Okay, this is gonna be a bit of a darker story.

Also I fixed Athena to Artemis, that was a bit of an oopsie!

Chapter 1

Staring at the skies above the trees, Rosa closed her eyes, the box visible in her vision remaining even behind her eyelids.

It was oh-so-fucking-perfect. Death, reincarnation, and a golden spoon in her mouth in the form of a system. It would give her power and let her step up those pearly white steps all the way to becoming a powerhouse. She would 'court death' with the greatest of overpowered bastards and become powerful enough that she wouldn't die from a roof-tile falling off a scaffold and caving her fucking skull in.

But oh no, she didn't deserve a real system. Instead, the system she got, and it was oh-so-proud to be so, was a 'Sacrifice System'. The name was on the fucking tin. Whereas other systems had questing and leveling in a normal sense, she...had a vastly different system. She still had quests, but where hers differed was that her quests were about sacrifices. As in, tie a person or animal down, say some mumbo-jumbo, then stab them and sacrifice their essence to Khorne, Willy Wonka, the Rice Krispies Mascot or whoever the fuck the recipient was.

Her first quest? She had to hunt, kill and then sacrifice a rabbit to Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt. Her reward would be the ability to track small prey within 50 meters, as well as 50 'ritual points', a currency she could use to redeem various items. What items, exactly? She had no idea, because the ability to use the shop was locked behind a paywall of a hundred points, which was just fine and dandy.

As for the other features of the Sacrifice System, most were locked. Her inventory was locked, as was her map, as well as crafting, each locked behind varying levels of ritual points. The only one other than her quest log available to her was her status screen, which showcased that her stats were humiliatingly bad. Instead of numerical, her different traits and attributes had a letter-based grading system, which ranged from F-3 all the way to SSS+3. Each letter was able to go from three minuses to 3 pluses, so to go from F-3 to SSS+3, that was 66 upgrades.

All of her stats, ALL of them, were at the very bottom, F-3. She quite literally had the dung-beetle-bumper-pack of stats, and to upgrade one of them to the next tier was 500 ritual points. Ten quests to level a stat up even a single time. And she didn't doubt that as those stats rose, they'd get more and more expensive. So, she was basically the human equivalent of a dung-beetle, and in order to get more powerful, she'd have to sacrifice a rabbit.

She was in the middle of a forest, so that was good news, the only issue was that she had no clothes. She also had no food, nor any water, and certainly no shelter. No weapons, no traps, nothing but her hands, and with her abysmal stats, she probably couldn't outrun a nonagenarian with two locked-up hips, one half-working lung, cataracts, replaced knees and a terminal case of every illness on the planet if SSS+3 meant peak ability, so for Agility that would mean she would be above Gold Medal Olympians.

Using the only thing she had available to her, which was her big, smart, human brain, Rosa tried to figure out the best way to catch a rabbit. She would have taken a carcass if she could find one, but the issue with that was that it specifically said she had to hunt and kill a rabbit, a rabbit someone else had caught and killed wouldn't count. So she'd need to make a rabbit snare. Good thing she was very much an indoors person and had literally no experience making rabbit snares outside of video games.

Maybe she could try to find a rabbit hole, make a rope out of something, make a noose out of it, then plant that at the entrance to the hole, and when a rabbit emerged, yank the rope, and catch the rabbit? Or...maybe she could enclose a rabbit hole, find and seal any other exits, then pour water...no, she had no pottery, so how would she even carry the water there? A bow and arrow would be nice, except she hadn't used a bow and arrow since she was a child and she was abysmal at it then anyway. A spear would be useless because it relied on her being able to hit the rabbit, and she was both out of shape as well as being utterly hampered by her stats, so hitting a rabbit would be a miracle.

Laying a trap was the best option, and so, she got to work. First order of business, make a rope. She wasn't outdoorsy, but she had seen videos of people living in the wilderness and making shit, so she drew upon those memories and tried to mimic what they did. It didn't take long for her to find some plants that looked right, but what did take a long time was snapping them, flattening them down, removing the wood and leaving only the plant fiber. At least a few hours passed, and the pile of discarded 'ruined attempts' grew embarrassingly large, but eventually, she was left with enough usable plant fiber that she could begin.

Taking one piece, she wound it around itself, tied in such a way that it stopped it from unwinding itself. She repeated the process on the other plant fiber strands she had gathered, then tied several pieces together and wound the other pieces around it to make a crudely-braided plant fiber rope, using some scrap fiber from the ruined attempts to give it more strength and thickness.

Once she was confident in the solidness and length of her plant fiber rope, she wound it around herself from shoulder to waist and then crossed it over the other side, covering her nipples and giving her at least the tiniest modicum of modesty. Taking some more scrap fiber, she looped them between her legs and then through the rope, using a few dozen strands to achieve her goal of covering her privates to at least some extent. It made walking kinda difficult since each step shifted the plant fiber and made things tenuous, but it was enough for her.

