Eren spent his mornings on Earth handling all of this chaos and his afternoons in Evon trying to get stronger.

He’d charge the Dungeon Heart Fragment overnight in Evon’s mana-rich atmosphere where it soaked up ambient energy and then open the portal from the farm every morning. The Fragment held 1000 mana at full capacity which gave him roughly ten seconds of portal time - enough to move people and supplies back and forth without rushing anyone.

His personal mana pool had climbed to 770 after the Clone’s final level-ups and in planet Aradne’s atmosphere the regeneration was fast enough that he could afford a full portal cycle every day without worrying about running dry.

The afternoons were spent pushing deeper into territories the Clone had mapped but never fully explored.

..

Eren couldn’t reach Level 50!

He’d noticed it during the first week of hunting. Killed a pack of six vine crawlers near the eastern ridge, Level 28 to 34 range and his skills worked perfectly. His body moved with a fluid violence that came from the Clone’s muscle memory mixed with his own raw stats and six of them were dead in under a minute.

But his experience bar didn’t budge.

He thought maybe the vine crawlers were too weak so he went further east and found a territorial gorilla at Level 38 that threw chunks of rock the size of car tires. Took him twenty minutes of kiting and arrow shots to bring it down. Good fight. Hard fight. And still not a single point of experience from it.

Maybe I need higher level targets..

He tracked a pack of armored beetles through the southern ravine. Level 41 average. Used Charming Voice and Lovely Eyes to confuse the lead beetle while picking off stragglers with his bow. His Love Shot passive triggered twice during the fight and he actually saw two skill notifications flash back to back.

[Congratulations! Your skill "Love Shot / Love Arrow" levelled up]

-Level 2 > Level 3

[Congratulations! Your skill "Love Shot / Love Arrow" levelled up]

-Level 3 > Level 4

The skills were still growing. So the system wasn’t completely dead. But the experience bar? He checked it three times between fights and it hadn’t moved a single pixel. Level 49 with a full bar and nowhere to go.

The real confirmation came during the crocodile fight.

It was a massive thing living in a murky lake about two hours northeast of the Clone’s old tree. His Observe tagged it as a Jade Poonta Crocodile - Giant Variant at Level 42 and its hide was thick enough that his arrows bounced off the body scales without even scratching the surface.

"Your skin is stupid.." he muttered while crouching behind a fallen log near the water’s edge.

The thing had six legs and a jaw that could probably swallow Thadric whole. Its tail was covered in bony spikes and it moved through the shallow water with a laziness that told Eren nothing in this lake had ever seriously challenged it.

He spent twenty minutes working around its flanks and burning through his Charming Voice on cooldown to keep it disoriented. The charm effect lasted maybe half a second on something this size but half a second was enough for it to turn its head slightly and expose the one weakness every crocodile-adjacent creature shared - the eyes.

His first arrow hit the left eye socket clean and the creature thrashed sideways hard enough to throw a wave of mud and lake water three meters into the air. His second arrow missed because the head was moving too fast but the third one sank deep into the right eye and the thing screamed in a frequency that made his teeth vibrate.

[Congratulations! Your skill "Basic Archery" levelled up]

-Level 8 > Level 9

That’s gonna have Evolution League selection soon. Nice..

The blinded crocodile thrashed for another full minute before it rolled sideways into the deeper water and stopped moving. Eren watched the massive body sink while dark blood pooled across the surface of the lake and waited for the system notification.

It came, looked wrong through.

[You gained 000% energy of Jade Poonta Crocodile - Giant Variant (Level 42)]

His exp bar was full officially but the system message this time wasn’t a usual number percentage or even "0%" from killling too low level creatures- no! It was three zeros like the display was trying to explain something the system couldn’t even process.

There was a big fu*king problem..!

He wiped crocodile blood off his forearm with a handful of leaves and drank water from his canteen while watching the dead creature’s tail fin poke above the surface. His skills leveled fine. His body got stronger with every fight. But the one number that actually mattered for the Class upgrade at Level 50 refused to change.

