Chapter 195: Diminishing Returns from Magical Fruits

A month went by and Eren finally understood the forest.

Not all of it. Nobody could understand all of it because the place rearranged its own horrors every few kilometers. But the western half between the portal meadow and the old village ruins he had mapped in his head down to which streambeds were actually streambeds and which ones were lids on top of underground bug wars.

He also got better at using his own body. After weeks of fighting things that wanted to eat him he had stopped thinking about his skills as separate buttons and started moving like the skills were just part of him. Two of them had even leveled up from pure use, his Combat Mastery and his Basic Archery climbing one notch each over the month.

But he still couldn’t wrap his head around the Clone.

One month. The Clone had survived in this exact forest for one single month and in that time he’d picked up something like a dozen skills and pushed half of them toward evolution. Eren had a full month here too now, with a stronger body and better gear and a portal back to a warm bed every night. And his skill growth was still slower than the Clone’s had been while the Clone was sleeping in trees and eating stolen fruit.

Was he just more talented than me?

The thought bugged him more than it should have, mostly because it made no sense. The Clone wasn’t a different person. The Clone was him. When Eren had finally used the Clone skill all those weeks ago he’d watched the thing form out of nothing in a random spot in the forest. From the second it opened its eyes it had the exact same personality and memories Eren had on the day they found the weird door in the apartment seven months ago. Same jokes. Same panic. Same everything.

So if he’s me, why was he leveling up like a shonen protagonist and I’m out here struggling to bump Archery from eight to nine?

He had two theories and he chewed on both of them while walking.

The first was the half-elf thing. Maybe his Awakened bloodline changed how his body absorbed experience, slowed it down somehow in exchange for the monster growth he got every level. The Clone didn’t have the bloodline active the same way. Maybe that was the trade.

The second theory was uglier and he didn’t like it. The Clone had been desperate. Every single day for a month the Clone woke up knowing that one mistake meant death, no portal, no farm, no Emily waiting with stew. That pressure changed a person. The Clone fought harder because the Clone had no choice and the system maybe rewarded that desperation with faster growth.

And I’ve got a folding chair and a Migros snack bag. Hard to be desperate when you can quit any time you want.

So he started trying to fix it. He spent a month deliberately throwing himself into worse situations, building movement patterns, drilling his body the way the Clone must have, fighting things he could’ve just walked away from.

Some of it worked of course and his footwork was sharper these days..

His reactions had gotten scary fast. But the experience bar still wouldn’t move from Level 49, not a single point gained from any kill, because the Totem was still broken and a dragon was still sleeping on top of the World Tree.

That part hadn’t changed in a month either.

..

His days had a rhythm now.

Mornings on the farm, dealing with whatever new disaster two hundred elves and a half-finished solar setup could generate. Afternoons through the portal into Evon to try, one more time, to find some way around the experience problem.

Every day he tried something different. He killed higher-level things. He killed lower-level things. He ate strange plants the Clone’s memories flagged as harmless. He tested whether assisting a wolf kill changed anything, whether a finishing blow versus a first strike mattered, whether distance mattered. None of it moved the bar. The zone was just dead, top to bottom. There was nothing clever he could do about it from out here.

Which left him with two real options and both of them pointed at the same place.

He could go to the village ruins and check the Totem. If the dragon had wandered off, he might be able to get close to whatever was left of the burned little tree and see if anything could be saved. If the dragon was still there he’d figure it out on the spot. And if that whole plan was a bust, well, there was always the centaur farmland to the north where he could maybe steal fruit the way the Clone used to, since stolen fruit was at least something.

Pathetic that fruit-stealing is my best long-term strategy right now. But here we are.

He started toward the ruins around three in the afternoon.

The path to the village took him through ground the Clone’s memories had marked clearly. About halfway there he recognized where he was.

Oh. This is the deer place.

The ghost-deer territory. The Clone had hit this spot near the end of his month and walked out with fifty Perception points and the Invisibility skill from a single weird fruit. Eren slowed down at the edge of the tree line and looked into the clearing.

Same as the memory. Six of the glowing deer grazing around a single huge black tree in the center, their bodies leaking that soft blue-white light that meant their mana saturation was way past what their bodies should hold. And on the lowest branch of the black tree, one fruit. Semi-transparent, peach-sized, glowing faintly like it had a little light trapped inside it.

The deer had grown a new one in the month since the Clone took the last.

Grab and go. I shouldn’t fight for it.

That was a Clone thought inherited word for word and it still held up.

Eren stacked everything he had. Kinetic Flux Runner first, then a hard pulse of speed through his sixty-point Agility and Strength, and he hit the clearing as a blur of motion. The deer barely got their heads up before he crossed the thirty meters to the tree. His hand closed around the biggest fruit and Swift Snatcher made the grab so clean he didn’t even slow down.

The deer turned toward him with their glow flaring brighter and that pollen-toxin starting to push into the air. Eren was already moving the other way. He ripped one of his scimitars free and swung it in a wide screaming arc at the closest two. Not to hit them but to scare them. The blade whistling past their faces did the job. They scattered. He was out of the clearing and back into the trees before the toxin could touch his Poison Resistance.

He didn’t stop running for another two hundred meters and then dropped to a walk, breathing hard, grinning a little despite himself.

"Still got it.." he muttered to nobody.

He turned the fruit over in his fingers while he walked toward the ruins and then bit into it. It tasted like cold water and faint honey, exactly the way the Clone remembered it. The system screen came up a few seconds later.

[Congratulations! Perception: 85 > 105]

He stopped walking.

Twenty-five points. That’s it?

The Clone had eaten this exact fruit from this exact tree and gotten fifty Perception points plus a whole Rare skill. Eren just got twenty-five points and nothing else. No skill. No second notification. Half the stat boost and none of the bonus.

He worked through it for a second.

The first time anyone ate this fruit it gave fifty points and the Invisibility skill. The second time, the same fruit on the same tree gave a quarter of that and no skill at all. Which meant the fruits weren’t a flat reward you could farm forever. Either the effect dropped off hard after the first use or a specific fruit type only paid out big once and gave scraps after that.

So magic fruits have diminishing returns. Eat the same kind twice and the second one barely does anything.

It made a brutal kind of sense and it was easily the most useful thing he’d learned in weeks. The problem was he couldn’t really test it much further out here. He had a handful of fruit types in the Clone’s memory and a forest full of things trying to kill him. Running a proper experiment wasn’t exactly safe.

But there was one more place he could check on the way and it would tell him if the pattern held.

The monkey territory was a short detour east.

The Clone had gotten his Physical Durability skill here, off a fruit that filled your body with heat and made your muscles vibrate. Eren came in the same way he’d taken the deer, fast and clean. The monkeys scattered just the same because monkeys everywhere understood a predator moving at full speed. He grabbed fruit off the low branches. Only two this time, the same number the Clone had managed before the troop regrouped, then he was back out and walking.

He ate the first one and the heat hit immediately, that furnace-in-the-ribcage feeling spreading out into his arms and legs while his muscles buzzed for about ten seconds. The screen confirmed it.

[Your basic skill "Physical Durability" levelled up]

-Level 4 > Level 5

-Physical Stat Effectiveness: +20% > +25%

He ate the second one and got the same heat but there was no second notification.

Sad..