Recovery

Loran should have expected this. He definitely hit his head when the Demon Bear slammed him through that tree, and he was hit much harder than when Zed threw that rock at him.

"Okay, stuck in the woods, alone, with a concussion. I…fuck! What do I do?!"

He was trying to stay calm, but he already knew how defenseless he was with this debuff. Just a few minutes ago he was capable of overpowering an entire pack of Moss Wolves, and now he could likely be taken out by one.

The only positive he could think of was that he probably had a decent amount of time to think of a solution. The Demon Bear had made plenty of noise during their battle, meaning most of the usual threats probably heard it and would steer clear of the area for a while.

"But that doesn't matter if I can't think of an answer!" he groaned while pressing his hands to his face. A few seconds passed in silence before Loran let his arms drop to his sides. The concussion was already made thinking difficult, he needed to calm down. "Just think slowly. What do you have to work with?"

As far as healing supplies went, he did have a few HP Potions on him as well as a decent amount of Wolf's Boon, but neither of those would have much of an effect on a debuff like this.

Magic was his only other healing option, but that presented its own problems. In addition to taking too long to help, he had also just learned that trying to cast spells while concussed was difficult and painful.

He already knew that his healing spell was able to accelerate the pace that debuffs healed at, the only reason he was hesitating was because he wasn't sure if the debuff would go away afterward. His arm was being healed continuously for days and was still months away from completion. If his spell couldn't cure his concussion quickly, it would be a lot of pain and effort that would just go to waste if a predator happened to show up in the next hour or so.

"But...this is still different from my arm."

The [CRIPPLED ARM] debuff was caused by his arm having healed improperly, with the muscles, nerves, and bone all being misaligned when he hastily shoved them back together. His concussion was a result of existing damage that was in the process of healing.

The only reason his healing spell had an effect on his arm at all was by accelerating the already enhanced recovery capabilities the game gave them. Assuming his concussion was a result of existing damage, it might go away faster than he might be expecting.

"....Only one way to find out."

He began focusing the mana into his head, and instantly the dull throbbing in his head exploded into a splitting headache. The mana nearly slipped away from him again, but he desperately held on. The pain was too great for him to do much more than maintain the spell, even reading the menu felt too difficult, so he could only maintain the spell while hoping the pain started to wear off.

While the healing spell was focused on his head, he could feel the warm waves of energy rolling through and restoring the rest of his damaged body. Perhaps if he had any remaining mental capacity he would have kept a tighter grip on the mana and kept it all focused on his head, but that was a little beyond him at the moment. It wasn't as if the mana was being wasted or anything, as the steadily decreasing pain from the rest of his bruised and battered body could attest.

