Chapter 10 Instead of Becoming an Adventurer I Chose to Fish

When I woke up, the sun was already shining through the window. Getting a proper schedule back in one day would be impossible, but it wouldn't take too much longer.

I kinda wished I could know exactly what time it was, but I could only guess that it was around ten. I didn’t have any personal clock to know what the exact time was.

“Enough stalling,” I said to myself. The fact that I had been able to keep myself from messing with the inventory skill surprised me. The entire last night while I was running, all I wanted to do was test it out.

From what I read, there were two main options for what I could have. Picking up the pen, I focused on the new sense I had that was at the back of my head. To use it, it was like using an unfamiliar muscle, but the pencil popped away and disappeared into nothingness as soon as I properly thought of storing it in my inventory.

Now, instead of emptiness, I could sense the pencil there. Instead of there being a space that was empty, now only having the pencil inside of it, which would have been the first type of inventory, instead, I felt the pencil being inside its own space.

So I got the slot-based inventory. That was a lot rarer. The book did say that this type could have a downside of only fitting small objects, but that wasn’t necessarily the case every time. It was also possible that some items might stack, so I went to the table to grab a few pieces of paper.

As soon as I made one disappear, a new box section appeared in the part of my mind that saw inside the inventory. As I added another piece of paper, instead of another box being created, it went into the same one, and I instinctively knew there were two there.

I was able to fit ten pieces of paper before a new box appeared. That was surprisingly good. From what I understood, this inventory made less logical sense overall.

That fact was soon confirmed as I was able to add to the next stack a lot of papers that had different writings on them without any problems, until I put in a piece of paper that had almost all of it filled up with writing.

That one was stacked in another box, even though the third one wasn’t entirely full yet. I just barely had enough pencils to confirm that I could still add them to one stack.

What else should I test? The table perhaps, but no, there were too many things inside. My eyes went to the bed. I grabbed hold of it and thought about storing it. There was a moment of pause before the bed disappeared, filling up six boxes.

The books definitely didn’t say anything about that. I can share boxes to fit in larger things. Next, I tried the table; it took up four boxes, but also everything that was inside the table. Nothing was left behind.

“Wait, wait. There’s no way…” There was a simple backpack in my cabinet, and I quickly filled it up with everything I could get my hands on and stored it. It only took up one space with everything staying inside, but if I tried to store them separately, it would take up more and more boxes.

My mind raced, not believing how lucky I had gotten. This was way better than anything I had read about or the lecturer said an inventory skill possessor could have, and it was just at Inventory I. There were ways of upgrading it, but for that I needed equipment that had the necessary upgrade things. I did not know what exactly they were, but they would probably be extremely expensive.

I wanted to keep experimenting, but as I stored another item, I felt exhaustion taking over me. Was this the skill-use fatigue some of the lecturers mentioned? I did not know exactly what it was, but I did have a list of lectures and books to read, and explanations for that fatigue were on that list.

I tried to find it but remembered that basically everything was currently stored in my inventory. Walking around, I also understood that while I did weigh a bit more, I was certain that the weight reduction must’ve been extremely high.

That made me swallow nervously. How could I have forgotten the warning about testing skills? If I had a different type of inventory, the weight of the bed and the table could have crushed me. This was a good lesson, fortunately, a lesson that I survived.

Sitting on the floor in a room that was now a lot emptier, I waited until I could place a couple more items into my inventory, confirming that I had 25 slots.

The book did mention something about an interface you could make yourself. Hours continued to pass as I now started to take all the stuff out that I had stored. It still amazed me how I could make something disappear and reappear. This was so incredible.

When the room was back to normal, I started to purposely try to make this interface. It didn’t take me too long, and soon I had a bluish screen that I could close at will, showing 25 squares.

A little bit of messing about later and I was able to see an image of the thing that was inside one of the squares, and a small number underneath to show how many items there were stacked.

This was like when I was for the first time allowed to play a computer game. It was as magical right now as it was back then.

It was time to start making further plans. I would need to finish reading all the workshop booklets that introduced those places, rules, and what you could do there. Next, I really needed to start the combat training, as survival isn’t guaranteed no matter where you went.

Finally, I needed to go to the mining workshop so I could start leveling up my mining profession, hopefully getting the looting skill.

The lecturer said that the best chance to get looting was when you just got to level 10. You could try to do the same thing as with inventory, but the chances of getting looting dropped off immensely with every level.

That was why it was recommended to get mining to level 10, then move on to the next most likely profession, which was trapping, after that gathering, then harvesting, and finally fishing.

The time was moving fast toward evening, so I went out and got something to eat. I felt the mood was a bit strange, everyone looked a bit downcast. It was when I made it to the training grounds that I finally overheard what had happened.

You needed to have a combat class picked before they allowed you to enter the dungeon near the town. As I saw myself while leaving the refugee camp, some of us picked a class before teleporting away.

It seems that the group of my fellow Earthlings who had combat classes lost one of their members while delving. It seems that they were rushing a bit too much. I could understand why they were doing it, but my mood also went down a couple of notches from the high I had during this morning.

It was a stark reminder that this was no game, even though some parts of my new reality did resemble one. What also didn’t help my mood was that I didn’t exactly know what dungeons were. I knew now that it was a place where you could fight monsters in a more structured way than out in the wild, but nothing more.

