Alice settled into a routine over the next week as the temperature continued to drop. In the morning, she would wake up and train her magic, moving objects around and trying to improve her proficiency, as well as training {Sprinting} and {Spearmanship}, since those seemed to be relevant to combat and easy to train. She also tried throwing stones at herself using her magic to train {Dodge}, but her control over her magic wasn’t very good and it was hard to launch stones at herself that wouldn’t hurt her too much if she failed to dodge. After some training, Alice didn’t see a single notification that {Dodge} had increased, so she gave up on this part of her training after a while.

It became easier to keep up her training routine after the wound in her leg had finally healed, much faster than the wound would have on Earth. Alice attributed it to some influence of her increasing [Endurance] Stat. Along with this increased speed of regeneration, Alice had noticed that her [Endurance] Stat was gradually making her body stronger and tougher. Her feet didn’t get as scratched up as they used to when Alice walked over the forest ground without shoes, and her body was also becoming increasingly resistant to cold temperatures even without taking new Perks that improved her temperature resistance.

After her training in the morning, she would replenish her firewood and bury some nuts, then catch and smoke some fish. Afterwards, she would eat some berries, then work on creating some stone and wood tools to make her life easier. At night, she read her book by the fire, boosting her Language Skill and helping her level up [Scholar].

She had also managed to, with equal parts luck and skill, make a stone knife after several tries of using rocks as both hammers and chisels, even if the knife’s edge was rather uneven. With it, she had carved a few wooden boxes to store her smoked fish. Most importantly, she managed to grab some branches and smaller tree logs and had made a very rough that covered some of the edges of the cave. It wasn’t made very well, and didn’t cover the gaps in the cave perfectly, but it still helped keep the heat in. Slowly but steadily, her life in the wilderness was improving as she grew stronger and more experienced.

As time passed, [Survivor] had also leveled up to 21, [Scholar] had leveled up to 3, and [Explorer of Magic] had made it to Level 10. The progress was much slower now, but if Alice’s earlier guesses were correct, the System might respond to ‘risk of death’ by increasing her experience gain. During her encounter with a monster she had gained 4 levels in Survivor in less than an hour, while it had taken her a week and a half to get up to level 12 in Survivor beforehand, and now that there were no monsters and Alice had solved most of the major threats to her life in the woods, she was naturally at a much lower risk of dying than when she had first arrived in this dimension.

Her level 10 perks for [Explorer of Magic] hadn’t been too exciting, but she had grabbed {Enhanced Regeneration}.

Like all other stats, [Magic] increased when she used it. Therefore, regenerating mana 20% faster meant that she would have more training time than other people at the same level, boosting both her [Magic] Stat and [Explorer of Magic] Levels by a significant margin as time passed. Alice’s Magic still barely at a usable level, but Alice was determined to turn her Magic into a major tool for survival. Apart from that, she had acquired two more skills related to magic, both of which seemed quite useful.

{Mana Precision} helped her control how much mana she sent through her mana tendrils. If the first time, she had been grabbing random amounts and pumping it through her mana tendril, now it was at least a bit more refined, allowing her to avoid wasting mana when she didn’t need to.

{Kinetic Force} was much more interesting, primarily because it seemed like the most odd Skill she had gotten so far. Most of the other Skills she had gotten so far improved her knowledge and instincts. Sprinting, for example, seemed to help her naturally adopt a proper running posture, something she could have theoretically learned even without the System. {Mana Precision}, as another example, improved her control of mana, but if she had sufficient practice, she probably could reached the same level of control anyway. It just would have taken a far longer period of time. By contrast, {Kinetic Force} didn’t seem to be doing any of that – instead, with the exact same amount of mana, she was able to exert more force on an object. Alice was baffled by the question of where this force came from, since she wasn’t using any more mana than before, but at least thus far she had no idea where the extra kinetic energy was coming from if it wasn’t fueled by mana.

