“Samuel F Jackson!”

  Alan flopped on to the sweet soft grass of the plains after emerging from that nightmare forest. His body was covered in numerous scrapes and cuts and his left leg once again had a large gash on his thigh. His previously torn and stained tunic was completely gone at this point and his bare chest was a criss-cross mess of cuts outlined in a literal red flag of infection.

  “What did you say?” Tamee inquired.

  He lay there panting some more before he sat up. He checked out his injuries starting with the deep laceration on his leg. It wasn’t bleeding anymore and there were some encouraging signs of mending. He would normally cast his healing spell but was currently tapped out of mana. His stamina wasn’t much better off as only his health was above 25%. He had used the last of his mana to stop the blood loss from that ghastly cut with a healing spell just after his battle with the queen.

  “It’s something I picked up while my ex was babysitting for a girlfriend. The friend’s mother had gotten really sick so she had to go back to the states to take care of her while her daughter and son stayed behind with the husband. Because of his job my ex ended up watching them a lot. I used to swear all the time so I had to train myself to replace them with other expressions. Samuel F Jackson replaced mom fornicator.”

  “His middle name starts with an ‘L’, does it not?” was her next question.

  “It does, but it feels more satisfying to have a hard F in there. And how do you know about Samuel J.?”

  “I do have a lot of free time on my hands so I have been checking out some of your Earth movies. They are very entertaining, and that man is in like half of them.”

  Alan’s stamina was already on the way to being refilled and he had enough mana to cast another healing spell. As the cool sensations spread to his leg he lay down and enjoyed the sun on his face and the gentle breeze across his skin. The forest had been a Stephen King level nightmare. It was so traumatizing that it took him a few moments to realize there was no sun and the gentle breeze was actually a mist coming from the grey clouds overhead. Weather was definitely becoming a thing, but he hadn’t been gone that long in real time so it must also move at an accelerated pace because there hadn’t even been a single cloud when he went in.

  That place should have been called the Dark Forest. Maybe before the corruption of the spiders it had been a pleasant place, but his first steps had been into a dark world of large pine trees whose lower limbs almost connected with each other. It meant there was barely any visibility between the branches and he was constantly brushing against their scratchy needles.

  At first it had only been annoying, but he soon started to run into spiderwebs. Originally they were rather small, delicate things that he felt catching on his face, arms, and legs. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation and Alan already had a complicated relationship with spiders. It was complicated because he wasn’t sure if he hated or feared them more.

  There were probably small, normal sized spiders in those webs, but with the dim light he couldn’t tell. Soon enough as he pushed forward he started to run into larger specimens. These were the size of his palm and almost gave him a panic attack. Their eight legs were powerful rather than spindly, like a tarantula’s. The small bristles all over their body were a mixture of reds and browns. The first time his skin came in contact with those spines he also discovered they delivered a minor shock. He wasn’t sure if it was electrical or some kind of neurotoxin.

  He already had out his seax, but he was holding it in his left hand. He had equipped his new gladius in his right. He didn’t have a machete and was using the larger sword to cut through the ever thickening webs in his path. These ‘smallish’ spiders were easy to dispatch as long as he noticed them first. All too often his first indication they were there was when they landed on him.

  After ten minutes he was covered in small bites and had stopped trying to heal himself. He would soon run out of mana if he tried to heal after every attack and needed to wait until the damage stacked up to something significant. The good news was it should be great for his healer class, but it was not great for his mental fortitude. Hoping to reduce the ambushes, as a test he tried to use a fire bolt to kill a group of the small spiders and burn off some of the sticky webs.

  The fire worked great on the arachnids as they curled up into crispy multi legged balls, but the webs seemed to shrug off the flames. There must be something about them that was able to resist his fire mana. He would have tried a larger fire bolt to see if he could overcome the resistance, but he had already had a feeling that he should save his energy, this dungeon was going to be a slog.

  The quest the dungeon offered included killing off a hundred spider offspring, but these smaller spiders must not have counted. He had killed over fifty of them and his quest tracker still showed [0/100]. The palm sized spiders soon turned into basketball sized monsters. His injuries were mounting and the only thing keeping him from screaming in both agony and psychotic terror was the realization that he didn’t want to call even more monsters down on him.

