The hay-covered rat in Pen Seven was not the end of a struggle, but the first brick in a wall Leo now had to build, one tiny, bloody brick at a time. He returned to his cot that night, but sleep was a foreign country. His mind was a chalkboard covered in frantic, glowing equations. The cold clarity that had followed the kill had solidified into something more obsessive: analysis.
He lay in the dark, the snores and shifts of the other laborers a distant ocean against the shore of his focus. He summoned his status screen, the blue text painting the darkness above him.
NAME: Leo
LEVEL: 1
XP: 0/100
STATS: STR 6 | AGI 7 | VIT 5 | INT 8 | WIS 5 | LCK 1
SKILLS: [ARCANE REPLICATION] (Mythic)
COPY SLOT: [POWER STRIKE] (2/100 MP)
MASTERED SKILLS: NONE
His eyes locked onto the numbers. 2/100 MP.
He did the math. It was simple, brutal arithmetic. One rat, one MP. Assuming he could find and kill one rat every single night without fail—no misses, no interruptions, no getting caught—that was ninety-eight more nights. Over three months of this clandestine, muck-drenched butchery.
Three months.
The number didn't daunt him with its length; it daunted him with its monotony. It was a sentence of repetitive, tiny violence. But it was a sentence with a defined end. A finish line he could see, even if it was vanishingly small on a distant horizon. For the first time in his life, a goal had a quantifiable metric. It was almost comforting in its grim specificity.
His gaze drifted up. XP: 0/100.
A different number. A different progress bar. The rat had given him MP, but no XP. The System notification had been clear: XP GAINED: 0.
A new layer of understanding settled over him. Killing a Level 0 Rock Rat was beneath the System's notice for character advancement. It was worthless for making him stronger in a general sense. It was only good for grinding the specific skill used to kill it.
So he had two parallel tracks to advancement:
1. Mastery (MP): Grind the skill itself by using it to kill. Any kill would do, even Level 0 trash.
2. Character (XP): Gain general strength by killing things that actually challenged him—things that gave XP.
He was stuck on both tracks. His MP grind was a crawl. His XP grind was nonexistent.
The realization wasn't a lightning bolt. It was a slow, cold seep of logic, like water finding cracks in stone. The world had always talked about "leveling up" as the singular path to power. But his System revealed a duality. You could be a high-level adventurer with poorly mastered skills, or a low-level nobody with one brutally efficient, perfected technique.
He was the latter. Or he would be, in ninety-eight rats' time.
But the two tracks weren't independent. They could feed each other. This was the crucial leap. If he could gain just one Character Level, the stat points he'd gain could make him stronger, faster, tougher. He could kill rats more efficiently, speeding up the MP grind. A faster MP grind would give him a mastered skill sooner, which would let him hunt more dangerous things for more XP.
It was a loop. A slow, excruciating, bootstrapping loop. He had to use his current pathetic self to build a slightly less pathetic self, who could build a marginally competent self, and so on.
The Plan solidified in the dark, a three-point manifesto of survival.
Phase One: The Foundation. The Rock Rat genocide. Ninety-eight more executions. This was non-negotiable. He had to master [Power Strike]. It was his only key. He would become a nocturnal ghost, a precise, patient murderer of vermin. Efficiency was the god he would worship. No wasted swings. No missed opportunities. Every night, a brick in the wall.
Phase Two: The Breakout. Concurrently, he needed XP. He needed to find something—anything—Level 1 or higher that he could realistically kill. A sickly Tunnel Weasel? A lone, aging Cave Moth that had drifted into the yard? He didn't know yet. But he had to start looking. Observing. The weasel breakout had shown him they existed in his world. He just needed a crippled one, a distracted one. A chance.
Phase Three: The Momentum. The loop. One level up. A handful of precious stat points. Would he put them in STR for harder hits? AGI for better accuracy and dodging? VIT to endure longer nights? The choice would be strategic, a luxury of planning he'd never had before. Those points would then be reinvested into Phase One, accelerating the brick-laying until the wall of mastery was complete.
It was a plan born not of ambition, but of desperate system analysis. It had no glory. It promised no fame. It was a blueprint for converting time, filth, and rodent corpses into incremental, personal power.
Leo dismissed the status screen. The darkness of the bunkhouse returned, but it felt different. It was no longer a smothering blanket of despair. It was a workshop. A planning room.
He stared at the rough-hewn beams above, seeing not the limits of his prison, but the first draft of his escape route, etched in blue numbers and blood.
The emotion that curled in his chest, faint and fragile as a new flame, wasn't happiness. It wasn't even optimism. It was the quiet, fierce glow of a problem identified and a path, however long and grim, laid out before him.
For the first time since the Brand, he wasn't asking "Why me?"
He was asking "What's next?"
And for the first time, he had an answer. A terrible, grinding, meticulous answer.
Hope, he was starting to understand, wasn't a feeling. It was a formula. And he had just written the first line.