The next morning, Damon stood in front of the guild quest board with a plan.
He had three days before Mira and Jax's goblin hunt. Three days to prove his editing concept worked. But he couldn't just wait around theorizing. He needed practical experience. His own content to edit. His own footage to test the Creator's Eye system with.
Which meant taking his first real combat quest.
He studied the F-rank combat postings with careful consideration.
His eyes landed on one posting:
Exterminate Slimes Near East Gate - 5 copper (repeatable)
"Slimes," he muttered. "The absolute bottom of the monster hierarchy."
"Smart choice for first combat," Luna said from behind her counter, having apparently overheard. "Blue slimes are slow, predictable, and barely dangerous. Even complete amateurs can handle them without serious injury risk."
"That's exactly what I'm counting on."
Luna stamped his quest form with efficient precision. "The eastern meadows have dozens of them. They respawn regularly throughout the day. Try not to get eaten, though slimes rarely kill anyone. They're more embarrassing than lethal."
Outside the guild, Jax was waiting with his Ruin Ball already prepared. They'd made the deal the night before over drinks: one single chance to prove that editing could genuinely transform amateur content into something people would actually want to watch. If Damon failed to deliver, Jax would take his equipment and move on to other opportunities. If he succeeded, they'd discuss actual partnership terms.
"You sure about this?" Jax asked as they walked toward the eastern gate. "Slime hunting is literally what children do for their first kill. It's not exactly exciting content material."
"That's because nobody's made it exciting yet." Damon activated his Creator's Eye, reviewing the recording capabilities thoroughly. "Besides, I'm not trying to make exciting content right now. I'm making relatable content. Everyone's hunted slimes at some point. Everyone's struggled with the absolute basics. That's the entire appeal."
The eastern meadows stretched before them in rolling green waves. Grasslands dotted with patches of forest. And there, wobbling lazily near a small stream, were the slimes. Translucent blue blobs about the size of large dogs, with glowing cores clearly visible inside their gelatinous bodies.
"Alright," Damon said, pulling out a stick he'd grabbed on the way out of town. Not ideal weaponry, but it would have to work. "Start recording. Keep me in frame as much as possible, try to stay steady."
Jax activated the Ruin Ball with practiced efficiency. "Recording now. And for the record, I still think this is a complete waste of time."
"Noted." Damon turned toward the camera with what he hoped was a confident smile. "Hi, I'm Damon, and welcome to what might be the worst monster hunting tutorial you've ever seen. Today we're hunting slimes, which literally everyone says are easy. Let's find out if that's actually true."
He approached the nearest slime with his stick raised cautiously. The creature didn't react at all until he was about five feet away, then it suddenly wobbled in what might have been menace. Damon circled it carefully, waiting for any kind of opening.
"Okay, so the glowing core is supposedly the weak point," he narrated, trying to sound vaguely educational. "You hit that directly, the slime dies instantly. Simple enough, right? So I'm gonna wait for it to lunge forward, then counter-strike and—"
The slime compressed its entire body and launched forward with absolutely shocking speed.
Damon yelped and swung wildly, missing completely. His foot caught on a half-buried rock and he went down hard, landing flat on his back in the grass with all the air knocked out of his lungs. The slime crashed into the exact spot where he'd been standing half a second earlier.
"You okay?" Jax called out, the Ruin Ball still recording faithfully.
"Define okay," Damon gasped, scrambling awkwardly to his feet. "Nobody mentioned they were that fast!"
"They're not fast at all," Jax said with barely concealed amusement. "You're just that slow."
The slime repositioned itself for another attack. Damon raised his stick again, considerably more cautious this time. He waited for the telltale compression that signaled an incoming lunge, then dodged desperately at the last possible second. His counter-strike missed the glowing core by several inches.
"This is significantly harder than it looks," he told the camera, breathing considerably harder than he'd like to admit.
Five attempts later, Damon finally connected properly. The stick hit the glowing core dead center with a satisfying impact. The slime made a wet squelching sound and exploded violently, coating him completely in blue goo that smelled exactly like stagnant pond water.
[BLUE SLIME DEFEATED]
[EXP GAINED: 5]
[SLIME CORE ACQUIRED]
Damon stood there dripping from head to toe, covered in slime residue, looking absolutely miserable.
"Still think this is relatable content?" Jax asked, lowering the Ruin Ball with barely suppressed laughter.
"More relatable than I actually wanted," Damon admitted, wiping blue goo from his face.
They hunted four more slimes over the next hour. By the fifth kill, Damon had improved marginally through pure repetition. He only needed three attempts instead of six, though he still ended up covered in progressively more goo each time. When they finally returned to Thornhaven, Luna processed the quest completion without commenting directly on his appearance, though her lips definitely twitched suspiciously.
