On waking up, Alex began sorting out how he was going to extract vengeance on the murder chickens. He had a few things he needed to do.
The first was to observe his enemy. He had a good number of questions which were still unanswered.
Were they nocturnal or diurnal hunters?
What sort of groups did they hunt in?
How strong were they individually?
What did they hunt?
Did they exhibit anything approximating group tactics?
How good were their senses?
How did I kill one if they have mana? Did I luck out and fight a young one?
The second thing was to distribute his stat points, which he'd been putting off. He had 53 stat points accumulated, but he was holding off on spending them for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was that he felt he had to invest in all of them at once, his reasoning being that most of the stats were highly synergistic.
Investing in strength without also investing in resilience had the potential to cripple him, as he needed the associated tendon and bone strength increase that came with resilience. Snapping your tendons when you jumped too hard would be pretty sad.
Similarly, there was a limit to how much increasing your strength was effective. Eventually you had to invest in agility if you wanted to deliver more power, as strength had serious diminishing returns with regards to speed. All the strength in the world would only let you throw a fastball marginally faster - though replacing a fastball with a shot put, would yield some pretty devastating results.
At some point you had to increase the speed at which your muscle fibers could contract in order to make use of your newfound strength. However an increase in dexterity would increase your cardiovascular demands, as each contraction of your muscle fibers required energy, mandating an increase in endurance.
Lastly, making good use of dexterity requires an increase in cognition, as doing things like running at increased speeds require improved concentration and reflexes to properly handle things like slips, or changes in balance.
The main reason Alex had been holding off on investing his points was because it was disruptive to his physical training. If he increased his stats, he'd need to replace all of his equipment constantly, and that was more time consuming than was worth it. He already had to replace his equipment once, and that was a huge pain. He'd invested two points in strength before backing off, noticing the drastic improvement it brought.
'Well, I might as well get this over with, time to upgrade.'
Before he invested his points, Alex decided to invest some time in creating some benchmarks so that he'd have a good idea about how much his strength actually increased.
He found a patch of the clearing with a relatively clear straight away, leaving himself 100m of runway, and then made a mark in the dirt, and placed rocks on either side. He then sprinted down the runway as fast as he could, and clearing the rocks, he jumped pulling his legs close to his body, where he landed in a crouch.
He was using the long jump to gauge his sprint speed and jumping ability. He repeated the exercise a few times to get a rough measure of accuracy and to use multiple data points to get a sense of his distance. He estimated it was about 7m, and etched a few marks in the dirt with his dagger.
This number, while not superhuman, was extremely good, especially considering Alex hadn't been in great shape prior to entering this world. He also didn't have much practice with the long jump, and he wasn't using any particularly special tips or techniques that you'd see from olympians.
On the other hand, he was now in phenomenal shape - where previously he'd been a bit chubby and roughly 190 pounds, with minimal muscle definition, he'd replaced almost all of that fat with muscle, putting him down to 180 pounds. He estimated his body fat was around 12%, based on his visible veins and barely visible six pack.
The other point in his favor against typical olympians and track and field athletes was the fact that he was giving himself unlimited runway, and his ridiculous endurance let him reach top speed and maintain it for prolonged periods of time. He could now sprint at his fastest speed for minutes on end without getting tired at all.
It had gotten to the point where in order to train his cardiovascular system, he either needed to sprint, or tie the log to his back and run around the clearing. He ended up going with the latter, as sprinting through the forest was asking for death, not only at the hands of a predator, but also by tripping and falling.
The next thing he did was measure his vertical jump, though this was more crude and he just ended up stabbing the tree with his knife. His vertical ended up being a solid 70cm, which by his estimations put him in elite athlete territory.
Finally, Alex grabbed one of the medium sized logs he'd outfitted with handles and tested how many rows he could do, ending up at a solid 7 reps.
'Benchmarks are complete, now let's see how much of an improvement we get.'
Alex then opened his system interface, and invested his extra points into his stats.
[Honor System]
[Name: Alex]
[Existence Tier: 1]
[Ability: Water Control]
[Ability points: 0]
[Mana: 132/132]
[Soul Force: 3830]
[Strength: 2->10]
[Endurance: 20]
[Dexterity: 0->10]
[Vitality: 35]
[Resilience: 0->10]
[Cognition: 2->10]
[Perception: 25]
[Available stat points: 15]
Alex felt the warmth and power seep out of his core, followed promptly by complete and utter agony.
