The Arcane Archer - Chapter 22 Healing Break

Running was all I did for the rest of the night. I payed no attention to the direction or where I was going, all I was focusing on was getting away. Eventually I did stop as the exhaustion was catching up to me.

Looking around quickly, I found a couple of trees grouped together so I quickly used some magic to jump my way into the branches.

Laying down in the branches, I took a moment to rest and gather my thoughts, but I was more tired than I originally thought as after laying down, I fell asleep almost immediately.

Upon waking up I could feel the throbbing pain in my right wrist from where Kaleb broke it, and all the other injuries too.

‘System, what time is it and how long have I been out?’

[The current time is 10:56 Am and you’ve been out for a total of 11 hours, 28 minutes, and 44 seconds. You also have multiple unread notifications.]
for visiting.

I raised my head slightly upon hearing this but quickly put it back down as is hurt just to do that.

‘Summarize the notifications for me please.’

[Affirmative. {Minor Regeneration} has leveled up 7 times and evolved into {Intermediate Regeneration}. Thanks to {Adaptability} and being under constant pain, you’ve learned {Pain Numbing} and it leveled up 5 times. {Lucky Break} is now in effect for the next 1.5 hours. Thanks to {Adaptability} and constant running, you’ve learned {Running} and its currently max level. Thanks to {Adaptability} and surviving from large amounts of damage, {Constitution} has increased by 2.]

I read the messages and smiled slightly. The intermediate regeneration and pain numbing must’ve helped a whole bunch as when I moved my arm up slightly to look at it, I could see it healing ever so slowly.

Though it may have been slowly, it was still noticeable.

Looking around, I noticed that it was no longer raining, and it was actually sunny and warm now. Though there was still a couple of injuries here and there on my body, I assumed that there was some stuff I could do to fix that.

Quickly asking the system how long it would take for me to fully heal, it responded with a couple of things. If I stayed awake, didn’t eat or drink, and did nothing for the next two days, it would heal fully. If I slept, didn’t eat or drink, and did nothing for the next day and a half, it would heal fully.

It kept rambling on and on about all the possible things I could do that would change the estimated time it would take to fully heal but the best one it gave me was to just cast a basic regeneration spell on myself, eat and drink some stuff, and sleep to allow my body to do the rest of the work.

So that’s what I did.

Casting {Minor Regeneration} using basic magic (Which leveled it up), my healing speed doubled once again. Next, I pulled out some spare water I had and drank as much as I could.

Searching around my inventory I found some of the left-over food that I couldn’t eat from the Inn and started chowing down on that. I was able to eat all of it but was still very hungry which I assumed to be a side effect of my regeneration that I haven’t adapted to yet.

With a mental shrug, I pulled more and more food out until all I was left with was a bunch of raw food that I haven’t cooked yet, and the rabbit steak. I really didn’t want to have to eat the rabbit until I could figure out how to deal with the aftertaste, but I had to do what I had to do.

Pulling it out, I took a gigantic bite and after chewing it for a bit, slowly swallowed it. Immediately my throat felt dusty and dry and the aftertaste left in my mouth was horrible, but I fought past it with tears in my eyes.

I kept taking out massive bites while thinking, ‘This is horrible!’

Eventually I did finish and got two things out of it. First, I was finally full and no longer had to eat everything I could. Second, my basic earth attunement that I got from originally eating the rabbit leveled up twice.

Now all I had to do was finish taking a nap and I should be completely fine in the next 5 hours (Or so says the System.)

