Night fell. The moonlight was bleak as water, while the wind wailed like evil ghosts deep within the forest.
Inside a hidden cave somewhere in the mountains, a blazing campfire drove away the bone-piercing cold.
Bare-chested, Dago picked up the green herbal paste before him, crushed in a stone mortar and blended through an exceedingly complex set of proportions under the flickering firelight.
Without even furrowing his brow, he dipped a finger into the salve and, expressionlessly, smeared it bit by bit onto his horrific wounds—so deep that bone showed through, some still festering.
"Hiss—"
The instant the potent herbs touched the rotten flesh, intense burning pain erupted, yet his gaze remained as still as a pool of dead water.
Over the past three days, he had not rested for even a single minute.
With his own hands, meticulously and bit by bit, he had completely destroyed the handsome face that could once have driven women across the world mad.
At the same time, using this ruined body, he had calmly arranged all the survival supplies and escape preparations he would need to spend the rest of his long life deep in these mountains.
To completely escape the control of Sekajielin, that monster of power, while the machinery of the state hunted him frantically, "destroying" the "self" who had been her male favorite and making her lose all interest in searching for him was undoubtedly the most logical and permanent solution.
To ordinary people, wounds covering his body would already have been a hopeless predicament beyond even divine rescue—a certain death.
But for Dago, whose mind contained the knowledge base of an entire orthodox wizarding system, and who possessed Potioncraft mastery ingrained into him from his previous life—
Gathering materials in this world, finding substitute herbs, and concocting low-level healing