By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 6 - Chapter 14

Chapter 4 Episode 14: Trouble Arises

“What’s wrong?!”

I followed Roche to the animal dissection space behind the carriage and found it in chaos.

“What happened? Is anyone hurt?”

“I just started extracting some blood, but the blood in the bucket started to go wild. These guys were just startled, nobody was hurt or anything. But seriously, what the heck? Did an animal fall in there or something?”

“Oh, I had slimes in there, but that’s still strange. I wonder what’s wrong with it?”

I got the sense that my bloody slimes were panicking about something. There was nothing around that seemed like a threat, but I was still nervous.

“Gazelle, where’s the creature whose blood you were draining?!”

“That one all the way at the end there.”

I cast Appraisal on the flesh dangling from the tree.

Grass Rat Corpse

A herbivorous rodent. Its meat is fresh but contaminated with poison. If this poison is ingested orally, it’s harmless as long as there are no open wounds in the mouth. It can be eaten if necessary.

“I knew it. This meat is poisoned.”

“Poisoned?!”

“We didn’t use any poison!” one of Gazelle’s allies said, but my magic proved there was poison in the meat. That being said, he probably wasn’t lying. That meant the poison must have come from somewhere else, and I thought I knew where.

“Here we are,” I said. Blood and fur obscured two small holes between the rat’s front legs. “That’s a snake bite. A venomous snake probably attacked the rat before you captured it.”

It must have only barely survived the bite, but as it was hiding in its den, Gazelle’s party caught it while the poison still remained in its blood. Then that blood was drained into the bucket containing my slimes. Maybe they had started thrashing around in an attempt to avoid the poisonous blood.

“Oh? They’ve gone quiet.”

“Looks like the bloody slimes absorbed all the blood and poison.”

“Will it be alright?! Does it need medicine or something?!”

If it was a venomous snake that lived in this area whose venom was safe when ingested orally, it had to be a bush snake. I did have medicine for that, but it was meant to be drunk by humans. It wasn’t meant to be injected directly into the blood.

The first thing I wanted to do was dilute the poison as much as possible. I collected my bloody slimes from the other buckets and gathered up as much of the blood as possible.

“There were seven more grass rats, right? Sorry, but as there doesn’t seem to be any poison in them, would you mind giving me their blood? It has nothing to do with the training, so you don’t have to do it, but I’ll pay you.”

“It’s our mistake that caused this, no need to pay us. Right, guys?”

“Oh, yeah. Not like we need all that blood.”

“We’d just throw it out anyway.”

“Thanks!”

I quickly checked the other seven rats, then poured their blood into the bucket.

“Hopefully this’ll thin out the poison a bit. And if it doesn’t, it’ll still be nutrients for the bloody slimes.”

The bloody slimes were suffering, but I wouldn’t say they were in danger. The bush snake poison was weak, and the bloody slimes had resistance to poison. Not as strong as a poison slime’s, but it could handle some types of poison.

I decided to watch for a while and see how diluting the poison and providing nutrients helped it. Trying medicine that had never been tested on a slime before would be a last resort.

“Now to let it rest for a while. Thanks, Gazelle.”

“Thanks? We didn’t do much of anything.”

“Just giving me the blood was helpful enough. I’m partially to blame for not being cautious enough myself, so you shouldn’t feel bad. And neither should the rest of you.”

The other three boys were nice enough to respond, but sounded uncomfortable.

Roche went behind them and patted them on the back. “Might be hard not to feel bad, but feeling bad won’t change anything. Instead of just getting depressed, try to reflect on your mistakes so you can do better next time. You agree, right, Ryoma?”

“Right.” Thankfully this poison was safe to ingest orally anyway, but they could have eaten the meat without knowing it was poisoned at all. If it happened to be dangerous to digest, that would have spelled their doom.

“Listen, when people start getting used to something, they slack off and make more mistakes. For adventurers, those mistakes can be lethal. I know hunting’s your specialty, but take this opportunity to brush up on the fundamentals.”

“Okay!” the kids said.

“Then get back to work. Ryoma, I don’t know much about curing slimes, but tell me if there’s anything I can do. I’ll help however I can.”

“Us too!”

If I needed something, I decided to ask Roche or Gazelle’s party first.

■ ■ ■

It was early next morning, before the sun had even risen.

“Oh, time for the next shift?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks. I’ll swap out, then.”

I was holding a pot containing my bloody slimes under one arm, keeping an eye on it as I got my work done. Eventually, the team for the next shift gathered around.

“I heard your slimes consumed poison. How are they?”

“They’ve calmed down quite a lot, thank you.”

I was on guard duty, but all the teachers and students who knew the situation were pretty accommodating to make it easier to care for my slimes. So while I was technically on guard duty, I was permitted to hunt for animals near the campsite and give their blood to the bloody slimes. Thanks to that, they seemed to have gotten past the worst of the poisoning. They were still in a weakened state, but no longer seemed to be in pain like they were immediately after consuming the poison. Their recovery was even faster than I expected.

