Chapter 3 I Guess It's Good to Level Up?

Lief watched as the vitality in the withered tree dropped to 0, causing the tree to look even more withered than it did before.

In his status window, he could see his vitality increase by 7.

After that was finished, he turned to another nearby tree and transfered some vitality into it, raising the total vitality of the tree from 8 to 15.

Suddenly, a thought occurred to him and he turned towards the tiger that represented the system.

"Hey Silvy."

The dark green feline growled at the nickname, clearly making his displeasure known. Lief raised his claw hands in a gesture of surrender.

"Okay, no nicknames, got it. Anyways, what does leveling up the system do?"

[I believe that upgrading the system will unlock new functions such as missions and a chatroom to communicate with other system hosts. It will also increase your absorption speed of vitality. It may also unlock some new skills.]

Lief's interest immediately peaked and his focus tunneled into the first part of the tiger's statements. "A chatroom? There are others with a system like you?"

When Silvester nodded, Lief's hopes rose.

He found out from his system that people from this world could not normally access a system. If others had a system, they should have been summoned from another world like he was.

Before he had appeared in this world, he and the twins had been surrounded in the same golden light.

That meant it was possible that Cain and Asher were also in this world, and he might be able to find them through the chatroom.

He held no attachment towards his old world, but if it was possible to meet up with his best friends, he would be just that bit happier.

Lief knew that if he had still been in a human form, he would be smiling from ear to ear at the possibility of meeting up with his friends.

Suddenly a new thought came to him.

"Silvester, will I ever be able to leave this forest? I'm supposed to be guarding it, right?"

[Once the system reaches a high enough level, you will be able to create knights to protect the forest in your place. After that, you will be able to temporarily leave the forest to travel to see other places.]

With that possibility in mind, he excitedly went to work on expanding his forest.

It took awhile just to get one tree back to full health. The absorption speed was how much vitality could be moved per minute. That meant Lief could only drain or transfer 1 vitality a minute. The first tree that he restored needed 93 vitality to get back to full health.

That meant it took Lief 186 minutes or around 3 hours to fully restore it, though it took a little longer because he needed to go find trees that still had vitality. Except for a few at the beginning that had 7 or 8 vitality each, ost of the trees in the dead forest had 4-5 vitality left at the maximum. He needed around 20 of the withered trees just to restore one.

Draining vitality felt pretty interesting, like he was absorbing pure energy. The more he absorbed, the more rejuvenated he felt. Meanwhile, transferring away vitality made him feel slightly hollow, almost like hunger, but not quite.

Luckily he didn't seem to need to eat anything as long as he had extra vitality stored and he didn't really feel exhaustion anymore so he could work constantly without needing to pause.

According to Silvester, Dryads could live as long as they had vitality, though most Dryads could only gain vitality from living forests. A skill like his Vitality Drain skill that let the user take and store vitality from other living beings for themselves was not common.

The skill probably had something to do with how Lief looked like some sort of evil creature.

After a full week had passed, he had restored a total of 38 trees and had a good amount of vitality in reserve.

Lief also found out that restoring the trees added to the forest size in the system. The system also gave him one vitality and one exp point for each tree in his forest every day.

"Silvester, open the status window please."

[System Level: 1]

[EXP: 151/200]

[Forest Size: 38]

[Vitality: 174]

[Absorption Speed: 1]

[Skills: Vitality Drain 1, Vitality Transfer 1]

"Oh! The system almost has enough exp to level up."

Looking at the exp bar, Lief realized that it would only be another day or two before he could level up the system.

He glanced around at his small forest, a feeling of satisfaction filling him. Although he had never been the type to overly care for the environment, he did enjoy the occasional nature scenery and it still felt pretty good to see a dead forest slowly regain life.

As the forest began to be restored, signs of other life also began to appear. A few birds made their nests in some of the living trees, and several bushes and other types of undergrowth also began to appear.

The birds did not seem to be afraid of his monstrous form. Occasionally, they would even rest on his horns when he stood motionlessly to transfer vitality to the trees.

He also found out that other creatures could not see Silvester. The large tiger that was his system's avatar was just like the status window, similar to a hologram.

Thinking of his goal of unlocking the chatroom to find his friends, he reminded himself to work hard.

"Okay, time to go back to work!"