Chapter 23

Nick enjoyed the fight and while they were resting, he approached the corpse of Ent. Watching the various wounds, he saw a hole burned through with holy mana. It was the only spell that could completely pierce the trunk of Ent. Watching the branches that were completely without leaves, he saw how the curse that was in them was dissipating. There was no more danger in the black dust that was everywhere and he sighed with relief. Coming closer, he tried to pull out the arrow that was in the tree, but due to severe pain, he was unable to apply any force at all. Nick spent about half of his stamina and 1200 MP today. He also overloaded his constitution too much for the final blow, this was the most unpleasant consequence. His stamina will recover to its full value only after 33 hours, and to restore his mana will take about 53 hours in meditation.

Damn, I think I got the main lesson. It's about distributing your resources. I can't imagine how long it will take for the vampire and the prince to recover. At least I have 2000 MP in my sword. And I still have almost 1000 MP in my mana core.

Nick noticed his life force level had dropped by 30%.

Ah, was the blow really that strong, or could he draw out life force with the touch of his hands, and I didn't notice? It's good that the sword is full of life force.

Having drawn the life force from the sword, Nick restored it to its full value, which made it easier for him to move, but his body still hurt terribly.

An archer approached them, and she also looked bad. She hadn't received a cursed attack, but she was terribly exhausted. Nick looked at the others and saw that most of them had leveled up, all except Norn. Nick couldn't tell if it was because she hadn't done much damage, or because she hadn't received any experience at all. Nick planned to find out in the future. After a 10-minute rest, the Prince stood up and spoke.

"I suggest we go, and bring the rest of the group here later. I think the Alchemist might be able to extract something useful from the Ent later."

The others also stood up, two adepts had to carry the archer, since she could not move her legs at all. Nick wanted to suggest that one of them go and translate the others, but he himself did not want to do this, in case someone was attacked alone, he would have little chance of fighting back. And it would also not be safe to split the group. After 15 minutes, they reached the rest of their classmates, they were on a small hill with no trees. The prince approached and spoke.

"Hello everyone, we were able to kill the Ent, but we have some wounded. Healers please check on them."

The whole group quickly gathered around them and started asking different questions. Nick didn't care and didn't really listen to anything, he paid attention to what the Half-Elf was doing to heal the cursed wound of the Sword Adept. First, he covered his entire hand with life mana and began to make strange patterns with mana, these were not full-fledged spells and Nick could not understand them. The Elf manipulated the life mana for a long time and when he decided that this was enough, the life mana that completely enveloped the hand was completely absorbed into it, leaving no traces of the curse. According to rough calculations, this cost about 1200 mana, Nick thought that it was not expensive for such a wound. Noticing that the Secret Healer looked at everyone else and approached him, he waved her off.

"Thanks for your help, but I'm fine, it's better if you and the life mage try to do something with the vampire and the archer, they suffered the most." The girl didn't argue with him and went to the life mage.

Together they began to examine the archer, they cast a couple of small spells and the girl began to feel better. Her pale cheeks became normal, the trembling in her fingers stopped and she stopped feeling so much pain. Then the healers approached the vampire and Nick eavesdropped on their conversation with the help of a small sound spell.

"I know you're low on life force and need good blood to recover. So stop sitting there and go try begging someone for blood." The Half-Elf said.

"I don't want to, it's better to catch some animal and drink from it."

"You may be right, but with each passing day you will become weaker and weaker. The sun is already limiting you, soon you will definitely have to drink blood."

"Okay, I'll think of something."

Now Nick knew that she was indeed limited by the sun a little. That would explain why she didn't seem that strong for her level. And in his opinion, she was completely lacking in the perception stat, or the intelligence stat. Considering how easily she took his blow. By activating the [Reincarnator's Madness] skill, Nick learned that she would need to drink blood for two days, and also confirmed that most of her stats were on the magic side. Nick roughly calculated her stats and this is what he got.

Statistics:

Strength 170

Dexterity 170

Stamina 170

Vitality 300

Regeneration of Vital Energy 400

Constitution 300

Intelligence 170

Wisdom 170

Mental Control 190

Willpower 190

Perception 170

Charisma 70

Mana output 300

Mana 400

Mana Regeneration 400

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Luck 10

By their standards, she was a monster, but her skills were not as strong as he would like to think. She was physically stronger than him, but he did not notice her increasing skill in use, although he was sure that it was there. Her fighting art in his opinion was bad, in general in close combat, without blood magic he was confident in his victory, but he saw her blood magic perfectly well and he knew that in a real fight he would lose to her. Having seen her approximate characteristics, he thought about her skills. Her life force regeneration characteristic was crazy, but as far as he understood the whole point was that she, as a vampire, could use her regeneration only if she drank a large amount of blood. Nick was also sure that she had a blood core, like a vampire. But alas, he did not know the racial skills of vampires to understand whether she had a skill like his, which increases basic characteristics. According to his new calculation, she should have had a lot of blood mana left in her core, but in his feelings she was almost empty of all energy.

So, either she came with a completely empty blood core, or her regeneration eats up a lot of blood mana. Which shouldn't be likely. Too bad I couldn't figure out how much she spent during the fight.

Deciding to hold off on his conclusions, he snapped out of his thoughts and saw everyone already leaving for Ent's corpse. 15 minutes later, they reached the battle site and Teacher Elton was waiting for them there, along with his assistant.

