Well, my thirst only makes my need to find water and food more important, so to the valley I go.

  As I start moving to the valley and start being able to see the trees and bushes more clearly I notice something interesting, namely the colour of the leaves, they have a slight blueish tint to them, now I’m no expert, but I know that leaves in Earth are green because of the energy they absorb from sunlight, if they are bluish if would mean that either plants here don’t need as much energy and can release more of it for some reason or that there’s more energy in the sunlight so what the plants do absorb still leaves some light in the blue side of the spectrum. Of the two I’m betting on the second option for a single reason, when I finished the path the window told me I had unlocked radiation resistance, if I the Transferred branch really exists to help us survive in this world, we need radiation resistance to survive. Now I’m really glad I decided to go for the Transferred instead of System Pioneer.

  Thinking of radiation resistance I remember it did say it was a sub-Trait of Endurance, I open my “Trait Table” and see it is the same except for the Progress which is now 2, makes sense, what does not make sense is me not seeing either radiation or toxicity resistance anywhere, I click on Endurance wondering if there’s another menu for each Trait and I’m right.

  Ok, that’s cool, it seems my resistances are a bit over the 10, which means I’m above the average of normal humans, and since I doubt that happened before the System appeared, it looks like the Branch not only unlocked the Traits, but also increased them a bit.

  I close the window with the Endurance sub-Traits and decide to go check if clicking in the other Traits does anything. I click on Recovery and nothing happens. I make a small pause and notice that I’m now very close to the forest and suddenly a sharp headache appears out of nowhere. I try to understand what is happening when I notice a white blur going straight for me, I feel a rush of adrenaline and almost purely on instinct I slap the blur before it hits me. The blur falls to the ground and I notice it kind of looks like a bunny but with sharper eyes and longer ears bearing strange markings on them, the longer I look at those ears the worse my headache gets and I understand that the bunny is what is causing the pain, and my immediate reaction is to kick it I hit it but the bunny goes farther than I thought, I start moving to kick it again, but the pain, it’s so strong I can barely stand. The bunny gets up and looks at me, and then goes back to the forest, this time I can actually see it move, it’s slower, hurt. As it goes away the headache weakens, but it still hurts way too much. The only thing to do I find reasonable in my condition is to back off from the forest so that’s what I do.

  I go back to the same tree I was at before going into the valley and just sit down. Most of the pain is gone now but damn, that was not fun. I only now notice I have the System icon flashing in my vision and I click in it.

  Congratulations, you are 7th member of your species to suffer mental damage: “Resistant Mind I” Branch unlocked.

  Congratulations, you are the 1st member of your species to survive mental damage: “Evolving Mind” Branch unlocked; “Pioneer” Title unlocked; “Surviving Mind” Title unlocked; 5 Progress gifted.

  Ok there’s definitely a lot of important stuff. First, there’s the fact that apparently that bunny was doing “mental damage”, if the name is at all related to what it is, it makes sense that I got a headache apparently my mind was being hurt in some way. Then there is the fact that I was the 7th person in the entire species to suffer from this and that the 6 previous people all died since as the next notification says, I’m 1st one to survive. Then, there’s the fact that I got a ton of stuff from that one fight with the bunny, two Branches, 5 Progress, and two Titles whatever they are.

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  I decide to open my Traits Table.

  It seems like even though all that stuff happened, the only difference are the Branches, since even the Progress is now what it was in the beginning. The Titles are nowhere to be seen but due to how it worked with the sub-Traits, I click on Title.

  And quite a bit of more information, It seems Titles are things you get by doing special actions, and they give benefits, it also seems like you can only have one selected at a time but some titles don’t need to be selected to give their benefits, which seems to be the case of the Pioneer title, but not of Surviving Mind, which makes the choice of which title to select clear. Besides that there’s the reference to Skills, something that I do not have access to but if it is anything like what they are in games, I should really get them.

  Which leaves only one thing to take care of, my Branches, I have System Pioneer which I can finish Resistant Mind which I feel like I really want to choose due to, you know, not dying of headache and finally Evolving Mind, which is probably useful but costs way too much and has nebulous benefits so that one is out the first one I really don’t know what I could get and although the price is low, what I really need at the moment is food and water and the only way to get that that I know of is in the valley so Resistant Mind it is, but this time I want to avoid what happened last time so I will only put one Progress at a time and I want to keep some points so I will only use two of them. I put the first and that strange heat I felt last time appears but this time it’s manageable and only in the head, in a bit it is finished, and I’m left with a notification.

  Mental Resistance increased.

  Mental Resistance Trait unlocked. Defined as a Secondary Trait.

  I check and there’s indeed a the Trait Mental Resistance in it’s own space which I suppose it’s due to it being a Secondary Trait and not a sub-Trait and it’s currently at 12 so that’s good.

  I add the other point, this time the heat is even shorter lived and there’s no notification. I check my watch and notice it has been an hour since I’ve been here... I suppose that’s a reasonable amount of development for an hour.