[QUEST COMPLETE: SLIME EXTERMINATION]
[REWARD: 5 COPPER]
[TOTAL FUNDS: 22 COPPER]
Back at The Rusty Tankard, Damon claimed a corner table and pulled up his Creator's Eye editing interface. Jax watched with open curiosity as Damon began methodically reviewing all the recorded footage.
It was, objectively speaking, a complete disaster. Shaky camera work throughout. Terrible combat technique on display. Him falling over repeatedly, getting progressively slimed, looking thoroughly incompetent. His Creator's Eye system delivered its blunt assessment:
[FOOTAGE QUALITY: POOR]
[ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: UNINTENTIONAL COMEDY]
[ESTIMATED RETENTION: 25%]
"This is absolutely terrible," Damon muttered.
"Told you slime hunting was boring content," Jax said.
"No, this is actually perfect." Damon's mind was already racing ahead. "Everyone expects content to make them look good. Heroic. Competent. What if I lean directly into the disaster instead? Make it a genuine comedy piece about how even the easiest quest is actually hard when you're a complete beginner with zero experience."
He spent three solid hours editing. The Creator's Eye helped tremendously, identifying the absolute best moments of failure, suggesting optimal cuts, even adding simple transitions between sequences. The final product was exactly eight minutes long: a tightly edited comedy of errors showing every fall, every missed strike, every single moment of slime-covered humiliation.
He titled it simply: My First Monster Hunt (It Went Badly)
[CONTENT ANALYSIS]
[RUNTIME: 8 MINUTES]
[ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: HIGH - GENUINE COMEDY]
[ESTIMATED RETENTION: 45%]
"It's very short," Jax observed.
"Good content should be concise." Damon saved the edit carefully to the Ruin Ball. "Now we need to actually show this to someone."
Grimbold agreed to a screening that evening, though his enthusiasm was distinctly limited. "I'll give you ten minutes before the prime drinking crowd arrives. If it's boring, I'm cutting the projection short immediately."
That evening, maybe twenty people were scattered through the common room when Damon activated the projection. Most were clearly there for the ale rather than the content. The video began with his confident introduction, immediately followed by him falling flat on his face with comedic timing.
The small crowd chuckled.
Then came the missed strikes, the increasingly frustrated commentary, the moment where three slimes seemed to coordinate against him simultaneously.
By the time the final slime exploded directly onto his face at the end, the entire room was genuinely laughing.
When the projection faded to black, there was scattered but genuine applause throughout the tavern.
[VIEWERS: 23]
[RETENTION: 48%]
[CP EARNED: 50]
[CREATOR RANK: NOVICE (LEVEL 1)]
"That was actually funny," an older adventurer said loudly. "Reminded me of my own first slime hunt. Took me ten tries to kill just one."
"Same experience here," another agreed. "Made me feel considerably better about my own embarrassing rookie days."
A young boy approached shyly. "Will you make more videos like this?"
Damon looked at the kid, then at the small crowd still discussing the video enthusiastically, then at Jax who was staring at the Ruin Ball like it had just performed actual magic.
"Yeah," Damon said. "There'll be more."
Grimbold handed him a small pouch. "Five copper total. Viewer fees. Not much revenue, but you genuinely filled seats during my dead hour." He paused meaningfully. "That editing thing you did. That was legitimately different from everything else. Do it again."
[EARNINGS: 5 COPPER]
[TOTAL FUNDS: 27 COPPER]
After the crowd dispersed, Jax sat down across from Damon at the corner table. "Okay. I admit it completely. That was significantly better than I expected."
"Better than expected, or actually good?"
"Both." Jax pulled out the Ruin Ball reverently. "You turned my terrible camera work and your genuinely worse combat skills into something people actively wanted to watch. How?"
"Editing isn't magic. It's storytelling." Damon opened his Creator's Eye interface, showing Jax the timeline visualization. "I took twenty minutes of raw footage and found the eight absolute best minutes. Cut out all the boring walking parts, kept only the interesting failures, built an actual narrative arc with beginning, middle, and end."
"Can you teach me that?"
"Maybe eventually. But first we need to make considerably more content." Damon grinned despite his exhaustion. "This was just proof of concept. Twenty-three people isn't viral success. But it's a genuine start."
That night, Damon reviewed his system gains carefully:
[CREATOR POINTS: 50]
[SYSTEM SHOP: UNLOCKED]
[AVAILABLE UPGRADES: BASIC CAMERA STABILIZATION - 50 CP]
Fifty CP. Twenty-three viewers. Five copper in viewer fees.
It wasn't much. In his old life, his first videos had gotten similar tiny numbers. But he'd persisted, learned continuously, and improved steadily.
Here in this new world, he was starting from absolute zero again.
But he'd done it once before.
He could definitely do it again.
Tomorrow: more slimes, better content, bigger audience.
The grind had officially begun.