“Clang.”
The heavy two-handed axe slipped from Xia Nan’s hands and crashed onto the cave floor, its metal blade striking stone with a crisp ring.
“Haa…”
Xia Nan stood there gulping down air.
The powerful enemy was dead.
And with the battle over, all the exhaustion and pain that his razor-sharp focus had suppressed came rushing back at once.
Leveling up had given him two more attribute points, but it could not magically erase the fact that his body was already spent.
He had squeezed every last bit of strength from that sudden boost to kill the bugbear.
That had been his limit.
If another monster of the same level appeared right now, Xia Nan doubted he would have any chance of winning.
He spat out a mouthful of bloody phlegm and rubbed his chest.
That was where the bugbear’s arm had slammed into him during the fight.
Fortunately, the pain seemed limited to the flesh and was already beginning to fade.
[I probably didn’t break anything, right?]
Xia Nan felt a flicker of relief.
With this world’s near-medieval level of technology, he had no idea how a broken bone would even be treated.
Then again, this was a fantasy world with genuine supernatural power. Maybe there were scrolls that stored healing magic, or priests capable of wielding some kind of holy healing light.
“Xia… Xia Nan…”
A weak voice suddenly reached his ears.
Only then, as the last remnants of battle frenzy faded from his mind, did Xia Nan remember that someone besides him was still alive.
Maji looked terrible.
One of his lower legs had been smashed almost completely apart, with broken bone jutting through the flesh. His knee was barely connected by a strip of skin and muscle, like the crude joint on some cheap wooden puppet sold at a market stall.
His face was deathly pale. His lips trembled without a trace of color.
If not for the faint awareness remaining in his eyes and the way his body shivered from the pain, he would hardly have looked any different from the goblin corpses scattered nearby.
“Belt pouch… red potion… help me…”
Even his consciousness seemed to be slipping. Maji forced the words out one by one.
He was the ragtag party’s only surviving full member.
He was also a teammate who had just fought a life-and-death battle beside Xia Nan, and the only old hunter who knew the way out of Misty Forest.
Xia Nan had grown up in a modern society, received a proper education, and considered himself a reasonably normal person with at least a basic moral compass.
No matter how he looked at it, there was no way he could simply watch Maji die.
He crouched down and followed Maji’s directions, pulling a small bottle from his belt pouch.
It was made of glass, shaped almost like a laboratory test tube, and sealed with a dark brown wooden stopper.
Only about a third of the red liquid remained inside. It had clearly been used more than once, and when Xia Nan shook the bottle, a faint glow shimmered within.
Maji had not explained what it was.
He hardly needed to.
The sight was so familiar that Xia Nan could guess its function immediately.
“A life potion?” Xia Nan pulled out the stopper. “Drink it or pour it on the wound?”
“Drink…” Maji nodded weakly and opened his mouth. “All of it.”
Xia Nan did not waste time asking anything else. He tipped the bottle up and poured every last drop into Maji’s mouth.
For a moment, Xia Nan thought he caught a trace of heartache in Maji’s eyes.
As though this basic consumable that appeared everywhere in the games and novels of Xia Nan’s previous life was actually something incredibly precious.
A second later, he understood why.
Almost the instant Maji swallowed, color flooded back into his bloodless face.
His unfocused eyes sharpened.
The bleeding stopped.
Even the violent rise and fall of his chest gradually eased as his breathing stabilized.
The effect was so immediate that it looked like something out of a movie.
For one brief moment, Xia Nan almost expected that half bottle of potion to restore Maji to full health.
Then the recovery stopped.
The shattered bones did not return to place.
His mangled lower leg remained twisted at an unnatural angle.
Clearly, the life potion’s effects were already far beyond what Xia Nan had expected, but it was nowhere near powerful enough to regenerate a severed limb.
[So it can probably heal most minor injuries and stabilize serious ones?]
“Better… much better.”
Maji dragged in deep breaths of the cave’s stale air like a drowning man who had finally broken the surface.
“Thank you… thank you.”
His face was still drenched in sweat from the pain, but at least his voice no longer sounded as though it might vanish at any moment.
“You go clean up the battlefield first.”
Maji reached into his belt pouch and pulled out several rolls of bandages.
“I can handle the rest myself.”
Maji had already explained some of the unwritten rules among adventurers.
When it came to looting a battlefield, anything that clearly belonged to a specific killer, such as goblin ears collected for bounty credit, naturally went to that person.
Everything else generally belonged to whoever found it.
So by telling Xia Nan to loot the battlefield, Maji was all but saying one thing outright.
Everything in this goblin lair was Xia Nan’s.
Xia Nan knew very well that without Maji’s two arrows, he might not have beaten the bugbear even after leveling up in the middle of the fight.
But since Maji himself had already made the offer, Xia Nan was not about to waste time pretending to be modest.
He gave Maji a small nod, then walked toward the other side of the cave.
Reality was nothing like a game.
There was no treasure chest that magically appeared after clearing a dungeon, and no convenient mouse click that made a pile of loot spill from a monster’s corpse.
Collecting spoils in the real world was far more troublesome.
First came the goblins.
The bounty only counted adults.
So Xia Nan mercilessly killed the five greenskin cubs and sent them off to join their bastard fathers.
Then, with practiced efficiency, he pinned down the heads of four adult goblins and cut off their left ears one after another, dropping them into the pouch behind him.
After that came the real search.
The cave was not large, and almost everything inside could be seen at a glance.
Still, driven by a perfectly reasonable desire to squeeze every bit of profit out of the place, Xia Nan raised his torch and swept the cave from end to end.
He did find a few things.
After discarding everything too bulky to carry or too worthless to bother with, his haul from the goblin lair came down to three things.
Three pale green, opaque gemstones streaked with darker lines.
A small round wooden shield with faint signs of damp and mildew across its surface.
And a small pouch of coins.
Xia Nan weighed the pouch in his hand.
It had some heft to it, though most of the contents seemed to be silver and copper coins.
[I wonder if these stones are worth anything.]
By the time he finished, Maji had dealt with his injuries.
“How’d it go? Finished cleaning the place out?”
Maji braced himself against the cave wall and slowly forced himself upright.
His mangled lower leg had been crudely splinted with wooden sticks and bandages. Walking would still be difficult, but at least he should not make the injury any worse.
“Pretty much. I searched twice,” Xia Nan replied.
“Twice?”
Maji gave him a faintly amused look.
“Then you missed the most important thing.”
He jerked his chin toward the bugbear’s corpse.