  Moving through the webbing became more and more difficult and he was spending just as much time pushing through the dense strands as he was fighting the creepy crawlers. The first time he encountered the dog sized spiders he couldn’t help letting out a small yelp. To be clear, this was a comparison with a real dog, not one of those yappy pomeranian things.

  The only good news was that these spiders finally started counting for his quest. He had already been in the forest for over three hours before his first kill that counted. He was worried about how long it would take to reach one hundred.

  The next time he worried, it was that he wouldn’t be able to make it to the queen before his body was completely drained from the hundreds of small wounds he was receiving from all the spiders he killed. He had passed one hundred of the larger spiders after two more hours of intense fighting. His mana was constantly hovering around seventy five as he tried to heal himself to keep from dying. His stamina kept dipping low after each fight as well, but he could only give himself a short time to recover because he could hear the spiders moving around him in the forest.

  The only two things that allowed him to keep hope was that these bigger spiders rarely came in groups larger than two and he had a clear destination in mind. A few times he had managed to find a gap in the trees allowing him to see more of the dungeon. In what looked like the center of the forest was a group of trees that mirrored those that formed the entrance of the dungeon except they were almost twice as large as the trees around them, and they were covered in webs almost all the way to their tips. If there was a spider queen living in the forest, that would be where she built her lair.

  It was three more hours before he finally made his way to that central stronghold. The webs there were as thick as a tree branch and formed an almost impenetrable wall. There were openings here and there that allowed the large spiders to come and go. It was a boon that Alan was on the short side as it only required a few minutes of cutting to make a hole wide enough for him to fit through. He was also attacked four times while he was doing that, even once from a spider trying to use that opening to come out.

  The offspring were rated as rare level five arachnids. The queen on the inside was something altogether different. Each of the large spiders had been relatively simple to overcome. Their only advantages were that they often were able to ambush him in the dim light and that there were so many he never seemed to have time to recover. He had tried to cast light once but the reflection off the webs had been blinding and it had summoned at least ten spiders to him at once. Dim it would have to stay. That fight had left his tunic in tatters and his skin covered in numerous small cuts dribbling blood. He had to use a precious healing spell to deal with the larger slices he had received. The spiders’ legs ended in small barbs that were able to slice into his skin. Luckily his high endurance mostly prevented them from penetrating too far. By the time he found the queen his reserves were low and all of the toxin, poison, or harmful mana that the spiders had infected him with were keeping him from moving as well as normal.

  Beast: Arachnid Queen (Epic) level 8, threat: extreme

  Her body was the size of a large sedan. And her legs were at least six meters long. It was good that the legs weren’t kept straight or he would have never been able to reach her body. Instead they bent back down from their highest point before connecting to the body and there was just over a meter between her abdomen and the ground.

  If he had a choice he would have skipped this fight just like the skeleton boss, but there was no portal here to escape through. His only path was into this icky sticky nightmare. Her bristly mandibles were big enough to easily bite him in half and what were small barbs on the offspring were large daggers on the mother.

  In the end it wouldn’t have been that bad of a fight if he was fully recovered. The spider queen was strong and fast, but not nearly as fast as he normally was. The bristles covering her body were a challenge because it felt like getting stabbed every time he brushed against them. Fortunately his gladius was long enough to strike without letting his skin come in contact with the spines.

  However, he wasn’t fully recovered and the first time she reached out with her leg he was too slow to dodge. The attack almost looked like a casual brushoff rather than a true strike, but the power behind it was immense. He was sent flying through the air and landed against a particularly sticky section of webbing that showed signs of other creatures being stuck and cocooned there. Freeing himself cost precious seconds and that left the remainder of his tunic behind.

  They traded blows for a while, with Alan getting the worst of it every time. The reason he was willing to keep going like this was that he was also recovering mana. He had come into the fight with not even enough for a healing spell, but by now he had almost a hundred mana and was ready to use it.

  So far he had been restricting his movement trying to keep himself from bottoming out on stamina. The queen had not been as conservative and her attacks were becoming sluggish. She must have been aware of how many of her babies he had murdered and wanted him dead. Now that it was time to go all out he easily managed to dodge the next attack and found himself only a few meters from her terrifying face.

  The bristly mouth was capped off by her tiny spider eyes. To clarify, they were only tiny by comparison to the rest of her. There were eight eyes arranged in roughly two rows. The four on the bottom were smaller than those on the top and the two middle eyes on the top were even larger than the outer two. They all were an evil, soulless, black.

