Shen Zuo hurried back to the small cave to treat himself.
He quickly assessed his condition: both wrists bleeding, a broken leg, five broken ribs, and internal bleeding in his intestines from the rhino's earlier kick. He rated his overall state as... pitiful.
Still, he wasn't helpless. Thanks to his training with Zhou Ji, he'd built a solid foundation in chemistry and medicine, and luckily, he had a few useful substances on hand.
First, he tried to stop the bleeding in his hands quickly. The tendons in both wrists had already been severed, so he couldn't grip or hold anything.
He hurried over to his medical supply box and pulled out a small wooden vial sealed shut at the top.
Shen Zuo pressed his limp hands together, cracked the top of the vial open with his teeth, wood splinters scattering into his mouth, but he ignored the pain and the splinters, drinking down the blue liquid inside before spitting it out onto both of his hands.
Instantly, many of his severed tendons and veins knitted back together, though the bleeding continued, lighter than before but still steady.
Shen Zuo cracked open two more wooden vials before the dangerous bleeding in his hands finally stopped, his tendons and veins fully restored, giving him back full, free movement in both hands.
But he still couldn't relax; there was still internal bleeding in his intestines that needed fixing.
Through certain training exercises with Zhou Ji, a person could learn to see their own body and internal organs as clearly as they could see the back of their own hand, so he was able to pinpoint the internal bleeding quickly. Fortunately, it wasn't severe, but it still needed immediate treatment, or it would spread.
Shen Zuo took out a dark blue pill, one that, for some reason, resembled the blue liquid from the vial that had healed his wrists earlier.
He swallowed it immediately, and using everything he'd learned, he quickly directed it toward his stomach to break down. Once the pill dissolved into a semi-solid liquid, he channeled the extracted fluid straight to his intestines.
As expected, the wounds and bleeding in his intestines gradually vanished, and within a few breaths, his insides were completely healed.
"This liquid really is incredible!"
Shen Zuo smiled, unable to hide his admiration for this miraculous substance. Zhou Ji had given it to him for emergencies, and he hadn't even used it back on his very first day here, despite his injuries then.
But getting hold of this liquid wasn't easy. It required finding an Aether Spring, boiling and purifying the spring water, then using the resulting liquid in Water Refining. Unlike the traditional method, where the refiner used fire and a Refining Cauldron as the core for breaking down and combining materials, the Water Refining method used a Refining Fluid and a Refining Spring to produce the desired substance.
As should be clear, the Refining Fluid, much like Refining Fire, was meant to break materials apart from one another and help analyze them, but in the Water method, this was done by generating currents or whirlpools within the fluid that broke the materials down from the inside, with the Refining Spring taking the place of the cauldron, holding both the materials and the fluid within it. The two methods differed fundamentally in technique and underlying principles; what worked in one wouldn't work in the other, and what mattered in one held no real significance in the other. Because of this, certain sects and individuals practiced only one of the two Refining methods, and it was rare to find a sect or person who practiced both.
Shen Zuo looked over his remaining injuries.
The broken ribs and leg were easy enough to deal with, so he wasn't in any rush to treat them, letting his thoughts about Refining and chemistry keep spinning through his mind.
"Damn it, so what exactly is the third Refining method?..."
After a long stretch of thinking, the memory finally surfaced: Zhou Ji had once told him there was a third Refining method, considered far more difficult and complex than the other two.
Refining had more than one type and use, since a person could, with it, make medicine, poison, even a Phantom, essentially anything was possible through Refining.
His recovery and self-care took nearly a full month, the longest stretch of downtime he'd had in a long time, spent mostly eating, snacking on fruit, and drinking water. It almost looked like he'd used his injuries as an excuse to take a vacation.
After all, he usually took far worse injuries than this at the hands of old Bai Ren or Ling Li, only to be healed the very same day by Zhou Ji.
But of course, the month didn't pass without him doing something. While his body slowly healed, his mind never stopped working. Shen Zuo spent the time putting together a comprehensive plan to trap every region he'd already explored, and began hand-crafting dozens of arrows.
On this particular day, he coated the heads of all those arrows with the Craigar poison core extract, preparing them for lethal use. He decided to lure beasts into specific zones, kill them there, then leave their corpses to rot, which would draw even more beasts to the same spots.
This way, he could set up additional traps without much extra effort. His ideas were simple, but as always, brutally effective against beasts.
The plan went like this:
First, lure beasts into designated zones using the rotting corpses of beasts he'd already killed. He'd distribute these corpses in a wide arc through the forest, adding scents that would attract predators like Shao wolves and foxes. Each corpse would be carefully placed at a spot tempting enough to draw beasts closer, but one that was actually exposed from three different directions.
