Chapter Seven: Leveling Up Through Monster Battles?

“Your Majesty, you’ve grown even stronger—this is the result of a single night’s work.”
The old village chief was deeply gratified; the wayward youth he once knew had finally matured.
In this era, people judged a person’s strength by the amount of loot they could gather from slain monsters.
The more loot obtained, the more formidable that person was considered.

In the central plaza, the ground was piled high with the spoils that Mo Fangyuan had collected from killing monsters the previous night.
It was just like two nights ago, only the quantity had increased.
“So much experience…”
As mentioned before, there were few glass bottles in the Block Kingdom, and Mo Fangyuan hadn’t asked them to waste resources making more.
“In any case, it’s all enchanted. Whether I absorb it into my body and then enchant, the result is the same.”
He stepped into the sea of shimmering orbs, and immediately, experience globes surged toward him, astonishing the onlookers.
They didn’t quite know why they were so amazed, but it didn’t stop them from thinking it looked impressive.

A chime sounded.
His experience bar filled, and Mo Fangyuan rose from level zero to level one—a common occurrence in games.
But the prompt he heard from the heavens was anything but ordinary.
[Vitality +1]
“What… what is this?”
He felt a warm current flow through his body, an indescribable comfort.
“Is this the leveling system so often written about in novels? Is this my golden finger?”
The adolescent in him was ecstatic.

Chimes rang again.
[Strength +0.2]
[Constitution +0.5]
Unfortunately, this experience bar was far longer than the one in the game. It took more than fifty orbs to rise a single level. Only after devouring all the scattered or bottled experience on the ground did he reach level three.

Mo Fangyuan’s perspective on monsters shifted subtly but significantly.
Before, he killed monsters out of necessity, to protect the Block Kingdom. Now, he could hardly wait for nightfall, eager to seek them out and slay them.
Do not underestimate this small change—from passive to active was a world apart, a necessary step in becoming a true hunter.

“Use what’s useful, store what isn’t for now!”
He roused the nearby bystanders from their daze, hefted his axe, and strode toward the kingdom’s southern lumberyard.
Ore was scarce, and so was timber.
To get rich, start by chopping wood—Steve’s old wisdom.

Compared to Mo Fangyuan, no one cared more about timber output. If the Block Kingdom were a development and farming game like Clash of Clans, iron would be black oil, while timber would be gold or elixir.
In the early stages, “elixir” was clearly more important than “black oil.”
His plan was simple: increase the number of lumberjacks and ensure each had an iron axe.
In the blocky world, trees grew fast—a sapling could become a towering tree in a week at most, a day at best.
Fortunately, trees only seeded once a year. If they reproduced faster, the entire world would have long since become a vast forest.

The lumberyard was adjacent to an oak grove beside the Dark Forest. The Dark Forest’s giant trees made it easy to harvest vast quantities of wood.
But “breeding ground for monsters” was no empty boast! The forest teemed with monsters, and no lumberjack would risk death for timber. Harvesting from the Dark Forest was simply not an option for the Block Kingdom at this stage.

But everything has two sides; where there are drawbacks, there are also advantages.
If he was right, Mo Fangyuan could grow stronger by absorbing experience orbs.
Where did those come from? Monsters, naturally—it wasn’t as if he could kill people or animals.
The Block Kingdom was desperately short of livestock for breeding; any they had were reserved for mating, far too precious to slaughter.
As for killing block people, that was unthinkable! Mo Fangyuan was no enemy of humanity.

Thus, the monster-breeding Dark Forest became his ideal target: by day, he could hunt monsters there, weakening the threat to the kingdom; by night, he’d guard the fields.
Sleep? Impossible, not in this lifetime!
Wasn’t the path of cultivation far more enticing?

“With this new power, the kingdom’s peril will soon be a thing of the past!”
After spending considerable time in this world, Mo Fangyuan understood that in a place with scattered populations, backward development, and every village fending for itself, notions like economy and politics were largely useless, even laughable.
Could a ragged village of a hundred souls truly stand as a kingdom? In the world he’d come from, humanity still struggled against nature, teetering on the edge of extinction—a primitive era.

Here, for the people of this world, monsters were both their competitors and their greatest threat. If they were lucky enough to discover another human kingdom, they’d likely band together in alliance to resist the monsters.
Conquering other human nations?
Please, just feeding their own was hard enough. If more mouths arrived, they might as well all go feed themselves to the zombies!

This brings to mind a passage in “The Watchers” about population growth—
Where people gathered, monsters swarmed, increasing spawn rates; the denser the population, the faster the monsters appeared, and the higher the chance of rare or elite variants…
This, too, was one of the main reasons why human kingdoms were so few and their numbers so small.
Large populations couldn’t withstand the onslaught; small populations, too, were doomed…
With too few people, development was slow, making kingdoms weak, and weak kingdoms couldn’t withstand the monsters—leading to fewer people still…
A vicious cycle, utterly unbreakable!

In short, this was an era where individual power far outweighed collective effort. As long as Mo Fangyuan attained overwhelming strength, all problems could be solved.
Yes—through strength.

In the blocky world, chests and similar storage items came with their own internal space, so the lumberyard required little room for stacking timber, and thus wasn’t very large.
With a small warehouse, a timber processing area, and a rest zone, the whole thing covered barely a hundred blocks.
During the day, all the lumberjacks were out in the woods, leaving the lumberyard empty save for Mo Fangyuan himself.
After a brief inspection, he found only half a small chest of logs in storage.
A small chest held twenty-seven slots; half meant thirteen. Each stack of logs was sixty-four, and felling an oak typically yielded four logs…

Solo survival was one thing in a game, but for a kingdom, such a quantity was woefully insufficient.
“Maybe… I should build another lumberyard?”
He dismissed the thought at once. The Block Kingdom lacked the manpower; diverting more workers to chop wood would cripple other essential tasks.

He’d had several ideas, but none were feasible.
Better tools? No ore!
Redstone automation? No redstone!
Improved management? Not worth it for such a small crew!
Overtime? He wasn’t about to work everyone to death!
…

“Monsters, screw you!”
Mo Fangyuan offered the monsters a heartfelt curse.

After leaving the lumberyard, he decided to check out the Dark Forest—though he knew better than to actually enter, content to observe from the edge.
The map south of the Block Kingdom ended at the Dark Forest; no one had ever ventured beyond it.
From a distance, the forest was shrouded in shadow, its depths pitch black, with occasional flashes of red.
No need to look—those weren’t zombie eyes, but the gleaming eyes of spiders.
With the giant mushroom caps looming over the trees, the entire forest resembled the enchanted woods of a fairy tale, home to some witch.

Of course, this was just a metaphor—if there really had been a witch, Mo Fangyuan would’ve rushed in already.
The witches he referred to were the industrial sort, not the ugly, big-nosed hags.

The Dark Forest completely encircled the Block Kingdom and the southern plains, blocking any route further south.
After circling the edge of the forest till noon, Mo Fangyuan gave up; in all his time playing Minecraft, he’d never seen a dark forest of such vast scale. The number of monsters it sheltered was unimaginable.

“Maybe… I’ve found a solution…”
On his way back to the kingdom, Mo Fangyuan spotted a small river teeming with fish.
But that wasn’t the point—what mattered was that he suddenly remembered fishing rods…