Adventure

After two days in and out of consciousness, Roy's fever finally broke on the morning of the third day, and he woke up. The old couple caring for him couldn't help letting out a heavy sigh of relief. They'd been worried sick these past few nights, especially after seeing One-Eyed Jack and the night watchman covered in blood and wounded. They'd thought they were about to lose this child too.

Aunt Susie sat beside his straw mat, clutching his hand tightly. Her slightly swollen face was full of affection.

"We've already heard about the cemetery from Thompson. The Fletcher family's fate was sealed... I believe they'll be reunited in Goddess Melitele's realm... You did all you could, child. Don't dwell on it or try to get close to that monster again. Now lie in bed and rest. If something happened to you, what would Old Mol and I do?!"

Roy looked into his parents' concerned eyes and at their aged faces, and couldn't help feeling a little guilty.

He still remembered how, while he'd drifted in and out of consciousness, the old couple had taken turns staying by his side and feeding him mushy food from time to time. They probably hadn't slept much at all these past two days.

But he had no choice... The Northern Wars hadn't even arrived yet, and already a terrifying cemetery monster had appeared, bringing a deadly threat.

What a miserable world.

Disasters and calamities, known and unknown threats—they wouldn't give him time to slowly grow stronger. He had to seek growth on his own.

He never wanted to experience that profound helplessness again.

"Dad, what's the village decided?"

"The village chief went by carriage to the city two days ago to ask the lord for help..." Old Mol sounded uncertain. All three of them knew in their hearts that the lord of Xiabosada wasn't exactly a saint. It was perfectly normal for a few people to die in a remote little village like this. The lord's soldiers were only eager when it came to collecting taxes. When it came to fighting monsters, they'd run faster than anyone. At most, someone would come to Kaye Village and make a few token inquiries.

"Those who went with him put up a notice on the city's bulletin board, waiting for a Witcher to take the contract. It'll take a month or two, but we'll hear something eventually... Don't worry about it."

Roy sighed, but he still felt uneasy.

After lying in bed for two days, he felt rusty all over. He wanted to go out for a walk and see Old Jack at the tavern. But the old couple insisted he stay put, and he wasn't allowed out of bed until noon.

An odd atmosphere hung over the village. A few people hurried back and forth along the streets, worry and fear etched across their brows. The people who used to stop and chat by the roadside had vanished, and the farmers who normally worked hard in the fields outside the village were gone too.

Most of the villagers had shut themselves inside their homes, anxiously watching the outside through their windows. No one knew if the cemetery monster might come into the village and abduct someone, so they'd had no choice but to stop all their usual activities.

Every so often, the sound of a child crying or a man and woman arguing drifted out from a house, making the ominous feeling even worse.

The bulletin board in the center of the village, which had been unused for a long time and covered in cobwebs, had been cleaned up. A contract had been posted on it. Unfortunately, Roy couldn't read more than a few words in Common Script.

When he reached the tavern, Jack was sitting alone in front of the bar, lost in thought.

The old man's wound had been bandaged with clean white gauze. He reeked of herbs, and his face was tired, his eyes bloodshot. He looked terrible. He'd lost Pusig, his friend of decades, overnight, and had aged considerably. His hair and beard had turned a glaring white, and the old spark was gone from his one eye.

"You're here, child. Feeling better?"

"Yeah, I'm all better." Roy sat down beside him and fell silent. He didn't know what to say. That night, he'd been nothing but a deserter.

"Have a drink with me." A flash of pain crossed Old Jack's face. He poured two glasses. It wasn't sweet-and-sour fruit wine; the smell of alcohol was sharp. "With my old friend gone, there's no one left in Kaye Village to drink Dwarven spirit and play Gwent with me..."

"To Pusig!" Roy's heart shuddered. He abruptly picked up his glass and drained it in one gulp. The strong, burning liquor lit a fire in his chest, and he made a decision.

