Eren took a sip from his stone cup and thought about the second evolved skill.

Collector..

Yeah. Not an insane skill but it was perfect for him! But he was still embarrassed about how he got that one.

It was day four. He was starving so badly that the system had started sending him passive-aggressive health warnings like [Warning: Prolonged hunger will result of your death] as if he didn’t already know he was dying of hunger.

The yellow fruits high in the canopy were the only things he’d found that tasted good. But those fruits had guards. Not monsters, just extremely territorial birds that sat next to each fruit and treated it like a family heirloom. If you climbed up slowly they’d scream until every predator in the area knew your location. If you reached for a fruit they’d dive-bomb your face with claws way too sharp for something that small.

So he did what any starving man with zero dignity would do. He waited until a bird turned its head for half a second and snatched a fruit so fast his arm blurred.

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

A stealing skill. The system literally rewarded me for stealing food from birds. I’m a Level 4 fruit thief.

But it was better than a stealing skill. The passive effect changed how he saw the entire forest. Things he would have walked past without noticing suddenly jumped out at him. Edible mushrooms half-buried in dirt, roots hidden under leaf piles, useful stones mixed in with regular gravel. His eyes just started catching details that weren’t visible before, a slight color shift in the soil that meant food was underneath, a pattern on tree bark that meant grubs were inside.

The skill leveled up faster than anything else because he used it every single waking moment. Every day started with gathering. Food, materials for rope, sharp stones, dry moss for fire. He collected things from dawn to dark and the skill responded to the volume by growing like crazy.

By Level 7 his peripheral vision was practically a radar system. A glint of a useful stone or a specific shade of green that meant "edible" would catch his eye and his hand would reach for it before his brain finished processing what it was seeing.

The evolution came on day twenty-one near the river. He’d been speed-gathering mushrooms while a wolf pack watched him from the other bank. Grab three or four mushrooms in under a second, sprint twenty meters downstream, grab more, circle back. The wolves couldn’t figure out what he was doing and lost interest.

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

[Option 1: Deep Forager - Quality: Basic - Second Evolution League] [Reveals hidden underground resources within a 5-meter radius. Increases detection of buried items. Digging speed improved by 20%]

[Option 2: Bulk Harvester - Quality: Basic - Second Evolution League] [Allows gathering of multiple nearby items in a single sweeping motion. Area collection radius: 2 meters. Reduces individual item quality assessment]

[Option 3: Swift Snatcher - Quality: Uncommon - Second Evolution League]

QUALITY UPGRADE: Basic → Uncommon]

Requirement Met: High-speed gathering under threat & diverse material collection]

-Gathering speed reduced to near-instant for items within arm’s reach. Item identification happens on contact rather than on sight.

-Retains all original Collector benefits

Deep Forager wanted him to dig holes like a dog. Bulk Harvester reduced quality which meant he’d grab poison berries mixed in with the good ones and die. Swift Snatcher made his hands work faster than his brain and let him grab things without interrupting whatever else he was doing.

Easy choice.

When the skill activated his hands felt like they belonged to someone else, someone with ten years of pickpocketing experience and fingers that moved on their own. He tested it by walking past a bush with small red berries and his hand shot out and grabbed four in one motion without him even looking at the bush directly.

His fingers sorted the ripe ones from the unripe ones by touch alone and the bad ones fell from his palm before he brought his hand back.

My hand just quality-checked fruit by feel in less than a second. This forest is turning me into something I can’t explain to anyone back home.

..

Eren finished his water and set the empty cup down.

Two Evo 2 skills from before yesterday. Calculated Arc for throwing and Swift Snatcher for collecting. And then yesterday Running evolved into Kinetic Flux Runner with that insane synergy ability that let him use other skills while sprinting at full speed.

Swift Snatcher already let him grab things without stopping whatever he was doing with his body. But before Kinetic Flux Runner "whatever he was doing" usually meant walking or climbing or fighting, not running. His old Running skill demanded full concentration just to keep his footing on the forest floor and any distraction meant tripping over a root and eating dirt at high speed.

Now that limit was gone.

So if I run at full speed using Kinetic Flux and activate Swift Snatcher at the same time...

His stomach growled loud enough that a fire bird on the outer branch turned its head to look at him.

Only one way to find out.

