And Yet, I Won't Stop (8)

Then I spent two weeks in the town of Badas gathering various information before entering the Great Wetlands, the Man-Eating Great Swamp.

With the water spirit's help, I traveled by walking across the water's surface.

Walking on water for a short time was one thing, but doing so for extended periods required the water spirit to support me constantly, making it a fairly taxing and exhausting way to travel.

But not all of the wetlands were submerged, and it wasn't a place so forgiving that I could simply avoid the lakes and ponds and stick to land, so I had no choice but to endure it.

The reeds growing near the water's edge swayed, and at the same time, the water spirit warned me.

Something was steadily closing in on me from underwater, targeting me.

Contact in... three, two, one.

Timing it perfectly, I kicked off the surface of the water and leaped high into the air.

At that same moment, a giant crocodile's enormous jaws snapped shut below me.

I readied my magic sword in midair, channeled magic into it, and swung it as I fell.

With a clean slice, the magic sword severed the crocodile monster's neck without being hindered by its hard hide.

Well, it's not as though a crocodile's neck and body are all that easy to tell apart.

Once I landed on the water's surface, I used my magic sword to cut off the tail of the crocodile monster floating belly-up, grabbed it, and hurried away from the spot.

If I didn't hurry, blood from the severed neck and body would spread through the water, and carnivorous fish would gather in no time after catching its scent.

It had been a huge—truly enormous—crocodile, but the voracious carnivorous fish would reduce it to bones in ten minutes flat.

Still, getting the crocodile's tail had been incredibly fortunate.

Crocodile-type monsters were among the creatures in these wetlands that were particularly suitable for eating.

They were neither poisonous nor home to any frightening parasites.

Their light, clean-tasting meat was neither muddy nor gamey, and even simply sprinkling it with shaved rock salt and grilling it made for a meal that was more than tasty enough.

Of course, in these wetlands, finding somewhere to grill meat and securing fuel were both somewhat difficult.

Indeed, even the land in these wetlands was very often wet.

So even when walking on land, I asked the earth spirit to firm up the ground beneath my feet, and when I rested, I had it raise a rocky outcropping for me to lie on.

When grilling food, I learned to heat a flat rock with fire magic and use it in place of an iron griddle.

Naturally, whenever I left, I restored the surroundings to their original state.

Even a high elf like me, who could put on a somewhat superior air in the forest, was nothing more than an intruder, an alien presence, to these wetlands.

And as an intruder, I felt I needed to show respect and exercise restraint toward this vast place, which teemed with creatures of great power.

I was in the position of asking this place to let me pass, head bowed.

Once I got the hang of it, living in a danger zone called the Man-Eating Great Swamp wasn't all that bad.

After all, water spirits and earth spirits were everywhere, and the wind blew, too.

By borrowing the spirits' power and making full use of the skills and magic I'd picked up along the way, I didn't feel particularly inconvenienced.

Even these wetlands had trees growing here and there.

There were certainly many monsters, but put another way, that also meant I never had to worry about a shortage of food.

I continued east through the wetlands, shooting fish leaping across the water with my bow and arrows, chopping the limbs off crab monsters with my magic sword, and running away from herds of giant otters.

The herds of giant otters that chased me across both water and land were a little frightening.

They didn't look tasty enough to make me want to hunt them deliberately, and they were large enough that if they caught me, they looked capable of crunching me down starting with my head.

Anyway, after making my way through the wetlands like that for about a month, I sensed a gaze and stopped.

It probably wasn't the gaze of a monster stalking prey.

It was a gaze that plainly bespoke intelligence, mingling wariness and curiosity.

Though I was being watched warily, no hostility was directed at me.

I looked around, but couldn't see any sign of them.

That meant they were either underwater or hiding in the shadows of the grass.

Could they be the lizardfolk from the rumors?

When I asked the water spirit, it told me that some were peeking at me with only their faces above the water, while others watched me from the grass.

I was curious to see what they looked like, but I didn't want a careless approach to be taken as an attempt to antagonize them, so I decided to leave it at that.

Just being able to confirm that a race thought to have gone extinct still existed here was more than enough.

I felt a joy I couldn't put into words.

As long as they still existed, if fate brought us together, we'd have opportunities to interact someday.

There was no need to rush and force a connection right now.

I waved in their direction, then started walking east again.

I passed by monsters resembling either crayfish or giant prawns that were larger than people, chased edible frog monsters, and used a giant catfish as a stepping stone.

There were even times when I thought I had found land, only to discover that there were no earth spirits anywhere nearby; on closer inspection, it turned out to be the shell of an absurdly enormous turtle monster.

Incidentally, creatures that parasitized monsters' bodies were themselves monsters in most cases.

As a result, they were usually large, making it unlikely that I would accidentally eat one.

However, even when a parasite had become a monster, its eggs were difficult to distinguish, and if I accidentally ate one, it could sometimes hatch inside my body before my body expelled it and ravage my internal organs.

That made them more troublesome than ordinary poison.

Cooking killed them in most cases, but some rare species were resistant to heat, so great care was necessary when eating monsters, especially their internal organs.

In town, specialized butchers handled that sort of thing, but out in the wild, any monster I hunted myself was mine to process.

If the egg of a parasite that had become a monster entered my body, I would need to take medicine to expel it before it hatched; if it had already hatched, I would have to quickly take medicine that monsters detested to drive it out, and then have a mage versed in healing or someone similar heal my internal organs.

I did have some of that medicine with me, and I also knew a little healing magic.

Still, in my case, the spirits would warn me before I put anything clearly harmful into my mouth, so I would need that medicine only in the truly unlikely event that something went wrong.

Another month or more passed, and as I continued walking, the dampness vanished from beneath my feet and the marsh changed into grassland.

Yes, I had finally passed through the Great Wetlands called the Man-Eating Great Swamp and set foot in the eastern part of the continent.