I moved with a skip to my step. “So, Mister Menu, feel free to tell me about yourself,” I said to the box floating before me. “I’m sorry that I haven’t spoken to you in a while. I was sort of busy. Then again, I know that you’re kind of shy when you’re on the job.”

The menu popped away, letting me see the long, treacherous road ahead. A thought made it come back.

“Now, now, no running away!” I chided. “I need to grind my new skill. You’re the one who gave it to me. Or at least, I think you are. It doesn’t feel like something Miss Menu would do.”

The box just displayed the same thing it had for the past twenty minutes or so.

Friendmaking
Rank F - 13%
The ability to make friends. As you practice this skill your ability to make friends will improve.

“Come on, I need to get this skill super high so that I can make all the friends!” I told the menu box. “Maybe we can try hugging again?”

The box popped away.

“No fun!” I called after it.

Shaking my head, I refocused on the road and kept on walking. I had an eye open for any interesting plants, but so far all I had found was a nice spread of chamomile to top up my tea reserves. There were other plants along the road, but none that had properties that interested me.

I wasn’t about to start carrying around poisons if I could avoid it. That just wasn’t a very nice thing to do.

I hopped up to a low hanging branch, then started jumping from tree to tree without using any stamina. It was good practice in case I had to make a run for it.

“Mister Menu, can I see my profile please?”

Cleaning was reaching the edge of Rank B. I wasn’t exactly grinding it ceaselessly, but I was trying to make sure that my mana was never completely topped off just so that I didn’t waste any time.

Jumping was plodding along as well. It might overtake Cleaning at some point in the near future. My general skills, on the other hand, were falling behind. Insight was the only one slowly ticking up, but the rest? I would need to find a way to get them up a few ranks.

It seemed as though the main barrier for skill growth wasn’t experience points at all. Sure, it could take days to get a skill up to max experience, but that didn’t matter if you were going to rely on that skill your entire life. It was the hard limit imposed by skill points that slowed everything down.

A month of dedicated practice would be more than enough for me to get every skill up to the highest level they could go, I suspected. Then I would be stuck waiting forever to level up and get just one more skill point to spend. It felt like an almost artificial restriction on what I could accomplish.

Annoying, but understandable. If skills allowed the user to become super strong with only minimal effort and some grinding, then they would be completely broken.

The road forked.

I paused at the intersection and took in the two diverging paths. One to my left, deeper into the forests, one straight ahead towards the marshes. Neither towards the mountain city that I assumed was Port Royal.

I shuffled around to pull out my backpack, then grabbed the map Leonard had drawn for me. It showed the camp, the road, and indicated the fork with an arrow pointing ahead and towards Rockstack which was, according to the map, not too terribly far. I had crossed half the distance already.

The left path continued and ended with a big skull and crossbones symbol. I wondered what was over there. It was pretty clear that Leonard thought it would be too dangerous for me, but he also seemed to think that tying my own shoes was beyond me.

“I’ll go check later,” I decided as I replaced the map into my sack.

Mid-day came and went. I probably should have stopped for lunch, especially now that I actually had supplies, but instead I stopped for a quick break behind a bush, then after cleaning up, pulled some still-soft-ish bread from the supplies sack I had and nibbled away at it while walking.

If I was within only half a day’s distance from Rockstack, then it was worth it to rush back over. There might be an inn, and people too. As much as I was enjoying my time on the road, having a roof over my head, a warm meal in my tummy, and a hot shower before bed sounded heavenly.

I was finishing up the last of my bread when I caught sight of smoke between the trees ahead. I paused along the road, then climbed up a tree to see a little better. Not one smokestack, but about five, all of them joining together hundreds of meters above.

It had to be Rockstack!

My steps were a whole lot faster after I hit the ground. I wanted to make it to the town and I wanted to get there now!

Then the road I had been travelling on for a few days now ended. No more cobbles, no more path, not even some flattened dirt to show where it could have been. I took out Leonard’s map and eyed it for a moment. It said to continue, but I had been expecting to follow the road for a while.

I ran ahead a ways, skipping over brush and bushes until, between one step and the next, I caught sight of a new road ahead.

The stones were well-placed and untouched by roots. The sides had deep ditches with thin rivulets of water at the bottom. The path was even wide enough that two cars might have been able to drive along it side-by-side without issue.

“Whoa,” I said as I took it in with a growing smile. Well-maintained roads meant civilisation!

I checked Leonard’s map one last time, turned to the left, and started jogging.