  He sent two prismatic blasts out to blind her. He followed that up with a large fire bolt to the face. Just like with the smaller spiders the fire quickly spread over her entire body. However, she was on an entirely different level than the small specimens he had roasted earlier. The fire was causing her pain, and she let out a shrilling scream, but it wasn’t fatal damage. Alan wasn’t sure how spider screams worked, but the flames were already dying down as the mana was expended.

  Unfortunately for the queen, his attack wasn’t over. Even as the fire was exploding over her body he took two steps and leapt onto her head. In the strangest crouch walk he had ever done he made his way from the spider’s head all the way to the top of her abdomen in the back. His knees occasionally brushing against the burning bristles made him feel like he was being stabbed with a rusty stake. He, on the other hand, was truly stabbing the queen with every step. He was using his gladius and seax as a pair of ski poles and stabbing as deeply as possible with every step.

  By the time he hopped off of her bulbous abdomen he had stabbed into her over fifteen times. She tried to spin around but something vital had been hit and she collapsed before she got even halfway around. Her body still twitched and she tried to strike out at him once more but he simply waited out of range until his mana had recovered enough for another large fire bolt to finish her off.

  It wasn’t until the queen was truly dead that he realized his leg was flashing red. He looked down and saw a large slice cutting deep into the exposed muscle of his left leg. His adrenaline had blinded him to the injury but now he could see blood was pouring out. There wasn’t time to wait a couple of minutes for his mana to recover so he tore one of the legs off of his filthy pants. Infection would be a real concern, but he would die from blood loss if he didn’t do something soon. He used one large strip to partially hold the two halves of his thigh together and another strip along with his beating stick as a tourniquet to stop the flow of blood.

  The system was flashing at him but he didn’t have time to check messages as he tried to tend to his other injuries. Because of his many encounters he had been unable to fully heal since early in the dungeon. A large number of his small injuries were already showing signs of infection so he used the vial he had filled with water, and another patch torn off of his pants, to try and wash some of them.

  Finally his mana reached fifty and he cast minor healing. The mana wanted to spread all over his body but he had long ago become adept at guiding it where he needed it. It all flowed into his left thigh and he carefully removed the tourniquet. Even with the pressure removed there was only a tiny trickle of blood, but he was concerned because it was still a large open wound. He wanted to wait for another round of healing before he tried to put weight on it so he turned to his Network notification.

  Before he could call it up he was interrupted by a cacophony of tiny screeches as a hoard of lion sized spiders came flying into the dead queen’s lair. He didn’t know if they were here for revenge on her killer or to fight over who would be the new queen. Was that even a thing with spiders? Either way he was out and dove into the portal that had opened after he roasted the giant queen.

  Now that he was safe on the plain and finally healing, he checked out his reward.

  Quest Completed: Spider Queen

  [You laid waste to the queen and left piles of her slaughtered offspring. Reward: one fighter talent stone, one healer talent stone, and 100 dungeon points.]

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  “Samuel F Jackson,” he repeated.

  “What is it now, more spiders?”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” Alan told her as a shudder ran through his body. “No, I got two talent stones from that. It was almost worth it,” he told her.

  “Almost? You wouldn’t want to do it again if you could?”

  “Hell to the no no. If I never saw a spider again that would be amazing. I will probably have nightmares about that place for years. Now that you mention it, though, could I do it again? Can you repeat dungeons?”

  In the initial tier it had been made clear that you could only earn the reward once. But what were the rules for these new dungeons? If it was up to him he would never step foot in that forest again, but what about some of the others? Luckily he had Tamee to fill him in.

  “Most dungeons can only be completed once, but there are also many dungeons that can be done repeatedly. They will indicate that they can be repeated when you enter them.”

  He must not have run into any repeatable dungeons yet, but this was good information to have. Not wanting to waste any more time he absorbed the two talent stones while he was waiting for his mana to recover so he could finish healing up.

  New Healer talent unlocked: Cure

  New Fighter talent unlocked: Slash

  Those two pleasant spikes in his brain also pushed his scholar class up a bunch. It seemed like every talent stone he used his scholar class got a boost. Looking over his classes he saw they had all seen a lot of growth from that dungeon.