However, between the pain of using magic while concussed and the relief of having his body healed, Loran lost track of how much mana he was expending. It didn't take long for Loran to run out of mana, and the moment the display hit 0 the mental strain suddenly disappeared. Loran felt the world around him fade, falling into the darkness of sleep as if a rope had been cut.

~~~~~

Loran was groggy as his consciousness slowly returned to him, aftereffects of having emptied his MP supply.

'I don't think I'll ever get used to that,' he thought as he lay still, exhaustedly looking up at the sky that was slowly turning orange as the sun began to set.

This was something that he had discovered very quickly in his magic experimentation, a debuff called [MANA EXHAUSTION]. It was a penalty that came from using up every last drop of MP he had, and by god was it severe.

In addition to immediately knocking him out and forcing him to remain unconscious until his MP was restored to full, the debuff reduced his MP regeneration rate from 1 MP every 10 seconds to 1 MP every 100 seconds. Worst of all was that the debuff didn't go away once he woke up, and instead required him to spend a certain amount of time at full MP for the effects to wear off. If even a single point of MP was missing, the timer would stop.

After some experimentation with a few other players, he discovered that the amount of time necessary for the debuff to go away varied depending on the player's stats. For Loran that meant his timer started at 55 hours and 30 minutes!

'At least I was right about nearby predators having been scared off by the fighting,' he thought as he sat up, awkwardly pulling himself out from underneath the Demon Bear.

With his MP regeneration rate reduced, it took him around 5 and a half hours to regain consciousness, the fact that he was still alive was proof that his theory had been correct, though there was no telling how much longer the beasts would stay away.

Furthermore, the situation with the predators wasn't the only thing he was right about, as he slowly realized that while he was feeling groggy and exhausted, the mental fuzziness of the [CONCUSSION] debuff was absent. Quickly checking his menu revealed that he had, in fact, managed to cure the debuff before passing out.

"At least I'll be able to think straight for the trip home." Loran crossed his arms as he stood up, looking at the dead Demon Bear before him. "Now how the hell do I deal with this?"

If there was one criticism that the players had for the new inventory system, it was that while they had plenty of space to store things in, they were still limited in how large those things could be. Anything they wanted to store had to fit through the menu, which was only a little longer than a foot on any side. There was no depth to it, so logs were fine, but something like a particularly large Hell Pig just wouldn't be able to fit.

The Demon Bear was several times larger than any pig, so the only way Loran was going to be able to haul the body back to the village was by cutting it up.

'But how?'

Admittedly, Loran hadn't really thought this part through. He had more or less planned to use the Mana Blade spell, but now that he was under the effects of [MANA EXHAUSTION] that seemed unwise. He couldn't rely on his regeneration rate to maintain his defenses, even spending 25% of his MP felt like too much with threats like Demon Bears in the area.

Still, he wasn't going to leave the body here, so he pulled out his hunting knife and started removing the bear's pelt. It was a slow and bloody process, but Soze had shown him how to break down a carcass during the first week and this wasn't too different, just bigger and tougher.

Eventually, the fur was removed, and Loran was looking over the body, muscles clearly defined by lines created from fat and tendons. All that was left was breaking the rest down into smaller pieces, but that was going to take forever with his little stone knife, and with the sun starting to set he really needed to start setting up camp.

His thoughts returned to the Mana Blade spell, but he shook his head.

'I need something more mana efficient than that…'

Loran stared at the enormous corpse as he thought, quickly thinking back to each of his experiments to see if anything could be applied to his current situation.

Fortunately, it only took him a few seconds to recall his most recent experiment.

Holding out his hand, Loran began to shape mana into a flat circle. After a few minutes of slow but steady progress and refinement, Loran was soon holding a circular sheet of mana that was about as flat as a sheet of paper, but lacked the glowing, energy-dense edge that a Mana Blade normally had.

He pressed the edge against the bear, and after confirming that it did not immediately cut on contact, Loran felt the edge with his finger.

It had a strange texture, almost like smooth, wet, hard plastic, but still perfectly dry. It was a bit of a softer edge than what he was hoping for, but it was a proof of concept if nothing else.

Loran continued refining the spell, sharpening the edge and drawing out a few razor-thin points, and after about 20 minutes he was holding what looked like a glowing blue circular saw blade. He commanded the blade to spin, starting out slow while getting faster and faster, before soon reaching a speed where the blade was audibly cutting the air.

'Mana constructs don't seem to spend mana to be maintained, they just require concentration.'

With the saw blade completed, Loran got to work cutting the Demon Bear into manageable pieces. The saw made the whole process even messier than the knife did, throwing blood everywhere as it hacked through the dense muscle and bone. Removing the limbs was easy enough, and while he wasn't too sure what to do at certain points with the torso, Loran was making steady progress.

By the time the sky was starting to turn dark, Loran had one whole bear carcass stored safely in his inventory.

Author's Note

The Contest on RoyalRoad is over, and I lost. Updates will be every Monday and Friday now. I would be going back to three chapters per week, but I had to get a second job recently and I need more time to get used to my new schedule. Thank you all for being patient with me.