I stared at the screen, uncomprehending, that advancement was... Significant. Three levels all at once was huge. The crawling feeling I'd felt the last time I'd gained a level returned with a vengeance; it was stronger this time, and I shivered where I lay on the cool stone floor of the cave tunnel. I grit my teeth, trying to let it just wash over me, which was difficult. Like last time, it faded quickly enough, which was a blessing in itself. While it wasn't a painful sensation, it was certainly not a comfortable one. The massive boost in stats wasn't the only thing I got, or even the most interesting thing that had come from my brush with death, though.

  If I had to guess, I'd be willing to bet money that this skill had come from resisting two separate doses of venom, that honestly, probably should have killed me outright. I could still feel the remnants of the [Juvenile Root Serpent]'s venom burning in my veins, so I dumped half my free points into endurance without a second thought. I was certain it would help me flush the remnants and be even more useful in the future. After all, it didn't matter what my stats were if I didn't survive to make use of them. I certainly wouldn't be going for a glass cannon type of build.

  No thanks, I choose life.

  There was an immediate sense of relief, and the smouldering embers in my veins began to rapidly cool. That left me with three more points to consider. Strength and Endurance were now by far my highest stats. Admittedly, it was an extremely attractive option to push my already high Strength even higher or my Dexterity. I could see immediate usefulness out of either of those options. More strength would make fighting and doing damage much easier, while higher dexterity would make avoiding harm in those fights easier. There was also the option of bringing my other lower stats up to par.

  Honestly, I felt it was a bit of a catch-22; I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't. I knew from games I'd played over the years that each choice had its merits. Generalists never had the same top end that a specialist did, but specialists never had the breadth of skills to call on for different situations that a generalist had. After several moments of mental debate, I decided that, for now at least, it was likely that whatever strange creatures populated this place were the biggest threat to my survival and being able to combat them better was the best choice for allocating my resources. So I ended up dumping my points into a combination of Strength, Dexterity and Endurance.

  When I opened my stat sheet to check the changes, I couldn't help the low whistle that escaped me echoing through the tunnel.

  My stat sheet had filled out rapidly from the first time I'd seen it up on the surface. Where before there had been very few entries, I now had a handful of skills I could utilize, and my stats no longer looked quite so pathetic. At least compared to what I'd started with, and I'd barely been here for a day. The numbers themselves were interesting as well. If I considered myself fairly average when I arrived, then it was likely that the average person had ten points in each stat. Plus or minus probably two or three. If that was true, then I was well beyond the capabilities of the average person. Though I had little in the way of information to frame that information, unfortunately. Was I the same as a professional athlete now? An Olympian? Or had I exceeded the normal limits of humanity entirely? It was impossible to know without any additional information to go off of or a source of comparison. I turned my thoughts away from that line of questioning. I simply didn't have a frame of reference or enough information to make it productive right now, though I did make a mental note to revisit it later if I had the opportunity. It would be worth knowing what my actual physical limits were.

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  A large portion of my growth was due to my bloodline; it was responsible for a significant chunk of my new attributes as well as several of my skills. Without my bloodline, I would be significantly weaker, not to mention dead. There was a not insignificant part of me that was certain that if I hadn't unlocked my bloodline when I did, I would have ended up a meal for that massive spider. Part of me wanted to deny that, to live in the fantasy that I would have found a way out, bloodline or no, that was what that was however; a fantasy.

  Regardless of the many what-ifs involved, the growth I'd seen so far seemed ridiculous, almost meteoric. It did make me a little cautious; there was going to have to be a point where the growth slowed down, a point where I would hit a bottleneck of some sort. There was no way I could simply continue to experience growth like this ad infinitum.

  One does not simply walk into Mordor, and all that.

  That was a worry for the future, however.

  Groaning, I dragged myself up from the ground to stand despite the protests of my aching body. Looking around at the remains of all the serpent roots I'd slain, I couldn't help but smirk at the thought of more loot as I set about touching each of the corpses. There were enough of them that it took a few minutes to get all of them. Thankfully, getting up and moving seemed to help with the aches, and I slowly began to feel better as I made my way around the tunnel.

  Oh yes, yes I would.

  I accepted the prompt and very pointedly took a large step to the side.

  Once bitten, twice shy.

  A moment later, I was greeted by the soft thump of an object hitting the cave floor where I'd been standing only a moment before. Looking down, I found what looked like a dark brown messenger bag, a satchel, maybe? It seemed to be made of vines very similar to the ones found in the forest and made up the strange bodies of the serpent roots that inhabited the forest. Where the serpent roots were a mix of near pitch black and electric blue, this satchel was more like a charcoal. I reached down and snatched the bag up from the floor. It was light in my grip and felt oddly smooth, almost leather-like. Considering the way it looked, that was a little odd, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  [Root-Woven Satchel (Uncommon)] - A sturdy bag made from woven roots, designed to expand magically to hold more items than it appears capable of.

