It took hours for Chef to fight through the hallucinations, and with some of them that was literal. Floating heads make for very difficult opponents. On the plus side he had a very meaningful conversation with his stomach. Not that he could remember it, but he just knew that it was incredibly moving.

The bear had died at some point presumably between Chef poisoning himself with some uncooked berries he hadn’t tried before and the sun reaching the middle of the sky. Truly, the day was off to a great start.

He started out with a good stretch, checked and saw that he hadn’t gained any levels, and then went about retrieving his knife. That, as it turned out, was going to be a difficult task. The bear hadn’t managed to fully turn over in all of its flailing and gurgling, meaning it was still laying partially on the hilt… which had been pushed all the way into the creature as well. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but unfortunately for Chef, this was not your average bear. This was a wagon sized bear, the kind that you’d tell stories about and no one would believe you. Just like how that guy you knew would hold up his hands to show you the size of the fish he caught but had no proof of.

In this instance, Chef would have to roll the thing over in order to even reach the knife. Putting all of his weight into it, he got a running start and slammed into the massing being, bounced off of it, and fell over onto the ground immediately.

“It’s like trying to move a boulder,” Chef complained while rubbing his shoulder.

Ok, new plan. What’s the new plan?

Chef activated all of his skills as he considered his options. And then, in a stroke of conniving genius, he figured it out. He made some more thatch using his trusty strategy, twisted it into rope, and began to tie it together. Then, he wrapped it several times around the bear’s front paw as it faced belly to the sky. He tied some more crude knots, grabbed his handful of rope, and climbed a nearby tree. He then tied the ropes around his waist, grabbed onto it with his hands, and jumped off of the thickest branch he could find perpendicular to the corpse.

First, he felt his hands get skinned by the rope, second he heard an enormous cracking sound from his back, and third he felt the rope go taught. It gave a bit as he groaned in pain, slowly lowered closer to the ground as the bear was rolled over slightly.

Then the rope snapped. It had taken him most of the rest of the day just to make that stupid rope and he only moved the bear one or two goblin feet. He got up off the ground, rubbing his back in pain as he wandered over. Being able to at least see where the knife was now, he decided he’d gotten close enough. Chef then spent the remainder of the daylight available to him digging into the bear’s neck with his bare hands in order to get the knife out.

Eventually, he wandered off to get a couple of thin sticks and managed to pry it up just a little bit, pulling it out the rest of the way.

That was awful. Never again.

Chef took a much-needed meditation break before doing what he did best: carving the night away. Hours passed by so quickly when one was elbow deep in a creature they had just killed. Of course, the problem soon arose. He didn’t have his things with him. This then gave way to the second problem.

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“Where am I?”

Chef had no clue where the bear had taken him. Panic struck for a moment before he shrugged and decided it didn’t matter. He summoned some low heat fires and began to wander around looking for flat rocks. He eventually found some that were too heavy to carry and some that weren’t. The heavy ones he put into his breadbox after carefully placing the flour basket near his kill, and he brought back one at a time as he carried the lighter ones back by hand. After a couple of hours, Chef had amassed a dozen low heat fires with flat stones over them. He then spent the next hour slowly heating them while placing slab after slab of meat on them for cooking.

Metal was much better than stone for this, but he did what he could with what he had. In his breaks for mana regeneration, rather than meditate he just went back to carving. Chef entered the vicious cycle known as carve, cook, consume. The three c’s as he liked to call them. The faster he could carve the faster he could cook. And the more he cooked the more he could eat! And Chef could eat a lot. Another full day was spent on the creature, though he had to use a dedicated slab and fire for poisonous goop production just to keep the other predators at bay. Not that he killed them, of course. He just gave them some fun visions of whatever animals saw when they were fed hallucinogens.

Chef began to meditate to stave off sleep, determined to cook and eat this thing before it went bad; not to mention that he needed to babysit it anyways otherwise there was a good chance that his kill would get swept out from underneath him. Eventually he did just that. Finish it, that is.

He just lay there, peacefully chewing on one of his recently finished steaks as he cherished the taste of it. Nothing special, sadly, since only half of the berries in this forest could be trusted and he couldn’t for the life of him tell them apart. Not to mention the sadness that came from not having time or tools to make anything more sophisticated that cooked meat on a fire. Oh well, a problem for another day. His breadbox was full with flour and steak and, for the first time in over a week, so was he.

Nearby fires were smoking out the rest of the meat that he didn’t plan on eating today while his stomach remained blissfully silent. A smile spread across the goblin’s face as he let himself bathe in the satisfaction while the sun beat down on him.

*Ping*

Congratulations! You have digested a Giant Bear[49]! You have gained some of its stats and abilities!

Congratulations! You have gained Health, Stamina, Gusto, and Intestine!

Then he got back to work. Last time he’d cleaned a hide it was, in a word, disastrous. It smelled and rotted, both in short order. And while he still didn’t know enough to properly tan a hide, he did have some ideas on how to minimize the problem.

But first he needed some water. As usual, animal trails and tracks led him to a water source, a sizable creek in this case. With hide, river, and knife on hand, he actually did his best to clean the fur thoroughly of all residual meaty bits.

When he felt that the job had been done about as well as it was going to be, he went ahead and carried them back to his mass cooking location. Once there, he decreased the heat of several fires and used them to dry out the pieces of hide.

His plan was basically to treat the hide like jerky and smoke it out in order to make it last longer. And so, he returned to meditation while meat and hide both smoked around him. Every hour or so he’d set out a little bit more of his new favorite poison to distract and discourage the nearby wildlife before coming back to meditate.

Finally, when he felt like everything was as smoked as it needed to be, he grabbed the hide, cut it into appropriately sized pieces for his much smaller body, and used some extra thatch he’d been making to properly fasten the bear fur around himself.

Without the still water of the lake to admire himself in, he really had no idea how he looked, but he didn’t see any green skin poking out. Feeling confident, Chef began to make his way back to the human village while holding an armful of jerky.

…

Which way were they again?