Bruno turned around with a smile on his face, expecting to see a distraught Cinder. Instead, he saw a young man wholeheartedly focused on studying the animal's body and Bruno's technique.
Bruno's eyes widened for a moment before he returned to the animal and focused on teaching Cinder to the best of his ability.
He showed Cinder which parts of the animal were good, which he could just toss out, and which needed some treatment before being viable ingredients. He showed Cinder how to cut them, avoid getting blood all over himself, take out organs without bursting them, and store everything he wanted to bring in cloth bags after wrapping the things that might spoil in specific herbs.
Cinder was hesitant at first since he wasn't used to dealing with dead animals. But as he watched Bruno, the obsession with it being a dead animal faded. It was just a task. It was something he needed to do if he wanted to earn money.
After an hour or two, Bruno had finished turning the dead animal into several piles of ready-to-sell meat and one pile of waste that would be given to the cleaners or turned into compost and manure for the fields below the Mountain.
When Bruno mentioned that, Cinder took the opportunity to ask him about the cleaners since he seemed more experienced than Kode. But he was also clueless. He knew 'the cleaners' existed and that they cleaned up unwanted matter and remnants of battle and so on, keeping the Mountain tidy.
Cinder had to set aside his curiosity regarding that. It was an interesting part of the game, but Cinder liked it. He liked the mystery. It made it feel like there would always be new things to discover that weren't directly related to what was right in front of him.
The cleaners had nothing to do with his money-earning or boar hunting, but they were still there in the background somewhere, painting a full picture of the game's world.
Cinder decided that if he ever had the time, he would try and catch a glimpse of them. But that was a matter for the future, right now, he had to make his heart bleed.
His only tool and weapon was his mace, which, after the morning's hunting session with Kode, was pretty battered. Even Bruno had said that it would be impossible to dismantle even a slime with it. Cinder didn't know what a slime meant in that context, but it was pretty obvious Bruno was too busy looking at him like he was stupid to bother answering any unrelated questions.
Unfortunately, that meant Cinder had to waste his hard-earned Tokens on tools and equipment. He had to buy at least one knife, and it had to be good and long enough to be able to cut through the boars. He also had to buy the packets he needed to carry his loot. The last thing he might need was the leaves to wrap the meat in to prevent it from going bad.
The leaves could be found in the wild relatively easily, but Cinder would need to learn what they looked like and where to find them for that. He didn't need to be sidetracked further. Besides, they were cheap. If he was splurging on the rest, he might as well throw in a few leaves.
He would also only need the meat if he was planning on wasting time before returning to the village or bringing the nastier meat. He had no plans on doing either of those. Still, it would be better to have than to not have.
With iron-willed determination, Cinder put fifteen Tokens toward a good dismantling knife, a backpack, and four reusable meat-carrying bags. It was most of what he had earned when hunting with Kode earlier.
Cinder's heart ached, but he knew good stuff, while more expensive, was worth it in the long run. He could either buy a cheap knife now and every other boar or a good one once.
Still, he swore to treasure it. It was worth more than his life, after all. He had only been worth five Tokens when he first started the game. Right now, most of his Tokens were in that knife and he only had a few loose ones left.
Cinder almost didn't want to use it. But he had to make money. So, with his gear on his back, he set off toward the Mountain again and climbed it until he reached the boars' habitat. It didn't take long for a boar to find the intruder trying to set his dirty feet on its plot of land on the Mountain.
The boar charged. Cinder dodged and whacked it with the mace. That repeated until Cinder landed a solid blow to its head, crushing its skull.
The crunching sound still sent chills down Cinder's spine. It was such a barbaric method of hunting. It was nothing like the way hunters on Earth just used rifles and shot them from afar before they had a chance to feel any pain.
Kode could maybe do something similar if he was a better shot, but arrows didn't have the same power as bullets.
But however realistic it was, it was still a game, and the boars were monsters. They had already killed him twice. Who cared if their deaths were messy?
Cinder sighed and stopped stalling as he picked up the bag he flung aside when the boar showed up. He grabbed the knife, unsheathed it, and pointed it at the boar.
Bruno hadn't shown him this part, but he had told Cinder that skinning wasn't that difficult. It was like peeling an orange. A big, stubborn, bloody, non-round orange.
Cinder wasn't sure if he liked Bruno's analogy, but Bruno had at least told him where to begin. Under its head. Since it was already crushed, Cinder had a surprisingly easy time getting started.
After a few moments, he noticed that he was feeling a little wet. He looked down at his blood-stained shirt.
"Shit. I should have bought a hazmat suit."