Day twenty-five started with the dead electric cat body problem.

The thing was still on a thick branch about a meter from Eren’s sleeping platform where he’d left it last night after failing to hang it properly.

Some fragile leaves made rope problems..

He’d tried the same trick he used for his stone water cups, tying bark rope around the body and suspending it from a branch close to the trunk. But the cat weighed more than everything else he owned combined and the rope snapped twice before he gave up and just shoved it onto the widest branch he could reach. He’d spent the night hoping nothing would climb up and steal it.

Nothing did luckily.

Then he remembered that dangerous but harmless looking bird from yesterday’s chaotic time.

That bird was barely bigger than a parrot. Maybe the size of a large pigeon if you included its tail feathers. But last night it had opened its beak wider than its own skull and swallowed a cat bigger than itself in a single motion.

Some kind of spatial skill or a body modification ability that Eren couldn’t even try to understand in this shit show that he had to use half of his drinking water to clean his ass.

There were enough problems he had to find some answers like a "clean ass" in this place and a magical bird wasn’t his concern if it didn’t eat him.

A parrot-sized bird that eats creatures ten times its own size and scares every predator in the forest into staying away from that tree. Whatever that thing was it wasn’t a bird in any definition Eren knew.

He’d been staring at the dead cat since dawn trying to decide if eating magical monster meat was a good idea or an incredibly stupid one. The exposed muscle tissue still had faint arcs of electricity crackling across it even though the thing had been dead for hours. It smelled like burned rubber mixed with raw steak.

The colorful bird gave it to him and Eren still didn’t know why.

That tiny little bird that could swallow something 5 times its size gave it to me like a gift. Either it’s saying "welcome to the neighborhood" or "fatten up before I eat you."

He poked the meat with his sharpened stick and the electricity arced into the wood, making his fingers tingle for a second. It wasn’t painful but it was definitely weird.

Back on Earth he wouldn’t eat meat from a street vendors let alone from the corpse of a magical electric panther-cat delivered by a parrot-sized apex predator. But back on Earth he also had a refrigerator and a phone to order delivery from.

He tried to butcher a small piece from it’s leg with heavy stones and slightly sharpened rocks. There was still electrical activity in the inner flesh. And somehow it still existed like this body was acting like a biological battery.

He couldn’t figure out how to touch the more deeper sides so using that leg part was the only available option for today.

His Fire Making skills wasn’t a magical skill as a matter of a fact!

He had many fire stones and a trusted method that he used to make the fire in two minutes. Which was a improvement instead of the four straight days of failed attempts in his first week. One of the few things in his life that had objectively gotten better.

He held the meat over the flame on a stick and watched it cook. The arcs died as the heat increased and the color changed from raw purple-red to something closer to normal cooked meat. The smell improved too. Actually it smelled kind of good.

If this kills me at least I’ll die eating something that isn’t a grub or wet cardboard mushroom.

He took a bite.

It tasted like pork. Smoky and slightly metallic but definitely pork. After three weeks of grubs and mushrooms and the occasional stolen fruit this was the best thing he’d ever eaten in this world. He took another bite before even finishing the first one.

Then the tingling started.

It wasn’t the food-poisoning kind he’d learned to dread after the purple berry incident. This was different. It started in his tongue, traveled down his throat and spread through his chest and arms and legs. A buzzing warmth like his whole body was a phone set to vibrate. His skin prickled everywhere at once and for about five seconds he felt like he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket without the pain part.

[Congratulations! You have learned a new skill]

[Electric Resistance (Rare) - First Evolution League]

-Gives elemental resistance to current based damages

-Level 2: Electric Resistance 6%

(Each additional skill level: +1%)

Eren read it three times and figured it gave %5 for the base skill and with level 2 it was 6 now. But..

Rare huh...

He smiled but it was a bir forced. He would likely wish for a electric attack skill or a movement skills related to the element if it even existed.

It’s not that bad, I guess.

Also every skill he’d gotten so far was either Basic or Uncommon. The system had never given him anything Rare before. And it started at Level 2? He didn’t even know skills could skip levels.

Six percent resistance. So if one of those electric cats bit me right now the shock would be six percent weaker.

That didn’t sound like much. But six percent of "instant death by electrocution" was still "slightly less instant death by electrocution" and in this forest that fraction was the difference between losing a limb and losing your life.

His brain immediately started doing the math. If every level added one percent and the base was five then Level 95 would be... one hundred percent? Complete immunity to electricity?

