When she awoke, night hadn't yet fallen. She thought of fishing again, while protected by her clothes, but she decided to walk a little further. There seemed to be no dangers lurking in the river bed, and she was eager to find a way out of that place.
Therefore, a vampire with sunglasses, gloves, and a balaclava-like garment, put away the strange castle-tent and advanced in the opposite direction of the current. Before that, she left behind a Portal mark.
The sun was low, though the night was hours away, so the cliff faces provided a welcome shade. In fact, there was little direct sunlight that reached there, barely an hour a day. Due to this and the humidity of the river, numerous plants more typical of jungle areas grew on the walls.
It didn't take long for Gjaki to hear the sound of falling water, to see how several consecutive waterfalls fell.
"Maybe I can go up," she told herself.
However, it was still daylight, so she couldn't risk tearing her clothes. Therefore, she waited in front of a small lake formed by the rushing waters, and where many fish went to spawn. There were also others that went there to eat those eggs.
There wasn't much to do there while waiting, so she pulled out the fishing pole again.
A few hours and thirty-odd fish later, it had gotten dark. Her blood pool was full again, and she even had some stored in the inventory. Although she was beginning to loathe the "fishy" taste of the blood.
The rock was wet and slippery, thus making the climb dangerous. Fortunately, it wasn't a single vertical wall, but consisted of many small waterfalls, falling one after another in staggered fashion.
The first –or the last– depending on how you look at it, was barely over a meter high. So Gjaki just jumped to get over it. However, upon landing, she realized how dangerous it was to lean on the slippery stone floor.
Her foot slipped, causing her to fall. She was agile and quick enough to react, place her hands to break the fall, and prepare to push off with them, roll over, and land on her feet.
Nonetheless, the ground was still slippery, and her hands weren't able to steady her, so she fell against the stone, and then from the edge of the waterfall. Almost like a cat, she flipped over in midair and used Gliding, to land softly back on the lake shore. She nearly fell off again.
"That hurt," she complained, although the pain barely lasted the time Self-Regeneration needed to counteract those small bruises.
She looked again at the place she had fallen from, defiantly. Then, Gjaki leaped again, with a little more force, thus rising a little higher. She then spread her arms to use Glide and land softly on the slippery surface.
"It's almost like skating," she thought while precariously keeping her balance.
She looked up the next step, this time a little more than two meters higher. With her whip, she tried to Grab onto a rock, but it was too slippery for the weapon to hold on. She couldn't hold on to the indentations in the wet stone wall either, and some kind of moss growing in some spots was also extremely slippery.
"There could be an entrance behind the waterfall," she wished.
However, no matter how much she looked, she didn't see anything that might look like an entrance, not a clear passage under the water either.
The vampire then used a huge battle hammer to drive one of the daggers into an indentation in the stone. After that, she wanted her fairy to retrieve it, but there was no reaction from her. Only when she pulled it out and laid it on the ground did the fairy obey her wish.
"It would've been too easy…"
Still, she drove the dagger back in, and then another, and then each of the swords as she climbed, thus creating something like a ladder. When Gjaki finally got over the waterfall, she looked for a place to stick one of the spears, and used the hammer to secure it. She then tied a rope and went down to retrieve the weapons.
The silver-haired vampire continued to carry out the same operation with care. She jumped if she could. She used the whip if there was something to Grab on, be it branches, bushes or stones. Gjaki created a weapon ladder if there was no other choice.
Thus, she reached what could be called the last step. From it, the roots of a nearby tree hung, and there were even areas dry enough not to incur major problems.
She decided to take the tent out for a moment to take off her clothes, dry off, and put them back on. She was soaked, which made the chill of the night more penetrating. Apparently, vampires have some resistance to cold, but they aren't immune at all.
"They've gotten a bit nicked," she regretted as she examined the daggers.
Neither she much cared that the swords had been nicked, nor that the spears had splintered. However, the daggers were her main weapon. In the early stages of the game, until she had reached level 15, she had been testing different weapons, and therefore had not bought a second level 5 dagger. So, Gjaki only had the two that could adapt to her level, up to 10.
There wasn't much she could do. She would have to use them as they were for the moment. Therefore, she went out and started climbing the roots. It was easy to climb them, use the whip to Grab onto some other roots, or drive the jagged daggers to find an anchor point.
It was a fascinating sight to contemplate from above the multiple waterfalls in all their splendor, the reflections of the moons shining in the water, to listen to the sound of the water falling. From there, the Forest of Death to which she had gotten from the beginner's area could be seen. It looked like an isolated valley between the mountains and the cliff.
She was still in a forest, but it looked different, it smelled different. The omnipresent aura of death didn't reach there, which didn't mean that there were no dangers, quite the opposite.
As soon as she arrived, she wrapped herself in Darkness and climbed a tree. She intended to carefully observe her surroundings.
Gjaki supposed that the forest must be the one the vampires arrived at in the game after leaving the undead behind. They were mistakenly relieved by it, and many times found a worse fate in the jaws of the fast and ferocious predators that hid in the undergrowth.
She recalled Eldi saying that it was impossible that an ecological balance could be maintained with so many of them, as there were many more than was sustainable in the forest. Therefore, she hoped that in reality there would be less, that it was just another joke from the developers. Nonetheless, even if there was only one, there was reason enough to be cautious.