Now equipped with a rope, she continued onwards, the entire time spent looking for either something to use as bait for a rabbit, or alternatively, an actual rabbit hole. She kept her eyes peeled for any sign of a rabbit, such as tufts of fur or droppings, though in a forest, that was fucking hard. She saw signs of wildlife, dropping of animals she didn't recognize, as well as of course noises as well, but no rabbits.

However, after taking a break for a few minutes, it seemed her luck had turned. A rabbit, asleep beneath a bush. She didn't dare move, not when a rabbit, the target she was searching for, was so near to hand. She had no carrots, and she had no fucking idea what rabbits liked other than carrots, so she had no bait to use. Her only hope was to throw the rope like a lasso and catch the rabbit, since she knew getting too close would make it bolt. The problem with that was that she had no fucking idea how to throw a lasso, and she was really unwilling to risk the rabbit bolting. Once she caught one, the perk Artemis would bestow upon her would be fucking amazing for finding other rabbits or small prey.

Taking a few steps towards the rabbit, she could see it was breathing, so it wasn't dead, that was good. Taking the rope from her body, she utterly blocked out the fact she was now completely nude once again, her focus absolutely laser-pointed on the rabbit. Trying to control her hands, she wound the rope around into a loop, trying to figure out how to make it so that when it was pulled it would tighten, and eventually figured out how to do so, all the while terrified that the rabbit would get up and just leave.

With her very shitty lasso ready, Rosa held it in her right hand, her left firmly holding the end of the rope, and she tried to judge how to throw it so it'd get under the bush and over the rabbit without getting stuck. Eventually, she scrunched up her eyes, thrust her right hand forwards and threw the lasso, wrenching the rope as it landed in the bush, and succeeded...in wrapping around some fucking branches. Her fist clenched around the rope, but not for long, as she realized...the rabbit hadn't...moved? It was still just laying where it was, still breathing but just not moving.

Tilting her head to the side, Rosa approached the bush, dropping the rope and having both hands free in case it bolted, she'd have the slimmest chance to catch it. But each step she took forwards, the rabbit simply ignored. Now thoroughly confused, she arrived beside the bush and knelt down, peering at the rabbit, who still just refused to move. She got back up and took a few steps back, worried that maybe the rabbit was sick or something, and looked around, eventually finding a sizable rock she could use.

Then she remembered she also had to sacrifice the rabbit, so crushing its head would likely not go over well. Instead, she searched for a better rock, and found one that was pointy enough to do the trick. Heading back to the rabbit, she pushed into the bush, angled the rock carefully, then practically dropped down at the rabbit, smashing the rock into its body entirely, mostly thanks to just her body weight.

Wincing at the scratches that the bush had given her as well as a nasty poke she'd gotten to the thigh from a particularly sturdy branch that had ended up between her thigh and the ground, she took ahold of the impaled rabbit and got up again, extracting herself from the bush with her prize. Not wasting any time, she laid the rabbit down, and contemplated on how exactly to sacrifice a rabbit to a god. Maybe a few words, offering the rabbit to Artemis, with some rocks to symbolize what exactly was being sacrificed?

She had no better ideas, and so, she extracted the rock from the rabbit and left it beside the carcass, grabbing rocks from the ground to encircle the carcass and the rock that had killed it. Then, she knelt beside it, closed her eyes, and tried to dredge up some manner of religious zeal. "Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, I offer this prey, alongside the stone that was used to hunt it, to you in my time of vulnerability and hope it pleases you." Accompanying every word, Rosa could feel...something, looking at her.

It felt like eyes were watching her, judging her, weighing her very existence. She pushed through, delivering her words without stuttering or failing, pushing as much meaning as she possibly could into them. As she finished, the rocks that she had randomly decided to circle the rabbit with lit up, and in a flash of white, both the rabbit and the rock vanished, leaving an empty circle and a fairly uncomfortable girl. The presence she could feel viewing her departed along with the rabbit, and Rosa, who had been an atheist up until that point, decided that religion probably had the right idea.

Her quest finished, however, she also received a 'ritual report', which indicated that the grade of the ritual was F-, as well as explaining why it was so. The rabbit was in fact sick, so that detracted from the value. However, the fact the ritual had a clearly defined circle increased the grade, and on top of that, the hunting tool that had been used being sacrificed alongside the rabbit also increased the grade, raising it up from the bottom-tier ritual it initially would have been thanks to the sickness up to F-, which gave her a full 60 ritual points.

Paired with the 50 points that the quest gave her, that was immediately enough to purchase the ability to access the shop, and since she figured it'd probably be necessary, she did just that. Immediately she opened up the shop to check it out, and the prices were...well, rather respectable actually, but that was because they were all medieval-era items. Ratty clothing, iron tools, that sort of thing. To buy a pair of the cheapest panties was 25 ritual points, so if she wanted clothes, she'd need to sacrifice another few rabbits, if she could find them of course.