Buying a pillow for 10 System Points, I fluffed it up slightly and took a nap.

~~~~~5 Hours Later~~~~~

[DING DING DING. Leo, your 5-hour alarm is done. DING DING DING. Leo, your 5-ho-]

‘Yeah yeah, I’m awake. Please shut up now.’

I slowly got up from laying down into a sitting position and stretched my body out slightly. Everything felt completely normal as if nothing happened within the last 24 hours. Storing the pillow into the inventory, I jumped out of the tree after looking around briefly to see if anyone was nearby.

At the moment, I was completely lost and had no clue what to do now.

The main problem at the moment was that Kendrick tried to kill me just because his god told him to. I was going to go to the main human kingdom, but I have no clue how many religious people are like Kendrick. For all I know, Kendrick might even say I killed Pyra and Kaleb just to get people who aren’t religious to want to kill me.

My best bet would be to either hide for the rest of my life and become a hermit or find some of the other races for protection.

I contemplated my choices.

In the end, I decided that becoming a hermit would be way to boring for me and I’m only on this world because God The god I like, not the god that Kendrick followed, sent me here to entertain him.

I’m definitely not going anywhere near human settlements for a while cause of what I’m predicting Kendrick to do. The best choice would to find the other races that might be able to help me.

What I know of this world, there’s Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, Halflings, Half-Orcs, and supposedly Dragonborns. There’s probably a whole bunch more but that’s all I know with my current limited knowledge.

‘System, could you tell me where the closest group of people that humans aren’t are?’

[Affirmative but for me to do so you’ll have to use 100 System Points.]

‘Fine, take them.’

[Deducting points The closest is a large group of dwarves about 184 miles away (About 1 week if you never stopped for breaks during the day). Would you like me to pinpoint the general location on your map and HUD?]

‘Do it.’

A mark was then made and signified that I had to go in the south-eastern direction. Without anything else to do, I started walking and after a few hours, I eventually heard some talking.

“Are you sure he’s here?” Asked person #1

“Yeah, this is the direction in which the church said he went after killing the two.” Replied person #2

“Then let’s keep looking and find him! If we bring him in either dead or alive, we get 20 Platinum coins so we might as well kill him!” Said person #3

At this point I was in a tree keeping my eyes on them. They seemed to be your stereotypical group of humans who were assuming that this was going to be a very easy mission for them just because it was one person. You know the Clich.

I was starting to reach for my bow but before I finished what I was doing, I decided not to kill them and put my bow back onto my back. While they did say they were going to kill me and such, if I were to kill them it would make my case even worse.

I could even imagine what the headlines of it would be if there existed newspapers.

“Leo Walter has continued his path of murder and killed another group of people for no reason whatsoever! Just as the Church said, this man is someone who’s a menace to them human race itself!” Or something along those lines.

Instead of doing that, I took the opportunity to focus on improving my sneak skill. Now it is level 5 and helps a ton but can always do for some improvement.

Getting close to the ground, I started sneaking around them while also keeping an eye on them the entire time. Every now and then I made a bit of noise, but I was able to move away fast enough from it that they just thought that it was an animal.

After two minutes of slow maneuvering around I was finally behind them. Sneaking leveled up once and increased the small auto-adjustments to where I walked so that I wouldn’t step on things.

Continuing in the direction once again, I encountered a couple more groups of humans tempted by the offer of 20 Platinum coins. Once again, I sneaked around them or used some magic to get around them. It got to the point of this happening so much that both of them leveled up twice.

Because of it, {Basic Magic} became max level and {Sneak} became level 8. With {Basic Magic} becoming max level, I decided that now would be a good time to start evolving all of my skills. As the System said earlier, there is two ways for me two evolve them.

The first one is to ask the system in which it’ll then give me possible choices of what it can evolve it into. The second one is to do it manually forcing the skill past the limits into trying to achieve something that it wouldn’t normally be able to do at that level.

The second method is a mix bundle because it can lead to it becoming something else entirely different of what I wanted, or it can evolve perfectly into what I want with an extra bonus or two.

Take the skill {Arachnophobia Immunity} for example. It started out as just resistance to help me deal with all the all the spiders on my body and evolved into immunity because I was that scared of all the spiders. If I asked the System to evolve it instead of me having accidentally evolving it manually, then my supposed options could’ve been something like entomophobia (Fear of bugs) or maybe something that allows me to do more damage to bugs.

It evolving into Immunity might’ve been an option but it’s impossible to tell unless I asked the system for the choices.

‘System, evolve {Basic Magic}]

[Evolving {Basic Magic} . 3 possible evolutions found.

1. Intermediate Magic- Increases the available difficulty of spells to a higher amount allowing you to cast harder spells by continuing to use the ancient language. (Like minor teleport)

2. Wordless Magic- Allow for you to use actions, emotions, feelings, and thoughts to control magic into what you want by merging with the skill {Mana Manipulation}. Will have to relearn how to do magic as this is an entirely new way.

3. Word Magic- A hybrid between Wordless Magic and Intermediate Magic that allows you to enhance the power of your magic through the use of the Ancient Language. For example, you could change the properties of a spell and other specifics while a spell is being casted or even after.]

All of these choices were amazing things. Intermediate allowed me to just cast harder spells, Wordless allowed me to pretty much manipulate the mana into what I want with actions and thoughts instead of spells, and Word Magic allowed me to manipulate the spell whenever I wanted.

I personally preferred Wordless Magic as with it, I could do something with a simple thought. Maybe with a simple gesture like a point, I’d be able to cast a fireball or something like that.

For another couple of seconds, I thought of the possible things I could do after picking each one. In the end, I followed my preference.

‘Please evolve it into Wordless Magic.’

[Confirmed. Combining {Mana Manipulation} and {Basic Magic} . Skill fusion and evolution successful. {Wordless Magic} level 1 has been made. {Basic Magic} Skill has been retained and is still usable. {Mana Manipulation} is no longer available as it’s now {Wordless Magic}]

I stopped running for a moment and did a small gesture with my hand trying to do wordless magic. Nothing happened. I kept doing what I assumed would work over and over but nothing ever happened.

Eventually I angry because I felt like I was scammed. Going over to a tree, I punched it but somehow, my fist became wrapped in a light red glow and punctured right through the tree while also burning it slightly.

“Wow”