  Effect: Increases the user's inventory capacity, allowing them to carry more items without becoming encumbered. Provides extra dimensional storage space of 2 cubic meters. Items generated by loot type abilities will go directly to linked storage items.

  Admittedly, I did want to dance a little bit from sheer excitement. I didn't have much loot at the moment, but there had been a concern about where I would put it all once I started getting more. Already after my little tunnel killing spree, there was a fair bit of loot that I would consider odds and ends, worth hanging onto, even if I had no clue what I'd ever use it for. I didn't exactly have enough pockets for new daggers and whatever else fell from the sky every time I killed a new monster. So to say the bag was a boon to me was putting it lightly.

  Unfortunately, nothing else near as exciting as my new bag came from the small horde of serpent vines. I had dozens of small piles of [Root Fibre (Common)] which matched the one I'd obtained earlier. In the mix, I'd also picked up a few vials of a strange, viscous liquid the system referred to as [Serpent Root Sap (Uncommon)]. The description it offered was almost exactly the same as for the root fibre. It seemed a little odd, though I had suspicions that it had to do with my lack of crafting knowledge, or perhaps a lack of familiarity with the material. Maybe there was a Skill that would give me better information than the system's basic description? I had no way to know at the moment, and it wasn't exactly at the top of my priorities to unravel the mysteries of the System. Thankfully, all of the loot I'd acquired fit into my new bag with ease. Two cubic meters might not sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but it was more than enough for the moment. Unless I suddenly had a need to store several suits of full plate armour.

  The far larger and more current curiosity was that despite all the running and fighting, all the moments that should have been a massive strain on my stamina and endurance, I felt no hunger and no desire for sleep. Certainly, there was a degree of physical exhaustion, and I was still a little sore, but nowhere near what I should have been feeling. By this point I should have been an absolute wreck, stat points aside, I hadn't been in great shape on arrival here. Yet there wasn't a feeling that I needed to sleep despite being awake and more active in a span of hours than I had been in years. Had I gone through this ordeal normally, I was certain that all those factors and more would have been present, yet here they were not. In the end, I had to write it off as an effect of The System, and all the stat points I'd been accruing since I arrived. There simply wasn't any other explanation that I could apply to the situation.

  I shook my head. I had other things to worry about before I worried about my strangely resilient and self-sufficient body. I made my way back towards the pond I'd dropped into earlier. While I wasn't feeling a desire for food or sleep, I was absolutely feeling a desire to wash the gore from my body, preferably before it dried and hardened. That was something I very much wanted to avoid, given how liberally coated in gore I was. I poked my head out into the open space of the cavern, looking around for the occupant of the web above. Nothing moved in the large cavern, and there was no noise save for the soft plop plop of water dripping from stalactites above. Not wasting the opportunity, I quickly stripped off my clothes and slipped into the water as quietly as I was able and began the process of scrubbing the sap like blood from my body.

  Fortunately, the gunk came free easily enough; despite the lack of hot water, the cool water of the pond worked well enough. Perhaps it was the shivering that was doing it. I wasn't looking forward to walking around in wet clothes, but they needed a wash just as badly as I did after the struggles they'd been through. Washing my clothes felt so ordinary, mundane even, I laughed at the thought of it. Here I was in this fantastical place filled with magic and monsters, and I was washing clothes. By hand no less. The irony of it all was too much. Vicky and Sean would have laughed at me. Such was the prerogative of younger siblings. Thoughts of my brother and sister turned my mood more dour. Maudlin.

  I washed my clothes in silence while I thought about my family. Would I see them again?

  Will they even recognize me? Will this place change me so much that they don’t? I shook myself. Such thoughts were not helpful at the moment. Or ever really.

  Leave the future where it lies. I'll get there eventually, and I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

  The wet slap of cloth against stone echoed in the chamber as I slapped my soaking wet bundle of clothes onto the outcropping. My gaze flitted around the chamber again, checking for its occupant. It seemed odd that it was nowhere to be found once again. Had the massive spider been missing since I unlocked my bloodline? Where had it gone? How in the hell had it gotten out of the cavern? There didn't seem to be an exit big enough for it to escape through.

  "Questions, always more questions," I muttered, letting out a dissatisfied grunt as I hauled myself up and out of the water. At least I was clean now. "I blame you for this System."

  And so are the things inside it.