That didn’t last very long. I might have been working out a whole lot more, but that didn’t mean I was in shape. The weight of the backpack didn’t help, or so I told myself. My jog turned into a fast walk, then an easy, more stable pace as the terrain grew a little hilly.

And then, at long last, I crested a hill and saw Rockstack.

The first and most obvious thing, the only thing I could see, actually, was the wall. It was a solid barrier of living tree trunks, each one as thick around as my arm-span and nearly completely branchless. What few branches were there all stuck out like the spiny thorns of a cactus.

Huge, bulbous bowls sat atop the walls, each one made of some dark bark and big enough to fit half a dozen Broccolis. They reminded me a little of coconuts, only they were perfectly distanced all around the wall.

I squinted and took in the form of two guards by the arch of the doors. Each one was only about as third as tall as the wall. There was even a small moat going around it, and the forest near the town had been cut back to create a big clearing full of tree stumps.

I reshouldered my backpack, made sure Orange was sitting pretty in my bandoleer and walked over to the gate.

The guards were both grenoils like those in the Exploration Guild party, only they didn’t seem quite as intimidating. They had cheap spears and thick gambesons with a bit of scalemail that seemed ill-fitting.

“Hello!” I called out to them as I got closer.

A bored Grenoil Fencer, (Level ?).

A bored Grenoil Hunter, (Level ?).

“Hail, traveller,” the hunter said. He seemed to snap himself awake as I came closer. “What business do you have in Rockstack? Ah, I mean, Royal Outpost Seven?

I stopped when I was still a dozen steps away from them, just in case they got nervous. “This isn’t Rockstack?” I asked.

The fencer sighed. “It is. At least, zat’s what everyone calls it. Official name is Royal Outpost Seven. Not zat you look like an inspector.”

“Well okay then,” I said. “I’m here to find a place to rest, and maybe a way to get to Port Royal?”

The hunter nodded. “Zat’s fair. Might take a while before ze next caravan passes zrough. As for ze place to rest, go ask Juliette at ze Inn. You can’t miss it.”

“It’s on the main road?” I asked.

They both laughed, croaky chuckles that calmed down after a moment. “Miss, zere are only seven buildings here. If you can’t afford an inn room zen it’s off to the tents with you.”

“Oh,” I said. “If there are so few buildings, then what are the walls for?” I asked.

“Keep zings zat want to eat you out at night. Had a high-ranking Wood Mage show up when ze outpost was still fresh. Built ze walls in a few minutes is what I heard.”

The fencer shook his head. “It took hours,” he said. “Zis idiot is just trying to impress you.”

“Whoa, that’s still awesome!” I said. “I have a Gardening Skill, do you think I could do that?”

The hunter looked at his buddy and it was clear he was trying not to laugh. “Yeah, sure. Go on in kid.”

I did as he said, running through the arch and into Rockstack. My eyes went huge as I tried to take it all in at once. There were people here, and a ring of buildings that all looked strange and unique, but what caught my eye right away was the huge structure right in the middle of the sort of square that made up the centre of the outpost.

It was a stack of rocks. Sort of like the little stacks someone bored might make by balancing one rock atop another, only this stack was ten meters tall and had rocks that would more appropriately be called boulders. There were three stacks, each one arching up at the top and meeting in the middle at a shiny black stone covered in little golden flecks.

Fool’s gold, if I had to guess, but pretty all the same.

I tore my eyes away from the strange sorta-sculpture and took in the rest. The guards were right; there were only seven proper buildings in the outpost. There was a huge inn to one side, then three little shops with second floors that probably had apartments. Then a big blacksmith’s shop. There was a huge home that looked like it belonged to someone important, and lastly two large buildings that were both square and boring-looking, as if someone had built a fantasy office building out in the middle of nowhere.

There were a few people around, all grenoil and all minding their own business, so I decided to do the same.

“Where do I start...?” I wondered aloud.

The obvious answer was, of course, the Inn. That’s where all the best adventures began, after all. The Inn was a long building with a huge front. Three stories tall and completely out of place in the middle of nowhere like this. It was a bit strange to see such a large building so far from a proper village, but maybe there were enough travellers to make it viable.

There was a sign on the front with a frog jumping into a mug and the words Hop on Inn after it.

Grinning, I held on to my backpack by the straps and ran over to the building, every part of me ready for my first chance to see the inside of a working inn.

The doors were, disappointingly, normal, but the moment I stepped through the threshold I was inundated with the sound of glasses clinking, people talking in low murmurs, the strumming of a lute and the mixed smells of sweaty people and fresh food.

I had found a small paradise.