My Home is complete!
This time around, My Home is an ambitious creation that wraps the entire forest in its embrace.
I covered the whole forest—roughly a hundred meters in diameter—with silk, and converted it directly into My Home.
From a distance, it might look like a giant white cocoon.
So, I built the whole thing in one night, but I wonder what the townspeople think?
At this scale, the nest is impossible to miss, whether they want to see it or not.
I'll use Clairvoyance to check on things.
Hm?
Huh?
Hmm...
I can't really tell.
Maybe they haven't noticed yet?
Well, they'll probably figure it out eventually. Until then, I guess I'll just wait.
*Phew.* It's been a while since I made something this big, so my Stamina Points took quite a hit.
I pulled out the food I'd stored in my Dimensional Storage and ate it.
Nom nom.
I think I'll use this place as my base for now and write off the Great Ello Dungeon as a vacation home. I mean, it's still usable, so rather than writing it off, I should think of it as a secondary residence. If something happens, I can always retreat there. Besides, with those scary people chasing after me, having more bases isn't a bad thing.
For now, I'll just keep an eye on the town and take it easy, I suppose.
Nobody's coming.
Why not?
I can tell there's a bit of a commotion in the town.
The soldiers and adventurers are bustling around, clearly agitated.
But even though they're busy, it doesn't feel like they're gearing up to deploy.
If anything, it seems more like they're strengthening their surveillance to keep watch.
What gives?
If a dangerous monster was nesting right next to the town, shouldn't they jump into action right away?
Why are they dragging their feet?
Have they gotten complacent from too much peace?
Or maybe—wait, did that vampire girl's mother feed them some nonsense yesterday?
Lady Seras, was it?
That woman and the vampire girl arrived at the town around dusk yesterday.
And just as I predicted, they went straight into the biggest mansion.
The servants bowed their heads to her, so that mansion must be where she lives.
Which means she's the wife of the person in power in this town.
The powerful wife of a powerful man, high social influence, saved the vampire girl in the heat of the moment yesterday, and now I—a spider—have set up what is unmistakably a spider's nest right here.
Ah... right.
It's like a word association game.
I can pretty much see where this is headed.
Yesterday, she was also whispering something earnestly as she left. There's a real possibility she went home and talked her powerful husband out of sending a subjugation force.
Seems likely.
No, wait.
That's not a done deal yet. Surely they're in the observation phase right now. A preparation period, you could say. If I wait a little longer, soldiers and adventurers should come swarming in.
And when that happens? Welcome!
It'll be Experience Points galore.
Right?
Three days passed.
Still no action from the town.
Why?
The soldiers have increased their numbers and set up a base at the guard post closest to my nest, and adventurers have started scouting nearby from time to time.
But that's all.
The soldiers stay on guard but won't take any further steps, and the adventurers approach to a certain distance before pulling back.
Why pull back at that point!?
With nothing better to do, I raided and wiped out a bandit gang nearby.
If there are bandits bold enough to attack the temporary town leader's wife and child, then the security around here really isn't great.
Once you step a little outside the town, they're everywhere.
I used Detection to track down those bandit gangs and raided their hideouts.
Delicious.
Good for Experience Points and good for filling my stomach.
That said, the taste was awful.
They stink, those guys.
One of them had a Skill that made him odorless, which was at least passable, but even that one tasted bad.
The knights I ate before should have been reasonably tasty, but apparently, humans vary quite a bit in flavor depending on the individual.
Well, I'm accustomed to eating all sorts of poisonous and nasty things, so a bit of stench is nothing I can't handle.
While I was taking out bandits, my Level went up and my Skill Points reached five thousand.
Now I can grab another broken Skill!
I was all excited about that, but for some reason, the required Skill Points had increased.
That's weird.
I was supposed to get Salvation at five thousand points, but the number had somehow jumped to six thousand.
Did I misread it?
By the way, the other broken Skills are looking a bit out of reach.
Lust and Purity are at ten thousand.
What really gets me is Jealousy at fifty thousand and Humility at a hundred thousand.
It's not as bad as Immortality, but they clearly don't want me getting those.
Oh, as for the vampire girl's Skill Points, I can take a portion of those.
But saving up that much would be a pain.
So, having no other choice, I took the Demon King's Skill instead.
"Demon King: All Status types and all Resistance types increase."
Now I'm officially part of the Demon King's club!
Yay.
Well, possessing this Skill on its own is meaningless—it's just a Skill, after all.
You need the Demon King Title for it to really work.
The Skill itself is just a slightly high-performance Enhancement Skill.
Plenty of other people besides the actual Demon King seem to have this Skill, too.
For reference, each of the boosted Status values went up by a hundred.
Meh.
No, I only think it's underwhelming because my base Stats are absurdly high, but normally, a flat plus one hundred to every Status would be an incredibly powerful Skill.
And it boosts Resistances too.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a cheat Skill.
The Hero's Skill that pairs with it probably has the same effect.
From what I've seen of human Status values so far, humans really are weak.
The highest I've seen was that mage traveling with the knights, and even he barely managed four digits in his magic-related Stats.
Aside from him, I've never seen anyone with four-digit Stats.
So if you added a plus one hundred bonus to every Stat, well, that would make a dramatic difference.
Among weak humans, that alone would put you a cut above the rest.
And if you level up the Skill, the bonuses increase further.
But on the flip side, that's all it is.
An effect so negligible that I call it "meh" is, for humans, an earth-shattering advantage.
Come to think of it, without even realizing it, I must have turned into something absolutely monstrous.