Chapter 28: Mana-infused blood

Getting woken up due to suffocation wasn't something pleasant and Jason was forced to gather his thoughts, as he couldn't breathe due to something soft covering his face.

It was Artemis trying to cuddle with Jason and unknowingly she caused him to suffocate a little.

Jason was awake now and he got out of his bed as he rubbed his eyes drowsily. When he had driven sleep away from his eyes he noticed that Artemis looked more lively and her plumage shimmered faintly.

He did a double-take when he further noticed that her whole body was covered with lines of mana flowing through her whole body that eerily resembled blood circulating through veins.

This astonished Jason and he wondered if Artemis' blood fused with the digested mana since the day before because the mana around her was full of vigor and life.

If that was the case, Artemis's strength would drastically increase because every move she made would be naturally enhanced by mana.

Even if that was the case, Jason guessed that the amount of mana fused with her blood would be almost negligible. He believed that she would at most receive a boost of maybe less than 0.001% at the moment and it was more than negligible.

The lines of mana Jason saw were almost invisible and thinner than most threads but still there.

Artemis jumped on Jason´s shoulder after he changed his clothes and both stepped out of his apartment.

Jason was ready to sleep outside and if he were, to be honest, he was eager to sleep on the plains under the sky even if it was inside the dome.

40 minutes later, Jason stepped through the dome again as his hunt began.

Aside from eating a small lunch, he hunted the whole day until around 6 pm when the sun came down.

Jason was pleasantly surprised about his teamwork with Artemis as it was much easier for him to take out two star wild beasts in groups of 2 to 3 with her.

Artemis was a one-star wild beast but she seemed to be extremely smart for her rank and age. This caused him to wonder if she would be able to defeat beasts at a higher rank than her own once she gained some combat experience because most wild beasts were extremely dumb and driven by their primal instincts.

While Artemis was a very good companion, Jason's combat experience brought him huge results as he was tempted to fight a three-star wild beast alone.

However, he disregarded this thought for now as he could still sense some minor flaws in his technique though he wasn't sure what it was that he was doing wrong.

A single fault could cost him his life.

They hunted four groups over the day, and all in all, 10 two-star wild beasts were killed by him.

Most of his time was used in searching small beast groups with weak combat prowess or he was pretty sure that he would have hunted more beasts.

Artemis was satiated after eating two two-star wild beast cores but she wanted to eat more and looked at him with pleading eyes though Jason decided to stop her before she got habitual of the same.

He had to maintain the Mana-operated freezer and he wanted Artemis to not eat too much so that she wouldn't leave him for a good nap again.

Jason was still unsure of a way to calculate how much Artemis could digest in a few hours so that they could hunt together while Artemis could grow along with Jason.

Still, Jason knew that she could digest around 5 two-star wild beast cores in one night so eating five over the whole day should be fine for now.

He could permit her to consume more later on but for now, giving her five two-star wild beast cores was the best solution for Artemis to grow stronger during the night.

If she had to grow stronger, she had to accompany Jason during the day while earning combat experience, which led him to his previous solution.

He had been lonely since his mother's death, even Greg, who he hadn't called previously, was growing attached to him.

Now with Artemis´ birth, he suffered a little bit. He was lonely again, even though he knew she was with him during her slumber but she wasn't really there in a materialistic way.

His hunting skills increased with each passing day and Jason hoped that he would be able to kill five-star wild beasts in less than 3 weeks.

Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to enter an A-grade city let alone enroll in a school there.

Jason used the remaining wild beast cores to maintain the mana-operated freezer. It looked like the freezer could be operated for a day with his remaining five two-star wild beast cores.

The best thing about the freezer was that even if Jason stored it inside his spatial storage, it would still work perfectly.

One could say that the large freezer was comparable to a small integrated cooler and it was definitely cheaper.

Jason practiced his martial art under the clear night sky, out in the open, and it felt much better than training in his small and closed apartment.

After that, he took out a basin and poured water inside it, to wash up.

When Jason finished cleaning himself, he opened the Heaven's Hell manual and read it for a few hours before he went back inside the tent to sleep.

No sooner had his back touched the small bed, he soundly fell asleep while Artemis digested her incomplete wild beast cores.

---

During the next day, nothing special happened except his continued failed attempts to hunt slightly bigger groups of at least 3 two-star wild beasts. Dejected, he returned to his tent.

His eyes fell upon a few hundred luxurious mansion-sized tents erected at a distance. They looked gigantic compared to his two-person tent.

If he were to estimate, probably around 20 people could stand in such tents with enough space to walk around.

Jason began to wonder what was going on, but he hoped that they would train inside the one-star plain wild zone as he had trouble avoiding so many beasts all the time.

The one-star zone Jason entered every day was overpopulated with almost every kind of beast but the main problem was that the beasts would always roam around in bigger groups instead of moving around alone.

Jason had to avoid many beast groups and more than often he had gotten uncomfortably close to getting detected and attacked by them which was slightly scary.

If these mansion-sized tents had trainees inside, they would most probably hunt huge numbers of wild beasts. That would automatically lessen his worry over walking around inside the wild zone all alone, tremendously.

Today he had hunted 15 two-star wild beasts in total. He had given Artemis five of the beast cores while another 5 were used for the freezer. He then ate hurriedly before focussing on improving his martial arts.

After an hour, Jason stopped his practice and he took out the Heaven's Hell manual to read it through.

Another two hours passed while he had been engrossed in reading the manual. It was already dark with only a few lights and the stars lit up the surroundings when he looked around.

Jason had now memorised every crucial detail of the manuals first level and he readied himself to use the technique.