Chương 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. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. 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. Willpower alone saw her through that process, but she would take a few minutes of agony over the constant agony of an infection.

There was no way she'd use some unknown magic poultice on dirty wounds. Especially considering some of the lacerations were deep enough to need stitches. While she did have a few capsules of the 'feel nothing' injections, she had no clue how to use them and didn't feel comfortable stabbing herself blind. She also didn't want to pass out halfway through stitching herself together. Which left her with the feel nothing pills that she knew would compromise her.

As none of those options sounded appealing, she was going to go with the poultice. She just hoped the description was being literal about accelerating tissue repair. When she applied the poultice, the effect was immediate and deeply unpleasant. Heat spread through torn flesh in sharp, needling waves. The deeper aches flared next, followed by a crawling, tightening sensation beneath her skin that made her want to claw at herself. Apparently accelerated meant compress weeks of healing into minutes fast.

If only it was instantaneous. The majority of the process took place in the first ten to fifteen minutes. Every single minute had been a nightmare of sensation. Feeling her skin stitching itself together in real time was not something she wanted to experience ever again. Then, all at once, it was like the poultice ran out of energy. The healing slowed to a crawl. She could tell she was not fully healed yet. She was functional though, and that would have to do. Still.

For all the discomfort; the bleeding slowed, the dizziness eased, some of the exhaustion receded just enough to be manageable. She rebound her wounds, drank water, forced herself to breathe, then cleaned and re-sheathed the blade from her cane so she could use it as a proper walking aid once more. She looked reflexively to see how far the sun had moved. That's when she remembered she hadn't actually seen a sun. She'd seen light she mistook for sunlight, but no actual solar body in the sky.

It was just sort of bright. Light filtered down, but from where? Did this pocket world not have stars? Did it have outer space at all? She checked the time on her interface [00: 05: 13: 04 TE] There was no way it was 5am. She'd been out of it, but not so far gone that she'd miss nearly 20 hours. Also, what was TE? [TE (Time Elapsed): Measures the ongoing duration of time personally experienced by an individual under specific conditions, in specific locations, and often when under time dilation.] What?

Time dilation? Like her stasis bag? Scarlet nearly panicked. She'd been in here five hours. What if time moved differently, what if time was sped up in here? Her storage bag operated on absurd temporal compression, at one to a million, but stored objects weren't exactly alive. Surely being shunted between wildly different time states couldn't be consequence free.

Perhaps the explicit ban on putting living entities into her storage bag had brought her to the false conclusion that such extreme time dilation was not possible, safe, or healthy, for living beings. And if time here was accelerated relative to Earth… how much had already passed outside? She'd been in here five hours. If five hours had gone by inside, at one to one-million, centuries would have passed in the outside world. No, that wasn't possible.

She knew that because her Safe Zone quest was still active when she checked it, and that had a seven-day time limit. Unless the System just set timers arbitrarily, which she didn't think was the case. So, either the time here was moving more slowly, or it was moving more quickly, but it wasn't nearly that exaggerated. Luckily for her, she had an easy enough way to figure it out.

She used the time elapsed from her quest since she entered the portal world, then calculated it against the time elapsed within the portal world, and came up with an incredible realization. Inside the portal world, she'd spent over five and a quarter hours walking, fighting, and patching herself up. To the outside world, though, to the world she'd come from, only about seven minutes had passed. Seven minutes to five and a quarter hours. If she was doing her math right. One day outside would be over a month in here.

She didn't have precise numbers, but it looked to be around forty days... at least a month and a half. A month and a half. The implications were staggering. Or maybe that was the blood loss. She really needed to go. She could have a crisis when she was out of the woods. Literally. Unfortunately, the direction she needed to travel in to get to the tower would bring her directly past the site of the battle between Maus and the Level 8. She knew in her mind he wasn't really gone.

In fact, she wondered, if she sat down and meditated would she be able to feel the pieces of him reconstituting. Either way, his survival depended on hers. If she wanted him to live, she needed to survive, and make it to safety, or at least whatever semblance of it she could find. However, knowing his body was in stasis had her lips thinning on reflex. She wanted to give him a proper burial. She knew now was not the time. Still, she gave herself a minute.

Once that minute was over she reminded herself that sentimentality was for people who could afford to waste time, and that she was not one of them. Scarlet began moving towards the tower. She took a moment to reload her guns, before actively scanning her surroundings. Taking a few deep, settling breaths, she winced at the pain. The poultice hadn't fixed everything. On her way once more, the forest was the same but different. Nothing had changed outside of the destruction caused by the fight.

Still, Scarlet moved slowly, partially due to necessity and partially to see if she couldn't squeeze an extra smidgen of stealth out of this ridiculously loud foliage. She just hoped beyond all hope that there weren't a bunch of other opportunistic Level 8s leading along hyperaggressive skulks. Scarlet was, as always, foolish to hope. As she slowly made her way towards the tower, she was attacked no less than six times, three of which were a potential ambush.

One was a smaller skulk of three that included a Level 6 adolescent, a Level 3 and a Level 4. Bullets took down the weaker two before they could even use their skills. Having learned her lesson from before, the blade of her cane was out and imbued by mana before the biggest one had even passed. Turns out having a weapon that could cut into your enemy was a huge game changer. The rest of them were either weaker or solo, and being able to sense any potential enemies before they even knew she existed really helped.

Additionally, she didn't receive any more serious injuries. However, she absolutely aggravated the ones she'd already bound to the point where she knew at least one of her bandages were seeping through. She paused, swapped it out, then kept going. She walked for hours. She knew she was pushing too hard. She should stop, rest, eat something, and properly check her wounds. She'd already had to stop more than once to rewrap them and hydrate.

She just knew that if she sat down now, it would be that much harder to stand back up. So, she kept moving. Eventually, through the unchanging false daylight, the trees began to thin. The forest gave way to open ground. There, rising from the clearing was a tower wide enough to be a city block, and so tall she couldn't fathom how it stayed standing.