"Should I go and hunt some more?" Leon muttered with a cheerful smile.
The thing was, he no longer had some forest beasts in mind.
Yet, as soon as Leon turned around and even took a few steps along the hints of the trail he was following... he stopped.
Leon pursed his lips. His face tensed up as he lowered his eyelids and fought with his thoughts.
'Would it really be okay?' he asked himself. 'To leave so much good stuff behind for no reason?'
The bloodmancer turned his head over his shoulder. He threw a quick glance at the sack of fur and bones that were left from the massive bear he hunted down.
In theory, he took all that he could from it without going for the extensive effort of carving out the fur to a form he could not only drag around but maybe even sell sometime later.
'But after a second of thought...' Leon took a deep breath. 'Well, yeah, it doesn't sit well with me to just leave it like that.'
The bloodmancer then turned around and retracted his steps. He then stopped right in the same place where he was while consuming all the energy of the monster that he could steal.
And once again, Leon pushed his hand through the opening carved out by his spear.
He didn't attempt to grab the fur from the inside or anything. It was simply way too far for him to keep it, especially while he was still on a mission.
But there was something else that could hold great value within this sack of bones.
And since it wasn't the sack itself or the material it was made with...
'There it is,' he thought a moment later once he managed to feel up some of the smaller bones inside.
Leon picked up only a single of the bones before raising it to his eyes. He didn't inspect it with his vision, though, running a small bit of his mana through it instead.
At first, nothing happened. Yet, as he continued to increase the volume of his activated energy that he run through the piece... he could feel the resistance starting to mount and grow.
'Isn't this fucking precious?' he thought, opening his eyes wide and staring at the small bone in his hand with a shocked expression on his face. 'To a degree, those bones are even better than the energy I got from its flesh!'
The absorption of mana through the burning of its medium was the simplest yet also the least efficient method of doing so. The only reason why Leon decided on it was due to its convenience... and lack of ability to perform any of the other possible techniques.
As such, rather than absorbing all the power that the massive bear accumulated through its lifespan, Leon only got to tap into a small fraction of it.
But the bones...
They didn't hold any energy at all. Yet, years of acting as a foundation for a mana-rich organism made them quite the good conductor of mana!
'This is going to be fun,' Leon thought, digging into the deflated corpse once again. He spent a good while collecting all the bones small or thin enough for him to either carry or cut into comfortably smaller pieces.
Then and only then did he dare to stand up and properly walk away from the treasure trove of materials that this beast's corpse offered.
'Now, let's focus on the mana I gained,' he thought, taking a look at the pool of energy he stole from the corpse with his mind's eye.
It was in a crude form right now with the residue intent of the beast still lingering within. Yet, as it was now all within Leon's body...
'Blood magic, inner furnace,' Leon thought, squeezing a single drop of his true blood.
Then, he activated all the mana condensed within, setting his own stomach on a magical fire.
Soon, all the residual intent of the monster's energy evaporated.
"Burp!" Leon twitched, letting out a breath full of the residual intent and other impurities formerly contained within the beast's mana.
But if that was all he was intending to do, there would be no use wasting an entire drop of his true blood!
And so, the bloodmancer continued to raise the rate of his inner flames by condensing them more and more.
Only when all the mana that he stole reached the point where it could barely get any thicker than it was before imploding in on itself, did he start to mold it.
'First, let's recover my blood,' Leon thought, raising his spear to his left hand before cutting the inner side of his palm open. And then, like the heretics of the past, he licked down the blood that oozed out of his wound, allowing it to flow down to his stomach.
Or in other words, right where the process of refining the mana reached its most vulnerable state.
The blood flowed down his throat. And upon sinking into the pit of his stomach, it then mixed right into the boiling rage of his mana furnace.
The extremely condensed mana within quickly started to bind with the particles of his blood, all the way to the point where not a single atom of it remained free of the purest form of the mana that could exist.
'A total of eleven blood drops,' Leon thought once his blood bounded and thus exhausted most of the energy within his inner furnace, causing the reaction within to cease.
'Not bad,' the bloodmancer smiled with satisfaction.
He was still far from recovering even to the state he was in when he appeared in this world. But right now, he was stronger than he was ever since he wasted all that blood of his to escape from that damned castle!
"And I still have some leftovers," Leon muttered to himself while patting himself on the stomach.
The amount of mana he used to raise his spatial perception was just a fraction of what the activated mana he held in his stomach right now.
"Well, with that said, it's time to get back to work," Leon said, solely to put his mind back on track.
He closed his eyes for a second. Then, Leon took three deep breaths, calming the state of his stomach while spreading the activated mana evenly through his entire body.
Then and only then did he open his eyes again. And soon enough, he could see the tiny clues that the more obvious tracks indicated its maker has missed while scouting this part of the forest.
'You really came close to tracking them down,' Leon thought as Alice's face appeared before his eyes once again. 'Close, but not close enough,' he thought before getting on all fours and starting his tracking job all over again.
He moved quickly. Now that he recovered a somewhat satisfiable chunk of his energy, Leon could easily afford to expand his mana perception beyond the range of the noises he was making.
As such, he had no reason to keep a low profile anymore. Yet, soon he came to regret his decision to speed up the process.
'Is it really going to be that easy?' Leon thought to himself when he reached yet another clearing in the forest.
This time, however, the camp set up in its middle was nowhere as big as the one he encountered deeper into the forest. It consisted of a set of three tents set in a triangle and what looked like a small, covert fireplace right in the middle.
Leon still stood within the area of the woodlands. And yet, he could already hear the voices coming from within the biggest of the three tents.
'It really is that easy,' he thought, a wave of disappointment spreading through his soul.
Leon took a deep breath and reined his dissatisfaction in.
Without a proper challenge, finding what he was looking for felt like a drag rather than an accomplishment.
Still, the bloodmancer fell to his knees before sprawling himself all over the ground. He then rolled around, covering his cloak with mud, leaves, and all sort of bio-trash from the forest undergrowth.
'Well, let's wrap this up,' he decided once he looked more like a bushman rather than a member of a civilized society.
And then, Leon started to crawl forward.