Son of Chaos 44 Temporary base

Soon it started to get late and it was time for him to find a place for the night. Unlike when he was crossing the grass land he couldn't just sleep anywhere in the forest since many monsters called the floor below the high trees their home. And especially at night these monsters would come out.

According to the guide he had read. One should try to find a small cave either in a tree or in one of the cliffs. Since the terrain had gotten increasingly mountainous it shouldn't be that hard to find a cliff with a cave.

He had ruled out a tree cave since he wanted to try his hand at refining pills and he was sure that it would be a bad idea to create any kind of fire in such a cave. On the other hand he wasn't strong enough to create a cave himself within an acceptable time so he could only depend on naturally formed ones or ones made by his predecessors.

His luck wasn't so good so he only found a small cave which was at least 3 meters up on the cave wall when it was nearly dark. He hurriedly climbed up to it and found that the space behind the narrow entrance was surprisingly spacious. It was at least twenty square meters and what was a pleasant surprise was the small pond at the end of it. There was some water dropping down from the cave ceiling which then landed in the pond before being slowly drained through a small hole at the bottom of it.

The rest of the cave on the other hand was dry since all the water was concentrated. As such the cave was very suitable to stay in. Especially since there were no bones anywhere which was an indicator that there had never been any monster or animal staying in it.

* Maybe I should make this cave my base. *, Ivan thought. * After all it is deep enough into the forest so I should be able to find anything I need in less than a day march of here and I shouldn't really venture much deeper into the forest since the monsters there are increasingly strong and ferocious.*

After deciding on making the cave his temporary base he pulled out his sleeping bag from his inventory and placed it on a flat piece of floor at one of the sides. The floor was hard but he would manage. Maybe if he managed to hunt a few more animals he could use their pelts as a bed but for that he would have to tan them and he honestly had no idea on how to do it and all the tutorials he could check with his phone didn't offer any solution either since they required items he just didn't have. So for now he would have to sleep on the hard floor with only his sleeping back as comfort.

Next he took out a piece of cloth he still had and used it and hung it in front of the entrance so the light of his fire wouldn't be as visible from the outside.

Having finished the preparations he then used his phone to call his daughter which he had started to miss after being separated for only a few days.

While they chatted about everything that happened to them during the time they hadn't seen each other time flied by and it was time for Jane to go to bed so they could only stop and say goodbye to each other.

Now that Ivan had finished everything important he could move on to refining pills. Of course poor as he was he was unable to buy all the necessary equipment and as such could only use a method he had once read about.

One pill refiner had written down this method in a survival guide and it was intended to only be used if one lost everything on oneself or couldn't access it for whatever reason.

Firstly Ivan took out the four required herbs which he had an ample amount of since they were easy to find in this forest. The pill he was planning to craft was a simple detoxification pill which would be of the lowest grade.

The rank of a pill was mainly determined by the grade of the used herbs and the number of different herbs used. Of course this wasn't a strict factor for the rank but generally it was enough to guess the rank of a pill. Besides the rank there was another important characteristic which was the quality. There were five different qualities starting with the worst, trash, low, middle, high, supreme.

Any pill could only have one rank which was specific to the used recipe but the quality solely depended on the skill of the refiner as well as the used tools. Of course the better the tools the higher the chance to get a good quality which would also increase the effect of the pill.

The pill Ivan was planning to refine was of the lowest possible rank. Strictly speaking it didn't even have a rank since it was only an unranked pill that didn't even reach rank F.

After taking out the required ingredients he then used some water to clean them and used his knife to cut away the parts which weren't needed. Higher level pill refiner would use their excellent control over the refining fire to burn these away which was much more precise but he just wasn't able to and as such had to be content with cutting away most of the unneeded pieces.

The more unneeded pieces of the herb there were at the pill formation stage of the process the worse the quality of the resulting pill, so it was important to cut away as much as possible without removing anything that was used for the pill. This balance act required experience and that's why he only prepared five sets. Because trying to form the pill would help him to understand if he could cut away more or if he had cut away to much. Hopefully the second try would be more successful then.

Chapter end