On a tree in the middle of the forest stood a figure with tattered clothes and only one visible arm.

Of course, that figure was me, standing on a branch of a large tree that I had painstakingly climbed to find a better spot to look around.

At that point, a day had passed ever since the last encounter, or to be precise, it was the last dangerous encounter with a beast, creature, or whatever abominations this world held.

I knew that something was extremely wrong. Yes, I might have not been the best at my studies, but I was slightly above average and therefore I knew a lot about the periods that Earth had been through for the last 4.5 billion years. After all, I was studying the subject in college.

There were simply no geological records of some of the creatures that I had seen in the last 4 days, including the giant toads, the oversized Dragonflies, and hell, most of the lizard-like creatures that I am seeing right now aren’t supposed to exist before the Triassic period.

Let’s not forget to mention the pterodactyl-like creature that I met yesterday. If a creature with the power to reach the border between space and earth, wouldn’t that be a huge scientific discovery?

Yet even then, even if I juggle through my memories, looking at every single one with the intent to find precisely what I wanted to know, I still could not find any records of something with that kind of power, nor anything being as big as that flying creatures.

However, even after seeing so many things that simply did not add up, I had a suspicion_-.

I had a feeling that not only in this forest but on this entire planet there would be things that were much, much more terrifying than the flying creature.

Creatures that would exceed our understandings of the sciences themselves… Something that would make every one of us question the boundaries between fiction and reality.

However, right now, all these things were the least of my worries. I could have not cared less about the scientific impossibilities or the unknown creatures I had seen, I simply had one thing in mind and it was to survive… To survive through the next 3 days without dying so I could finally activate this system thing that I’ve been wondering about.

[Level: 1]

[Progress: 60/100]

‘Immortality System huh… To think I would have gotten 20 whole experience points for the assist alone…’ I sighed and jumped down one of the branches, landing safely on another, and another, and another until I felt my feet touch the ground.

I had minor difficulties trying to keep my balance, but for some odd reason, I found myself capable of getting used to it quite quickly… It was as if the disability was not there and it was something as easy as getting used to an itch at the back of your neck.

Jolts of phantom pain had forced me awake multiple times last night, but I guess that also must have been for the better as it was when I had woken up for the last time when I had finally heard something pass by the cave where I stayed at for the meantime.

When leaving my cave, I found that the passing tide was one made out of hundreds upon hundreds of monkeys with deep red fur with scattered yellow across it.

I felt a fiery flame within their eyes, a determination I had never seen on any creature before, and also the building power that emitted from every single one of them combined.

The power was more symbiotic than individual, and even though I could not take away the reality that their powers were far higher than my own, they were far weaker alone than the monstrous threat they emanated as a group.

I even theorized that it would have probably been possible for them to take on the pterodactyl with only a quarter of their tide alone.

At that moment, I had looked at the monkeys before looking at my crumbling stomach, causing me to decide that in any other instance would have been seen as being the worst decision I could ever make.

Desperate and hungry, I followed through the forest, jumping around trees and swerving my path to make sure that did not realize that I was right behind them this entire time.

Thankfully, this worked for a while but after a few hours of this, I finally felt the aching pains from the night before assaulting me alongside my limits as a human, simply not being capable of moving for that long without rest.

It was then that I had decided to climb one of the tallest trees with an array of different branches, just strong enough to hold my weight but at the same time not noticeably large enough for them to ever pay attention to it.

These monkeys, while looking and having the agility of monkeys, looked closer to being gorillas instead.

Their weight was probably comparable to a rhino’s while their size was 2 or three times larger than the average black gorilla.

from a distance, one could probably mistake them for being a flock of giant fireflies rather than being apes with red fur, yet even though they might have looked like fireflies from a distance, the danger they emanated was no joke no matter how far away you were looking from.

Getting on top of the tree, I looked into the distance, trying to find out in what direction they were going in since they hadn’t really changed the route, and instead, we were going completely straight, swerving past a few trees here and there but still maintaining the same path as before, as if they were programmed to do so.

Seeing this, I could not help but sigh and take a long spear out of my pants made out of wood that I had carved and sharpened just enough to break the skin of any creature that did not have scaly skin.

This made it a lot easier to eat the small creatures like the giant rats, weakened centipedes, and even at one point I found myself in front of an injured baby bear with no animal in site, allowing me to kill it and take its meat to cook later when I got back to the cave.

My eyes glazed in their direction, not directly looking at them but at the same time looking in their direction. I second later, they flared up in determination, making me finally drop down to the floor, stepping down branch my branch while barely stabilizing my balance before finally dashing in their direction.

***

In the faraway distance, yet so close that one could feel their eyes, a being with pale green chartreuse skin sat atop the canopy of the forest, watching and listening as everything unfolded in front of her.

She had glistening green hair while having a pair of beautiful emerald eyes.

Vines wrapped around her entire body like clothes, covering her from top to bottom with the green ropes which seemed to have a life of their own, twitching every now and then, something one would pick up after looking at them for a while.

She was not sore to the eyes in any way, however, and with all honesty, it might have been the complete opposite.

However, while her beauty would have caught the eyes of everything, from random animals to intelligent creatures, there was one thing that everything found their eyes drifting to and that was the large crystal in the center of her forehead.

The crystal, just like her eyes color, shone with a crystalline emerald. The crystal was barely the size of the tip joint of the thumb, but even then it just happened to find itself being the most eye-catching thing about one of the most beautiful creatures on the planet.

The creature, unlike everything I had seen up to that moment, has a twinkle of free will and intelligence within her eyes.

Her eyes were currently looking in a certain direction, them eventually narrowing when seeing that I was following a herd of red monkeys that ran around in numbers that far exceeded a hundred.

“So that is the human huh… To think he is this weak…” The woman shook her head and was finally enveloped by tree roots which eventually dispersed and left no one atop the canopy.

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