The First Tattoo

That night in the dark corner of the warehouse, I engraved the first tattoo onto my thigh using beast blood and bone fragments as the medium. I had to literally fight through the entire night to keep the beast's nature from devouring me. [Awooooooo—!] The wolf's hallucination tore through my mind while a red haze of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠destructive impulse flooded my vision. To suppress the wild urge to smash through the door and sink my teeth into someone's throat, I chewed my lips until they bled and scraped the dirt floor with my nails until they came loose.

Once the storm of terrible side effects that nearly shattered my sanity passed and dawn broke, my ten fingers were soaked in blood and my entire body was drenched in sweat. Such was the cruel price of Primal Magic. Yet the raw strength of the wild now etched into my thigh was so sweet and undeniable that it made the pain worth it.

"Huuuuh……."

I rose from the floor, letting the heavy heat radiating from the grotesque pattern on my thigh cool. Extreme fatigue weighed on me, but my body's senses felt sharper and more solid than the day before.

The dismantling yard was the perfect workplace for obtaining mediums, but I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠couldn't risk exposing my secret hand every night while battling side effects in a corner of someone else's business. I needed my own "safe house" where I could truly rest and experiment with magic.

I headed back into the stinking, filthy slums. A blind spot pressed against the commercial district yet untouched by the guards' eyes. I found a half-collapsed shack whose roof still barely held. Rotten straw littered the floor, but the interior was deep enough to completely block outside view.

I dipped my finger into the leftover blood of the fang wolf I had brought from the yard the night before and smeared it across the shack's entrance and crumbling walls. Then I drew crude magical sigils over the marks. I had no medium to curse a specific target, nor did I need one. This was a form of "territory marking" that amplified the predator's scent and savage wildness contained in the wolf's blood through sorcery.

It was nothing more than a crude trap at skill level 1, but the instinctive pressure radiating from the beast's blood was enough to induce mild headaches and intense discomfort in the sewer rats and low-level vagrants with stats around 10, making them reluctant to approach.

This corner of the wretched slums had finally become my first "home" in Shedborax, a place where I could stretch my legs.

From that day on, my grueling, mechanical routine began. I woke in the shack before dawn and headed to the dismantling yard. While Grum and the workers butchered beasts, I silently wiped blood and cleared entrails, secretly pocketing the blood, bone powder, and tough sinews of magical beasts that were discarded as useless. Then I locked myself in the shack until deep into the night, enduring the horrific side effects as I used my own body as a canvas to carve new tattoos.

It was exactly as I had heard in the tutorial. Even without slaying monsters, stats would twitch ever so slightly through grueling physical labor and tracing the paths of beasts.

Exactly one month of rolling through that pit of blood and flesh.

"Huu……."

Rear yard of the dismantling yard. Alone, I lifted the hind leg of an adult-sized horned boar and hung it on a hook. A month ago, I would have had to drag it across the floor while grunting. My base Strength and Stamina stats had broken past 13, and grotesque, primal patterns carved from the blood and bones of magical beasts now writhed across both thighs, forearms, and back beneath my clothes.

"You stubborn bastard. Most foreigners can't even last ten days before running or dying, yet you're planning to bury your bones in this yard?"

Grum, who had been smoking, clicked his tongue as he watched me hang the leg with ease.

"The boss gives me two loaves of bread, so I've got strength to spare. By the way, the hides that came in today look pretty rough."

"Ah, the northern forest boundary has been unstable lately. Even the mercenaries who went out monster hunting are coming back half-crippled."

I wiped my bloodied hands on a rag and nodded calmly at Grum's words. In the past month of cleaning nothing but beast assholes, I had gained more than just Strength. By eavesdropping on the conversations of merchants and mercenaries passing through the yard, I had thoroughly mapped out the village's inner workings—the vigilante group, the otherworlder guild, and the power structure among the mercenaries.

It was near the end of yard cleaning when I heard a rumor from Grum that seemed quite plausible.

"Come to think of it, those other foreigners who fell around the same time as you. I heard the merchants talking this morning—apparently their state is quite a sight to behold."

Grum spat on the ground and continued.

"Didn't I tell you murder is impossible inside the village? Those idiots believed that and banded together, demanding equal rights from the natives and the guild. So the guild gave them a quest to gather herbs in the swamp outside the village. They didn't know the no-kill rule lifts the moment you leave the village boundary."

Grum's lips twisted upward.

"In the end, more than half were used as bait and torn apart by the swamp crocodiles. The lucky survivors who crawled back are either poisoned or missing limbs and out of their minds. Now those survivors are scattered around the slums you commute through, begging in rags."

After leaving Grum's warning behind, I walked the path home from the yard. The slum alleys, now dark, were unusually noisy. Familiar faces lay groaning on the foul-smelling ground. Their once-luxurious branded T-shirts had become rags soaked in blood. The salaryman who used to smile kindly now stared blankly into the air with one leg twisted at an unnatural angle. The calculating glint that had once mocked me as dead weight a month ago was nowhere to be seen. They were so lost in pain and terror that they didn't even register the sound of my footsteps.

Completely broken failures of survival. I felt no pity for them. I simply walked through the alley, cool and indifferent, careful not to let their pus and blood splash onto my worn shoes, stepping around them like insects.

I had merely confirmed with my own eyes how lethal the modern morals of goodwill and solidarity were in this world of beasts.

When I closed the shack door behind me, the pouch of blood I had brought today was in my hand. But I stopped undressing and coldly stared down at the pouch of blood.

'Not enough.'

One month. I had endured the lowest labor at the dismantling yard to raise my Strength and Stamina to 13, and my skill proficiency had also increased. But I had clearly hit a "growth limit." My body had already developed resistance to the blood of horned boars and low-grade fang wolves. The explosive efficiency of the tattoos at the beginning had plummeted, and now, no matter how much I endured the horrific side effects to carve low-grade magical beast ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blood into my skin, my stats wouldn't even twitch.

The first sweet sap I could secretly suck from the dismantling yard had already dried up completely.

Of course, deep in the inner warehouse of the yard, there were corpses of massive and powerful "high-grade magical beasts" hunted by top mercenary groups or the guild. But those precious byproducts were strictly managed by Grum himself, locked away. If a low-ranking worker like me dared to touch them, my head would be on the line or I'd be kicked out that very day.

In the darkness, I clenched my fist tightly.

Would I remain a safe dismantling yard hand forever, scraping by on pocket change? No. This meager peace was nothing more than a sandcastle that could be shattered at any moment by someone else's whim or a monster attack. To truly become a predator, to push my Primal Magic to the next level, I desperately needed far denser, more violent, higher-grade "blood and bones of superior magical beasts."

The time was approaching when I would have to leave this lowly cesspool behind and throw my own hide into a true life-or-death gamble.