  Class:

  Fighter (100%) Quartz

  Guardian (81%) Quartz

  Healer (100%) Quartz

  Hunter (68%) Quartz

  Mage (100%) Quartz

  Rogue (100%) Quartz

  Scholar (84%) Quartz

  Seeker (73%) Quartz

  He now had four of his classes at the maximum of 100%. Before he could gain anything else in those classes he would have to evolve them to opal. When Dracon was convincing him to wait for his class evolutions he let him know that it was a common problem that some classes would max out their potential before others. Even if he evolved them to opal they would stay at 0% until all of his classes got to opal.

  Luckily something about the process kept it from being a total loss. Any advancement in a class that was maxed out would instead be given to a class that hadn’t maxed out, usually the one with the lowest progress. The sharing wasn’t perfect, however, as the gains were somewhat reduced by the transfer. What this meant was that he could continue to fight with his spells and blades and he would still be progressing his other classes.

  The wound in his leg was mostly healed by now but he still had the many cuts spread over his body. He cast healing again as he removed the bandage that was holding his leg together. Only some of the energy went to fully sealing his thigh injury, with much of the rest spread out over the many smaller wounds. He was pleased to see that the infection seemed to heal along with the wounds.

  A short while later he was fully healed and on his way to the lake again. He was determined now not to stop at any more dungeons, instead simply making note of the few he passed. The encounter with the eight legged spawns of evil had turned him off of dungeon delving for the moment. He had also lost almost two hours of real time in that last dungeon. The day wasn’t done yet, but it was into the afternoon. If he wanted to get anything done at his homestead he would need to hustle.

  Finally he slowed down as he carefully made his way through the pass at the bottom of the plains. Tamee had told him that beasts would keep spawning in tier one and another mana-infused hedgehog might have taken up residence here. His worries turned out to be unwarranted as the pass remained clear. However, as he looked out over the lake he could see the occasional beast roaming across the far clearing or moving through the forest. That much activity wasn’t something he had seen before.

  The rocks on this side, under what used to be the waterfall, were too large to work with and he didn’t see any made of quartz anyway. There were some with quartz running through them, but he decided to find smaller, purer specimens.

  Checking the depth of the lake he determined it was only a little under two and a half meters here and it seemed to get shallower fairly quickly as he moved away from the falls. Rather than having to deal with any of the beasts on shore he took his chances in the water. Soon it was only up to his mid chest and he was peering down looking for likely stones while still moving toward the shallower areas. The water was incredibly clear and even when he bent over to pick up some stones no dirt or silt was stirred up blocking his vision.

  In this manner he spent over two hours collecting stones. By the time he was done he had filled up a large section of his ring with quartz rocks. Most of them were white but he had found the occasional black one as well. While he was here he also took a moment to refill his makeshift water bottle and rinse himself off. It turns out that ground in rotten zombie innards are hard to get out of cloth pants, so after drying himself off he changed back into his now only real set of clothes. Those smooth, soft boxers were really growing on him as despite the hours-long fight through the spider infested forest they were still shockingly pink.

  His hopes of getting home and working on his house area before dark went unfulfilled. The sun had been set for over an hour by the time he made his way back. However, his swim in the lake had reinvigorated him, and with his increased endurance he felt no need to sleep that night. Instead he cast a light spell on one of the stones on the back wall of his house to provide some illumination and checked out the place.

  The house didn’t look any different, and the grass that was his current floor didn’t seem any more trampled than when he was here last. However, the string that had been holding the door closed was chewed through so it was hanging open when he got there. Outside of the house there were many changes. All of the plants were showing signs of growth, but it was not as impressive as what he had seen in tier one. Using his aura senses he could tell that the plants were all alive, but in need of more water to further spur their development. The apple trees were now doing the best and looking closer he noticed that they had roots going deep into the soil that had hit an underground offshoot of the stream.

  After taking out his poor shovel and working for about half an hour he managed to dig an irrigation trench over to help water the plants while he was away in the future. He also now had in his possession quite a few more fruits which he could plant. The rest of the night was spent expanding his small farm. While he worked he also spent time smoothing out his pathways from all of his recent growth, and also strengthening the energy fields of the seeds he was planting and the others that were already growing. While he was digging he noticed his overseer was back. The young wolf pup, looking noticeably larger, was hanging around the perimeter, watching him work.

