Morning twenty-four came with the first bird chirps for Eren. Nowadays he didn’t even care if the sunlight came down or not.

He was already inside a big giant ass forest and seeing and depending on sunlight was a nightmare. So he gave up on that path and relied on birds and bugs, which he was fortunate neither of them came too close to his sleeping area of the giant tree- or it’s main body to be exact.

Eren carved a new scratch mark into the bark with his sharpest stone hooked with his weird failure rope and blew the dust off from the thick branch. He was living in a forest with almost zero hygiene, but having all this dust and filth in the one place where he slept and kept his valuables was starting to drive him insane.

Every instinct for order and cleanliness that the modern world had drilled into him made him absolutely loathe this mess. I’m a 25-year-old man from the city, not a caveman.

The thing he missed most, even more than a warm meal was the massive, sparkling clean toilet back at his house that always smelled like a fresh bottle of bleach.

God, I’d trade a stat point right now for just five minutes in a bathroom that doesn’t have leaves or bugs in it.

Then he counted the twenty-four lines in a neat row and signed with sadness. Almost a month of waking up alive in a place that wanted him dead every single day...

And Eren didn’t even know why or how the hell he was here.

He untied the bark rope from his waist and stretched his arms above his head until his shoulders popped. The fire birds were already screaming in the outer branches. Same noise every morning like a broken car alarm that nobody could turn off.

I swear one day, one day I will eat you. I don’t know how for now, but wait for me!!

But first things first of the day, or everyday was....water.

No surprise right?

Water was the biggest bit*h in the whole living in the forest madness. And surprisingly, water was harder to find and collect than food for most of the time.

He grabbed the three stone cups he’d spent a whole week carving with nothing but a sharp rock and patience. They weren’t pretty or big enough to be spent in one toilet session.

One of them even looked like a drunk person had tried to make a bowl with his eyes closed in mud. Other one was even worse. But they held water and that’s all that mattered in his book.

The small pond was about a one and a half kilometers north through a gap in the trees.

He climbed down and jogged to it at a comfortable pace. The Kinetic Flux Runner skill upgrade from yesterday made even a casual jog feel smoother than it used to be. It wasn’t insanely better than before but all improvements in this hell was nice.

His feet found the ground between roots without him having to look down all the time with his high perception stats.

Actually, the single improvements to all his stats on level ups was the real reason he survived here. Not the skills or his wits.

He reacted the pond and saw some mid to tiny animals around but didn’t react or engage with them. They didn’t try to him in return and Eren filled the first two cups and jogged back to his tree.

He halfly climbed up then set the cup in the junction where the bark platform met the trunk and covered the top with a broad leaf, pressing the edges down with small stones to seal it.

He’d learned about sealing the hard way. On day nine he left a full stone cups under the tree on the ground while he went hunting. Came back thirty minutes later and the water was gone. It wasn’t spilled but gone.

Some kind of animal with a tube-shaped mouth had apparently drained the entire thing even if it was stuck to the ground.

Another time he left dried grubs in an open pile and came back to find a trail of tiny black ants that had eaten everything and were now forming a neat line down the trunk carrying crumbs bigger than their own heads.

Insects in this forest are organized criminals! Like they have a supply chain manager or something..

Second trip. Third trip. By the fourth run he had all three cups filled and sealed and stored in the safest spot he’d found: the inner junction where two thick branches pressed directly against the main trunk. Nothing climbed into this area. The birds stayed on the outer branches and the ground predators couldn’t climb this high. Whatever the tree was doing to repel animals from its core also protected his supplies. He didn’t understand why but he wasn’t going to question free refrigerator space.

He sat on the edge of his platform with his legs dangling twenty meters above the forest floor and drank from the fourth cup he’d filled for himself. The water was cold and tasted slightly like minerals. Not bad. Better than the river water which always had a weird green tint that he didn’t trust.

The morning was still early enough that the dangerous predators were retreating to wherever they slept during the day. This was his window. The safe hour where only small and medium creatures moved around and the big ones were too full from their night hunts to care about a skinny guy sitting in a tree.

