What a Dead Tiger Leaves Behind (4)

I could count the explosions I had experienced in my life on one hand.

The first was tossing a live hand grenade during my military service. That was the day I truly realized what a terrifying weapon a grenade was. Aside from that, there had only been one other instance: the time hot cooking oil popped and burst in the pan, splattering violently across my face and arms. Compared to a grenade, it was pathetically trivial, but an explosion was still an explosion.

Why was I entertaining such pointless, rambling thoughts right now? The reason was simple.

"Cough! Cough! What in the..."

Never in all my born days did I imagine a heart—not cooking oil, but a literal heart—would detonate in my face. It was fortunate that an instinctive prickle of dread had spurred me to react instantly; otherwise, I would have taken severe damage.

Hacking up soot and dust, I stared toward the spot where the heart had been resting.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

As if mocking the blast that had just occurred, the heart was still beating rhythmically. In contrast, the surrounding campsite had been reduced to utter ruin. Everything nearby was obliterated. If I hadn't already moved the jars packed with tiger meat safely inside the cave, I would have broken down in tears on the spot.

"Kyuu! Kyu!"

The detonation had been so deafening that even Wonmo came scurrying frantically out of the cave. His round eyes were opened wide in panicked bewilderment, looking impossibly adorable. I gently reassured him, telling him it was nothing and urging him to go back inside and sleep. Wonmo glanced back and forth between me and the throbbing heart with an utterly confused expression before reluctantly waddling back into the shelter.

As for Bbarmbo... completely unharmed.

Before I knew it, the Fast Tree Sloth had already hitched himself up onto the wooden barricade. His danger-detection instincts were nothing short of extraordinary, so he had evidently braced himself well in advance. Aside from the scorched disaster zone centered around the heart, everyone was in one piece.

Damn it. Even products from China don't have exploding hearts.

People joked about made-in-China electronics blowing up, but this defied all logic. It wasn't as if someone had rigged a detonator inside the organ. I couldn't wrap my head around it in the slightest.

And when baffled by the inexplicable, what was a man to do? Naturally, ask the Gallery.

What is that, an organic nuke? I let out a dry, incredulous chuckle.

Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—what I had hunted wasn't a dragon, but a tiger. A saber-toothed tiger the size of a city bus. If a genuine dragon had ambushed my campsite, I would have turned into ash before I even knew what hit me.

Without a moment's hesitation, I opened a trade window with Allfather and transferred the heart over.

Leaving a volatile organ that could detonate at any second lying around camp was downright terrifying, and I had no proper way to store it anyway. Handing something like this over to Allfather so he could dissect it for science was by far the smarter choice.

And as a nice bonus, I got this.

In exchange, Allfather sent over pills that granted immunity to common poisons. Since I had a mountain of chores waiting for me today, I washed down a single Inedia Pill with water to make do for lunch.

With my stomach settled, I sat cross-legged and began circulating my internal cultivation art as usual.

Wait... That's strange. Isn't it circulating faster than yesterday?

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The mana coursing through my meridians moved with unprecedented fluidity. It felt remarkably swift, accelerating through my channels without the slightest friction. I wondered why, but couldn't detect anything wrong with my body. If anything, a cool, invigorating refreshment washed through my limbs, so pleasant that I wanted to keep meditating indefinitely.

Is it because I fought on the brink of death?

Of course, that was pure guesswork. The fundamentals were what truly mattered anyway, so I didn't dwell on the speed. Having wrapped up my cultivation session, my next task was to wait for Starlight Princess to upload her guide.

I had barely finished tidying the campsite, and one explosion undid all that work.

First, I set about cleaning up the scorched devastation left by the heart's detonation. Fortunately, none of the primary earthworks had collapsed, which was a relief, until—

"Wait... Holy shit, my charcoal!"

Looking closer, I realized the hard-earned pile of charcoal I had painstakingly produced was completely gone, scattered to the four winds by the shockwave. Tears welled up in my eyes. I scrambled around the clearing, desperately gathering every wayward chunk I could find, but managed to recover barely a third of the original batch.

A sudden urge to just buy a bag of charcoal from the auction house surged through me, but I grit my teeth and held back.

Stay calm. I'm going to be smoking meat soon anyway...

I needed to stay positive. A negative mindset was toxic in the wild. Still, the bitter disappointment lingered as I gathered fresh firewood with a wry smile. How many hours of grueling labor would it take to turn all this timber into charcoal again? A heavy sigh slipped through my lips, but I shook my head and pushed forward.

I'll use what little charcoal remains to scrub the hide and wash my clothes.

My plan was to use the tiger's pelt as a floor mat or a bed blanket. Since it was my very first time butchering an animal of this scale, the pelt's quality was far from prime. To make matters worse, several sections had been cleanly sheared open by the Heavenly Demon's Sword. Handing a shoddy, hacked-up pelt like this to Praise the Sun in exchange for a top-tier shield would be shameless robbery.

I'll need to trim it down some. It's way too big.

Handling and drying a pelt that massive was a logistical nightmare, making trimming an absolute necessity. Once the preliminary cleaning was done, I logged back into the Gallery to check if Starlight Princess had posted her instructions.

