Chapter 35: What the Warriors Fear, the Herbalist Is About to Exert His Power

The sun sank below the horizon again today, but have no doubt, it will rise as usual tomorrow morning.

And it will bring the sweltering summer that makes people miserable to the entire land.

However, within the limited night of less than ten hours, everyone can catch their breath slightly and enjoy a brief coolness in the scorching season.

In the open space in the middle of Duoduogongti Cunzi, the area originally used by the Villagers to dry grain and hold activities, nearly ten campfires were burning, illuminating this fairly large village square.

The Human Warriors had just won a beautiful victory in the evening, and even though Jier was rewarding coins based on each Warrior's performance today, these reward sessions, which used to make everyone's blood boil with excitement, failed to stir most of the Warriors.

Many were whispering to their companions beside them with looks of lingering fear, and those new Warriors who had joined the team not long ago were even more pale-faced, holding their rice bowls but taking a long time to remember to take a bite of the gradually cooling vegetable soup.

These vegetables were found and pulled from the courtyards of various Farmer households in the village by some Warriors after dark while they were checking for any remaining scattered Parasitic Vine Monster. Although there had been no rain so far this year, the village had a water well, and the Villagers had watered the small vegetable patches in their yards before they were ordered to leave; furthermore, those Monster were particularly fond of water, and they would draw water from the well every day to pour over themselves, wandering around the entire village soaking wet.

The water droplets that dripped from them barely kept some of the hardy vegetables alive.

It was just that they looked dried out due to the long-term lack of water, and the vegetable soup made from them also tasted a bit strange.

Jier was now giving the final reward to the heroic Captain Aoni, because he had fulfilled the requirement set before the battle began—not a single Warrior was to be sacrificed during the entire battle.

Therefore, he even gave Aoni a special reward!

However, even Aoni, who was receiving the reward at this moment, was not very excited, only managing a faint smile when the Gold Coin were placed in his hands.

"What is wrong with you all? Scared by this?" Jier naturally knew what was up with the Warriors; they were terrified by the Parasitic Vine Monster that had fused its body together in the gate passage at the end.

Many of them had bent over and vomited violently right after defeating that thing together, and they only dodged the final fused Monster, which had shrunk into a ball, with unsteady steps after they could no longer even vomit up stomach acid.

During the battle, driven by high morale and the life-and-death struggle, the Warriors did not shrink back because of the changes in the Monster; many of them had only seen what the Monster they were fighting looked like in passing during the gaps in the combat.

But once the battle ended and the life-threatening pressure was gone, those scenes they had inadvertently witnessed, along with the traces of the battle presented before their eyes, made them unable to help but dwell on them.

"Hey, there's nothing to it..." Jier still had a cheerful look; he felt a bit puzzled by the Warriors' fear of the fused Monster just now. Even though the skull he held in his hand did not show the ability to kill specifically at the time, he did not think those weak, shrimp-like ordinary Parasitic Vine Monster became much more powerful after joining together.

They were even stupider and easier to deal with.

After all, he only needed to use the Magic Dagger 【Heart Fire】 at his waist to activate the 【Burn Enemy】 skill, and he could burn that fused Monster to death with just one strike.

Because their bodies were fused together, they couldn't even scatter and flee; what was more interesting was that Jier had even wickedly thought: if it came to that point, with bodies fused together but minds and wills not, how would the Parasitic Core with human faces control the Monster's nearly twenty legs to move in unison?

Would an awkward scene occur where you try to run east and I try to run west, and in the end, no one manages to escape?

At the thought of this, Jier wanted to laugh, but he discovered that the Warriors under his command seemed to have been disgusted by that fused Monster?

Seeing that some Warriors had already fetched a bucket of water to wash away the stains from the battle with cold, clear water, and were concentrating on wiping their respective Plate Armor with the Linen Cloth they had picked up, he knew the Warriors should be fine, so he began to stroll around the Yingdi.

The busiest person after the battle was not the Warriors or the idle drivers dealing with the Monster corpses and cleaning the battlefield, but the Herbalist Mr. Zuojigela. Ever since he discovered that the partial remains of this kind of Parasitic Vine Monster, which was ravaging the north of Sasi County, had medicinal value, he had been busy dealing with the remains of these Monster with his current wife and his pair of children.

