Chapter 174 - Arcane Bone

I was wrong. 

This was the only way, to sum up just how naive I was when thinking that I could hunt as much as I needed to fill my quota by spending just half of the day on hunting. 

This was nothing short but a result of my arrogance. A stupid mistake was made by a beginner who thought he knew better. 

There was no chance that I would ever be able to fulfill my quota just by hunting in the morning and using the rest of the day for my own purposes. 

It was simply inefficient. 

After all, getting into the mindset of hunting or working took time. The time was nothing short but wasted when I had to switch my mindset in the middle of the day. 

That's why, rather than doing two things at once in a simple day, I focused hard on my hunting for the next four days.

I did nothing but hunt in the forest for four days straight. And after those four days, I finally managed to obtain all the resources I needed to get my quota submitted properly and all the resources I could potentially need in my private endeavors.

"Are you sure you don't want to go hunting today?" Lucius asked when he was ready, preparing for the morning departure for his hunt. 

After four days of watching me bring more and more haul with every passing day, he was finally faced with the reality. 

The reality was that my sudden sput of motivation and dedication was nothing but a plan to get more free time for myself. 

"That's right," I nodded my head. "There is a reason why I worked so hard over the last few days," I added, refusing to look at his face. 

Lucius was furious. 

I didn't need to look at him to confirm it. Even though he was trying his best to hide it, I could hear it in his voice. 

For him, the idea of NOT going to the forest to hunt even when there was a chance to do so was nothing short but laziness and slacking attitude. 

"I already finished my quota, don't you worry," I said with a small sneer, perfectly aware that this wouldn't be enough to shut him up. 

And then I waited. And waited. 

But no witty remark came to my face. No response forced me to my knees to admit to my mistake and apologize. 

'Did he finally give up?' I thought, full of hopes, as I raised my eyes to look at Lucius...

Only to realize that he had already started moving towards the forest!

'Isn't he going to chastise me for that?' I thought, baffled by the difference between what I expected and what actually happened. 

Still, I wasn't going to lament over the situation going exactly as I hoped it would!

'Now that the annoyance is out of the way,' I thought, quickly gathering my thoughts and moving back to my room for a moment. 

I held most of my belongings in a small crate underneath my bed. Even though I had a storage ring, I had to use this kind of barbaric level of storage. 

Not because I was running out of space in the storage ring I was using. But because I had to be able to somehow explain how I could manage to create so much stuff without actively hunting for the materials in the forest. 

In other words, if not for this storage that I made sure Lucius knew about, he would have all the information he needed to figure out that I had a storage ring on my own!

And with how I currently perceived my Overseer, that kind of information was more than just dangerous. 

With all my things gathered in one medium-sized bag, I moved out of the tent. 

It was a perfect place to practice all sorts of jobs... But I wasn't going to be as wasteful as to spend my time in the tent when I could do the same in the welcoming embrace of my array!

I moved all kinds of resources and tools to my new favorite place within the camp before laying them all out in the open. 

By the time I was done setting everything up, three-quarters of the space within my improved amplification array was occupied. I sorted out everything first by type, then by the quality, and lastly by size, allowing me to assess what kinds of materials I had to work on with just a single glance. 

'Finally,' I thought, grabbing one of the smallest and worst-quality monster bones while pulling out my trusty knife, 'it's time to do some fucking homework!'

To say that my attitude towards the work itself changed between my lives would be a massive understatement. 

Back on earth, even though I managed to turn my passion into my job, its results were pretty mediocre. 

Sure, I brought joy to countless nerds with my programming and storytelling. Sure, I was doing exactly what I always hoped to do...

But ultimately, it was all meaningless. 

Once a session would be over, it would be left as nothing but good memories of the players who partook in it. 

Once the game would be finished, it would be just another item on my portfolio, bringing in a few bucks every month. 

It wasn't a bad life, not at all, but it wasn't fulfilling. I constantly lacked the sense of meaning behind my word. I lacked the feeling that my work constantly helped me to achieve something. 

And in this world, this feeling was no more. 

I did nothing but waste the materials for the first three hours by loosely playing around with them. It was a natural part of trial and error. A natural part of a learning process. 

Back on earth, if I were to make a mistake, either the program would point it out on its own, or one of the players would bring my attention to it. 

In other words, there was no weight behind my mistakes as long as I made sure to fix them. 

This was also different in this world, as every failure to turn a monster's bone into a core of a small formation I envisioned in my mind would mean... losing that bone. 

A bone that, although easy to obtain, I only had a limited quantity off. 

'I need to gather my thoughts and calm down,' I thought when I failed to carve anything useful out of the fourth bone. 

My attempts at turning the bones into an arcane item failed one by one. No matter how hard I tried to carve a containment formation into it before driving the energy, it would break the second I attempted to push some energy into it. 

'Maybe they are just too... bad?' I attempted to guess, reluctantly reaching out for one of the better-quality bones. 

Once again, I recalled the set of runes I schemed the night before. And then, I got into carving. 

The pulling runes at both ends of the long bone. The push runes in a row of three on each of its four sides. The start and stop runes were plotted in a way that always kept both a pull and a push rune between them. 

Soon, the bone was finished. 

According to my plan, I should be able to inject or suck the mana out by covering the respective start or stop rune with my finger. It was a design that I spent several hours of the last night trying to perfect. 

But the most important part had yet to come. 

"Don't disappoint me, please," I muttered as I raised my hand with the bone in it... and I injected some of my mana into it. 

Tic. 

The bone didn't shatter. Instead, my mana properly fused into its innate drive only to end up stuck inside, blocked by the runes from escaping. 

I finally managed to properly craft an arcane bone!

It was a pity that it had no other use but holding some mana in it, though.