He climbed down and hit the ground at full speed from the first step because Kinetic Flux gave him instant acceleration without the stumbling start he used to have. His feet hit the forest floor and he was at seventy percent top speed before his fifth stride.

The first mushroom patch was two hundred meters south near the river stones. He could see the brown caps from fifty meters away because Collector’s passive was already highlighting them in his peripheral vision. Six mushrooms clustered around a wet stone.

He didn’t slow down to a walk. He just dropped his speed in half with a single thought, smooth and balanced like he’d been running at this pace all his life. His right hand dropped low as he passed the cluster and his fingers closed around three caps in one sweeping grab. Swift Snatcher identified them as edible the moment his skin touched them, a small pulse in his fingertips that his brain read as "safe" before his hand was even back at his side.

He was past the cluster and accelerating again in under two seconds with three mushrooms in his left hand, still running.

[Congratulations! Your skill Flux Runner (Uncommon) have become Level 2]

That worked. That actually worked with a skill level up in addition!

The yellow fruit trees were three hundred meters east. The ones guarded by psychotic birds. Normally he had to climb up slowly and time his grabs between their dive-bombing attacks. It took ten minutes and he usually got pecked at least twice.

He aimed for the tree with the lowest-hanging branch. Three ripe yellows dangling about four meters up with two birds perched above them staring down like they were ready to die for those fruits.

Eren didn’t slow down. He planted his right foot and jumped.

His Strength stat launched him high enough to grab the branch with one hand. His body swung forward with the momentum and his free hand snatched two fruits from the cluster as he passed underneath them. Swift Snatcher confirmed them ripe on contact and his fingers locked around them before his brain even registered what he’d grabbed.

The birds screamed and launched off their perch but Eren was already on the ground and twenty meters away before the first one finished turning around.

Two fruits in three seconds. No climbing, no pecking, no ten-minute negotiation with angry birds.

He was grinning so hard his cheeks hurt.

The grub area was ahead on his left. Normally he’d have to stop and flip heavy logs and dig through the rot with both hands. Instead he hooked his foot under a small rotting branch as he ran past and kicked it over. Grubs scattered in the exposed dirt and his hand swept through in one motion, fingers picking out four fat ones and leaving the small ones behind without slowing his stride.

He circled back toward his tree and climbed up with both hands full. Three mushrooms, two yellow fruits, four grubs, a handful of red berries from the river bushes and a piece of bark his Collector skill had flagged as "high-fiber supplement" which he still didn’t trust but was willing to try.

He laid everything out on his platform. The fire birds watched from the outer branches with their usual judgemental expressions.

Forty-five minutes of careful morning gathering compressed into ten minutes of sprinting with zero stops.

He bit into a yellow fruit and sweet juice ran down his chin.

I just invented drive-through grocery shopping in a magical death forest.

He chewed slowly and his brain was already racing ahead, not about breakfast but about everything else.

The rare glowing stones he’d seen deep in the forest but never dared to grab because stopping near them meant standing in a predator’s territory like an idiot. The medicinal plants growing near the wolf dens that he’d been avoiding for weeks. The special mushrooms that only appeared at the base of the oldest trees where the biggest creatures in this forest liked to sleep during the day.

All of those had the same problem. You had to stop moving to collect them. And stopping in dangerous territory was how you died.

But he didn’t have to stop anymore. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Sprint in, grab, sprint out. Munch munch..munch....

The creatures that guarded those spots did it by sitting on top of them and waiting for something stupid to approach.

That worked great against animals that needed to stop and eat or dig. But what do you do against something that swoops through your territory at full speed, steals what it wants in half a second and is gone before you finish standing up?

Nothing. He did absolutely nothing. Because by the time you react he was already fifty meters away and still accelerating. He finished the fruit and started on the mushrooms. They still tasted like wet cardboard and he was starting to wonder if they always would.

The sun climbed higher and the forest shifted into its daytime rhythm below him. Wolves moving south in a pack, something heavy dragging itself through the underbrush near the river, a distant crash that was probably a tree falling or a big creature knocking one over.

Just another morning, this was suppose to be. But something was different today and he could feel it.

Twenty-three days of running and hiding and barely surviving and now for the first time since he woke up face-down in the dirt wearing nothing but shorts, the forest didn’t feel the same as before.

Maybe I am getting crazy...