Unlike his prior investments, he invested many stat points simultaneously, he also underestimated the effects of investing in dexterity and strength. Strength literally ended up re-forging his muscles, and involved severe pain, as his muscle cells reforged themselves. Dexterity operated under a similar principle, and it improved flexibility as well as increasing fiber contraction speed, resulting in further pain stacked on top of the strength increase.
Resilience involved toughening all the tissues in the body, and so it involved a latent level of pain across virtually all tissues.
His investment into cognition rendered his nerves useless, and he lost his balance and ability to regulate his muscle contractions, causing him to fall to the ground and seize, further amplifying the effects of the strength and agility increase.
In short, this resulted in some of the worst torture Alex had ever endured, lasting for a solid 5 minutes, after which the effects slowly tapered off. He basically returned to normal functionality after an hour, at which point he carefully stood up from the ground, covered in sweat.
'Note to self. Invest stats one at a time or suffer the consequences.'
Alex didn't invest all his stats because he wanted to gauge the areas he was lacking after some trial and error. Turns out that may have gone a decent way towards preserving his sanity.
He looked around, reveling in his new stats. The world seemed slower and easier to understand, he could look in directions and feel his eyes focus quickly picking out details of the scenery. The cognition stat worked synergistically with the perception stat, allowing him to take in much more of the information it provided him.
Before starting with his other benchmarks, Alex wanted to test his limits as well as get acquainted with his body. He took off at a sprint for the forest, reveling in the power provided by his new stats.
'Sprinting feels effortless, like my body is incredibly light.'
'How much can I really push myself?'
Upon entering the forest, he noted the trees whizzing by him with careless abandon. Despite his ridiculous speed, he could still carefully control his footing, and he danced between the trees, across rocks, around shrubs. This was freedom and joy, unrestrained by the world and his weak mind, Alex was now free to fly.
After running around the forest for 15 minutes, Alex returned to the clearing, satisfied. Next he tried sprinting as fast as he could down the runway, and gave his best leap. After practicing a few times, he recorded his distance again, and compared it to his previous length. The results were simply shocking - he had already almost tripled his long jump.
Next he tried his vertical, and found that it had almost tripled as well, his vertical jump was almost 2 meters by his estimation. This surprised him, as he'd only expected it to double, perhaps his newfound flexibility was providing some unexpected benefits. He almost found his testing tree to be insufficiently tall, and he'd almost cracked his head on the lower branches.
Finally, he found he could now row two similarly sized logs tied together, indicating his strength had almost doubled, well in line with his expectations.
'Looks like my physical body gets multiplied by a factor of my stats, at least initially. I about doubled my strength, and saw a corresponding doubling of my strength.'
'Lets hope this trend continues and stat increases don't plateau'
'So investing my time to improve my physical strength wasn't a waste of time, as it just improves the foundation, and stats simply enhance it.'
'I would have to put another 20 points into cognition if I wanted to see an associated doubling in my reaction time now.'
Thinking about it for a second, Alex decided to invest his remaining 15 points into intelligence, dexterity and resilience, split evenly. This time, he invested 3 points at a time. Alex had chosen these stats as he valued the reaction time increase associated with intelligence, and the speed from dexterity, as it would prove invaluable in combat.
That brought him to his last problem - weapons and armor. He'd created something of a makeshift cloak out of the deer skin, but it was highly incomplete, as he didn't have enough leather. His clothes were basically rags at this point, and he'd basically been running around naked these last few weeks, though his dignity required he hold onto his rags somewhat.
The leather would provide decent, if temporary protection against errant claws, but probably wouldn't protect him against bites from the murder chickens - not that he was willing to test his theory.
His weapon supply was poor, he had lost his bow, and would need to hunt more deer to get more bowstring. While he hadn't broken any of his spears, they were hardly ideal, as they were simply sharpened wood, though he guessed it would be good enough for the chickens.
He'd much prefer a bladed spear so he could both slash as well as stab, giving him substantially more versatility, but iron was far outside his grasp, unless he chanced on an ore vein.
'I'll hunt during the day. Deer are too invaluable to pass up.'
'Come night time, we gather information on the hunters.'