength. It likely wouldn’t have magic but it would be the height of folly to discount the possibility.
He didn’t doubt for a moment that there would be a den. Rabbicorn were essentially just monsterous rabbits and well known for their dens. The term den had even been named after them as not all monster ‘dens’ were dens in the typical sense but rather just a centeralized gathering of monsters.
Blake had only been in the medium density region for a couple minutes, wandering about while thinking, when the first rabbicorn jumped out at him. It charged just like the ones in the low regions but he immedietly noticed a diffrence. This rabbicorn was faster.
It wasn’t to big a diffrence, maybe a ten percent bump, and he was still much faster than it but it threw off his well practiced timing. Blake had been fighting identical opponents while in the low regions and had mentally written of this rabbicorn as dead before he had even attacked.
He stabbed his spear forward with the confidence of a man who knew exactly where he needed to hit only to miss. It wasn’t a complete loss, he had missed the center of the rabbicorn but still carved into its side, but the change of speed, despite being so small, had thrown him off.
Blake’s attention snapped into focus. When had he gotten so comfortable around rabbicorns that he became complacent? A few weeks(or was it months?) ago he had been frozen in terror every time he saw one but now he didn’t even pay attention when one charged at him.
While he had missed his target a large gash was opened in the rabbicorns side throwing it charge off and missing Blake. The rabbicorn shakely got back to its feet to make another charge but Blake wasn’t taking it lightly anymore and stabbed it again before it could recover.
Pinned to the ground, bleeding out the rabbicorn only struggled for a moment before dying. Blake’s breath was heavy as his heart beat loudly in his ears. The fight had been nowhere near long or difficult enough to make him tired but his own complacency had shaken him. That was probably a good thing, he mused, it likely wasn’t going to happen again anytime soon this way.
Grabbing the body Blake threw it into his wooden backpack. He had many uses for the body of the rabbicorns and would not waste any if he didn’t have to. Looting done he set off in search of more opponents.
Over the next few hours, Blake ran into two more rabbicorns. He was disappointed that there were not more. The rabbicorns were too spread out to group up for a fight. One positive he did find was that just like their speed had increased so did the rabbicorn’s physical resilience.
In the low regions, Blake had tried to extend the fights with the rabbicorns to get some training in but had only been met with failure but on the third rabbicorn he fought in the medium region he tried again and was met with some success.
As long as he didn’t hit them in the middle of their body or do too much to cripple them Blake found that the rabbicorns could get up for a second attack before dying. It wasn’t much but it let him practice repositioning before his second attack. Not that there was much need unless he spent an inordinate amount of time between each attack.
The sun was begining to set so Blake began to look for a good place to rest for the night. He could have left the medium region for the night and come back the next morning but he felt that defeated the purpose of this excursion. He was training and that meant facing every challenge he could.
That did not mean that he was going to be stupid about it. There would be no fire or leaf bed tonight. Instead, he found the tallest tree he could that had large, sturdy branches high up. With his current level of Strength climbing the tree was as easy as breathing.
Once he got high enough he took out some rope he had made ahead of time. He slung the backpack off his back tying it to the tree. He then tied another rope around with waist that attatched to the branch he planned to sleep on. He had hear of people sleeping in trees to avoid monsters and had spent some time back at his homebase practicing the skill, and it was a skill.
The first night Blake had tried sleeping in a tree had been horrible. He kept rolling off the branch and had barely gotten any rest. He could only imagine it would have been worse had he not gotten the sleeping skills from his Talent after making the leaf beds.
It had taken a few days but he had gotten better at it and almost never rolled off anymore. It still wasn’t the most comfortable but he could do it. Rabbicorns were basically rabbits so they had no way of climbing trees giving him a sense of saftey that he would have lacked had he tried to setup his normal campsite.
The spikes Blake used to defend his camps while sleeping were enough to defend against one or two rabbicorns but there were only so many he could make each night. If a group of rabbicorns attacked him during the night they could use their bodies to cover all the spikes making them useless and leaving him defensless.
Before going to sleep Blake went through his normal meditation routine. Ever since reaching the threshold in his affinity stat, no more progress had been gained from his normal meditation though he did feel his mind develop a little when he processed new information from his Talent. Things changed tonight, however.
Blake had gotten used to not feeling himself grow when meditating so was suprised when warmth suffused him, the sign of the supernatural growth the spirit realm enabled. His eyes snapped open wide. What had changed?