"Greetings, you all did well. But now you have to survive in this forest. In a couple of days, all the remaining curse of the Ent in this territory will dissipate and monsters will start coming here that you will have to fight. Thanks to good teamwork, you were able to win, but you spent an incorrigible amount of resources, 12 people from your group do not have half of the mana and stamina that they should have. Of course, you will all have enough time to restore your stamina a little, but the main problem will be mana. Cassandra and Ariana have no resources at all, the prince has only a quarter of his mana left, the healers have spent more than half of their mana. Therefore, from this day on, do not turn on all your enhancing skills and do not fight at the maximum of your potential. You will have to live here for a very long time, but at the rate we are going today, you will not last here even a week. Keep this in mind."

After the teacher's speech, the prince lowered his head, ashamed of the fact that he spent so much mana and almost did not use the sword. The vampire did not care, Oriana also did not take her failure badly. Everyone who fought did not think that they did something wrong, everyone except the prince. Most who did not participate in the battle did not take it so seriously. Almost everyone thought that they could cope with this test, mainly warriors who quickly restored stamina, but the mages knew better that they would not last long.

"Okay, you won't get any more praise from me, in fact, you won't get anything from me except advice. Alistair, you can use the Ent tree to make a cursed weapon, or at least you have the opportunity. You won't be able to use the cursed Ent core for anything else, but if you really are a genius as they say, you are free to do whatever you want with the cursed core. We are leaving again and so that you don't think about returning to those houses that were before, I destroyed them. Don't forget, there is only enough food for two weeks, enjoy your survival." With these words, they quickly flew away.

Nick walked up to Liam and started a conversation.

"Liam, how are you?"

"Okay, but I should be asking you about the fight, you look rumpled."

"Yeah, that's right, I took one light hit from Ent, but I'm fine."

"Okay, I'm going to meditate and gather mana into the staff, you should do that too."

Liam chose the most comfortable place for himself, sat down and began to meditate. Nick really should do this too, but first he needed to eat, so that the speed of stamina recovery would not drop. He approached the corpse of Ent at some distance and began to rummage through the backpack in search of food. It turned out that there really was food for 2 weeks, but there was not much water, about 5 liters in a metal bottle. Among the food he had dried meat, something vaguely resembling very stale bread and some cereal, but it was not cooked. Among the other things that were in the backpack was a sleeping bag and nothing else.

This is not thick at all, we need to quickly find clean water, if we use mana to get water, we definitely won't survive here for more than a week.

Nick began to simply chew dried meat and try to chew bread. He had to eat it with a lot of water, since his mouth quickly dried out from such food. In order to eat normally, he had to wait until the meat and bread slightly opened in his mouth and only then could he live everything. At this time, Nick watched as the Alchemist tried to extract the cursed core from the Ent. Frankly speaking, he was not doing very well, first he tried a small saw, then switched to an axe, but all this was unsuccessful. The tree bark was too strong for tools of this level and he seriously lacked the physical strength to at least make a significant cut. Nick expected that a small saw would be strong enough to saw the tree, but it would take a very long time. Now Nick was doubly convinced of how useful his sword was, even without techniques, he could easily leave cuts on the Ent. Nick took the sword out of its sheath and threw it at the feet of the alchemist. He recoiled strongly in surprise.

"Take my sword, with it you will have a better chance of getting the core."

The alchemist turned his gaze to him and picked up the sword. He began to examine it. Taking it in both hands, he swung it and was able to cut the sword to half of its blade, to get the sword out he had to put in even more effort.

"Thank you, they didn't take it away from you because you made it yourself?"

"Yes, I was lucky."

"What do you say, it was you who cut it? Can't you help me?"

"Sorry, I put too much strain on my physique, my whole body hurts a lot."

"Okay, I'll go look for someone else."

"Good luck."

The Alchemist left the sword and went to look for someone who could help him. When Nick finished his food, he saw the Alchemist dragging the Sword Adept behind him. The guy took his sword and began to work with it like an axe, he struck a couple of blows where one piece of wood broke off and so on in a circle. Finally, seeing the cursed core, the guy began to carefully chop near it until he could grab it with his hands. The core did not want to be pulled out just like that, so the Alchemist stopped the adept and began to hit it with a hammer, using some incomprehensible spell. After a couple of minutes, the core separated from the tree.

Nick at this time looked at the physique of the Ent, and noticed that his "blood" had hardened and turned into something similar to resin, so that in the trunk of the tree there were many small inclusions of resin that resembled a circulatory system. Nick focused his senses on the cursed core, it was small, in size resembling a ping-pong ball, Nick stood up and approached the alchemist.

"Can I examine the core?"

"Certainly."

The alchemist gave him back the sword and also handed over the core. Nick poured some mana into it and tried to feel how much it could hold. It didn't remind him of the usual mana cores he had seen, the core was small and by rough feeling there was a maximum of 3000 MP. Nick handed the core back and asked about the obvious.

"Why is the core so small and why does it hold such a small amount of mana?"

"It's simple, your mana is not curse energy, the core can probably hold two or three times more curse energy."

"And how could Ent afford such a strong core?"

"I think the thing is that Ent invested all his resources into developing the Core, and he restored the cursed mana by absorbing the life force of the forest."

"Mmm, then we're lucky."

"You could say that."

After that, Nick went to restore his mana. Sitting down on the most pleasant piece of land, he began to meditate. Along the way, he thought about where to spend his free attribute points. He had 15 points, and the choice was between endurance and mana regeneration. Deciding to wait with this for now, he simply meditated. So time passed until nightfall, most of them set up sleeping bags and slept in them, some, like him, meditated. Nick realized that the prince had appointed those who would be on duty at night, since he saw that two people had climbed a fallen tree and were sitting with their backs to each other, examining the camp. Deciding to go to bed, he laid out a sleeping bag, climbed into it in his dirty armor and fell asleep.