NOVEL WEB Ch. 16: Recovery
Yet again, Cass woke with a killer headache and the ringing of system notifications. Was this going to be a common occurrence? She hoped not.
This time at least, her fire was still burning low beside her and the sky was bright. Cass added another log to the fire and poked it until it was burning happily again before turning her attention back to the pinging notifications.
Dreamberry poison Resisted
Oh, this must have been from yesterday evening. She’d poisoned herself.
Good going, Cass.
Skill Earned: Poison Resistance (lvl 1)
[Poison, the assassin’s weapon of choice. You’ve survived an attempt on your life by man or nature, and have come out stronger for it.
Passively increases your resistance to poisons and venoms.]
At least she’d survived and even gotten something out of it. But, maybe she needed to be more careful about what she put in her mouth. It just went to show, the System and its skills weren’t all powerful.
Foraging had said that Dreamweed was edible. And the leaves were. They were a great tea. The berries, on the other hand, were far too potent to eat like that. Maybe, they were edible if prepared properly. Cass didn’t know. But she was going to have to use her own judgment in addition to the skill if she was going to survive.
Speaking of the skill:
Foraging has increased to level 3.
It looked like trying poisonous berries was good experience as far as the skill was concerned. An experience she was going to do her best to avoid in the future, but experience all the same.
She shook her head and opened her status.
Stamina: 14/14 (27)
Focus: 88/88 (117)
Health: 11/24
Status Effects:
[- Beginner Reward: Bonus Staff Skill Growth
- Beginner Reward: Bonus Wll Skill Growth
- Disease: -50% max Stamina, -25% max Focus, -25% effective Wll, -15% effective Ala]
Still sick it seemed, but not nearly as bad as last night. Had the worst passed or had hypothermia exacerbated the symptoms? Either way, avoiding hypothermia was the goal.
Now the question was how?
First, her shelter. Or, perhaps, lack of shelter. The boulder behind her was better than nothing, but she was sure she could do better still. She wanted to be able to keep the heat around her, even if the fire went out again. That meant a roof. Maybe some more walls.
Cass started with the roof.
She put her hand on top of the boulder beside her and pulled on the stone with Elemental Manipulation. The stone resisted her influence, some inertia holding it in place. It felt exactly like dragging stone of this size through sand. Every inch was a staggering step in shifting sand. Cass refused to be daunted, pushing harder with all her Will.
Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 5.
Five minutes later, Cass dropped to her knees, her head swimming and body sweating bullets from the exertion. She ran her hand over her work. She’d managed a shallow outcrop, maybe as wide as her shoulders and as deep as her palm’s width.
Focus: 41/88 (117)
47 Focus for the smallest ledge? Cass sighed, she had her work cut out for herself, huh? This was going to take a while.
While Cass waited for her Focus to recover, she placed the vineroot potatoes she had remaining in her fire pit to cook. She had no desire to eat them, and her lack of appetite wasn’t helping, but she didn’t have the luxury to be picky.
Speaking of which, she was almost out of the things she’d gathered yesterday. There was still plenty of Dreamweed, but she’d eaten all the Thunder Sorrel in a panic trying to counter the Dreamberry poison. Would she risk wandering back up the river to find more? She hadn’t seen a monster along the river on her way down, but there was no guarantee her luck would hold.
On the other hand, did she want to risk eating anything she foraged without Sorrel on hand? Things would have gone very differently if she hadn’t had any last night.
Moreover, there was no guarantee no monster would show up on the cliffside here. Her chances of running into a monster were the same whether she moved or not, weren’t they?
Cass bit her lip. Put like that, there was no reason not to go back to foraging, huh?
She grabbed her staff and set off under stealth toward the river. She had only gone a few yards from the campfire when a wave of exhaustion swept over her. She staggered, only staying standing with the help of her staff.
A fog settled over her brain and a pressure built behind her eyes. Something pressed in on her chest and every muscle protested in sore strain.
She put a hand to her forehead. What was this?