None of his stats grew after reaching their threshold yet his affinity was suddenly improving again? Blake thought through his actions of the day trying to identify what might have let him break past the barrier in growth he had been experiencing. No matter how he thought about it though, nothing unique had happened.
Only one thing was diffrent that might be the cause. He was in a higher density region. He had never tried training outside the low region. It did make some level of sense. The higher regions exerted a pressure on his body and mind that he couldn’t properly quantify. The pressure must have stimulated his stat growth.
Despite it already being dark Blake had to test this immedieatly. There was only one other stat he could train on demand, Strength. Leaving the treetops before the sun rose again was a stupid idea since he couldn’t see in the dark but there were somethings he could try while tied to the branch.
Blake began doing pull-ups. He had long since passed the level where basic body weight exercise could provide any benefit but that was in the low density regions, maybe the resistance of the medium density region would make it beneficial?
Feeling no improvement left Blake feeling disheartened but he didn’t give up yet. His Will stat was not just for show. Untying his backpack from the tree he strapped it onto himself before trying again. This time there was something. It was only a slight tingle of warmth but it brought a wide grin to Blake’s face.
So he still needed more than bodyweight exercises to train, he could deal with that. It might have been a good idea to go to sleep after confirming that he could continue training again now that he was in a higher region but instead, Blake went through as much of an exercise routine as he could.
He cut branches from the tree to add more weight to his backpack then went through a series of pullups, pushups and situps. The pushups were the hardest part to do on his thin branch but by only doing one armed pushups he made do.
Having finished his first full physical training routine in months left Blake feeling elated. Before going to sleep he went through another round of meditation to help calm his racing heart before lying down on his branch with a big grin.
The next three days passed in a similar manner to when he had first begun training in earnest except combat replaced crafting. First thing in the morning he would get a round of exercise in. This was followed by some meditation to train his affinity then he was off to hunt.
During the day he fought rabbicorns and worked to better predict their movements. A couple of times he tried to group them up for a fight but they were just too spread out to do anything.
Before the sun set he would do another round of exercise and then meditate some more. The cooldown on his physical training had dropped back down to twice a day but Blake could already tell that it was only a matter of time before it increased again.
He never ran into a cooldown for his affinity training and started to wonder if he was doing something wrong. Was there a better way to train his affinity to maximize how much it could grow? Maybe it was how he exercised that was wrong and he wasn’t supposed to have much, if any, of a cooldown.
While meditating on his third night in the medium region Blake found that he had crossed the threshold of a new stat. He hadn’t been doing much in the way of physical resiliance training but it turned out he had been incorrect in his understanding of the stat.
It was his second stat within the body grouping of chains allowing Blake to confirm that there were three stats for both the spirit and body groupings. It was almost certain that the same would hold true for the mind.
The new stat Blake would best classify, when combined with his video game experience, as Constitution. It wasn’t just physical resilience, though that was part of it. Constitution was his body’s ability to resist any outside influences. This included improving his immune system which he had previously classified as its own thing.
The breakthrough of his Constitution had actually accured because of his intensified workout routine. Physical exhaustion occured because the body was resisting force applied to it and breaking down. His Constitution resisted the force of his muscles when working out pushing it forward.
What confused Blake was how he had been training it. There were essentially three methods he had been using to train Constitution without realizing it and they all had seperate training cooldowns. The first was by abusing himself. This had been done through falling from high places, wacking himself with rocks, and cutting himself with his weapons.
The second way was through food poisoning. He had thought this a diffrent stat and had been training his food poisoning almost as a hobby for months now. The final way was through his endurance and exercising. He had felt the cooldown for all of these before and had never noticed any overlap.
The endurance training could be excused as having never hit it since the cooldown for Strength training might have prevented him from ever reaching that point but his immune system and physical resilience had both been trained to the point of cooldown on the same day before with no problems.
This meant that if he found different ways to train his other stats he could improve even faster. At least that was the theory Blake was going to work under. He had already been questioning his training method for affinity, working to improve it, and he didn’t have any way to intentionally train Will and the unknown stat. Now he was looking to reassess even the stats he had considered solved quantities.
Blake hadn’t even located the den yet and already his plan to attack it was thrown out the window. He had a new goal before making his assualt. He needed to not only unlock every stat but also create consistent dependable training methods for them. Training his skills was one thing but he wouldn’t risk his life by attacking the sub-boss without exhausting every avenue of growth.
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