He leaned back against the trunk and looked at his skill list.

Running had evolved yesterday. Third skill to reach Evolution Level 2. But the other two had evolved before it and he hadn’t really sat down to think about what they meant together.

..

The Throw skill was an accident. Like most useful things in Eren’s life it came from panic and terrible aim.

Day six. He’d been cornered against a rock wall by three slimes that had somehow coordinated an ambush. Two from the front and one dropping from a branch above him. He grabbed the only thing within reach which was a fist-sized stone and threw it at the one falling from the tree.

He missed the slime completely. The rock hit the branch behind it and the branch snapped and fell on all three slimes at once.

[Congratulations! You have learned "Throw" (Basic) - First Evolution League]

I missed the target by two meters and the system gave me a skill for it. What are the standards here?

But the skill worked. Not immediately and not well but over time it became the most important combat tool he had. The passive correction was subtle at first, like an invisible hand nudging his elbow half a centimeter before each throw. He didn’t have to think about angle or timing anymore. His arm just knew where to aim even when his brain wasn’t sure.

By day ten he was hitting maybe four out of ten moving targets while running. By day fifteen it was seven. By day twenty he could nail a rabbit-sized creature in the skull from thirty meters at a light jog.

He’d used Throw more than any other skill in his entire list. More than Stabbing, more than Staff Mastery, more than everything. Throwing rocks and sharpened sticks was the safest way to kill because you didn’t have to get close enough for something to bite you. And in a forest where even the rabbits had magical teeth that could inject paralytic venom, distance was literally the difference between eating dinner and being dinner.

The evolution hit on day nineteen. He’d been throwing sharpened sticks at armored beetles from a tree branch for about two hours straight and the notification came mid-throw.

[Congratulations! Your "Throw" skill is ready to evolve to Evolution League 2]

[Option 1: Heavy Launcher - Quality: Basic - Second Evolution League] [Increases throwing force by 30%. Heavier objects can be thrown at combat-effective speeds. Reduces accuracy penalty for oversized projectiles]

[Option 2: Rapid Tosser - Quality: Basic - Second Evolution League] [Reduces recovery time between consecutive throws by 50%. Allows rapid-fire throwing of small objects with minimal accuracy loss]

[Option 3: Calculated Arc - Quality: Uncommon - Second Evolution League]

[QUALITY UPGRADE: Basic → Uncommon]

-Requirement Met: Consistent moving-target accuracy & varied projectile usage]

-Thrown objects automatically adjust mid-flight based on user’s Perception stat. Minor trajectory correction applies after release. Effective range increased by 40%. Retains all original Throw benefits]

-Projectile tracking improves with higher Perception and Intelligence stats

Same pattern as always. Two boring number upgrades and one option that actually changed how the skill worked.

Mid-flight correction. So the rock adjusts its path AFTER I throw it? That’s not throwing. That’s guided missile technology with a stone.

He picked the third one without thinking about it for more than two seconds. The moment it activated he grabbed a stone and threw it at a bird-sized creature on a branch sixty meters away. The stone left his hand aimed slightly too far left but then it curved. Just barely, maybe two or three degrees but enough. It clipped the creature’s wing and knocked it off the branch.

He threw another one at a fat lizard sprinting across the forest floor. The stone tracked the lizard’s movement mid-air and adjusted its arc downward just enough to catch it in the back of the head.

I have aimbot. The system literally gave me aimbot for rocks.

He spent that entire day throwing everything he could get his hands on at everything that moved. Rocks, sticks, pinecones, dried mud. Calculated Arc worked on all of them. By sunset he had killed more creatures in one afternoon than he normally got in three full days of hunting.

If I ever find metal and make a real javelin this skill is going to be absolutely disgusting. A sharpened rod correcting itself mid-air from fifty meters? That’s not hunting. That’s an execution.

He didn’t have metal. But he had sharp sticks and a Perception stat of 34 and those were enough for now.