Reincarnated as a Haunted House - Part 1 - The Serpent Forest

The Hunt Begins

Now that Vansh had discovered the process to acquire new skills, he was excited to get as many skills as he could, and for acquiring new skills, he made a simple plan, which had 4 basic steps.

Step 1: Lure the creatures out of the lake into the house's area.

Step 2: Kill them outside the house.

Step 3: Drag their body into the house, using a rope.

Step 4: Devour the creature and gain its abilities.

For the first step, he needed something to lure the creatures to the surface, and that something happened to be a lantern. Unfortunately, there were no more lanterns in the house. So, Vansh called Manual, and as usual, Manual replied, "How may I help you?"

"Can I recreate the lantern which was lost?" asked Vansh.

"Yes, you can," replied Manual.

"How?" asked Vansh.

"You can transform any part of the house to the lantern, but the object that you select to transform must have the same number of HP as the lantern, which is 5 in this case," replied Manual.

"Give me the list of all the part of the house which has 5 HP," said Vansh, and within a second after making that request, the transparent screen appeared before him with the list of all the objects in the house that had 5 HP.

After going through the list, he chose a bunch of bone fragments scattered on the floor and exchanged them for the lantern.

Now armed with the lantern and a rope, he returned to the lake, ready to lure the creatures to the surface. This time, he kept the lantern closer to the surface, ensuring that if any creature attacked, he could quickly pull it out.

In the beginning, all he could lure was Water Salamandars. He wasn't getting any new skills from them, but his stats were increasing.

Soon he improvised his baiting skill, and instead of the lantern, he started using Salamandar flesh as bait. Surprisingly, it worked. The technique lured in a different creature this time. It was a long-legged spider crab-like creature. Appraisal wrote:

"Drag Spider

Threat Level – D

Description – Drag Spiders are shy creatures, however, provoked enough, they don't shy away to kill off the threat. They can use sticky threads outside the water to drag their prey underwater and kill it.

Length X Width X Height – 6 feet X 5 feet X 6 feet

Weight – 100 kg"

When the Drag Spider initially surfaced, it swiftly shot a sticky thread toward the salamander flesh Vansh was using as bait and began dragging it underwater. Vansh, however, didn't let go of the piece of flesh. He grabbed a large knife and attempted to cut the thread, but to his surprise, the thread proved incredibly resilient and didn't break. Frustrated, he decided to take a more direct approach and attacked the spider itself. His aggression seemed to agitate the creature, causing it to abandon its pursuit of the salamander flesh and focus on attacking Vansh instead.

The shell of the spider was very tough, making it difficult for Vansh to penetrate any blade into its body. But Vansh found some gaps in the spider's body where its raw flesh was exposed, and he pushed his blades into those regions, eventually killing the spider.

Vansh managed to drag the Drag Spider's body into the house using a rope since he couldn't interact with objects outside the house. Once inside, he utilized his Devour skill to consume the spider. When the entire spider was devoured, Manual informed, "New skill gained – Sticky Thread."