When the slippery creature latched its teeth onto his inner thigh, Jason yelled as much as out of panic as pain. He still had no pants and that was much too close to the danger zone. He grabbed the long, slippery body, gripping down hard and yanking it off his leg. He screamed again as it took a chunk of thigh with it but kept his grip and started flailing the creature into the prickly hedge.

You have defeated [Flying Eel]

Defeat lesser monsters 9/10.

Jason dropped to the ground, pulled out a jar of healing unguent and started rubbing it on the wound, ignoring the blood coming out of it.

“Why can an eel fly?”

He looked down at the wound, high up the inside of his thigh. The eel had taken a decent gouge out of him, so the stinging lingered as the wound slowly closed. Even so, the ability to watch an injury vanish in front of his eyes was amazing. After nine encounters with different creatures, Jason had plenty of chances to see it, going through almost three full tins of the unguent. He used a full tin from one fight alone, against something called a malicious hedgehog.

One pleasant discovery was that he didn’t have to stand in the stinking smoke that came off them after they were looted. So long as he touched the creature he could back away before accepting. Even if he was far away from the dissolving creature, the loot went straight into his inventory. The only problem was that any of the creature’s blood that got onto him would dissolve away as well, giving Jason a full dose of the stink.

Every creature Jason looted gave out one lesser monster core and exactly 10 spirit coins. Most also produced additional, often nonsensical rewards. Tins of healing ointment were mercifully common, but mostly he received animal parts. That would have been understandable enough, given that he was killing creatures, but they arrived in his inventory already cut and packaged. The bundle of spines he received from the malicious hedgehog was bound with string, while the meat of the tyrannical pheasant came neatly wrapped in deli paper. The animal parts were all listed as crafting materials, some of which seemed to be for cooking. While he did enjoy trying new food, Jason wasn’t quite ready to put monster meat on his plate.

While he waited for the newest wound to heal, he checked the map again. He had a decent-sized chunk of the hedge maze mapped out now, but it was quite large and he’d met a lot of dead ends. He plotted out his next pathway and set out again.

* * *