Chapter 301 - 298: Patch

Chapter 301: Chapter 298: Patch

He had fought a Rainforest Giant Eagle in hand-to-hand combat, grabbing hold of it as it took to the sky. After killing the eagle, he and its corpse fell into the heart of the Blade Forest.

Right after landing, the Hunter noticed something was wrong. For some reason, wounds had appeared on his body.

It wasn’t until blood began to seep from the wounds that he realized he had been injured by something invisible.

’Blade Forest.’

Estimating his position, the Hunter quickly understood that he had accidentally fallen into the Blade Forest.

There were many Blade Forests in the Abyss, as this type of tree was not unique to any single region. The place where the Hunter had landed just so happened to be a previously discovered Blade Forest.

Realizing this, the Hunter stopped moving recklessly. Instead, he lay on the ground and used the Rainforest Giant Eagle’s corpse to probe his surroundings.

Fortunately, there weren’t many blade-like leaves around him. The trees were relatively sparse in his location, making it a comparatively safe spot.

The Hunter breathed a sigh of relief.

He quickly came up with a plan: he would use the Rainforest Giant Eagle’s corpse as a shield and walk out of the Blade Forest step by step.

But this idea was quickly interrupted by a sharp pain shooting up his leg.

His leg was injured. He could barely even stand steadily, let alone carry a Rainforest Giant Eagle while precisely navigating around the invisible bladed leaves.

The adrenaline gradually faded, and the pain began to set in. The injuries from fighting the Rainforest Giant Eagle, the impact from the fall, and the cuts from the leaves all began to torment the Hunter at once.

The bleeding wounds could not be ignored any longer. The Hunter wanted to find a needle and thread to stitch them up, but it was only then that he discovered his backpack had been lost somewhere during the fight with the Rainforest Giant Eagle.

With no other choice, he could only search the ground for a twig, hoping to fashion a wooden needle himself.

But just then, he found a needle on the ground.

’Where did this needle come from?’

As if the heavens knew what he needed, a needle with a metallic gleam lay quietly on the ground. Though it looked like it had been there for a long time, the needle showed no signs of rust.

’This is a relic,’ the Hunter realized instantly.

Many relics would suddenly appear when humans needed them most, like gifts from the heavens. But these gifts often came with an unbearable price.

But the Hunter didn’t hesitate. He picked up the needle and began to tear his clothes. This combat suit was difficult to rip, so the Hunter had to use one of the Rainforest Giant Eagle’s talons to pull out a long enough thread.

Threading the needle, the Hunter quickly began to stitch his wounds, one after another. The gashes on his body finally stopped seeping blood.

’It’s this effective?’ The Hunter tried to move a little and found that the crudely stitched wounds had actually stopped bleeding. Even the pain was slowly fading.

’Looks like it’s the relic’s power. I just don’t know what the price is.’ The needle had solved his immediate crisis, saving him from bleeding out and going into shock. That alone was a stroke of luck.

The Hunter didn’t dwell on it. He started looking for branches again to splint his injured leg, but as he moved, he found his body becoming more and more agile.

Realizing something was wrong, he immediately looked down at his wounds. The sight before him was astounding.

The tough threads from his combat suit had automatically formed a patch, completely covering the wound on his body!

It wasn’t just the gashes he had stitched; even the places originally injured by the Rainforest Giant Eagle now had a "patch" that had formed on its own, sealing the wounds tightly.

The Hunter looked at the combat suit material growing on his body and touched it lightly.

A clear sensation returned, as if these patches had been his own skin all along.

Though the material and color were different, the patches were completely integrated with the Hunter’s original body. There was no difference at all!

At the same time, he was shocked to find that the patches didn’t just mend the surface. Even the insides of the wounds had healed completely. He no longer felt any stinging pain from the deep blade cuts that had pierced him.

’This needle... it can apply patches to my body?’

The Hunter was stunned. He held the needle carefully, frozen in place for a long time.

The style of the patch seemed to depend on the material he used.

He silently glanced at the Rainforest Giant Eagle next to him, and a strange idea came to mind.

’What if I use it as the material?’

Once the thought took root, it was impossible to stop.

The Hunter wrapped a feather from the giant eagle around the end of the needle and plunged it into his own wound.

...

「A short time later」

Outside a nearby monitoring station, a strangely-figured person appeared. The station’s Guards immediately surrounded him.

The man’s clothes were in tatters, with only a few rags remaining. His exposed skin was even stranger, composed of many different colored areas, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Some patches looked like the combat suit he had worn, some like a bird’s feathers, some like a kind of bone, and some even looked like steel...

His left leg was particularly odd. It had no normal skin at all, just a mass of pure black shadow that looked incredibly bizarre.

"I am a Class-One Hunter, Tang Su. This is my dog tag."

The strange man took a blood-stained dog tag from his multi-colored neck and tossed it to a Guard.

The Guard carefully verified the authenticity of the dog tag, then quickly escorted the strange man into the monitoring station...

"You’re Tang Su, correct?" In the interrogation room, an examiner looked at the face that was completely different from the one in the files and asked doubtfully.

"Yes."

"What happened?" the examiner asked grimly.

Tang Su then recounted his experience in full detail.

Including the discovery of the needle and his subsequent efforts to save himself...

"The more patches you have, the harder they are to apply, and the more material you need."

Tang Su said, counting the patches on his body.

"This is feather, this is talon, this is bone. Bird bones are very fragile, so I didn’t dare use much, only picking the tougher parts. And here..."

"I used almost the entire Rainforest Giant Eagle for patches, leaving only the unsuitable parts."

He then pointed to a steel patch on his waist.

"This was all the metal I had on me. At that point, I could only stitch a tiny bit. The material requirements were getting higher and higher."

"That’s when I discovered that as long as I held the needle and thought about a material near me, it would use it automatically. So I started constantly looking for more patch materials in my surroundings."

"Twigs were too brittle, dirt was too soft—neither was suitable. I slowly ran out of hard materials around me. The needle’s range for drawing on materials is limited, only about a meter around me. I really couldn’t find enough."

The examiner looked at him and asked curiously, "Did you try using stone?"

"Of course." Tang Su turned around, revealing a small stone patch on his back.

"There wasn’t much stone, only enough for this."

"I see." The examiner picked up a datapad, took a picture of the patch, and meticulously took notes.

Then, he looked up at Tang Su’s left leg.

The dark, murky patch was indeed very conspicuous and had immediately caught the examiner’s attention.

"Your left leg, is that a patch too? What material is it?"

Hearing the examiner’s question, Tang Su quickly turned back around and sat down in the chair.

He looked the examiner in the eye and said with utmost seriousness:

"It’s shadow. My own Shadow."