  Beast: Adolescent Wolf (uncommon) level 3, threat: low

  By the time the sun came up he had gone from a single line of fruit plants that was about thirty meters long, to a large rectangular patch that was more than fifteen hundred square meters. All of it was irrigated and there were several patches that had been weeded and smoothed till there was a circle of dirt with a seed planted inside. This was where he would try out his magic diagrams.

  He had planted many new types of fruit including strawberries, raspberries, and goji berries in addition to the ones he already had. Those were just the ones that grew on bushes, well the strawberries technically grew along the ground. There were also many that would grow on a vine and needed trellises including grapes, cucumbers, cantaloupes, honeydew, and watermelons. He didn’t have a good way of making a trellis yet, but they hopefully wouldn’t need them for a day or so. There were several new trees as well, including orange, fig, plum, lemon, cherry, and banana. Those were more spread out to plan for their future growth. And yes, bananas didn’t really grow on trees, but shut up.

  In the special dirt patches there were planted blueberry, raspberry, peach, apple, and orange seeds. He wanted to see the effect it had on a variety of types of fruits and plants. The vines would be too hard to contain in a circle so he skipped them for now. The next step was generating quartz powder so he could draw the diagrams. While putting the finishing touches on smoothing out the circles he had noticed the small wolf push open the door and go inside. That solved the mystery of who chewed the latch.

  The tutorial had supplied him with a mortar and pestle in the mage dungeon and he had of course liberated it. Putting his back against the house he sat with a pile of rocks and slowly ground away. The finished powder was added to a section of his corpse sack as each stone was crushed. After about thirty minutes the wolf poked its head out of the house and layed down within five meters of Alan and watched him work. During a short break for a snack he also tossed the cub a chunk of raw boar. They both ate in relative silence. As the morning wore on Alan made plans for the coming days.

  The dwarven dungeon would have long been upgraded so that should be his first stop. Depending on how things were going there he might try and get a real shovel from the shop. After the use it saw in upgrading his farm his current one was barely holding together. He now had a few golds worth of currency from his various rewards, and he could also spend some time enhancing some of these quartz stones and sell them for a nice profit. After that he could either explore more of the plains looking for new dungeons, or head back south and hit the ones he had located on his trip yesterday. One was a cave in the mountain walls, another was in what looked like the ruins of a church, and the third was a literal hole in the ground.

  The church one looked interesting, if only from his rpg experiences, but he was leaning towards heading north. He still hadn’t seen what the exit to the next tier would look like and he thought he should check it out. It would also get him farther away from that spider forest. He knew that thought was irrational, but not only had it been terrifying, it had truly been an ordeal for his body.

  As he was grinding away he found himself dozing off. At one point he blinked and when he opened his eyes again he had slumped over on the ground having knocked over the mortar, spilling the contents. Fortunately there hadn’t been much in there at the time. Unfortunately when his eyes focused he found an intruder in his garden.

  Beast: Rabbit (common) level 1, threat: none

  So it probably wouldn’t take a hand grenade to take care of this thing, holy or otherwise. It was nibbling at one of the blueberry bushes, he could already see some fruit that had ripened on the bush but the little vermin was eating the leaves. He scrambled to his feet and tried out his new hand crossbow. Turns out it wasn’t quite as point and click as he hoped. The first bolt missed by more than a meter but it did cause it to hop away briefly. Seeing no other threat it returned to its meal. The second bolt was even farther away and it didn’t even twitch this time.

  Alan prepared himself to chase after it, not having much hope. Suddenly a white streak appeared from out of nowhere. The rabbit reacted almost immediately and was hopping away as fast as it could go. The young wolf was faster. In the span of fifteen meters it ran the bunny down and snatched it in its jaws. A quick shake and the vermin hung limply. The young wolf then trotted off into the grass and could be seen bending down and coming up with a bloody muzzle. It had definitely earned that meal and Alan was glad to have it around. If rabbits were spawning nearby there would be no way to keep them out without a real fence.

  Alan watched it for a minute and then continued grinding away on his stones. He had a nice pile of powder in his pouch by now but it was only enough for a few circles so far. As he continued to grind away he decided not to latch the door when he left this time, and to leave the wolf furs behind. It seemed like the little guy had enjoyed sleeping on them before, maybe they smelled comforting. He also had plans of putting a roof on his house this time so the pelt shouldn’t get ruined if it rained again.

