The rest of my shopping was relatively uneventful, though I did buy and sell a few more items, as well as purchasing some luxury items out of pocket to resell to the village at cost and ingratiate myself more at home. Frustratingly, I had to carry those in my pack as opposed to my inventory, as I needed to be able to explain to my fellow villagers how I brought it all back.
I also spoke with some grain farmers and merchants about buying bulk grain. The villagers paid for small batch grain in autumn, since they could only buy what they could carry, but I was able to negotiate a better price for bulk thanks to advanced negotiation. I would need a wagon to transport it, and I was planning on buying enough that I would actually need to use my inventory to transport a good portion of it, which I would go on to use as animal feed for my herds.
We stayed in Gurt for one night, at a cheap inn, buying up the freshest produce we were able the next day before immediately heading back out west. Again, our procession suffered no beast attacks, kind winds—though there was a heavy rainstorm during the trek back which we waited out, slowing us by a day—and I continued to improve the road in secret with magic. The storm actually helped me identify a number of muddy spots that needed extra shoring up with stone, for the stretch we traveled while it was still wet.
Once returned, I was able to sell some of the goods I brought back with me to interested parties, including Soren, and made some plans with Bortag to meet up in a few days to hunt mursin together. I could probably find them on my own and could no doubt take them out more easily and in larger quantities with magic, but I had enjoyed the young hunter’s company on the journey and wanted to build up the friendship more, and it would be wise to appear to have learned the local haunts and habits of the creatures from someone with experience.
After saying my goodbyes, I headed back to my compound-in-progress.
* * *
My four tamed companions and I stood at a distance, invisible, watching the pack of lubargs that had set up shop just outside of the enclosed caverns that contained my herds. I frowned as I observed the predatory beasts.
Clearly, the smell of the herds had attracted the wolf-like creatures to my territory, and in our absence, there was nothing stopping these beasts from settling down. Now the whole pack was here, which would make chasing them off permanently difficult. I was probably going to have to wipe out the lot of them.
The similarity with wolves was very surface level. The lubargs were large, but they had huge rounded ears that were actually very cute. Some of them had manes like a lion, but mottled black and white, and I guessed those would be the males. The rest of the coat was sleek and gray, as was the fur on their faces. The face structure was very wolf-like, but a bit narrower and more pointed. The tail was short, thick, and very fluffy.
I counted eleven in the pack, although it was hard to be sure as some were in a pile sleeping together. Part of me wanted to keep them all.
Frankly, taming was why I was here, so I could totally justify to myself that it was worth keeping the whole pack. They could defend the area from other packs and become the first line of defense for my herds. If I had the walls built and things were further underway, I probably would have. I recognized the reality of my situation and sadly put that notion aside. I had to finish building and I had a lot of bonds. When I could leave the herds contained while untamed in walled pastures, I would have more freedom to keep more beasts like I wanted. In the meanwhile, I would tame a male and a female, like I had with the rockstalkers, but the rest had to go.
I appraised the pack. The highest level one was probably the pack leader, and so I chose him to try and keep. He would be the quickest to evolve, which I was definitely planning on doing. I figured the beasts were rank E, as a pack this large of rank D beasts would be much too dangerous for anyone under Level 15, maybe even Level 20 or 25 if I took healing magic out of the equation. This pack would have torn me apart as a child, and I was lucky the various vipis and griffators that I dealt with as a youth were not pack hunters.
However, I was no longer the same young boy who had to struggle to fight rank E beasts. At the moment, a pack of rank C beasts might have given me pause. For these, all I had to do was snap off a quick series of spells.
I bubbled the two I wanted to keep in 5-point magic barriers, and summoned from my inventory a storm of stone shards, firing them at a speed I could never have afforded before double-advancing my 4-point magic directly into the skulls of the rest. A second volley took out any that failed to drop on the first, and then it was effectively over. I approached the pack, and started tapping the corpses, dropping them in my inventory to dismantle. I had targeted the heads to keep the pelts intact and was able to tan them in my inventory, and butchered out the meat that way too.
From the side, the two contained lubargs howl-roared at me, and I pulled a few pieces of older quadhorn meat out of my inventory, injected additional magic into them, and tossed them towards the two beasts, quickly dropping the barriers to allow the meat through then recapturing them in fresh barrier bubbles. They were chipping away at my MP by scratching at the barriers, but it was not an issue immediately, and once they ate the meat they would calm down, so I returned to collecting and processing the dead.
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With that sorted, I snuck into each cavern, left some fresh infused food, and waited until I had all the beasts back under control. Then I let the herds back out to graze while I took a nap. When I awoke, I would get back to work on the wall.