If I ever get to a hundred percent resistance could I headbutt a lightning bolt and walk away? Could I grab one of those electric cats by the face and just tank the shock?

But electricity wasn’t the only danger in this forest.

What about fire resistance? If I could eat something fire-based and get the same kind of skill... half the creatures in this forest use fire. The bears, the snake-birds, even some plants spit sparks. And what about physical resistance? Is that a thing? Could I get a skill that just makes me harder to cut or crush?

Poison he already had but that was from almost dying, not from eating something on purpose. Could he farm resistances by specifically hunting and eating the right creatures?

He didn’t even know why he was asking these questions. It wasn’t like anyone was going to answer.

What is this place? Why does it work like a game? Who built the system and why does it reward me for eating monster meat?

Gods? A simulation? Some kind of test? He had no idea. He didn’t even know if there was a way out of this forest let alone a way back home. And thinking about it too long made his head hurt worse than the purple berry incident so he stopped.

He sighed and looked at the remaining cat meat on his platform. There was probably fifteen kilograms of usable muscle on this thing and whether the universe made sense or not he had a plan now.

Fire resistance. I need to find something fire-based and eat it. Something small enough to kill first obviously.

He ate more of the cat and the skill didn’t level up again. Figured. Rare skills probably needed insane amounts of repetition or exposure to grow. He wrapped the remaining meat in broad leaves and tied them shut with bark rope, hung the package from the thickest inner branch he could reach and climbed down.

..

He spent the afternoon gathering instead of hunting. Yesterday’s battle had put ideas in his head that he couldn’t shake.

The white ants didn’t fight anyone. They just grabbed what they wanted from the destroyed nests and left while everyone else killed each other. The ghost-deer did the same thing. And honestly that’s what Eren had been doing every morning with his breakfast runs.

Grab and go. Don’t fight for it. Just be faster than the things guarding it.

He activated Kinetic Flux Runner and hit the ground sprinting.

That first burst of acceleration still made him grin every time. The skill didn’t make him faster, not technically. His raw speed came from Strength and Endurance same as before. But Kinetic Flux made his body move so cleanly that no creature with the same stats could keep up with him. Zero wasted motion, zero balance loss on turns, zero stumbling on roots or uneven ground. He moved through the forest like he’d been running in it his whole life.

He thought about his stats back at Level 1-2 when he first woke up in this dirt. Strength around 7 or 8. A normal human averaged 5-6. So he’d been maybe fifty percent stronger than a regular person at best. Faster by roughly the same margin. Enough to outrun a slime if he really pushed it but nothing else.

Now at Strength 52 he was almost ten times stronger than an average person. And with Kinetic Flux Runner on top of that his effective combat speed was probably even higher because he never wasted a single step. A running skill. The most boring skill in his entire list and it had saved his life more times than his whole Magician of Love class combined.

My class gives me ninety-nine Charisma in a forest full of monsters. My running skill keeps me alive every single day. The system has a sick sense of humor.

He smiled to himself while dodging a low branch at full sprint.

First target was a cluster of glowing blue mushrooms growing at the base of a rock formation about a kilometer southeast. A pair of territorial lizards usually sat on the rocks above them sunning themselves. The lizards could spit a corrosive liquid that melted wood on contact and Eren had watched them dissolve a fallen branch in under a minute once.

He approached at three-quarter speed, dropped to half as he entered the danger zone and his right hand swept low. Swift Snatcher did its job. Three mushrooms pulled clean from the soil and identified as non-toxic by touch alone. He was past the rocks and accelerating before the lizards even lifted their heads.

Three mushrooms in two seconds. Those stupid lizards are still looking the wrong direction.

He ate one while running. It tasted like dirt and metal and nothing happened. No skill, no stat boost, no tingling. Just a bad taste.

Not everything magical gives you something. Noted.

He hit four more spots in the next hour. A vine with purple flowers near a wolf den. Moss on the river bank that his Collector skill flagged as "potentially medicinal."

Three different berries from three different bushes he’d been avoiding for weeks.

Two of them like the vine flowers and the moss did nothing and also tasted so bad he almost threw up, but his Poison Resistance absorbed whatever toxin was in them.

[Congratulations! Your skill Poison Resistance levelled up]

-Level 4 > Level 5

Am I suppose to be happy about this..?

Give me a random Teleportation skill and let be go home!

FUU**UUCK!!

Eren almost lost his cool when he remembered his circumstance and the dangerous forest he was trapped in. Almost...