The system decided to surprise Zoe with an unexpected gift right as she prepared to drop down from the tree and begin going around killing things.


    New Quest!


    [THE FIRST HARVEST]


    As a newly minted Higher Demon, you now have the power to accelerate your own advancement with the blood of others. Ordinary Humans can actually do that too, but having thrown away your mortal shell first makes it feel significantly more dramatic.


    A humble suggestion—slaughtering 250 monsters of the same core type might be a good start.


    -Rewards-


    1 Elemental Awakening Core (Rank E)


    “Oh, well that’s neat.” Zoe actually read through the full text this time, managing not to get completely sidetracked by eviscerating another foolish bunny. “Elemental awakening core sounds like something that will probably be useful. But that honestly sounds like way too many monsters.”


    It wasn’t that Zoe was worried about not being powerful enough already for the challenge. What actually concerned her was the question of whether she could actually find that many killer rabbits in a reasonable amount of time. It reminded her of those times when grinding for rare drops in games involved more time waiting for new enemies to spawn than the time it took to kill them. I’m going to be really annoyed if I don’t find a giant nest of them or something.


    What was the saying? Beggars can’t be choosers? That might have been true back home, but Zoe didn’t care that the system was the one dishing out the rewards for free here. After ‘throwing away her mortal shell,’ Zoe wasn’t going to stay weak enough to ever be the one to beg.


    “Holy hell, that was a good one,” she muttered to herself. Lilith gave her a funny look—Zoe didn’t care though. I totally have to remember to use a line similar to that at some point.


    “Are you going to eat that?”


    Looking away from her blood-coated claws—and the mangled carcass impaled on them—Zoe raised an eyebrow in response to Lilith’s question. “No, I don’t think so. But you can’t have it.”


    “And shut up. You’re a ghost, you can’t actually eat anything anyway.” Zoe mindlessly brushed away the coming protestations as she set about her real business—carrying out the very first test of one of her new skills.


    It wasn’t hard to decide which one—because the name made it sound fairly simple, and also she now had the perfect materials for it. Assuming it worked the way she expected, that is. So without further ado…


    Blood Whip!


    Sure enough, the skill used the blood that was coating her claws, not the blood that was currently inside Zoe’s body. It also seemed to rip the rest out of the already torn-up carcass as well. Now that’s handy.


    Zoe realized she was grinning. Her grin grew when she realized that the writhing streamers of blood formed into a whip-like shape all on their own, even going so far as to coil across her palm in a surprisingly ergonomic way.


    Her grin grew even more when she saw how long it was. “Seriously? How does a tiny bunny even have this much blood?” Sure, the twisting threads the liquid had formed were quite thin. But it was still at least four meters or so long. Maybe it’s just one of those things where the change in shape makes trying to compare the volume deceptively tricky.


    Almost reluctantly, Zoe wrenched her gaze away from her new toy to focus on the bunny. The one that was still alive, not the one she had spun into a macabre implement of bloody pain. Or pleasure. My pleasure, specifically. Zoe dearly hoped that no pleasure would ever be taking place on the other end of the skill. That would probably just ruin it by making her uncomfortable.


    Zoe flicked her wrist. The whip followed her motion—or rather, it followed a rough approximation of what she felt like a casual whip snap should look like. She’d never used a whip, so she doubted that it would have had the same result with something that wasn’t formed by her own skill.


    The remaining bunny seemed to eye her warily. It didn’t make a move to retreat, though—your mistake. With another flick of her right hand, the crimson whip lashed out with a disturbingly wet crackle. Somehow—luck, fate, maybe—the thin tip snapped straight into the little critter’s face. It died instantly.


    Zoe stared. That was honestly a little anticlimactic, really. But what should she have expected? It literally worked exactly like she wanted it to. Maybe she was just getting too used to things going disastrously wrong.


    She decided to check on her quest. Pulling it up from her status, it looked exactly the same as before, aside from a new line.


    -Progress-


    2 / 250


    Simple enough. Zoe was still glad that it was there. It would have been annoying to have to keep track of it herself.


    “Are you going to do something with those cores, or are you just going to stand around looking like you think you’ve accomplished something?”The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Fuck you too, Lilith, Zoe thought as she stepped forward and focused on adding the blood from her latest kill to her new favorite weapon. While Blood Whip didn’t consume itself so fast she had to worry about using it immediately, it was still fast enough that she could tell it had gotten a bit smaller already.


    Surely she could replenish it by siphoning off blood from subsequent kills? It wasn’t working, though. Was it possible that she needed to get closer? That didn’t feel like the problem. Wait a minute…


    Blood Whip!


    “A-ha!” Zoe couldn’t help but cheer upon figuring it out. She had already correctly intuited that the skill fed on blood to sustain itself once created. But as it turned out, there was a difference between passively continuing to use the skill and actively modifying it. The latter took mana—just like the initial activation probably did. So while a lot of my magic looks like it’ll be based on my body, it’s still magic, which uses my soul. That would probably be a good thing to keep in mind.