"Another drink. To Fletcher..." Roy took a deep breath, then paused. "And Little Snot."

After Roy drank himself red in the face, as if to vent his feelings, Old Jack stopped him. They talked about what had happened over the past few days.

The village had sent people to seek help from the barracks in Xiabosada, but, as expected, they'd been turned away. Just as Roy had thought, unless monsters went on a rampage in large numbers or bandits invaded, the army wouldn't mobilize.

There was something Old Mol and his wife hadn't told Roy: four people had died in Kaye.

Besides Fletcher the Butcher and his son, as well as the blacksmith Pusig, another villager had gone missing over the past two days. Maybe the hothead hadn't wanted to live anymore. He'd headed to the cemetery alone at dusk and never returned.

An ordinary person who ran into that thing would only be slaughtered.

After hearing it all, Roy hesitated to speak. But when he saw how badly Old Jack was doing, he swallowed his words and left the tavern.

In truth, as someone who'd been obsessed with games, he'd studied the various monsters brought by the Conjunction of the Spheres. Now that he thought about it, he was ninety percent certain the monster lurking in the cemetery was a bloodthirsty creature known as a Grave Witch. It liked to use its long tongue, like a hidden weapon, to crack open corpses and suck out their marrow. If it ran out of corpses, some particularly vicious ones would go hunting near human settlements, burying the living they captured underground and waiting for them to rot before eating them.

More importantly, he also knew its weakness.

Grave Witches usually made their homes near cemeteries, like this one, which had simply taken over the gravedigger Gonger's house. But they had a major weakness: they feared sunlight, and their fighting ability dropped sharply during the day.

But even if he told the villagers, would anyone believe him? And how could he explain where the information came from?

Without gathering a dozen or more people, they wouldn't stand much of a chance even against a weakened Grave Witch.

Neither the blacksmith nor the butcher had relatives in the village to inherit their property. Aunt Susie's distant relative, three generations removed, didn't count.

The village chief was temporarily managing their businesses. Once their deaths were confirmed, Roy figured some of their property would probably be embezzled, some would be handed over to the lord of Xiabosada by the soldiers, and the rest would be kept as payment for hiring a Witcher. A hundred crowns?

The village chief had taken away and secured the money and valuables from both homes, but other things remained inside.

Roy sneaked into the blacksmith's house and ransacked it, stashing more than fifty crossbow bolts, a half-new steel sword, torches, grease, and several sturdy hemp ropes in his Storage Space.

At the butcher's house, he took several dozen pounds of preserved raw meat. Everything in his Storage Space remained perfectly still, so food, raw meat, and the like would never spoil.

As he'd hoped, he also found a fist-sized bag of yellow powder in the wardrobe. Fletcher had used it to anesthetize animals. Mixed into water, a dose the size of a fingernail could leave a two-hundred-pound animal unable to move within minutes.

The powder was also at the heart of his plan.

His Storage Space was packed full.

Finally, Roy took the short knife the butcher had used for over ten years to kill countless animals.

The knife was as long as his forearm and shaped like a boat. Its blade was sharp and white, while the body and spine were dark brown, stained that way by years of accumulated animal blood. No matter how much he washed it, the smell of blood lingered.

"Uncle Fletcher, Little Snot, Uncle Blacksmith, if I get the chance..." Roy swore silently. "I'll use this knife to avenge you and cut that bastard's head off!"

His battles with the wolves and the Grave Witch had already changed his thinking. He'd come to understand more deeply that he was no longer in the peaceful world he'd once known. If he wanted to find peace by hiding and running away, he'd only get the opposite.

With his steady source of experience as a butcher's apprentice gone, Roy planned to try a faster method and take a few risks.

The cemetery lay to the east of Kaye Village. The four dead villagers would keep the Grave Witch fed for a while, so it was unlikely to leave the cemetery to hunt during that time.

Still, to be safe, Roy set his next plan in the woods west of Kaye Village, far from the cemetery and less than a mile away.