The most difficult step was taking the remains of the Parasitic Vine Monster out of the bodies of the thoroughly dead parasitized Humans.

Because when dealing with the corpses, some Human Face Core whose bodies had been severed but whose Parasitic Core were not yet dead had ambushed the Warriors, so every corpse was fiercely struck a few more times by the Warriors until the Human Face Core hidden deep inside the parasitized human body was completely destroyed, before the Warriors felt at ease handing the corpses over to Mr. Zuojigela.

And our Herbalist had to temporarily take on the job of a 'butcher'.

He initially used his own Dwarf Dagger to process these dozens of parasitized bodies, but found that it wasn't that the Dagger wasn't sharp enough, but that a small Dagger was difficult to process these corpses quickly. To dig out the Parasitic Vine Monster rich in useful juices from the human body, he had to break open the entire parasitized human body and rummage through it to cut out the plant vines hiding in the gaps of human muscles and bones.

This was simply a labor-intensive job!

He had asked familiar Warriors for help, and even had Jier arrange for idle Warriors to assist him with this work. But soon he found that the Warriors' movements were too rough; often, after hacking a whole parasitized human body to pieces, they could only find a piece of parasitic plant the size of two palms, and it was very difficult to squeeze useful plant juice out of it.

So he had to do it himself. It wasn't that he didn't want his wife to lend a hand, but his wife had only ever killed chickens and ducks raised at home and couldn't stand the work of taking apart those already dead parasitized human bodies and rummaging through them.

He had to do it himself and replaced the Dwarf Dagger, which he couldn't apply force with, with a borrowed Single-handed Axe.

After all, he was a skilled worker; even though Herbalist Zuojigela had never personally killed anyone, he was familiar with human anatomy. After trying a few times, he could accurately find where the most parasitic vines were in a human corpse.

Therefore, his movements were fast, discarding the limbs of the parasitized human body and only collecting the parasitic plant remains from the spine and torso of the body. Because the Monster relied on the human's original spine to assist them in controlling the body, there were the most remains here.

Of course, he didn't let the smashed Human Face Core go either; he would find as many as he could, because the plant juice here was often the most abundant.

His wife was responsible for washing these bloody parasitic plant remains with clear water, then placing them in a wooden bucket, and repeatedly pounding the clean parasitic plant remains in the bucket with a wooden mallet temporarily found from a Villager's house.

After the plant's fragrant juice dispersed, she would tilt the bucket and carefully collect the pounded plant juice into a clean bottle.

His two children were responsible, one for tilting the bucket and one for holding the bottle steady, trying their best not to waste these hard-won medicinal raw materials.

Jier watched their family operate for a while, then left the Herbalist's wife and children who were pounding the bucket and collecting juice among the crowd, and turned to the side to the courtyard of a house where Herbalist Zuojigela was working away from the others.

"Does this thing have any specific effects?" Jier lent a hand, throwing the processed corpse remains onto the horse-drawn carriage nearby. Once the carriage was full, it would be pulled by the driver to the abandoned fields outside the village to be dumped, and tomorrow morning, before everyone left, they would pile up wood and burn these corpses with fire.

"Phew, hard to say, but by my estimation, they possess much stronger effects than ordinary similar Herb. For example, promoting wound healing, and providing sufficient physical strength and refreshing the spirit in a short time."

The Herbalist dissected a corpse, his movements already skilled at pulling out the destroyed Human Face Core, then used the axe in his hand to cut open the limp, no longer tough corpse along the distribution direction of the core and the human spine, pulling away the extra plant vines coiled on it compared to the inside of a normal human body.

These Monster remains were carefully placed aside by him, and once collected, they would be sent to his wife on the open ground.

"After all, these are materials left behind after a Monster dies, and compared to animal-type Monster materials that ordinary people cannot consume, this kind of plant Monster material, I saw when I was studying, is something only used by powerful Herbalist to make some simple Magic Potion. It seems that ordinary people can also use small amounts of Potion configured with them."