Is something blocking the experience itself?

..

He spent the next week wandering deeper than the Clone had ever gone.

Eren didn’t do it aimlessly. He had the Clone’s mental map and the information fragments from the bird colony’s chatter to guide him. But without the ability to level up the deep forest became more of an exploration mission than a training ground and Eren started paying attention to things the Clone had been too busy surviving to notice.

He found a grove of blue-barked trees whose sap increased Perception by 1 point per tablespoon consumed. He drank four tablespoons because free stats were free stats and then spent the next two hours hearing individual ant footsteps from twenty meters away. The migraine wasn’t worth the upgrade but at least the points were permanent.

Further east he found a cluster of orange mushrooms growing on the carcass of something enormous and long dead. The mushrooms gave +2 Endurance each but tasted like someone had blended a tire with a handful of dirt. He ate six of them anyway because he’d eaten worse things during his first week in Evon and at least these didn’t try to eat him back. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

There was a clearing full of flowers that glowed faintly pink at night and released pollen that his Poison Resistance identified as a mild hallucinogen. He backed out of that one fast.

"Not today.." he whispered while covering his mouth. "Last thing I need is to trip in a monster forest."

He also found landscapes that his Earth brain still couldn’t fully accept were real. A waterfall that fell upward from a pool into a floating rock formation above the canopy, cycling in a perfect loop where the water flowed up and then came back down through channels in the floating stone and then went up again. His Intelligence stat told him it was probably a localized gravity anomaly caused by mana density but his eyes said it was impossible and his mouth said "what the fu*k" out loud three separate times while he watched it.

The worst discovery was underground though.

It happened on the fourth day while he was walking along a dried streambed. The ground didn’t crack or shift or give any warning at all - one second he was stepping on solid packed earth and the next he was falling through a hole that had been covered by nothing but a thin crust of dried mud and root fibers.

He fell about eight meters before his Featherfall Reflex kicked in and reduced the impact enough that he landed on his feet instead of his spine. The landing still hurt and his ankles sent a jolt up through his knees while his hands scraped against something smooth and chitinous on the tunnel floor.

Complete darkness for about two seconds before his enhanced night vision adjusted.

He really wished it hadn’t.

The tunnel was enormous, maybe fifteen meters wide and seven meters tall, carved through packed earth and lined with a hardened substance made of dried saliva and soil that had a faint sheen to it under his night vision. The walls pulsed slightly with the movement of things behind and within them.

And the floor was covered in insects. Not normal ones and not even the oversized Evon variety he’d gotten used to seeing in the forest but things that didn’t belong in any world that a sane god would create. Multi-legged arthropods the size of dogs with segmented bodies covered in coarse hair-like bristles were moving between flat centipede creatures two meters long that crawled along the walls with hundreds of legs clicking against the hardened surface. Something halfway between a beetle and a vertebrate scuttled past his left foot with tiny clustered eyes above mandibles that dripped clear fluid.

And then there were the ants. Thousands of them moving in organized columns through the tunnel carrying pieces of the other insects, some alive and struggling and some very much not. The ants were each about half a meter long with armored heads and jaws that could probably take his finger off if he was stupid enough to offer one.

No...!

He wanted to scream from all kinds of emotions.

Eren’s heart rate went from sixty to about two hundred in the time it took him to understand what he’d fallen into.

I’m in the middle of a giant underground bug war.

His Apex Predator Awareness was painting heat signatures in every direction - above, below, through the walls and extending further than his detection range could reach. This tunnel system went deep and he was at the center of it.

He didn’t scream even though every cell in his body wanted to produce the loudest most undignified sound a grown man had ever made. But screaming underground surrounded by thousands of things that might react to vibration was a phenomenally bad idea so he forced his jaw shut and whispered to himself instead.

"Just climb up.. just climb up now.."

This experience made him understand he didn’t have the same survival instincts and emotional stability his clone built in one month with blood and desperation.

Eren needed more challenging fights.

And he had to learn what the fu*k was wrong with his system exp bar.