Time moved oddly without a clock to measure it.

Ash had no way to measure it precisely - no watch, no sun position he could read with any confidence given that neither of the two overhead followed patterns he had learned.

The one thing he could measure was the state of his body, and his body was clearly telling him, with no room left for interpretation, that he had gone an extremely long time since having water or food.

His throat was dry, and not in the simple, temporary fashion of thirst, but in a deeper, longer-lasting way.

Hunger was settling in like a weight over his whole body, overshadowing all other thoughts.

There was no question that he had been walking across the grassland, hungry, thirsty, for a long time, with absolutely nothing to quench either problem.

At least there were more trees.

That was new.

Where once only a few scattered trunks had been standing in a sea of tall grasses, now groups of trees could regularly be spotted.

While the grasslands persisted between the trees, and the sky overhead showed no indication of change other than continuing to be double-sunned and vast, there was more detail added to the landscape than before.

Though there were no people.

Just monsters.

Slimes had been numerous, and he had avoided each of them, with no place to store anything, nor reason to fight against them now that they did not give meaningful EXP or SP gains. He let them schlorp past him and kept walking.

But Horned Rabbits were a different matter entirely.

When he came across one, he had argued with himself, using logic and resource management to convince himself to simply walk past.

But then a memory of the first rabbit crossed his mind, with its flash of white fur, horns, and the place that it hit him.

The logical arguments fell away.

He killed every Horned Rabbit he came across.

He had killed seven Horned Rabbits since the last time he stopped to rest. All of them charged straight ahead in the same pattern, which all met the ♥️ 3 of Hearts.

In the process of these kills, the fire lance had upgraded itself, moving to level three and growing more powerful.

His gain was more unexpected than he had imagined it would be.

The first Horned Rabbit had given him thirty EXP and twenty SP, but as each subsequent one came, they gave him less, until they were a fraction of what he had received from the first.

It would seem he could expect diminishing returns on repetitive kills of the same monster type, despite his assumption that the system would give him constant rewards.

---------------

[✦GOD-TIER CARD SYSTEM✦]

[Name: Ash Vulkan]

[Title: Card Bearer]

[Level: 6]

[HP: 500 / 500]

[MP: 400 / 400]

[EXP: 15 / 700]

[SP: 5]

[✦STATS✦]

[STR: 125 INT: 80

DEF: 75 AGI: 155]

[✦ACTIVE HAND✦]

[04 / 54 Cards]

[♥ Hearts - 02/13 Cards]

[♠ Spades - 02/13 Cards]

[★Jokers★ - 2 Cards (LOCKED)]

[✦SKILLS✦]

Storage - Lv.1 (20/20)

[✦QUEST✦]

[★Unique Quest★: SAVE THE WORLD]

----------------

Fifty-five SP gained from the seven Horned Rabbits. Thirty SP had gone into improving his agility, and twenty SP into increasing his strength, while the remaining five were left unused.

He was unsure which of his stats was currently more important than the other.

His Storage was always full, though, even during these kills.

The Horned Rabbits did not drop anything useful for him, and while the first time he had attempted to clear some of the slime materials in order to make room for more, he had decided that the loss of loot was not worth it.

At the rate he was going, it seemed that soon, he would have to find somewhere to sell things in order to clear his Storage.

To do so, he would have to find people.

This proved to be far more difficult than he had imagined.

He scaled a small hill in the terrain, one not high enough to even be considered a hill, yet one that his body sensed as more than that.

He was tired in a way that seemed to come not from the mind, but from his muscles. Though he was level six, fast and strong, his level-six self was hungry, and on the verge of exhaustion from lack of sustenance.

But as he got to the top of the rise, he heard something.

Coming from just over the crest of the hill, he suddenly heard something he had not heard since coming here.

He heard a human voice.

Ash stopped moving forward.

For the first time since waking up in Veltharion, he forgot entirely about being tired.