Closing the shop down, Rosa redeemed the other quest reward, and in the top of her vision, a bar appeared, mimicking a compass bar, except it lacked any indicators. She figured that as she got within range of any small prey, it would be tracked on that compass bar. Turning on the spot, she could see it tracking something, but what it was she had no idea, plus, she doubted she would be quite as lucky as to find a second sick and easily-caught animal.

Instead, she focused on her quest log, reading the content carefully multiple times.

A Show of Piety

God: Chhinnamasta, Goddess of Self-Sacrifice

Description: Chhinnamasta, Goddess of Self-Sacrifice, would like to see a self-sacrificial act that venerates her.

Reward: Calculated based on ritual grade

That, was pretty fucked, actually.

She had no idea who Chhinnamasta was, but the quest made it clear that she was a Goddess of Self-Sacrifice, and she wanted Rosa to perform a self-sacrificial act. Since it had to be in the bounds of a ritual, that meant performing some manner of personal sacrifice as the focal-point of a ritual. The reward was supposedly based on the ritual grade, but how would she raise the grade? Maybe by a more severe or significant sacrifice? But, she was out in the wilderness, and sacrificing something of herself wasn't exactly easy, she couldn't just slice her hands open and perform a blood sacrifice, she didn't have a knife for starters, nor any bandages or disinfectant.

Gnawing at her lip, she tried to figure out a good way she could accomplish the quest in both a timely and effective manner, since she really wanted to actually be wearing clothes again, being nude out in the middle of the wilderness was not exactly comfortable. Granted, being out in the middle of the wilderness itself wasn't exactly her idea of a good time, but at least she'd have clothes.

But after giving it some serious thought, Rosa couldn't think of anything she could use to sacrifice to Chhinnamasta, at least, nothing that didn't carry a very real danger of killing her. And she'd already tried death once, she had no intention of giving death a second greeting any time soon. But...maybe it didn't have to be a physical sacrifice? Perhaps she could sacrifice something that wasn't physical? It was a ritual after all, so perhaps she could sacrifice...well, if she was looking for a significant sacrifice, maybe sacrificing the thing she was working towards first and foremost would give the ritual serious value.

She wanted to get clothing from the shop, so perhaps outright sacrificing her ability to buy the basic level of clothing from the shop would be both a meaningful and significant sacrifice, whilst also not crippling her in some capacity. The next tier of clothing after the basic one required several hundred ritual points per piece...that made it too easy, the ritual would be cheapened, so she amended the ritual words in her head, sitting down cross-legged within the circle of stones, and closing her eyes.

"Chhinnamasta, Goddess of Self-Sacrifice, I hereby sacrifice to you my ability to purchase the clothing available to me up to the price of a thousand ritual points, and shall never be able to purchase the aforementioned clothing items." Inside her head, she felt a feeling akin to something snapping irreparably, and the same feeling of being observed washed over her briefly before receding much more swiftly than the previous ritual, though that was almost certainly just because last time it was a complete shock.

Checking the shop first, she could see that the options for the cheapest and the next tier of clothing were blacked out, preventing her from purchasing them. Annoying, sure, but it was both a meaningful sacrifice, whilst also not screwing her over in a significant way. Plus, it meant she could now get a new quest, so it was a win-win-win really. She checked the ritual report, and her ritual was given an F+1 rating. The ritual itself was at a baseline of F-3, since you could sacrifice a single piece of hair, and the ritual then rose to F-1 thanks to the circle, then up to F+1 thanks to the value of what was sacrificed. She could possibly have gone higher, but the more limitations she added or the more severe the ritual, the more major the thing sacrificed would have to be.

An F+1 ritual gave her 100 ritual points, and from that, she deduced that each - or + was worth 20 points. F-3 was worth just 20, F-2 was 40, F-1 was 60, then 80 for F, 100 for F+1, 120 for F+2, and finally 140 for F+3. Whether that'd continue with E, D and beyond she didn't know, but only time could tell, so instead, she completed her quest. In addition to another 50 ritual points, she was surprised by a pair of cotton underwear, consisting of a simple pair of panties and a bra, dropping into existence in front of her.

'Clothing' was what the quest reward supposedly was according to the updated reward part, so that was rather curious, and it made her wonder if she sacrificed something else, would the reward have been related to that? She sacrificed her ability to purchase these clothes, as well as future clothes, and so, she was rewarded with that which she attempted to sacrifice. Whatever the case was, she put the undergarments on happily, and whilst they weren't made of a very comfortable fabric, they fit her perfectly and covered her private places, so she had no complaints.

Well, she was still in the middle of nowhere, but at least her tits weren't swaying in the breeze.