Poison wasn't the most ideal way to deal with the badger as it ruined the meat and fur making them worthless. The badger's meat was edible even if it didn't taste good, but the thick black fur was worth plenty under normal circumstances. The poison of the green death mushroom would kill the badger withing minutes of eating the bait, but it would turn the badger's blood poisonous and kill any animal or person that came into contact with it. He would have to burn the badger, full and all the moment he found it's dead body to prevent anything from scavenging the remains and causing many deaths.
The wire traps were easy to move as they weighed almost nothing, but the box traps and the spring traps needed more than one trip to get them to the stream. Grimvir decided to let the stream do the work of cleaning the traps, so he spent an hour moving rocks and placing sticks to create a fenced in area to place the traps. If it worked as he wished, the moving water do most of the work, but if he was wrong, he might spend the next few hours walking down stream to collect his traps. They were expensive and he was still had several payments to go before he could truly call them his.
The woods were teeming with life and finding something to use as bait didn't take long. A young squirrel was eating berry at the foot a tree, then it had a rock smash into its skull, killing it. It wasn't hard to find a green death mushroom in the northern woods, it had a sharp acidic smell and everything ten feet around it was dead. Tying a leather strap around the squirrel's neck and tossing it at the mushroom would allow the clear puss like fluid to coat the squirrel's fur, poisoning it. The only problem is now he couldn't touch the squirrel or most of the leather strap unless he wished to get poisoned to death himself. So Grimvir had to use a stick and wrap part of the leather strap around it to move it.
Taking it to one of the spots where his trap line had been only a few hours ago, he arranged it to look like the squirrel had got caught in a wire trap. By time night fell the poisonous puss from the mushroom would be completely dry and odorless and hopefully when he checked the trap tomorrow morning there would be a dead shadow badger nearby.
Making his way back to the stream, Grimvir checked to make sure his traps were still there and if they were getting cleaned. Seeing that everything was going as planned, he began walking downstream a bit with his fishing spear. Of the three fish he saw, he speared two and left the smallest one to grow some more. The two he caught weren't as big as the one he caught yesterday, but combined they were slightly bigger.
Not long after he came back to where his traps were being cleaned, he quickly made a fire and set about to roast the fish. As they roasted, Grimvir carefully washed and dried his hands, while he waited for his meal to be done, he was going to read one of the books from the chests. "Basics of Magic", a book that was old when his master's master took his first steps into the word of magic over a thousand years ago. It was the first book almost every magic user read first, a simple to understand book that carefully explained world of magic to children.
Opening the book, he was greeted by the same runes he first saw in the other books, but this time he could read them. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to read these runes had been forced into his mind. Instead of being able to read it in sentences, he was only able to read it word by word and then piece the sentences together to get their meaning. It was like learning a foreign language one word at a time and then trying to fit them together in a sentence that made sense. It would take some time and practice before it with ease.
The content of the book wasn't hard for Grimvir to understand, but he did get as far he had hoped before his two fish were done cooking. His meal was even better than yesterday, a pinch of salt and pepper from the spices in his pack made a huge difference. He was even thinking of asking the other hunters if they could teach him how to make some fish traps. He only wondered how much it would cost to learn, he still owed a hefty sum for the training and equipment he has now. The meat and furs he had already sent back should have erased a third of that debt, he wasn't comfortable adding to it. But adding some smoked fish to what he sends back might be worth the extra debt.
After eating Grimvir read by the fire till it started to turn dark, and after pulling his traps out of the water to dry, he headed back to his shack. He wanted to read more, but in the month and a half he had been living in this shack he had gone to bed and woke up when the sun came up. And while he did think of a way to read in the dark by using the glow of the talent orb, but he still needed to meditate to absorb mana and continue to build his runes.
Waking up to the sounds of the birds chirping as the sun started to light up the woods, did a quick round of meditation. Then grabbed his pack and left for his trap while chewing on some rabbit jerky. With each bite of rabbit jerky, he wished that he had something else to eat. It had too much pepper and covered the flavor of the smoke and the taste of the rabbit, and it stung his tongue.
Grimvir was lost in thought about this jerky he bought at the trade center as emergency rations and how he would prefer to eat food he had caught. But those thoughts disappeared the moment he was standing in front of the corpse of the shadow badger. It had inky black fur, it was as long as Grimvir was tall, and slumped on the ground it still came up his knees. What truly drew Grimvir's attention was that its stomach had exploded, and several feet of its intestines were outside its body. A few feet away from the badger's body were the bodies of a dozen or so rats, they had fed on the badger and were poisoned to death.
Putting his pack down, Grimvir cut down a tree branch to use as a broom and began to sweep the dead rats and all the pine needles towards the shadow badger. He then began to gather wood, after an hour the pile of wood covering the badger was over three feet tall. With a simple spark the pine needles caught fire and soon the entire thing was a blaze reaching high into the sky. Grimvir read his book for several hours until the fire had been reduced to embers, he then used a stick to scrape up the ground. This both smothered the ashes and exposed any blood that had seeped into the dirt to be exposed to heat, destroying any leftover poison.