  By noon he was finished grinding up enough stones for his plans. His companion hadn’t made another appearance after trotting off with the remains of the dead rabbit. Storing the mortar in his ring he got out some more rocks and just worked on fortifying and infusing them with mana.

  This time he tried to make sure there was no attunement to the mana. The last one he had given to Thadrick was light attuned. He wasn’t sure if a craftsman would prefer something with a specific attunement or not, so he was making some to compare prices. Before his trip to the tower this process was mostly instinctual. With his now higher mana control compared to previously, and with a better understanding of the process, it was easy to control. He just took the pure mana from his pool and fed it into the stone in his hand.

  Previously he had unconsciously been turning the mana into light mana before sending it into objects since his body was better in tune with it. Getting it to merge with the stone’s energy flow was simple as well. The final product was a stone that just felt intense and durable, he couldn’t think of a better way to describe it.

  The young wolf had returned while he was meditating and was staring intently at the stones as mana poured into them. If Alan didn’t know better, he would say that it could see the energy transfer. Come to think of it, he didn’t know better.

  “So Tamee, is it possible this wolf can see the mana I am moving?”

  “Yes, it is possible. Beasts and other creatures have an instinctual connection to mana as higher concentrations allow them to grow faster and stronger than they would otherwise. That is why an area with higher ambient mana will have stronger creatures.”

  That made sense, it was probably similar to how the plants reacted to the mana in the air and the ground. Speaking of which, now Alan could see about drawing his growth circles. Seeing as this was the first circle he would draw that had a real purpose he had chosen to start small. Each of the plants would get a circle that should increase their growth rate. They were very similar to the circle he had worked on originally, but without special attuned treasures to boost it they would be much simpler in purpose and easier to draw. Not wanting to be distracted by the cute pup he left it another boar steak to eat while he got to work. That thing’s stomach must be enormous.

  Each diagram consisted of two concentric circles with five glyphs between them. The glyphs were water, light, air, dirt, and heat. The last two were special subtypes of earth and fire. He drew a line coming out of each glyph and spiraling towards the inner circle, finally meeting it under the next glyph. It was a simple design that would boost the area inside of the circle with the energy a plant would normally get from the environment around it. Normally that is what the various parts of a plant, like the roots and the leaves, would absorb to help the tree grow. That was similar to how plants had worked on Earth, but here they were absorbing mana more than nutrients. By boosting the energies inside the circle it would allow the plant to absorb more.

  As he finished the last of the circles he noticed his furry friend had made its way over to watch him. He was standing close enough that Alan could have reached out and touched him. All of that drawing with the quartz powder had left him hungry again. Remembering the sight of ripe blueberries he made his way over to a clump of bushes. He found a nice bunch and gently pulled them off.

  Achievement earned: I Grew a Thing

  [You have planted, grown, and harvested a crop. Any seeds you plant will grow at a faster rate than normal.]

  That caused him to drop his handful of berries. The wolf quickly bent down and snarfed them up while he told Tamee about it. She was mildly excited for him, but unsurprised. She told him to check his skills and he found a new one, Farming. Apparently all of the work with digging, planting, and growing had been helping him acquire this ability, but it wasn’t until he actually harvested something that he was able to finally acquire it.

  He collected a few more blueberries and even some of the strawberries that had ripened. He ate a couple and then thought of something Tamee had said earlier. He sent some mana into the remaining fruits in his hand until they all had that same intense feeling the stones had earlier. It was much faster as their auras seemed to suck up the energy he poured in compared to the inorganic rocks. Two Socks, the name he decided to give the wolf, was almost quivering as it watched the process. The name didn’t really make sense, but it was a nice bit of nostalgia for him. A remnant of the first movie to ever make him cry.

  Alan held out his hand. “Go ahead, these are for you.”

  Socks looked up at him and tilted his head to the side. Alan offered his hand again and it took a tentative step over. When the hand didn’t move the wolf quickly slurped them up. Its tongue was warm and raspy on his hand. It was drier than he would have expected. He figured the wolf deserved a little treat after handling his rabbit problem earlier. If he could help it grow up faster it would also help it take care of any other rodents.