CHAPTER 29

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Isaia couldn't say for sure if anyone else had access to magic, at least the troublemakers he'd met so far were the most unadvanced representatives, a testament to their not-so-great relationship with Lady Luck.

He kept wondering if the unique skill would sense all humans as strongly as the trio he had just met. Their presence was too intense to Isaia's senses.

He also wondered if maybe in time the blood manipulation would treat them the same way as it did animals. Those are still felt as small torches and have no such strong recall or attraction in the matter of sensation.

The lad's thoughts were in the direction that either animals are not so attractive, or there is something missing in them. From which he gets less of an attraction from the wild fauna than how the humans felt. Then again he couldn't be sure of everything. Memories were vague, but he didn't remember the first two humans he'd met having such a strong call.

This again brings the need to check and be sure of one's own assumptions. Sometimes Isaia's head ached just thinking about the amount of things required to accomplish, especially when it came to blood manipulation.

Before embarking on his self-serving plan, Isaia decided to renew his reserves of strength, which due to shortsightedness and too much enthusiasm for experimentation, had become more depleted than the young man needed.

Despite all the hardships brought on by circumstances and the forest dweller's, Isaia was relieved that the only thing he had to worry about now was keeping his energy reserves up to par.

The latter was conditioned not merely to get rid of feelings of fatigue and hunger, but also to replenish energy to the point after which nausea and headache occur.

This was the lad's leisure: to avoid the lower limit, beyond which comes fatigue and hunger, and not to exceed the upper limit, the precursors of which are nausea and headache.

After checking the surroundings with his senses for the presence of wildlife, Isaia realized that this time he would have to try harder, because there were not a lot of targets nearby, especially wild boars, which were now a priority.

It was too much trouble to hunt hares, not only because they ran away at the first rustle, but also because of their small size and therefore the amount of blood in their bodies.

The boars themselves fly at you at an accelerated rate, expending only slightly more energy by using blood manipulation on them than it takes for a few hares.

Hence the priorities that it is better to go for larger animals, which by the way are not much less in the forest than the same hares.

It is whether the feeding is dense here, and the animals feel confident in their future, more often resorting to carnal pleasures, or it is a peculiarity of the animals themselves to have a large number of offspring each time.

Alas, he could not know this, and there was little interest in it. It was enough to rejoice at the number of wild fauna representatives and especially at the fact that a fair share of this population consisted of large animals.

He was about to think that it was all over and he could go back to his usual routine when he remembered one very important and annoying detail. The corpses of dead people would cause problems if someone found out about them. Accordingly, they could not be left in plain sight.

Whether these three were someone of significance or the ones someone would be looking for, Isaia couldn't speculate. Truth be told, he didn't care much about their status or relationships, but the fact that law enforcement might get on his trail if he didn't cover them up or hide the evidence well enough could get him in trouble.

Those who do not know all the details of the event may have all sorts of suspicious thoughts about it. It would be hard for Isaia to explain himself, claiming that it was self-defense and that he was not the first to initiate the attack. Hence the desire to conceal what happened here today.

At first Isaia thought about wolves and the fact that they were likely to come here sooner or later, and therefore could be a tool for removing evidence, but then he quickly dismissed it. First of all, the wolves hadn't been here for too long, so there might be a good reason for that.

The only thing that came to the lad's mind was the squeamishness of the beasts, for there was hardly any blood left in the animals Isaia had killed. Maybe it served to attract attention with its exceptional odor. Or maybe the wolves were proud individuals and satiated with their own hunting, which Isaia still had little faith in, given their acting and mean-spiritedness since the last time they had met in person.

He had read that wolves were the cleaners of the forests, so they would sooner or later find his hiding place and claim their rights.

There was also the possibility that wolves were far enough away and had their own sources of food nearby, and only when they ran out of it would they start to look for new ones, from which they would visit his hiding place. Besides all that said, animals really were a bad option.

For the most part, he hesitated to leave it to the wolves, because of the unprofessionalism of the forest servants. They'll probably eat the meat and maybe some bones, but they'll still leave a lot of evidence behind.

Sooner or later, the discovery of corpse remains may lead to speculation about the nature of the events that occurred at this site, most likely a desire to find the culprit, making Isaia the one who can be held accountable for what happened here.

It would be a mistake not to notice that Isaia did not know the local customs, being a stranger to the local order of things.

Almost every human society has its own rules and regulations to protect its members. He, being an obvious stranger to this place, would not have been protected by the rules of this society, especially if what had happened in the forest had become known.

Accordingly, he would have been recognized as the one who had violated these very rules by taking the lives of three members of this very social order. It does not matter whether he was the original source of the aggression or whether from the beginning he was only trying to protect his property and his life.