Second, plant more than thirty poisoned arrows in the surrounding trees. Each arrow would be hidden inside a small hollow, tied to a taut silk thread stretched across the path the beasts would travel. The moment something touched the thread, the arrow would fire instantly toward a lethal point: the neck, the chest, or just behind the shoulder.
Third, add secondary traps, like narrow pits covered with a layer of dry branches, at certain side crossing points, to catch any beast that tried to slip in from the edges of the main plan.
Fourth, use moving bait, like tossing a piece of poisoned meat from a distance using a long rope, to steer beasts toward the arrow zones without ever revealing his own position.
Fifth, set up three elevated observation points, one of them inside a thick tree with a hollow trunk, where he'd hide himself along with a small hand-drawn map showing the trap locations, the arrow positions, and wind direction.
Everything was calculated down to the smallest detail: timing, scent, the spacing between traps, even how long it would take a beast to die once poisoned.
Most importantly, none of it would leave any direct trace of him: no human scent, no footprints, no obvious movement... just a silent forest, quietly filled with death.
He got straight to work the moment he finished treating himself. There was no room to slack off; everything was clear in his mind, and the plan was no longer just ideas on paper, but something concrete and real now... all he had to do was execute it.
He started by checking on the old traps he'd previously set, ones that relied entirely on pits and crude mechanisms. Some were still functional, but most needed re-digging or repairs. He built pressure traps out of flexible branches and re-covered the pits with a fine layer of dirt and dry branches, making them blend seamlessly into the ground.
Once the pits were secured, he moved on to developing the new plan. For the first time, he added a long-range killing element: poisoned arrows. He rigged them onto crude mechanisms in some of the taller trees, set to fire automatically the moment a flexible thread stretched across the beasts' path was pulled. He placed these traps right beside some of the old pits, so they could strike from above and below at the same time.
Then he set up the bait zones, choosing relatively open spots and scattering rotting animal carcasses across them, after smearing them with spoiled blood and decayed berries to spread the scent deep into the forest. He used these spots as a magnet, drawing beasts into the heart of the poisoned circle.
Finally, he began building the observation posts. He picked three elevated points carefully spread around the trap circle, each covering a different angle of the area, giving him a clear view of the beasts' movements. He used sturdy branches to build small platforms hidden among the trees, tying them down with taut ropes to keep them secure without drawing attention.
At each platform, he left a small bag containing spare arrows, a little dried food, and a hand-drawn map marking the trap locations in detail. The most important of these points was the dense tree near the center, where he planned to sit once everything was in place.
But he hadn't climbed up yet; the work wasn't finished.
With a few more preparations, he finished everything after roughly three exact weeks of work, over which he'd covered a wide area spanning most of the regions he'd already explored.
During that stretch, he hadn't just been setting traps; he'd also managed to hunt down a few animals, along with killing two beasts outright.
Shen Zuo now stood atop his tall observation tree, hidden among its hollow branches, his eyes tracking every movement in the forest below. Down below, at some distance from him, near a small pool surrounded by thorny plants, a Leishi crocodile was slowly closing in, drawn by the scent of a carcass.
The raised sections of the beast's body were covered in sharp spikes, like a natural suit of armor, but Shen Zuo knew exactly where its weakness lay: a small gap just behind the spikes, one his poisoned arrows could reach.
On the platform, his bow sat drawn and ready in his hand, several arrows coated with Craigar poison core extract waiting in his quiver. Alongside that, taut, near-invisible threads stretched along the path had also been rigged with the arrow-firing trap.
As the Leishi crocodile approached the narrow crossing point between the thorns, its feet brushed against a taut thread, triggering the trap instantly. An arrow shot out from among the branches, striking straight into the small gap behind the spikes on the beast's head.
The beast roared harder, trying to pull back. Despite the poison now coursing through its blood, it fought hard and lunged away from the area, vanishing from Shen Zuo's line of sight.
From his elevated perch, Shen Zuo watched the scene calmly. He knew the beast wouldn't get far before it died; even diluted, the poison's effect was still potent.
On the eastern side of the circle, the soil shifted slightly over one of the pits, right before a wild rabbit suddenly dropped inside. It slammed into the narrow wall of the pit, letting out a muffled cry before landing on a bed of sharpened sticks.
Those sticks had originally been failed attempts at arrow-making, ones Shen Zuo had kept and repurposed as a crude spiked floor inside some of the pits. One of the sticks pierced into the rabbit's side, completely disabling its movement. It tried to dig its way out from underneath, but the ground was reinforced with small stones and a hardened layer beneath, blocking any attempt to burrow, as though the pit had been specifically designed to trap anything trying to escape by digging.
The rabbit kept kicking uselessly, trapped by both the pain and its own weakness.
When Shen Zuo saw the scene, he smiled quietly, then climbed down fr
om the tree with ease, slinging his bow over his back, muttering to himself:
"Roasted rabbit for dinner..."