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Chapter 24: For the first time….. (Part 1)

 

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About two weeks have passed, and for the first time I was about to go hunting monsters with Myun.

At about 9 pm when everyone was asleep, I quietly sneaked out of the house.

I haven’t been given a proper sword for combat as of yet, so my only weapon are the knives I brought and the slingshot I made. Nevertheless, I still had my magic and Myun was coming along with me, so I didn’t really feel scared. Myun said that since this was my first time, she would take me to a place that had weak monsters.

We went along the riverside walking upstream for approximately about 1 hour, and then we advanced into the forest to the east of the village and walked for about 30 minutes. After a while the forest thinned and we came to a place that had rocks scattered across the ground. According to Myun, this place had a monster that looked like a slug and was about a couple of centimetres in length. It didn’t really move that fast, and it didn’t have anything dangerous like a poison attack. If you think about it, even if the slug reached about 1 metre in length, in the end it was just a measly slug. As long as you don’t get surrounded and crushed by a swarm of them, there shouldn’t be any problems. Another thing is that, apparently these slugs live up in trees, and when passing animals walk by the tree in the ground, they would fall from the tree ambushing the prey and bite them in order to suck their blood. Wait doesn’t it sound more like a leech rather than a slug?

Anyways, I better stay alert and watch the trees above me. Because it was really dark and I couldn’t really see that well I used Appraisal to brighten things up. When I did, I immediately detected that there was leeches on top of the trees here and there. Let’s try using Appraisal on them one by one.

【Hermaphrodite/23/5/7433 Large Leech】(TL: Hermaphrodite = they can be both male and female)

【Condition: Excellent】

【Age: 1 year old】

【Level: 1】

【HP：11(11)　MP：1(1)】

【Muscular Strength: 1】

【Agility: 0】

【Dexterity: 0】

【Endurance: 4】

【Special skill: Blood Sucking(Lv.1)】

Oh is that it? They don’t look very strong. By the way, I want to show you guys, my current status.

【Alein Greed/5/3/7429】

【Male/14/2/7428】

【Condition: Excellent】

【Age: 6 years old】

【Level: 2】

【HP：24(24)　MP：4164(5379) 】

【Muscular Strength: 4】

【Agility: 4】

【Dexterity: 3】

【Endurance: 3】

【Inherent Skill: Appraisal (MAX)】

【Inherent Skill: Gift of Natural Talent】

【Special Skill: Earth Magic(Lv.5)】

【Special Skill: Water Magic(Lv.5)】

【Special Skill: Fire Magic(Lv.5)】

【Special Skill: Wind Magic(Lv.5)】

【Special Skill: Void Magic(Lv.7)】

【Experience Points: 2849(6000)】

This is the knife I brought

【Knife】

【Iron】

【Condition: Excellent】

【Manufactured date: 3/9/7431】

【Value: 960】

【Durability: 100】

【Efficiency: 10-40】

【Effects: None】

I have a feeling that if I just attack it once using my knife, the leeches will die. Even I feel like if I get hit by my own knife, I will die instantly. But then again, is there even a 6-year-old in this world that doesn’t die, if they get stabbed by a knife?

Alright, well I know that there is a lot of leeches on top of the trees. At the same time, I also know now that leeches weren’t a formidable foe. All I have to do is hunt down these innocent leeches and kill them. But, how am I supposed to do that?

「Myun, there so many of them on top of the trees, but how do we get them to come down?」

「Please watch me. To start off with, I will be the one to do it」

After saying this, Myun immediately ran towards tree and weaved around it, this made the leeches jump at her. All of them were aiming for her but they all missed, and several leeches had fell down. The leeches that fell into the ground wandered around aimlessly but couldn’t find any prey so they immediately begun to climb back up to the tree. Myun immediately went to attack the closest leech to her. Myun’s weapon of choice was a wooden pole. Using the advantage of her lengthy weapon, Myun could attack the leech from a slight distance away. After attacking the leech several times, they would get crushed and stop moving.

「Hmm, this doesn’t seem to be all that efficient. Myun, can you please come behind me for a bit」

I’m not sure if this will succeed but… I try to use a magic that has never been created before. First I create a large amount of wind using Wind Magic, and then I use Void Magic to make it violently blow across the trees. Although I used about 10 MP, not a single leech fell down. I guess so. I’ve never heard of leeches falling out of trees whenever a storm occurs, If I remember correctly I think that leeches have some sort of suction mechanism.

