One Last System

'This is my first kill,' I thought, lowering myself over the monster I managed to hunt. 'My first proper hunt,' I thought, unable to shake the excitement off my head.

"Don't waste time," the Overseer was quick to arrive at the scene. Judging from his reaction speed, I couldn't help but harbor some doubts whether he simply allowed me to hunt this monster or if I actually managed to do it myself. "Get the stones and any other material that you want and leave. It's dangerous to loiter around a place that stinks with blood," he adviced.

I shook my head to get over my excitement. I pushed my spear, blade first, into the ground and pulled out my knife.

I kicked the monster to its back and slashed its belly open.

"It should be at the base of its ribs," my companion advised, not even looking at the monster but scanning the area around us instead.

'Disgusting,' I thought, pushing my hand into the bloody, warm insides of the recently deceased monster. Soon, my fingers managed to feel up a small, hard thing.

Bingo.

I pulled out my hand and then smashed it into the ground, rolling it around the leaves and moist forest bed to clean the monster's blood off my skin and the stone.

Then, I pulled my hand out and passed the stone over to the Overseer.

'Huh?' I stumbled, shocked by my own actions. 'Why did I just do that?' I asked myself, unsure what prompted me to pass over my very first spoils of the hunt.

But my Overseer only smiled and shook his head.

"This is your prey. You should keep its core to yourself," he instructed before getting back on the move.

His actions finally reminded me that hunting a single monster was nowhere enough for our mission to conclude. While I didn't ask for the quotas that we were supposed to fulfill, judging from how fast my Overseer was at obtaining them, it wasn't a small number.

After all, if completing our recuring job was easy, there would be no need for him to try so hard to reach such a level of hunting ability. That or he was in dire need of money, pushing himself over his limits to hunt more spoils than he was required.

'Fuck, I don't have the time for that,' I thought, hiding the core behind my belt and rushing after my companion.

"Why?" I asked once I managed to reach him.

The content of my question was obvious. Even though I didn't understand myself why I offered him the results of my hunt, he didn't seem to be surprised about it at all.

"You need to see how valuable those spiritual stones are for cultivators, for yourself," he answered a question slightly different than what I had in mind.

But well, I was the one at fault for not explaining what exactly I had on mind.

Still, for how full of smiles he was ever since I managed to hunt down my first monster, the second he mentioned the need to see the value of the stone to myself... My companion's expression soured.

The hunt continued for several more hours. Yet, despite my utmost attempts, I only managed to obtain four more spiritual stones by the time it was over.

"For today, this will be enough," the Overseer said right when I was about to attempt taking my sixth stone for the day.

"Huh?" I stumbled on my feet, almost scaring the monster nearby out. Thankfully, the several hours of hard attempts at improving my flow allowed me to regain my stability and keep going.

Three jumps, stab with a spear, and then landing.

Killing the monster was surprisingly the easiest part of the hunt. Finding a monster's location that I could easily deal with was the real struggle.

"I can still go on!" I protested, kneeling by the dying beast and ending its struggle with a quick stab of my knife to its spine.

Out of all the monsters that I managed to hunt today, this was the smallest one.

"You can't," my companion shook his head. "I can see your movements getting sloppy. If this goes on, you will only scare more beasts than necessary, making further hunts a bit harder," the man explained, watching how I extracted yet another stone. "Anyway, I already found out what I wanted about your ability, so there is no point in loitering around this place any longer," he added.

"How about we take this entire monster with us, then?" I asked, raising my head from the bloodied corpse.

If I felt any disgust when I first opened the monster up, now this feeling was all gone.

This was the world of kill or be killed. As such, after killing a living being, the least I could do was to respect it by properly using the materials I hunted it for. This was the mindset that allowed me to get my hands all bloody without feeling even a tingle of disgust.

"No can do," my Overseer shook his head. "We only take what we came here to take. Everything else returns to the forest," he said.

"How about a small bit of its meat?" I pressed the issue, unwilling to give up on the idea of having the wild meat for today's dinner. It felt like a massive waste to just leave so much good meat to rot away, especially if we were about to go back!

"I promise, I will find a proper use for all the materials that I can extract out of it!" I announced, trying to convince the man.

There was a lot more value to the monster's remains than just its core alone. While there was no denying that the spiritual core was the most valuable thing it could provide me with, there was a lot more value to be extracted from it!

"Take whatever you want from it, but make sure to leave more than half for the forest," the Overseer shook his head again, implying that he already marked the limit of how much he was willing to concede on the issue.

"If we take too much, the stench of the blood will come with us to our camp, attracting the monsters towards it," the Overseer explained. "Only by leaving most of what we hunt in the forest can we placate them," he added.

But I wasn't really listening to him at this point. Rather than understanding something that I could ask about once we returned, I was scurrying my brain to figure out what were the best parts of the monster to take.

Then, an idea struck my head. An idea prompted by the last time I saw someone using up more than just the spiritual stone of the hunted monster.

The idea resulted in the spear that I held firmly in my hand.

"I decided," I muttered, getting down to work. With several slashes, most of the monster's bones, tendons were put aside, only to end up wrapped in its skin. "I'm done," I said, unable to ignore the look of relief that appeared on my Overseer's face.

'I wonder if he can figure out what I have in mind,' I chuckled internally, already making the designs of another weapon in my head.

Hunting with the spear was pretty... well, challenging. It forced me to get insanely close to the monster without alerting it, severely limiting my capability.

'Even if I will be able to get on that guy's level someday, it's going to take a long time,' I thought, wrapping my spoils up and rushing to follow after my companion, who had already left.

'Why not just make the hunting easier, with the weapon that humans on earth used to hunt for ages?'