"Guh… cough." Alex was starting to drown in his own blood.
With his lung punctured, he had mere minutes until the other one collapsed.
So he quickly took another of the five potions he had with his unharmed hand, and with difficulty, he drank it down.
The effect became evident immediately, as if time were rewinding. The bones puncturing his lung began to return to the place they once were and started to fuse with the rest of the ribcage.
But the effect did not last much longer. After barely repairing the lung damage, the regeneration stopped.
"It seems the damage it can heal is limited," Alex murmured.
His hand was still broken quite badly, and his leg was still battered from the stomping.
Opening yet another potion, he drank it down again. This time, the rest of his injuries were finally healed.
"Damn, two potions…" Alex was mortified.
He hadn't even left for one hour from the cave, and he had already spent two potions. Added with the one he originally used, he had two left from the five he found in the pocket watch.
"I can't be caught like this again. I only get one more chance at healing myself. After that, I'll be fucked if I get injured."
Alex then found a place where he could take a breather and regenerated his mana for one hour, putting him back at full capacity.
After that, he began moving again, but this time with renewed carefulness.
He knew now that the boars traveled in pairs or groups. He wasn't a hundred percent sure, but he preferred to think they always did, so he wouldn't get demolished like before.
After walking for an hour and a half, he saw another boar.
"They seem to be the main dish in this forest," Alex thought.
This time, instead of circling the animal, he retreated slightly to a vantage point and waited to see how many there were.
After no more than five minutes, he saw another two join the wandering one.
He made the right decision to wait and see. He wasn't able to fight three boars. In terms of mana, he could only cast two Wind Slicers.
And even though he had a mana potion, he didn't want to waste it randomly. He wanted to save it for a life-or-death scenario since he only had one.
"Hmm… with how precious potions are, I should try to become an alchemist now that I have a book to look for adequate plants." Alex began to entertain the thought of opening an alchemist shop.
After the group of boars left, Alex began moving again.
He kept walking and dodging any animal he came across, but mainly it was those boars. They seemed to be the main population of this forest.
Some time later, Alex found his first batch of plants.
"Gravemint," Alex remembered.
A common plant, but still used plenty in alchemy as it preserved the freshness of other plants during potion-making.
There were quite a few, so he pulled a knife and started cutting them from the base, stopping from time to time to lift his head and listen for noises.
He cut them all and left the roots for obvious reasons.
He placed all the grass in his bag and resumed moving.
It was still spring and approaching summer, so the days were starting to last longer. He still had some hours before sunset. Still, after a couple of hours, he needed to start finding a place to spend the night.
After two hours of walking, his ears perked up.
He stood frozen, then crouched and moved backward to find cover immediately.
He found an easy-to-climb tree and moved up. He was sweating buckets, his heart beating like crazy, even faster than when he fought the boars.
And for good reason.
Down below, heavy footsteps made the earth shake.
From the trees appeared something that made his skin crawl and his hair stand on end.
A monster. But not just any monster — a MONSTER.
Standing hunched at four meters tall with a two-meter tail, it had pale skin with some scales. The body was lean, muscles clearly marked on it, with hands and feet about forty centimeters long and claws ten centimeters each. It looked like a nightmare come to life.
The head was enlarged like that of a dragon, with horns extending upward at an angle and curving backward toward the end. On each side of its head, it had two holes for ears.
Its eyes also resembled those of a dragon.
It seemed the monster could both walk on two legs and run on four.
Alex began to wonder if climbing the tree was actually safe at all.
The monster had a boar in its hand and was munching on it like a snack, blood dripping everywhere.
"That's what I'll become if that ever gets its hands on me." Alex immediately understood that he was not a match at all.
That monster emitted mana outward, something Alex didn't even know was possible. But he could gauge that he had only a fraction of the monster's mana.
So he stood still, like he had become part of the tree trunk. He even forgot to breathe as the monster moved unhurriedly toward some random destination.
After five minutes and no longer feeling the mana, he drew a deep breath and poked his head from behind the trunk to see if the monster was still in view or if it had truly left.
After seeing it was gone, he let out a long sigh and began trembling the moment the tension faded. Everything hit him: the fear, the nervousness, the helplessness.
This monster was otherworldly compared to the rest of the animals he had found.
The boars gave him a tough time, but he could handle them.
On the other hand, this monster made him unable to think. Something deep inside him, a primal instinct, screamed at him to hide and not let himself be seen, so he moved without even knowing how.
Taking a long moment to breathe and calm his mind, he felt tired and mentally exhausted. He resumed moving, this time to find a place to spend the night.
As he was walking, he started to hear a sound.
It sounded like water flowing.
This brought Alex excitement and joy, knowing he was closer to reaching civilization.
Still, he needed to spend at least another night here.
So he spent forty minutes searching for a suitable place, gathering plants along the way for selling later.
He found a 1.6-meter-tall crack on the rocky side of a hill that was 80 centimeters wide and 1.8 meters deep.
"It's a bit tight, but I can cover the entrance with branches and leaves and use this to escape the humid cold of the night," Alex thought, and began moving to collect what he needed.
After another thirty minutes of gathering flora to make the crack disappear, he stepped in and started building from the inside.
After finishing, he placed his bag as a pillow and rested his head on it.
There was still a bit of time before nightfall, but he was so exhausted that the moment his head touched the bag, he fell asleep