Ether09

...I bombed my finals... sad times..."insert sad pepe," Hopefully I do better next quarter. To fantasy I go

Lately, I have often spent my time trying to improve my current hunting strategy. Well really since all I do everyday is hunt, well have my summons hunt, all of my attention goes towards thinking of more efficient ways to hunt. I have made significant changes of trial and error to try and increase the amount of exp I harvest, but still there are just so many different variables to account for. 

With 178mp/h or around 3 mp/s at my disposal and how my Merc Summons follow a 25/35/50/70/95/125/160/200 mp cost scale, I can have many different combinations of hunting parties at my disposal, not only by race, but also by each species available to me. I could have 7 Tier 2 wolves, or maybe 2 wolves, a bear, and 2 undead, or etc. So far, I have tended to get 3  tier 2 wolves, 3 tier 2 avians, and a tier 2 horse. RIght now, we have three groups dividing my life summons and I. Laos and I, Nix and Sigrun, and Ciel each get 1 wolf and an avian and the horse is a messenger/carrier of goods between us. I could us Recall to teleport a summon to myself, but it only works one way and it does have a cool down. 

I am very close to advancing my class already, and I probably will need it rather soon. Ciel is able to travel much further than us using her shadow magic and natural nimbleness. Using the wolf and avian to help her detect monsters, she is able to scout further ahead of us and relay information back to me. Up ahead, deeper into the forest the monsters are growing. Hobgoblins, Kobold Mages, Lesser Basilisks, Orc Villages, and more are pervasive in their presence further in the forest. On another note, I have also just recently gained information back from the summon I sent the other way. I had used recall on it, and discovered that the same progression of monsters from horned rabbits all the way to goblins was the same in both directions. So no matter if I went this way, or the reverse direction when I had started to leave my original site, it seems that it wouldn’t have made a difference. 

What is very weird though, is that if we assume monsters to be the wildlife of this forest, normally the wildlife would start out small and increase in diversity and density the deeper into the forest and the further away from civilization. Deeper into a resource rich ecosystem like a forest would house more of the wildlife than the perimeter/outside, but what recalling my summon tells me is that most likely from the desert site I started from, all directions acted like the perimeter of the forest, with the wildlife or monsters starting out small and sparse to how it is now with packs more abundant and stronger monsters the further we travel forward. Of course there is probably something odd with a desert in the middle of a lush forest, but there must be something even more special about that location since it seems to have some kind of relation with the monsters of this forest. 

This thought makes me come back to questioning my own existence. When one wakes up in an unknown place with no knowledge of parents or family, one might think that they were abandoned at birth like how one might leave a baby at the orphanage’s doorsteps, but a desert is hardly an orphanage, plus I am well over the age of being an infant. Could I have been abandoned by someone though? Maybe another schemed against me, left me here to die, and deprived me of my memories through magical means? Possibly. But then why was I level one? If this world is one of magic and might, then as someone who looks late in their teens I imagine that I should have obtained a few levels into a combat class or any class of sorts by now, yet when I woke up I was starting from the level fit for a beginner or a child. Maybe the age at which one begins to get their class or powers springs up in their late teens though. But still, the odds that I was kidnapped and made to lose my memories all right before my ‘system’ awakened feels like too small of a window to have happened. Just before my system awakened so that I didn’t level up even once or even choose a class, and waking up just after my system awakened so that I could learn magic to survive. 

Perhaps my life is the result of such a scheme that didn’t account for my system to awaken, but it would have been much easier to just kill me while in that desert, and there are too many specific what ifs for it to be that kind of scenario. And I still have my knowledge of the world Earth, which I am 99% sure is not the same world I am on right now due to the existence of magic and this system. Maybe some god summoned me or gave me another chance at life and my memories were wiped as is normal with reincarnation, except I started out with a teenage body instead of an infant’s. Yup let’s just go with it’s all god’s fault for now. I mean, its not like I have any other idea, nor a way to prove some other kind of theory for now. 

By the way, I am also very very very happy to announce that Ciel can COOK! Yes Ciel can cook, and has been in charge of meals and while our current inventory of ingredients is limited, our meals have become much better since Ciel has joined our party. Ciel said that she is best at baking though, so I hope that we can find a friendly village or town soon to get an oven and some sugar for sweets.