I kind of wanted to rush to the library and read up on dungeons properly, but there was a lecture that would explain it most likely a lot better. So, I pushed my desires down and approached one of the trainers.

“Excuse me, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, that’s why I’m here. Shoot.”

“I don’t really know how to fight at all. All I’ve done is swing around a few fake swords and fire a few arrows that all missed the target, so I’m kind of at a loss as to where to begin.”

His eyes glanced towards my right wrist that was covered by a sleeve. He did not comment on it, just thought for a moment before speaking.

“You have a decent build, you’re pretty tall and muscular, which is pretty good. The best way to start is by testing each weapon. Not to worry, I will take care of you,” he said with a big smile as he wrapped his arm around my neck, pulling me towards the weapon racks.

“Let's see how bad you are with ranged weapons,” he said and handed me a bow.

What followed was quite embarrassing. I missed absolutely everything.

“You weren’t kidding, but there is no problem with your form. You can take direction well and know how to position your body without any problems once you know what to do. But,” he looked towards all the arrows that had missed the target, “yet you missed them all. That's actually impressive, unfortunately in the wrong way.”

He looked at me like he was wondering if I did it on purpose or not.

“Let's see if you have problems with hitting something far away. Let's get you a few javelins.”

This one went better, as I really hit the target that was about 15 metres away.

“So you managed to hit those decently well. Not the best, but that's just practice. This makes the arrows even more strange, but let's move on.”

Next was a crossbow, which I failed pretty badly at as well, but I did manage to hit one.

“You aren’t messing with me, right?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“No, I’m not. I did shoot guns decently well,” I said, raising my shoulders in a shrug.

“Give the crossbow a few more goes. Try to think of it as a bulkier gun.”

I did as he said, and the next couple of rounds I did manage to start to get more and more into the target.

Next we tried the bow once again, but I still missed every single shot.

“Kinda wish I had a few of my friends here who have buffing skills. Would like to see if you could hit the target then. Not to worry, it just seems that the bow isn’t for you.”

He then indicated towards the melee weapons.

“Shouldn’t we try guns as well?” I asked, knowing that there weren’t any around but I just wanted to know why.

“Yeah, I don’t want to get myself blown up. Don’t know much about guns, never handled them, but I know the history. Plenty of worlds had them before their integration. Unfortunately mana doesn’t seem to work well with that design.”

“So firing them just blows them up?” I asked, hoping for more information.

“Yeah, for some reason. I don’t exactly know what. It’s the same reason why we don’t have electricity. Trying to contain energy in a space where there is mana is not a good idea. Bombs however are quite useful if you have a class to stabilize them, just stay farther away from them as the explosions are always stronger than expected.”

We started with a sword. He showed me some moves I had seen a lot of others practise. I was surprised at how much thrusting there was to do with the sword, and each time I had to do that my hand always felt awkward, like it didn't fit right.

The same happened when using a spear. I could hit the point I aimed for accurately enough when thrusting, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Now when I swung things everything felt the opposite. It felt amazing and I could get plenty of power behind each swing.

“You are quite curious, you know that? Here, try this.” What he handed me next was a simple club with a metal head.

Curious, I swung it and it felt nice. It was strange to swing around a weapon that could crush a human skull, it made me feel powerful. We tested a bit more until he made me stop and return everything.

“My conclusions are thus: bows are a big nono for you. You could learn to use crossbows, but it would be a long journey. Your best option for range is a throwing weapon like a javelin.”

“For a melee you could learn to use some types of swords, mostly the ones that use swing instead of thrust. But my best recommendation for you is blunt weapons. Hammers could work, especially if you need piercing damage, but different types of maces would be the best for you.”

One of the weapons I used did remind me of the club I used to kill fish quickly so that they would feel as little pain as possible.

“Thank you for the help. I think my best choice would be blunt weapons, as you said. I should probably continue to practise throwing javelins as well or are there any other throwing weapons you recommend?”

“Excellent. While it’s getting late you can always come tomorrow and I will teach you, or anyone else will as well, how to start properly using blunt weapons. But it would be even better if you narrow that down more; specialization is important.”

“As for other throwing weapons.” He looked around and picked up a smaller rock, then threw it strong enough that it knocked over one of the ranged targets. “Even a simple rock can be truly dangerous. Also you should sign up for survival training,  they will teach you a lot of the basics.”

“Thank you,” I said once again, but we continued to talk for a while longer. He emphasised the need to specialise but also to make sure that I learned to use every tool necessary to advance my professions. As soon as we finished talking I went back to my room to note down everything.

Before choosing which weapon to go for, it’s probably best to figure out what types of opponents I could go up against. If I understood it correctly, monsters as they got older could be completely different in the way they look from the animals they began as.

There is a whole crazy universe out there and a lot of it would want to kill me if they came across me. Still, most of the time hopefully that wouldn’t be a problem, but I definitely felt a bit underprepared to make a choice so early on that would impact my whole future.

Then again, there will be some weapons that I will be using constantly. One of them being a knife as it was such a useful tool. I would also want to fish, I was certain of that, as it was interesting to me now, perhaps even more than it was back on Earth.

So, learning how to properly use a blunt weapon and hopefully getting a few skills for it would allow me to quickly and humanely kill fish that I catch.

A knife and a club-like weapon would be good enough for a start. I suspect learning any weapon will take a while, so why not get started with something I already knew I was going to be using in the future.