Stamina: 13/14 (27)
Focus: 44/88 (117)
Health: 12/24
Status Effects:
[- Beginner Reward: Bonus Staff Skill Growth
- Beginner Reward: Bonus Wll Skill Growth
- Disease: -75% max Stamina, -50% max Focus, -50% effective Wll, -25% effective Ala]
Why had the disease status effect spiked suddenly?
Cass staggered back toward her campfire again. A single step was all it took. The effects lessened again instantaneously.
[- Disease: -50% max Stamina, -25% max Focus, -25% effective Wll, -15% effective Ala]
Cass took an experimental step forward again.
[- Disease: -75% max Stamina, -50% max Focus, -50% effective Wll, -25% effective Ala]
Cass stumbled back again and took a deep breath in the immediate and unexplained relief.
Something was making her illness worse when she walked that way. Why? How?
New questions, Cass slowly made her way around her campsite, looking for the borders of this new effect. It was an unpleasant process, taking a couple of steps in a direction, being bludgeoned by the brain fog and fatigue, stepping back toward her campfire, then repeating the process again.
It took a couple of minutes, but it was clear her respite was centered around her campfire. If she left the area immediately around it, her disease spiked.
Cass sat beside the fire, her staff over her lap, nibbling a vineroot in thought.
So it was an effect of her camp that was reducing her illness’s symptoms then, rather than something in the area increasing them when she left. It also probably meant that the spike in symptoms last night had more to do with her fire going out than from Hypothermia specifically.
But why did a campfire make such a difference? Cass nibbled the bitter potato another minute, turning over different options and theories.
She snapped and brought up a skill.
Setting Camp (lvl 1)
[The worst part of traveling is that you can’t sleep in your own bed. This skill will make that slightly less painful. Curate the comforts of home wherever you go!
Increased efficiency at setting up camps in wilderness settings.
Increased bonuses to staying at camps you set up or helped set up:
Increased rest regeneration
Increased bonus to stats of food prepared
Increased bonus to stats of food eaten
Increased comfort from sleeping arrangements
Increased campfire efficiency]
This had to be it. Either “increased rest regeneration” or “increased campfire efficiency” was the answer.
Now the question was what did she do about it?
There were only two options: stay put or set out anyway. The smart thing was probably to stay put until her illness passed. But how long would that take, exactly? She had no medicine. She had only a little bit of food. If her food ran out before the disease, she would die.
But if she ran into trouble outside her camp, that was also the end, wasn’t it?
She ran a hand through her hair, scowling. There was no right answer. Just two gambles with unknown odds.
Eventually, she stood again. She’d split the difference. She’d leave the camp, but she’d stay within sight of it. There had to be things to eat up here. More wood for her campfire if nothing else. Only after she’d gotten a better lay of the nearby land would she reevaluate wandering further off.
Nodding to herself she stepped out of her camp, bracing herself for the awful increase in her symptoms.
Dizzy but determined, Cass made slow staggering loops around the camp. She activated Foraging every couple of feet. The fog Foraging placed over her vision was worse while paired with the brain fog over her mind. Cass pushed through it anyway, following the sparks of color in her spinning vision to a tall, woody weed with white flowers.
Queen Fallhel’s Collar
[In the same family as Fennel, this is a hearty perennial herb that prefers dry and sunny hillsides, but which can withstand extended periods of flooding if already well established. The bulb and shoots are popular vegetables in certain cuisines. The flowers and seeds have a strong licorice flavor and contain many vital nutrients.]
With some effort, Cass dug it up and dragged it back to her campsite.
Stepping back over the threshold of her camp she breathed a sigh of relief and looked closer at her find. She had a non-potato staple food now! Here’s hoping it tasted even a little bit better.
Cass glanced back out at the wilderness beyond her campsite. She wasn’t in a hurry to get back to exploring. Maybe she’d make herself some tea?
She readjusted her pot in her fire pit so the coals surrounded the stone basin on every side then summoned water into it with Elemental Manipulation. She dumped the last of her aster into it with a couple of leaves of the dreamweed and a floret of the Fallhel’s Collar that she just found.