    It didn’t take much time at all for the whip to finish draining the second bunny. Latching onto the corpse like a parasitic vine, it throbbed and pulsed in a subtly disgusting way as it siphoned more material. Zoe was left with a freshly engorged whip and a mummified husk within just a few seconds.


    With another snap of the conjured weapon, Zoe smiled. It wasn’t just nearly twice as large as it had started—it felt more powerful too. It would be really cool if she could keep amping it up with every corpse she made, similar to a stacking kill-streak buff. I really hope so.


    The last thing Zoe did before setting off in search of more prey was to toss the two newest monster cores into her personal inventory. It would be nice to have a snack or two saved for later.


    _____


    “Muahahaha-ha!”


    Zoe cackled with unrestrained glee as her crackling whip tore through the remaining half-dozen or so bunnies. Actually, the name of the skill might be a bit of a misnomer at this point. It was more like a bloody tentacle, writhing in her grasp as it flicked through flesh and bone. It had become increasingly clear over the past half-hour that her stacking kill-streak theory was partially correct.


    The downside was the significant soft-cap that occurred way sooner than she would have liked. Beyond a certain point, the whip stopped growing thicker or longer—instead favoring a smooth transition into a violently chaotic, constantly twisting armament of carnage. Even a glancing brush from the lower part of its length was enough to inflict injury, as the once orderly twisting of fluid streamers morphed into a turbulent tangle of razor wires.


    Naturally, this meant that it started to consume a lot more energy. That was half of the actual soft-cap—the weapon started consuming itself far faster than it could kill and consume things to regenerate.


    The other half of the problem went back to mana. Specifically, beyond a certain point, Zoe had to focus more on keeping the unruly magic from tearing itself apart than on the actual combat. She was starting to strain her soul again.


    Still—it was pretty damn satisfying to casually flick her hand and have a dozen different enemies explode away from her before she could blink. Yes—explode. They’d stopped getting one-shot about ten minutes ago. Well, they still got one-shot, just in a much more dramatic-looking way. Not anti-climactic.


    The obvious downside was a bit of an irony—making her blood whip stronger ended up wasting more of the blood from the things she killed with it. Once again, reality ended up being annoying like that.


    With another flick of her wrist—the left one this time—Zoe snatched the dozen or so fresh monster cores into her own inventory. She had discovered that handy trick on her own, through the brilliant technique of Lilith deciding to tell her about it.


    She also got two level notifications.


    You have leveled up! You are now level 7.


    +15 stat points.


    +4% core progression.


    Blood Whip has reached level 2!


    “About… time.” Zoe staggered a little as coursing energy sparked through her core, sending expanding plumes of power out through her body. It felt a bit more intense than before. Was that just what happened as she kept going up, or was there something specific to it? Or maybe it was just random. For some reason, I don’t think that there’s a major power threshold at level seven.


    Also, she now had seventy-five stat points banked. Not that banking them got her anything. A childish part of her just wanted to get them up to an even one-hundred. The more rational explanation was that she still didn’t know what kind of distribution she should be investing in. Which is a good reason to test some more of my skills. Also wait, fuck. One-hundred isn’t even divisible by fifteen. The closest she would be able to get would be an awkward 105. Mathematical reality could be disappointing.


    “Hey Lilith, are you sure that there isn’t anything else I can do with all these monster cores?” Zoe hadn’t eaten any of them since her little pep-talk up in the tree. She’d just been storing them in her inventory for later, despite Lilith’s protestations. Need to make a point not to automatically follow the actual Demon’s advice immediately.


    “You can sell them once we find civilization. I’m fairly sure even Rank F cores sell for a decent amount, at least with how many we’ll have.”


    “Thanks,” Zoe started to say—


    “But then again, you could also just rob people. Eating the cores to get stronger faster actually makes that easier too. Win-win.”


    “Right…” Zoe just shook her head as she trudged towards the end of the tree-line. “I could definitely consider that.” Not. Killing people was one thing, robbery was another. ‘Oops, I think I accidentally robbed a guy!’ In Zoe’s mind—unlike killing—robbery was only permissible in self-defense.


    The ground had leveled out here, such that Zoe was no longer trudging uphill—just trudging. The mania of her recent slaughter was starting to fade, bringing her back to how she felt before—tired and cold. Just moments ago she felt like switching things up and experimenting with a different skill. But as she stepped out from the forest, she committed to instead finding some kind of shelter.


    “Ha! That’s convenient!”


    It looked like someone had built a house here, for whatever reason. Had built, in the past tense. There was a sad-looking quarter of a wooden fence that seemed to have been most of the way through rotting before even the mold died from being frozen over. Then there was also a big lump of snow that was notable only for the rest of the area—probably a field or meadow at one point—being otherwise nearly flat.


    Most importantly, there was a chimney.


    Leaving the woods behind, Zoe trudged towards it with renewed vigor. I wouldn’t say no to a hot bath—but all things considered, I think I’ll settle for a roof, a fire, and not worrying about getting attacked by Demon-worshiping cultists.