kscans

Chapter 10 - The Bounty of the Mountains (Part 3)

Before the corpse of the Mudderboar he had somehow managed to defeat, Yuri was lost in thought.

"For a moment there I thought I was done for... but this thing must weigh close to a hundred kilograms. ...Even if the edible parts are less than half of that... yeah, I can live on this for a while."

...His thoughts progressed that far, and then,

"...Um... what do I do now..."

There was no way a modern Japanese person living a normal life would know how to butcher game. What’s more, Yuri’s previous life had been long spent in a hospital, far from the outdoors. He had, however, read novels as a hobby that depicted the butchering of game, and he remembered the need to bleed the animal and cool it in water. In those novels, they hung the game upside down to bleed it, but...

"...There’s no way a seven-year-old kid can handle a boar that’s over a hundred kilograms..."

...Even before considering his stats, he was not tall enough to even try lifting it.

Yuri, stumped right from the start, racked his brain and came up with the idea of trying to use water magic. If it was called water magic, it must be magic that manipulates liquids. Blood was a liquid, so it shouldn’t be impossible to control it...

Having convinced himself of this, Yuri gathered all the magic power he could muster and activated his water magic, picturing the Mudderboar’s blood being manipulated and drained from its body.

"Oh... this is pretty difficult... but is it working...?"

Apparently, it worked. The boar’s... the Mudderboar’s blood flowed out from its body at a steady pace, staining the surroundings crimson. Yuri, who hadn’t thought about the cleanup, grimaced, but for now, bleeding the animal was the priority. By the time the blood flow stopped, the Mudderboar had been almost perfectly bled.

"I managed to do it... but it’s a pain... and it feels like I used a lot of magic power..."

It did not seem as serious as running out of magic power like in light novels, but it was true that he felt a little tired. According to the conventions of light novels, it should recover if he rested for a while... As he was thinking this, Yuri realized his mistake.

"No... I can use the Status Board, so I should check it with that, dummy."

He muttered to himself as he opened the screen and saw that his magic power value had decreased from 100 to 63. Ah, so I did use magic power, but I didn’t use as much as I thought... As he was vaguely staring at it, the magic number went up by one. Ah, so magic power does recover with rest, he convinced himself, and did not pursue it any further. If only he had looked at the "Magic Power" entry a little longer at that time, a pop-up window would have opened and displayed an explanation of "Magic Power." It would probably have said...

«The power required to cast magic. All humans in the Forea World possess a certain amount of magic power, but most only have enough to use life magic (ten or less) and are not at the level of what could be called a magician. Unlike vitality, there is no correlation with age. The average magic power of a so-called magician is fifty.»

He would have known that the average magic power of an ordinary person in this world was about ten, and that even a magician’s average was only about fifty. But Yuri, having seen his magic power recover numerically before his very eyes, stopped investigating it any further. It was truly an unlucky coincidence.

And as for Yuri himself...

"It took 37... more than a third of my magic power just to bleed it... I need to work harder and raise my level..."

That was his takeaway.

...If the magicians of the world had heard this muttering, they would surely have stared in disbelief. No, they might have angrily confronted him. That was how abnormal and unusual the feat Yuri had accomplished was.

To begin with, water magic was magic that manipulated water, but it was common knowledge in this world’s magic that if there were impurities or suspended solids in the water, the flow of magic power would immediately worsen. A small amount of dissolved inorganic matter was one thing, but blood, which was rich in organic matter and cell fragments, was far too difficult to manipulate with normal water magic. What’s more, to drain all the blood from a body... even if the target was dead, it was not something that could be done normally. Without being completely ignorant of such "common sense," being in a corner with no other way to bleed the animal, and possessing nearly twice the magic power of a normal magician, Yuri would not have been able to pull off such a reckless feat... in fact, he would not have even thought of it. Of course, Yuri himself had no awareness that what he had done was reckless at all.

Well, at any rate, the bleeding was done. The next thing to do was...