Chapter 29: Advanced Poultice of Recovery

She was quite eager to receive her system rewards, not because she was a huge fan of piles of shiny things – Scarlet liked quality, but she didn’t need it in quantity – but because the last time she’d accepted a System reward, it had increased her survivability exponentially.

What would that fight have been like if she didn’t have Inspect, or Mana Sense? How much material would she unknowingly miss or waste if she didn’t have harvesting knowledge? And would she even have been able to collect any of it if she never received Mana Imbuement? How else would she cut into those ridiculously tough hides.

Right, harvesting the beasts.

She looked at the scattered corpses around her and sneered. The fox looked smaller now that it was dead. With the aggression gone from its puffed-up frame, it almost looked deflated. Well, that and the blood loss, probably. Oh, and the missing head.

She turned to look at its head. That part of it hadn’t been covered with metal spikes, and apart from a bit of a metallic sheen, the thing was so ordinary it was bizarre. It was just the head of a very large fox. She didn’t dwell on it too much as she reached out and made contact with first the body, then the head. Each part made its way into one of the stasis slots in her storage bag.

The butchered and harvested roidcoons and shadow bat had been removed earlier, and were safely in her outdoor freezer, so she had a bit of space to work with. That was good, because after limping over to the other corpses and trying to store them away as well, she realised the corpses of the Level 4 and 5 juvenile foxes couldn’t be put in the same slot as the adolescent one.

As she worked, she was very careful not to look at the area where Maus had battled the Level 8. She was holding it together well, all things considered, but seeing his body like that? Just the thought of it made her stomach roil.

She was wounded in the middle of a weird forest. She needed to leave, go find shelter, or barring that, a safeish place to settle down and do more than just a patch job on her injuries. Then she looked down at herself. At the blood, the dirt, the steadily seeping bandages.

Right.

There were other notifications she would eventually need to check, especially that skill merge one. Right now, though, she only cared about one thing: whether nearly dying had earned her anything that would help her live.

She pulled up the reward screen.

[You have been Rewarded:

• Advanced Poultice of Recovery

• Foxsteel Shards -Tier 2

• SC1000 (System Credits)

• Spatial Storage — Expansion 1]

The first thing she saw made her nearly sag with relief, and she wasted no time retrieving it.

[Advanced Poultice of Recovery: A refined compound that accelerates tissue repair while restoring stamina and stabilizing internal reserves; reduces fatigue and prevents resource depletion during healing.]

“Oh, thank the heavens.”

Tension she didn’t know she was holding just drained out of her. She hadn’t been certain whether she was lying to herself about believing she’d make it to the tower.

She had to restrain herself from immediately slapping the poultice onto the nearest open wound. Instead, she moved on to the next item.

[Foxsteel Shards – Tier 2: Forged using traditional Vulpian smithing, metal shaping, and enchantment, these blades are highly mana conductive, durable and sharp. Each blade has a recall function. Durability and penetration scale modestly with user control.]

Well now, wasn’t that exciting. She’d test them out, later.

[Spatial Storage – Expansion 1: Stasis capacity increased to 10 slots; passive storage expanded to 10 m². Stabilization improved for harvested materials.]

Also, excellent. As she was increasingly finding herself in unavoidable altercations, it would be great to get an expansion on the storage bag. Later.

[sSC +1000]

That brought her balance up to two thousand credits. She’d check her balance, later.

Survival came first, and as nothing else was helping with the immediate ‘gross bodily harm’ issue she figured she’d deal with everything else later. Right now she was going to finish disappearing the bodies of the foxes into her storage bag.

Once she’d finished collecting the last metallic quill she could reach – the things were absolutely saturated in mana and there was no way she was leaving them all behind – it was finally time to move.

That included Maus.

Scarlet stared at what remained of him for a long moment, jaw tight, expression blank. It strained her to crouch down, but she did, placing his remains carefully into a stasis slot too.

“Perhaps that old adage about absence and fondness was correct,” she said quietly to no one. The temporary nature of their separation did very little to alleviate her feelings.

She stopped dwelling on it and went to find water. She’d passed a stream a while back with Maus and figured backtracking for a bit would be her best option. Patching her wounds without at least making an effort at basic sanitation was like playing Russian roulette with sepsis.

She made it to the narrow stream that cut through the forest floor. It was little more than fast-moving runoff over stone, but it would do.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The water was painfully cold.

She cleaned herself as best she could, hissing through her teeth as diluted blood spiralled downstream. Once the worst of the grime was gone, she peeled back her bandages and properly inspected the damage.

It was not ideal. She took a moment, now that she was cleaning up, to go over the wounds again. She diluted rubbing alcohol in some water, found a cleanish section of her jacket to stuff in her mouth, and bit down. She was glad she’d used cloth to muffle her shouts as most of the sound stayed trapped. But when she’d begun to rinse through the lacerations the pain was nauseating.