During the day, he went to the woods to scout the area, inspect the surroundings, and find a suitable large tree. He made all the necessary preparations.

At night, while Old Mol and his wife were asleep, he slipped out. When the patrolling night watchman had made his way to the other end of the village, Roy quietly left and headed for the tree he'd scouted during the day.

Then he tied several pieces of raw meat, smeared all over with Anesthetic Powder, beneath the tree. He'd deliberately made the meat bloody and pungent to attract his target more effectively.

Once he'd finished, Roy quickly climbed the tree, lit the torch tied to a branch, took out Gabriel, loaded a bolt, and closed his eyes to rest, waiting in silence...

Throughout the process, Roy kept taking deep breaths. He was afraid of attracting something terrifying, but also worried that all his efforts would be for nothing and no wild animals would take the bait.

But once he'd drawn the bow, there was no turning back.

Pale moonlight filtered through gaps in the trees, casting dappled light across his young, resolute face.

Roy pressed his lips together and stayed perfectly still, slowing his breathing. He waited nervously for about an hour. When dogs began barking in the distance, he knew he'd succeeded.

Five or six starving wild dogs, their eyes red, burst out of the bushes and fought over the pieces of raw meat tied to the hemp rope. They ate greedily, drool dripping from their mouths and bloody water splashed everywhere. Two even tore into each other over the food. When they'd devoured every scrap, they still weren't satisfied. They bared their teeth, covered in bits of meat and blood, and barked furiously at the person in the tree.

Roy's eyelids twitched. He suspected the gray-furred brutes might be carrying rabies, but he wasn't afraid of them.

"You mutts! Come up here and bite me if you can!" Sitting in the tree, he taunted the wild dogs from above as he squeezed the trigger and shot at the targets below... He'd coated the crossbow bolts with the potion too, just to make sure.

These were shooting conditions hardly any different from the time the four of them had protected him. Roy had the absolute advantage of the terrain. After one real battle, his mindset had matured, his grip on the crossbow was steadier, and his aim was better. Three bolts took down two arrogant wild dogs.

When the remaining dogs realized something was wrong and tried to run, the anesthetic began to take effect. They made it less than a hundred feet before collapsing limply to the ground.

Roy didn't climb down to finish them off. Straddling the tree, he took his time and kept shooting, one arrow after another, until three notifications appeared in his template confirming experience gained. Only then did he make sure the unconscious wild dogs were dead.

Level 1 (123/500)

"Fifty experience in all. Wild dogs and wolves are worth ten experience each, much faster than being a butcher's apprentice. I only need to do this eight more times to level up." Roy gazed at the wild dogs' corpses, bristling with bolts, his heart heavy.

Risk and reward went hand in hand. At least his dangerous plan hadn't been for nothing.

He rested in the tree for a while longer. After confirming there was no danger nearby, Roy climbed down, retrieved his bolts and tools, and dragged the wild dogs' bodies to a patch of hard-packed earth nearby. He piled them together, poured grease over them, set them alight, and headed back to the village.

The operation had gone smoothly, with no real danger along the way. Roy even had time to wipe himself down with cold water and wash off the faint smell of blood.

For a while afterward, he went hunting almost every night. At first, he could go no more than three nights before making a catch.

All sorts of animals took the bait: wild dogs, wolves, foxes, wild boars... Once, even a massive gray bear showed up. It snatched the meat off the hemp rope and charged back into the woods, and Roy didn't dare chase after it.

None of these animals gave more than ten experience. Once he ran out of raw meat in his Storage Space, he cut meat from his prey. As a butcher's apprentice, he was quite skilled at it.

Unfortunately, even though he moved his traps each time and had tried the woods north and south of the village, the frequency of his catches inevitably dropped after half a month.

He was only catching something once every five days. The animals in the woods had clearly learned to be wary.

His rate of gaining experience fell again. Then, one night a month later, he shot his last wild dog and finally accumulated enough experience.