Alice was also beginning to wonder how big of a role innovation played in her level growth, considering how much her levelling speed had slowed after her week in this world. She still got some progress from repeating her routine and preparing for winter. However, she had gotten multiple levels per day during the first week, and now after a week of training she had only gained two levels in [Explorer of Magic]. Part of the reason Alice had been thinking about this was also due to the name of the Class. [Explorer of Magic] indicated that it was about learning and innovating with Magic, and all of Alice’s classes seemed to level up whenever she did stuff related to their name. However, [Survivor] still seemed to reward her when she ‘invented’ a new tool that boosted her survival odds, so getting rewarded for trying out new things obviously wasn’t unique to [Explorer of Magic].

Alice had also figured out how mana regeneration worked, at least to some extent. She found that if she drained her magic seed, it took slightly less than two days to fully replenish, or at least it had before she got the {Enhanced Regeneration} perk. She guessed that the ‘base value’ for magic regeneration was probably exactly 2 days, and then her 15% enhanced mana regeneration from {Baptized by Broken Mana} was boosting that regeneration speed by enough to make the math screwy, but with enhanced regeneration Alice took around 40 hours to go from no mana to full mana again. As a result, with her morning training sessions she made sure to leave a little over half of her mana available, to deal with any emergencies, while draining half to get whatever Stats, Skills, and Levels she could.

It felt good to settle into a routine. No sudden emergencies plunging her into a crisis, no trying to figure out how to deal with the influx of new problems, no near death experiences. Just slowly and steadily working towards her goal of surviving the winter. Although her start had been a bit rocky, she was finally starting to reach some level of stability after three weeks in this dimension.

However, her somewhat comfortable lifestyle came to an end one morning. A problem she had known was coming for a while finally reared its ugly head.

Specifically, the river finally froze. The fish had been thinning out for a while now, but with the river gone Alice would be fully cut off from her supply of smoked fish. Not only that, but the berry bushes she had found near her cave had stopped producing berries entirely. She had about two and a half week’s worth of food, give or take a bit, but that was far from the three months worth of food she needed for winter to pass. At least, assuming seasons were still around ninety days on this world, which was something Alice had yet to verify.

She wandered around the region, trying to find new sources of nutrition that would last her through the winter. She could rely on {Foraging} to help cue her in on what was and wasn’t edible, so she just needed to see new plants to hopefully find something to tide her through the winter.. Furthermore, although she didn’t remember it particularly clearly, but she was pretty sure she had seen a rabbit on her second day here, when she was suffering from mana poisoning. That meant there should be other rabbits in the area, if she could find them. She could also try going after some birds, although their thinning presence in the area meant that they had probably migrated for the winter and would soon disappear entirely.

However, as she stepped through the trees, concentrating on random plants, she felt a familiar icy sensation of fear trickling down her spine. Danger.

She looked around, avoiding moving too much, and spotted another spidercrab. This time, she didn’t fly into a blind panic. The creature was sniffing around the trees, about 10 meters away, but it didn’t seem to have fully caught onto her scent yet. She had a few moments to think about things.

Am I about to get stuck in a tree again? Alice looked at her stone spear, which had a sharp and sturdy point. Her kinetic Magic Seed was about 70% full, having recharged somewhat from her morning practice. She hesitated. Then, finally, she extended a mana tendril out from her seed, preparing for a fight with a Spidercrab. These things were obviously common around here, and if she couldn’t even defeat one of them it would mean that she would need to flee whenever she saw one. That would seriously hinder her attempts to find supplies for the winter, and so she felt the need to put the Skills she had been training to use. Not to mention, when she got closer to civilization there might not be as much tree cover as there was in this area. If she couldn’t fight spidercrabs on the way back to civilization she might get eaten before she arrived. Fighting at least one spidercrab at a time might be manageable for her, and if she managed to kill one she would vastly improve her survival odds.

The spidercrab seemed to sense it the moment she used mana, and turned towards her, giving off a screech that made her wish she was deaf. Then, in one swift movement, it pounced towards her.

Clumsily, Alice maneuvered her mana tendril towards the spidercrab as it got within a meter of her. Then, she gave it a shove with her mana the moment she had a proper connection, trying to throw the spidercrab to the ground and mess up its balance.