"Is that so? Then what kind of Potion can these things be configured into? Tell me about it? If the effect is good, I don't mind sponsoring you to research and configure a batch of Potion made with the juice of this Parasitic Vine Monster as the main material." Jier clapped his hands and threw the last corpse he had just finished processing onto the carriage nearby.

The Herbalist didn't seem surprised by Jier's words: "I was just waiting for you to say that, my lord."

He stopped what he was doing, rubbed his blood-stained palms with the mud on the ground, and continued: "Just as I said just now, the juice of this plant Monster has three significant effects. I think it should be possible to use it to configure three types of drinkable Potion with relatively significant effects. Of course, if this thing is concentrated and added to the Healing Ointment I am most proficient in, it should only require a simple adjustment to the Ointment production method to significantly improve the effect of the Healing Ointment."

Jier flicked his finger: "That's four new things then?"

The Herbalist waved his hand: "The Healing Ointment is just a simple improvement; I don't have the ability to turn it into a new thing in the already mature Ointment production. If my teacher heard that, he would scold me to death."

Jier leaned against the courtyard wall nearby, letting the Hunting Sword at his waist reveal a portion to provide some temporary lighting for the scene.

"Thank you, Knight."

Waving his hand, Jier asked curiously: "I haven't heard you talk about your experience learning the Herbalist craft."

The middle-aged Herbalist smiled awkwardly: "In the past, perhaps talking about where I studied and my experiences might have had some use, but I have been missing from the outside world for so many years. I think, let alone Yemei Town, even the place where I studied should have many people who know I went missing, or even directly concluded that I died. In their eyes, especially my teacher's, I am probably already a poor fellow who went missing and died unexpectedly at a young age."

"But you are still alive after all," Jier said.

The Herbalist sighed with regret: "But to the Human society outside the Babotali Valley, I have long since died. Whether it was my family or my friends, or even some people who didn't like me much at the beginning, to them, when I appeared before their eyes a few days ago, can you imagine it?"

He said in a ghostly tone: "They had that kind of surprised and shocked look, like they had seen a ghost! As if I wasn't a living person, but a ghost that had been dead for a long time, and some people even shouted for the Priest of the Church of the God of the Dead in the town to come over."

"Although they really did call the Priest of the Church, the Priest knew at a glance that I was a living person," he said with a bitter smile.

"However, even after authoritative confirmation that I was a living person, my family and my old friends still found it hard to accept the fact that I was still alive. This even included my wife and children who had long since remarried. That was a short but very painful time. I was like a redundant person, without my own house, without my own property, and not even a bed of my own to sleep in!"

"My old clothes and old furniture had long been divided up by everyone when my wife remarried. Who can I go to to reason with this? Fortunately, I had some money with me, and during that time I was even staying in a hotel in the town where housing was tight."

Jier couldn't help but interject: "That sounds truly miserable. Everyone thought you were dead; in their lives, Herbalist Zuojigela was a relative and family member who died young. They had long accepted and concluded that you had gone missing and died in the mountains and forests of Sasi County. Fortunately, in a hero story I once heard, that unlucky hero was even frozen for fifty or sixty years; when he thawed and woke up, the people he knew and the world he knew had long undergone drastic changes. You are just like him, equally lost in this world that has already concluded you are dead."

However, Jier smiled: "But you are doing alright; being missing for only ten years is not too long. At the very least, the people who know you are still around, so the situation where the vast majority of people who know you are gone won't happen."

The Herbalist gave a few bitter laughs: "Then I have to count myself lucky, right? But this hero story you mentioned, which play is it from? Or is it from one of the long heroic poems sung by a Bard? Why don't I have any impression of it?"

"Hey, you are from the Southern Province, and I am from the Northwest Province; naturally, the stories sung in different places have many differences. The hero in the story I heard was good at using a Round Shield and was a young Knight who fought against evil enemies for the country and for justice."

Jier seemed to recall something and smiled: "His skills were average, at least far inferior to my skills, but he had one trait: no matter how powerful the enemy he fought, he could always trade a few blows with them without being injured or killed."

After the topic shifted slightly, the two began talking again about the simple Potion that could be made from Monster sap.

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