Then I guess the next step is pretty simple. From my previous life, I had heard that if you got bitten by a leech, all you need to do is use a burning cigarette butt and press it against the leech. This time around I used a combination of Wind Magic and Fire magic to create a really hot wind. It would be really bad if I started a bush fire so to start off with, how about I make it around 100 degrees?

It seems to have gone well this time. Like droplets of water, huge amount of leeches starting falling down. I was using my blazing wind about 20 m in front of me but, isn’t this like every single leech within the effected range? The leeches that fell down were all curled up due to the heat of the wind. Myun turned around and with a look of admiration on her face, she praised me. Now then, I should try to copy Myun and use a wooden pole to kill them from a distance.

After I smashed the first leech and killed it, I checked using Appraisal and it seems that my experience went up by 13. What a load of crap! Are you telling me I can accumulate 6~7 days’ worth of training with a single kill? However, I soon ignored the dissatisfaction from such a thing. I just concentrated on crushing them. My experience is increasing at a really fast pace. I feel completely exhilarated.

When I continued to smash these leeches while using Appraisal on myself, I started to notice a certain thing. The leeches HP is about 10 and the experience value I gain seemed to be 2 above the HP number. But, sometimes I was also able to gain 4 more experience points above the HP value. After killing enough of them, something changed within the Appraisal window…. The Inherent Skill: Gift of Natural Talents, which has remained at 0 all this time suddenly increased to LV 1. I panicked and immediately opened the sub-window for the skill (Up until now I couldn’t open any sub-windows for this skill)

【Inherent Skill: Gift of Natural Talents: Depending on the Level of this ability, the amount of experience gain is increased. It provides for a 20 % increase per level. It rounds off to the nearest decimal point】

Whatttttt?!

What in the world is this ability?

Up until now, I have never earned anything above 5 experience points so it never got discovered?

Is this the reason that Gift of Natural Talent’s have never increased in level?

God dammit.

Well, fine!

Whatever.

As long as I continued to hunt like this from now on, naturally, my inherent ability will keep increasing.

But man, this is really absurd.

If I ever raised it to the maximum level of 9, will it start giving me an increase of 200% for experience points earned?

If it will become possible for me to grow up with more than three times the efficiency of a normal human being, isn’t that a complete cheat?

I mean I am already getting three-fold increase in my abilities when I raised a level.

Wouldn’t this be about 9 times the growth rate if I total these two factors?

Ahh, it truly fits its title of ‘Natural Talents’.

This is bad, I am getting way to excited that I forgot to crush these bugs which were totally innocent.

After that, on this day, I smashed over 40 of the remaining leeches and my Gift of Natural Talent ability became LV 3.

I also acquired more than 600 experience points.

I was grinning madly while continued to crush these leeches until Myun suddenly told me “If too many of the leeches are killed off, their race will be exterminated”. I was truly like madman. (TL: shouldn’t he be a madbaby :P)

I really hated the clean-up process after killing all these leeches though. We had to individually collect the magical stones inside of their gooey and sloppy dead corpses and then combine the stones together. Seriously this process made me feel nauseated. After that, we gathered their bodies all in one place and using the power of Myun’s bracelet we changed them into water. Before I noticed it, it was already the middle of the night.

According to Myun there was several hundreds of these leeches living in this area and it wasn’t likely that they would get exterminated from killing this much, but after a leech is born, it requires about a full year to grow into adulthood (I think what she means by this is that it will take them a year to get at least Level 1). Therefore, it will be bad if we kill too many of them all at once.

Indeed, it’s probably not a good idea to kill too many of these leeches. If I continued my pace of hunting for the next 2 or 3 weeks, their race would probably go extinct…. In just a single day of hunting leeches, we managed to cause a great decrease of the leeches’ population, it was a major event for the leeches. It will be simple to understand, if you just imagined 40 people suddenly dying within Bakkudo Village. Even though they were big and sluggish and looking at them made one feel sick, they were after all an opponent that barely retaliated or resisted, it was possible to hunt them down from a safe distance and safely gather experience points,  but it probably wasn’t good to take them for granted.

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