{Small Iron Trinket}
{Base Attack +1, effective in storage}
A blue window floated above the metal scrap in Ellie's hand. The piece of metal looked like it had been used as a chew toy for a while. Ellie put it in her backpack and felt the subtle strength increase wash through her muscles.
"Well, now that I know these things are weak, let's be bold and harvest more teeth."
A couple of hours later, Ellie was sitting behind the same rock, with a pile of monster teeth next to her. Ellie was sharpening her broom handle into a spear using one of the cleaner sets of teeth she had harvested. Suddenly, a system notification pinged right in her ear and almost made her stab her finger with the tooth.
"I swear, you're doing this on purpose! Ellie frowned and looked at the window that had popped up.
{Reminder: 7 days of unclaimed daily quests}
"Daily quests? I didn't even know I had quests!" Ellie said while pressing the button to claim the rewards.
{7 quests points claimed}
{Survival quest detected as trivial, removing quest}
"What the hell is a quest point?"
{quests points can be used to unlock system features}
"Since when can you answer questions?" Ellie said, surprised that it had actually responded. But she got no answer back from the system this time.
Ellie looked through the little window that popped up and saw that even the cheapest feature she could unlock was at least 10 quest points, so she just put it to the back of her mind.
"I'll figure that out later," she said, as she picked up the spear she had made, and deposited the teeth in the now-empty first inventory slot.
She walked deeper into the nest, stopping every once in a while to listen to the sound of scratching the Gnawlings made when they walked. She moved slowly and inched her way deeper into the tunnels, past the guards in the periphery. Every once in a while a Gnawling made its way through the tunnel she was walking through, and she would have to sneak up behind it and kill it quickly before it made too big a noise. She made her way through winding caverns and over small rivers, before finally arriving at the gathering place where the Gnawlings would come to rest. The tunnels opened up into a wide cavern dotted with luminescent mushrooms and tufts of a gray grasslike plant. A clearing with many holes sat in the center of the cave, with the sound of soft breathing coming from a few of them.
"Garren said that monsters tend to bring any interesting objects back to where the leader sleeps, so all I have to do is sneak in, grab some loot, and then leave fast before I get noticed."
She moved slowly towards the center of the field of nests, stopping inside of an empty nest halfway when one of the guards came back from patrolling the outside. After the sound of gentle snoring came out of the nest the guard waddled into, Ellie got up and crawled the rest of the way to the central nest. Looking inside, a tiny rat with red markings was laying on a pile of loose metal, using a book as a pillow.
'I guess their leader is this weird mutated guy.' Ellie said as she slowly started to pick up pieces of metal to see if any of them would register as trinkets.
After touching almost 30 pieces of scrap metal, only 4 seemed to make the system react, so she picked them up and put them in her sack. She then looked at the leatherbound book the rat was using as a pillow, and could barely make out the cover, which was in some sort of language she had never seen before, but it looked old. She wanted the book, but she didn't know how to steal it. She poked the side of the book, slowly moving it out from underneath the rat, watching for any sign that it was going to wake up. Just as she was almost done moving the book from under the rat, it twitched a little and looked like it was going to open its eyes. Eventually, the rat just snorted and rolled over, and its head was no longer on the book. she put it in her bag and started to crawl out of the hole. She didn't want to find out why this small mutant could become the leader of the Gnawlings. As she was pulling herself out of the hole, a soft squeak came from behind her, and she felt a rush of warm air come from behind.