Three weeks in and I had a routine.
Wake before dawn. Check status. Eat whatever was left in the pantry, which was getting increasingly creative as a problem. Head into the forest. Kill things until my legs stopped working. Come home. Sleep. Repeat.
It wasn't glamorous. But it was working.
[Name: Caiden Knox][Level: 7][XP: 1,840 / 2,100][Strength: 11 | Agility: 12 | Intelligence: 10 | Endurance: 11 | Mana: 10 | Perception: 12 | Vitality: 10 | Luck: 2][Skill Points: 180][Skills: Basic Body Reinforcement (Passive) | Mana Sense (Passive)]
Seven levels in three weeks. My stats had more than doubled across the board. The Grim Rats that nearly gave me a heart attack on day one were now something I killed on the walk to find something more interesting.
The forest had layers to it once you knew how to read them. Grim Rats near the edges. Thorn Wolves deeper in, hunting in loose pairs, smarter than they looked. Past them, in the dense part where the trees grew close enough to block most of the light, something bigger moved at night that I hadn't gotten a clear look at yet.
I was working up to it.
The money situation got solved on day four when I found the adventurers guild in the nearest town, a place called Greyveil, about forty minutes walk from the estate.
Small town. Cobblestone streets, mana lanterns on every corner, a market that smelled like roasted meat and arcane reagents mixed together in a way that shouldn't have worked but somehow did. The guild building sat at the centre of it all, two stories, stone walls, a board outside covered in request slips flapping in the wind.
I walked in, registered under the Knox name, and got assessed.
The woman behind the counter ran a small crystal over my mana core and watched it glow.
Then she looked at the crystal.
Then she looked at me.
Then she looked at the crystal again.
"The reading is," she started, and stopped.
"Unclear?" I offered.
"Pink," she said. Like the word tasted wrong.
"Right."
She wrote something in the ledger that I didn't try to read upside down and handed me a guild card with FF stamped on it in grey ink. Lowest possible rank. She had the look of someone doing me a favour by not asking further questions and I appreciated that more than I showed.
I took the card, checked the request board, and picked up three material collection quests on my way out.
By the end of week two I had been bumped up to F rank at the guild.
Week three, F plus.
The guild master, a broad man named Carro with a scar through his left eyebrow and the permanently tired expression of someone who had seen too many overconfident beginners, called me into his office after I turned in a Thorn Wolf pelt.
He looked at the pelt. Looked at me. Looked at my guild card.
"You registered three weeks ago," he said.
"I did."
"At FF."
"Yes."
He put the pelt down. "Thorn Wolves are D rank threats."
"I know."
He watched me for a moment with the careful eyes of a man who had been doing this long enough to know when something didn't add up. I waited. I was getting better at waiting.
"You're Knox," he said finally. "Minor house. No core reading."
"Unclear reading."
"Same thing to most people."
"I know that too."
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a second. Then he stamped my card up to D rank, slid it back across the desk, and said, "Don't die."
"I'll do my best."
The thing in the deep forest turned out to be a Stoneback Bear.
The bestiary had a drawing of one that looked like it had been done by someone describing it to someone else who had then described it to the actual artist. It didn't do the real thing justice. Stoneback Bears were enormous. Their hides had a natural mana reinforcement that made the outer layer feel genuinely like stone when you hit it. They were ranked C on the strength scale and considered appropriate targets for a party of four D rank hunters.
I was alone, level seven, and had exactly two passive skills.
I thought about this for a reasonable amount of time.
Then I went in anyway.
It did not go well at first.
The bear caught me with a glancing swipe in the first thirty seconds that sent me into a tree hard enough to crack the bark. Body Reinforcement saved my ribs. My pride was a different matter. I hit the ground, got up, and reassessed.
Frontal approach was obviously not working.
I circled. Used the trees. Let my Mana Sense track it while I stayed out of its line of sight and looked for the spots where its natural armour wasn't as dense. The throat. The inner joints of the legs. The soft ridge behind the ears where the stone hide didn't fully form.
It took forty minutes.
It was not graceful or efficient or impressive to watch.
But at the end of it the bear was on the ground and I was still standing, bleeding from a cut above my eye, one sleeve completely shredded, quietly reconsidering every life choice that had led to this moment.
[Stoneback Bear defeated.][XP gained: 340][Level up! Level 8.][Level up! Level 9.][Stat Points awarded: 8][Skill Points awarded: 60]
Two levels at once. I stood in the quiet of the deep forest with blood drying on my face and bear fur on my knife and stared at the notification for a long moment.
Then I allocated the stat points, pocketed the skill points, and started the walk back to town with a Stoneback hide worth more than the Knox estate's monthly stipend slung over my shoulder.
Carro looked at it for a very long time when I dropped it on his counter.
He didn't say anything.
I didn't explain.