Instead of getting smashed into the ground, Alice felt as if a large part of her mana was trying to push through a barrier that had never been there before. A large part of the mana that she was trying to feed into spidercrab disappeared somewhere, throwing her calculations completely off balance. Alice panicked, but luckily, even though the spidercrab resisted over half of her mana, the remainder still threw it off balance and flung it to the ground. The spidercrab stumbled to its feet as it tried to recover its balance. Before it could, Alice shoved it again, this time committing much more of her mana to account for the creature’s mana resistance.

Then, Alice took a step closer before she stabbed at spidercrab with her spear. She managed to nick the monster on one of its legs. Green-white blood spilled out, and the thing released another screech, before launching itself towards her again. She used magic to flip over the two front legs of the spidercrab, stopping it in midair and leaving it struggling on the ground. While it was distracted, she stabbed its underbelly. The spear punched through its stomach, where none of its annoying chitin protected it, and it flailed and screeched for a brief moment before it managed to free itself again. However, she could see it was slower now, much more heavily injured than before.

Unlike the first spidercrab, this thing didn’t run away. It leapt to the side, then bounded towards her again, completely unfazed by how injured it was.

Alice tried to dodge and stumbled. She fell down, and the spidercrab’s teeth sank into her stomach. Alice screamed, and threw every last remaining shred of mana into throwing the spidercrab upwards. A sudden headache formed as her mana seed ran dry.

Spidercrab lifted several centimeters upwards, giving Alice just enough space to get her spear and ram the spear point into spidercrab’s head.

Spidercrab made a sort of warbling sound, trying to screech through the stone and wood buried in its throat. Then, it made a sort of warbling sound as its bottom legs scrabbled against the ground. Alice held on, not letting the spidercrab free of the spear before spidercrab started slowing down. A few seconds later, it stopped twitching entirely, its body going limp and sagging towards the ground.

Alice breathed in and out, blinking away the various notifications that had popped up in the middle of her fight. Her stomach hurt. She looked down, and saw blood. Panicking, she ran back to her cave as blood trickled out of her wound.

She cut another strip of cloth from her blanket, a larger one this time, while also using some boiled water to clean the wound. Fortunately, once she got a better look at it, she realized that it wasn’t actually that bad – it hadn’t managed to seriously mangle her flesh, or penetrate too deeply. Really, the wound was about a quarter of the length of her pinky. Which, while very painful, wasn’t lethal unless it got infected. It felt much better once a strip of cloth was wound around it. Hopefully her stats would do the rest of the healing she needed.

Calmer now, Alice tried to ignore the pain in her stomach as she took several deep breaths. She took a few minutes to relax, going through a vaguely remembered breathing exercise as her body and mind calmed down after the fight. After she settled her racing pulse and thoughts, she finally took a look at the notifications from the fight and its immediate aftermath.

Even though she got hurt during the fight, the gains were also nothing to sneeze at. However, beyond just the Levels, Stats, and Skills, there was one other notification that interested her.

 After a few more minutes of some basic breathing exercises to help relax her, Alice finally began thinking back over the fight and its results.

The first thing to note was that her spear had held up reasonably well, but her body and skill with the spear hadn’t fared quite so well. She had been practicing {Spearmanship}, and now had at least some of the instinct and reflexes someone who actually knew what they were doing with a spear would have.

However, she was seriously lacking in several other departments. Her body simply couldn’t keep up with what it needed to do, and her thinking speed couldn’t really keep up with a fight very well either. Alice was more at home in a library than in a fight, and before today she hadn’t been in a fight. So she was entirely reliant on her Skills to help her, and while they certainly, they couldn’t cover her lack of experience. Furthermore, she had no idea what had happened to her mana while she was fighting the monster. The monster had, somehow or another, dispelled a big portion of what Alice had thrown at it, which had thrown a lot of her preparations into disarray when the fight started. She had managed to get her mana tendril where it needed to be after hours of practice, but because her raw mana reserves were so low the fight had still been a massive strain on her.