It was a risk to include the new foraged plant, but between being related to fennel (something she knew on Earth was eaten in its entirety) and the description calling the flowers out as specifically nutritious, it seemed a safe bet.
While she waited for that to boil, she looked over her shelter again. She’d pulled the top of the boulder out earlier, not paying attention to where that stone had been moved from. But could she make more from her effort if she was smarter about this?
She put her hand on the boulder, right where her back usually rested against. She ran her Focus through the stone, grabbed a shallow sheet of the surface, and pulled it up and along the boulder’s surface. The material resisted her manipulation again, but it was less this time. She kept at it, moving one sheet after another, taking material from the base where she sat and pulling it to the gradually extending ceiling.
A few minutes later, Cass had doubled the width of her ceiling and tripled the amount it extended, all with the same amount of Focus.
Elemental Manipulation has increased to level 6.
Setting Camp has increased to level 2.
Cass grinned to herself. She was getting it now. It looked like improving her campground would count as experience for Setting Camp. Hopefully, that would increase the area and strength of the illness-suppressing effect of the skill. It was something to work toward.
Her tea had begun boiling while she’d been focused on her roof. She took a minute to scoop up a mug full. Staying hydrated was important. Boiling the water was good practice, even if she was pretty sure summoned water was safe to drink as is. None of this was an excuse to hide the fact that Cass just really liked tea and really needed something small to look forward to right now.
While she waited for it to cool to consumable temperatures she Identified it, more on a whim than expecting it to come back with anything interesting.
Cass’s Medicinal Tea
[Although brewed by an amateur with no experience mixing their own tisanes, this combination of herbs is a potent brew with a delightfully earthy flavor.
Minor increased resistance to illness
Increased resistance to symptoms of diseases
Increased Health, Stamina, and Focus regeneration]
Cass’s eyes went wide. What? Had she actually stumbled onto something good? She took a hesitant sip, her concerns about Fallhel’s Collar completely forgotten. Like the system had said, it was a rich earthy flavor, the licorice flavor of the Collar blending beautifully with the Aster and sweetened by the Dreamweed.
A warmth spread in her chest and Cass felt lighter than she had in a long while.
Skill Earned: Herbal Concocting (lvl 1)
[Mix plants into medicine or poison according to your whims and your luck.
Increased information on plants with concocting potential.
Slightly increases the information on concocted entities.
Passively increases one’s understanding of how to make the most of concocting ingredients and basic techniques.]
Of course, Fallehel’s Collar would have synergizing effects with Verid’s Aster, boosting fairly minor and general Health recovery to—Cass interrupted her own thought. What was that?
There was an entire theory about the effects of Queen Fallhel’s Collar spinning in the back of her mind, turning over the effects of combining it with any and all of the other plants she’d run into since arriving.
It all made perfect sense to her, but also, she had not known any of that literately thirty seconds ago.
She sipped her tea—tisane, there were no tea leaves in it, so it couldn’t actually be tea, now could it? She shook that thought aside, she wasn’t calling it tisane, that was a stupid word, even if it was more accurate. Oh, hell, had she known that before either?—and tried and failed to calm down.
This was good, she reminded herself again. This was going to reduce the chances she ate something poisonous again. This was exactly what she needed to treat the illness she’d picked up. This was not an existential crisis tearing at the very concept of her self and autonomy and personhood.
This was good.
She drank the rest of her tisane—tea, damn it—trying to enjoy the warmth in her chest and the wind on her face. Trying not to think.
When she’d finished the mug, she opened her status again.
Stamina: 16/20 (27)
Focus: 76/99 (117)
Health: 13/24
Status Effects:
[- Beginner Reward: Bonus Staff Skill Growth
- Beginner Reward: Bonus Wll Skill Growth
- Disease: -25% max Stamina, -15% max Focus, -15% effective Wll, -5% effective Ala]
See, good. Her Health was steadily recovering. Her max and effective stats were much less negatively impacted. Her head already felt clearer.
Things were looking up.
How many times did she need to say that before her heart believed it?