Oh, she posted it.

Her thread sat prominently pinned near the top of the board. Without hesitation, I tapped into it.

Giving an elixir meant for saving lives to Wonmo as a snack...? I felt a little bewildered by her extravagant doting, but brushed it aside. For now, setting up the smoker exactly as Starlight Princess instructed took top priority.

I'll need sturdy poles of the right length. If there aren't any fallen branches nearby, I'll just cut down a couple of trees.

Felling small trees was no longer a chore. A few clean swings of my hatchet were more than enough. Wandering the forest edge, I gathered suitable timbers and lashed them together into a tripod, binding the apex tightly with heavy cordage to ensure it wouldn't collapse under weight. I also bought heavy canvas cloth from the auction house to drape around the exterior—it felt like my gold expenses were unusually high today, but since the tiger pelt spared me from buying a bed blanket, I figured it balanced out.

Now all that's left is to hang the meat.

I bound the thick cuts of tiger meat securely with twine and suspended them from the apex. The setup was complete.

However, an unexpected problem soon reared its head: sheer volume. The saber-toothed tiger had yielded a mountainous heap of flesh, far too much for a single tripod.

If I want to store all of this, I need to smoke every single cut...

Which meant building a lot more tripods.

"Screw it. Let's do it right."

If it meant preserving hundreds of pounds of meat for months to come, no amount of manual labor was too much. I got to work and assembled five more tripod smokers across the clearing. Honestly, even six frames weren't quite enough to handle the entire bounty, but I had to draw the line somewhere—the campsite was simply running out of open ground.

Crackle! Crack-crack! Pop!

Beneath each tripod, I kindled low fires with seasoned hardwood, dampening the flames to generate dense, fragrant plumes of smoke. Before long, thick white billows curled upward, enveloping the salt-cured slabs of meat. Thanks to the canvas shrouds draped over the frames, surprisingly little smoke leaked into the open air. Had I known it would work this cleanly, I would have set this up ages ago.

Well, better late than never.

I leaned against a log, watching the meat slowly take on a rich, smoky coat. Where would I be right now if not for the Gallery? I probably would have died ten times over. Why was I thrown into this deadly Forest of Four Seasons in the first place, and how on earth did my phone connect to an interdimensional network?

Unanswered questions tangled together in my mind like a knot of thorns. But I had neither the time nor the energy to unravel them. Survival was the only thing that mattered right now. Escaping this place alive had to come before everything else.

I can't let myself get comfortable here.

Don't lose sight of what's precious just because life became tolerable. I sternly reminded myself of the old adage. Besides, this tiger incident was a stark, bloody reminder of just how safe modern civilization had been. This was merely a brief respite to catch my breath; my resolve to find a way home hadn't wavered in the slightest.

Time to get moving. Stand up and dig up those mandrakes.

The Peddler Mole would come looking to trade soon enough. Even if I couldn't secure the giant freshwater crabs he wanted, I had to at least offer him an Adult Mandrake Root. But having just completed a transaction with Allfather, I was saddled with another agonizing twenty-four-hour cooldown.

If there's one thing I wish I could change, it's that damn trade timer.

Unfortunately, the Juddak had an unyielding personality, making negotiations impossible. And trying to slip her a bribe seemed just as futile—she'd probably ban me on the spot.

Isn't there any workaround? Some way to shave down the cooldown, even by a little?

BOOOOOM!

A massive detonation roared alongside a blinding flash of azure light. The scale of the blast was neither overwhelmingly colossal nor small, yet the concentrated kinetic force packed within was terrifying. While it hadn't leveled the entire facility, it was more than violent enough to shatter every delicate instrument and workbench in the immediate radius.

"Cough! Cough! Hrmph."

Yet the mage who had taken the brunt of the shockwave head-on merely let out a dry cough, completely uninjured. A faint dusting of black soot clung to his snow-white beard, but it was hardly worth mentioning. Waving his sleeve to disperse the lingering acrid smoke, the old mage slowly blinked his eyes open and gazed forward.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

At the center of the smoking blast crater sat a heart significantly larger than an adult human's head. Despite absorbing the full force of the detonation point-blank, it pulsed steadily, utterly unbothered, as though flaunting its invincible vitality to the world.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Urgent pounding rattled against the reinforced laboratory door.

"Lord Kadir! Are you all right?!"

"Are you hurt, Master?! We heard a disastrous explosion inside!"

Several apprentices and tower guards shouted frantically from the corridor. Hearing an earth-shattering bang erupt from the Archmage's private sanctuary, their panicked reaction was only natural.

"I am unharmed, so withdraw. It was merely a novel experiment."

The old mage dismissed his fretful attendants with a casual flick of his wrist. Muffled murmurs of lingering concern filtered through the heavy wood, but Kadir's attention had already drifted entirely away from them.

"Good heavens..."

Kadir stared at the heart, his weathered face transfixed in pure, breathless awe. The crimson organ continued to surge and contract with primeval rhythm, proudly asserting its enduring vigor.

"What an utterly magnificent heart...!"

Within the depths of the Wizard King's eyes, an unquenchable, manic thirst for forbidden knowledge blazed to life.