* * *
“Lots of mursin this far east,” Bortag whispered to me, as we crouched in the forest and watched a small group of them drink from a stream.
I was carrying one of his spare bows, a rarity for me, but I was not ready to reveal my more magical skills to the hunter until we had built up more interpersonal trust. While I did tend to use magical illusions and projectiles, I did also have mundane skills, particularly advanced Stealth and Detect for sneaking through and finding things in the forest, as well as Strength if I could sneak close enough to use the knives I was wearing on my belt, although the plan was to use Ranged and try my hand at archery, once I got close enough with my roguish sneakiness to take a decent shot. I was using a bow with a heavy draw weight since I had the strength for it, so if I could land a single arrow, it would probably be enough. If I needed to chase down prey, Acrobatics made navigating the forest at speed easier as well.
Bortag had also pointed out some wild-growing food plants and I was using Foraging to identify more as well as the areas where the high value stuff grew the best. All of these mundane skills, aside from Ranged, were advanced, and while I was unlikely to ever double-advance them, that was true of most laypeople as well. With some additional practice I should be as competent as any villager, aside from my bow use at a distance. Perhaps I would advance that skill on my next level, just to fit in a bit better.
“How much further have you traveled?” I asked.
Bortag frowned. “Not much. Just more of the same to the east, and unless the mursin flee, this is about as far as you need to go. Lubargs tend to become a problem to the north, and to the south, beasts tend to keep away.”
“Oh?” That could mean a few different things. Perhaps it was the territory of a stronger beast, or there was a dungeon. I would have to check it out on my own later.
“Ayup. You gonna keep talkin’, or take a shot?” he said with a grin.
I rolled my eyes, but drew an arrow and carefully lined up my shot. I had done a bit of practice with the bow before we left the village, and so long as I was shooting while still, at my own pace, and at a static target, this distance was not a problem. I exhaled, released, and the arrow plunged into the ribs of a mursin, which took a few steps before it stumbled and fell. The rest of the group fled.
Bortag made a low whistling sound. “Ya got power, no question,” he said, straightening up and walking over to the felled beast. I followed, then glanced down at the beast and got a better look for myself.
The mursin was much smaller than a North American deer, and even smaller than a roe deer. It was closer to an Asian type of musk deer, barking deer, or water deer. While it was certainly deer-adjacent in form, the face was a bit off, more bovine than cervine, although the feet were all wrong, with four clawed toes instead of hooves. It would take four of them to match the amount of meat of even a young whitetail buck from my first life.
“Is there no bigger game in this forest to hunt?” I asked. The mursin were numerous enough to hunt in large numbers to meet the needs of the village, as apparently the females had four to five young each season instead of one to two fawns like deer on Earth. The increased numbers is what allowed the large lubargs to survive, but there had to be something else that was bigger and faster to justify the pack I had seen.
“Well…” Bortag said, working his jaw as he debated what to say. “There is one thing, a shug. But shugs live north, in ‘barg territory. The adults are more or less hardy enough to fend off a pack, unless they’re old or injured, but the ‘bargs will pick off the young before their skin gets thick.”
“You don’t hunt them?”
“Their thick skin can eat arrows all day. You can kill them with a lucky shot through the eye, but that’s tough to do, and getting close enough to even try puts you in danger of getting hounded by ‘bargs. Better option is to get close with a sharp blade and a strong arm, but that’s a big risk. A couple of times, when the village was struggling to bring in enough to eat, a group of hunters would have a go at it. Usually someone dies, but when they succeed, it’s a guaranteed feast.”
We chatted some more as we field dressed the mursin and strung it up on a branch to carry back to the village. I was definitely interested in the shug, it sounded like some kind of massive boar, and quite possibly rank D or even C.
On our way back, we encountered another trio of mursin, and Bortag got to show off this time, bagging our second, which we dressed and added to our bounty. We dropped both off at the butcher, and I sold the whole carcass for the village’s use rather than keep a share. I could just hunt another on my own and dismantle it with my inventory for meat, and I would not need to fuss with field dressing, carrying, and bartering.
Returning Bortag’s bow, I thanked him for the time and we agreed to hang out or hunt again sometime soon. We parted, and while I was in town, I decided to follow up on something we had talked about on our trip to Gurt and back.
I wandered through the village looking for the elder population, appraising my way through them until I spotted the man I had previously identified as having the taming skill. I walked over and cleared my throat.
“Torgit?” I asked, and the old man looked over and grunted non-commitally. “I heard you used to drive a wagon. Any chance you still have it?”