“That’s good.”

“Yes, thank you for the help, everyone.”

“So you’re really accompanied by slimes, Ryoma?”

I didn’t understand the question. I would have guessed he was wondering why I kept such weak monsters with me, but judging by his tone of voice, that didn’t seem to be the case.

“What, do you not know what people call you?”

“When you talk about the Adventurer Accompanied By Slimes, everyone in Gimul would know who you’re talking about lately, I think.”

“Really?” I asked.

“You’re pretty famous for your work at the abandoned mine and the weird shop you’ve got.”

“There probably aren’t as many people who know your name and face, though. At first, I didn’t know it was you either. But when people see your slimes, I think they can figure it out pretty quickly.”

I didn’t even realize I’d gotten so famous around town. It made me feel kind of awkward, so I decided to end the conversation there to get some rest.

“Well, there’s still tomorrow. Or later today, technically.”

“Go get some sleep.”

“Good night.”

I returned to my base, but I was so concerned about the health of my bloody slimes that I didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. They were in a stable condition, so there shouldn’t have been anything to worry about, but it had been a while since any of my non-poison slimes consumed poison. I fed poison grass to my slimes for my evolution experiments back in the day, but I let individual slimes pick out the food they liked, so they mostly just evolved without being harmed. This was the first time I’d given poison to a slime since the time I figured that out.

That brought something to mind for me, so I cast Monster Appraisal on one of the bloody slimes that drank the poison.

Bloody Slime

Skills: Suck Blood 5, Deodorize 3, Disease Resistance 3, Poison Resistance 2, Play Dead 10, Consume 2, Absorb 4, Split 1

Its Suck Blood and Poison Resistance levels had increased by one. The former was a result of all the blood I had fed it, but for the latter, I was pretty sure that I hadn’t fed it anything poisonous until now. There were no changes to its Disease Resistance level. Maybe it just stayed the same because its level was relatively high anyway, but there was something mixed into the blood I fed it. But that couldn’t have been, because I only ever fed it fresh blood I got myself or blood that was handled by Sieg’s butcher shop. If that wasn’t the cause, then I had to assume that its Poison Resistance level went up by one because of this recent incident. It was currently in a stable condition, and its Poison Resistance Level had increased.

I didn’t expect it to conquer the poison so quickly. The Poison Resistance skill was a physical attribute, rather than a technical skill like sword or spear skills, and it was cultivated through changes in its physical constitution and through experiences the way the Disease Resistance skill was. It seemed like it might function something like an immune system. If so, then maybe Poison Resistance was like antibodies.

It seemed absurd that it could have developed that in one night though, unless that’s just how slimes were. The first slimes were designed to be adaptable to environments and able to easily reproduce according to Gain, creator of slimes and this world itself. It was extremely unlikely that he was mistaken. Bloody slimes shared that adaptability, so maybe they could adapt to poison well enough to survive after a single night. I couldn’t be sure, though.

But it occurred to me that if all this was true, then maybe I could create an antiserum. It seemed like I might be able to check whether slimes had antibodies. I took a piece of a poisoned bloody slime’s body to use as a sample. Just as I could collect acid, poison, and deodorizing fluid, I could collect the bloody slime’s blood too. When normal slimes died, they disappeared without a trace, but evolved slimes seemed to take on the physical properties of the food they consumed. Anyway, this was no time to think about that.

For now, I needed the serum in the blood, so I used alchemy to separate it out. I could have made it separate just by letting it sit for a while, but I wanted to know the results as soon as possible. I cast Appraisal on the orange fluid that remained in the container.

Serum

Extracted from a bloody slime’s fluid by using alchemy. It contains antibodies that resist bush snake venom.

I had proven that the bloody slime serum contained antibodies. I still couldn’t guess exactly how adaptable the bloody slime was, but this answered one question. There was an antidote for bush snake venom that worked on humans, but not all poisons had antidotes. Even with the realm of snake venom alone, the composition of the venom differed by species, and even between child and adult within the same species. There were too many incurable poisons to count.

I needed to investigate whether this serum could be given to humans as an antiserum and if it was safe. But on Earth, they administered antigens to horses and used serums made from their blood to treat diphtheria, so it wasn’t impossible. Best of all, this serum didn’t cost anything to make. I also needed to think about how to preserve this in case of emergencies, but depending on the type of poison, I could make the serum quickly enough on the spot as long as I had the antibodies ready. If I obtained more bloody slimes in the future, then I could produce that much more serum too. It would be well worth preparing for such an eventuality just in case.

But while I made use of a lot of my knowledge from Earth already, the invention of serums had a huge influence on the study of medicine on Earth. This was one time where I had to proceed with caution. I decided to conduct my research on serums in secret.