Despite all of that, she had managed to pull out a victory during the fight. Even if the fight hadn’t gone as well as she would have liked, she managed to survive a fight with a monster and kill the beast. Her Stats and Skills definitely needed more training, but she could defend herself in a pinch if she needed to. That thought gave her a feeling of security – before, she had been worried that basically anything she came across in this world might swat her to death. She had no clue what the power levels of monsters looked like, so she lived in fear of a level 30 or 50 monster sneezing her out of existence one day. However, for now she was at least capable of fighting off the weakest monsters in the area, and hadn’t seen any hint of stronger monsters so far. While she still suspected that high level monsters would be a huge threat to her, she wasn’t totally helpless now.

Apart from that, she had gained another achievement. This Achievement also had a number next to its name that wasn’t linked to the rarity, which was something Alice had never seen before. Since it had a roman numeral next to it, and the roman numeral looked a lot like the ‘tier’ System for Achievements Alice had seen in some games, for now she guessed the Achievement could be upgraded.  The idea of an upgradeable achievement was something to keep in mind for the future, if her guess was correct. If she couldn’t find a way back home, upgrading Achievements might be a good way to improve her abilities further, since she had no clue what other Achievements existed in this world and Stats, Skills, and Levels would grow more and more slowly as her numbers grew higher.

Alice sighed, as she always did when thoughts of home came up. The last week had caused her homesickness to intensify, especially as she had settled in and her survival became easier. Without desperation to occupy her thoughts, they slipped towards the house she had been in less than a month before. Were her parents doing all right? What did they think after she had disappeared into thin air in the middle of the night? She hoped that they weren’t worried about her, but she ultimately knew that they were probably desperate to find out what had happened to her. If she could at least send a message to them and let them know she was alive, she would feel less guilty about being stuck here, wherever here was.

After a few minutes, she pushed the thoughts of home away. For now, they weren’t productive, and she needed to keep moving forward instead of drowning in memories and worries she couldn’t change.

She focused back on the fight, and suddenly had a thought - was spidercrab edible?

Even if its legs looked kind of spidery and gross, the center of its body looked much closer to a crab. Alice wasn’t quite desperate enough to resort to eating the spider shaped bits, but she had eaten crab on Earth multiple times. Maybe it’s worth trying?

Alice crept back out of the cave, keeping an eye on her surroundings in case another Spidercrab showed up while she was injured. After a bit of backtracking she found the body of her defeated foe.

{Foraging} let her know that, with some cooking, spidercrab was, in fact, edible. Thus began an entirely new ordeal -trying to drag the corpse back to her cave so she could butcher and cook it. Her stomach still hurt, even if it had stopped bleeding, and she had a hard time moving around too much weight due to her lacking strength and injuries. After some thinking, Alice took her stone knife and cut off the thing’s head first – she wasn’t going to eat the eyes or the mouth anyway, so it was adding on weight she didn’t need. Then, she also removed the ten legs – they were too spiderlike for her comfort, and even if it was irrational there was a huge ick factor when she looked at them. She might still eat them in the future, if she got really desperate, but for now, her disgust won out. Without the head and legs, the corpse was much easier to move.

Finally, she managed to get everything back to the cave, where she started dealing more carefully with the corpse. She quickly realized that the shell on spidercrab’s back was hard to remove – it was best to just try scooping out meat from the underbelly. After a messy process involving her knife, her bowl, a large amount of green blood getting everywhere, and a few edible chunks of meat getting stuck in parts of the shell or falling directly into her fire and becoming charcoal, Alice managed to get several chunks of spidercrab ready for cooking. Unfortunately, the internal organs weren’t safe to eat, according to {Foraging}, but Alice still salvaged quite a bit of meat from the corpse. Afterwards, she tried cooking the flesh until {Foraging} let her know the meat was safe to eat.

The meat itself tasted all right – somewhat similar to cooked crab from home, if a fair bit less delicious due to the lack of seasonings. She wasn’t sure if smoking the meat would work, but she gave it with the remainder of the corpse before she gorged herself on what she had already cooked. Once she healed up, she would try hunting another Spidercrab. Even if the first fight had been a bit desperate, she could improve her fighting skills with time and training. More importantly, she had found a source of meat for the winter.