Wounded Hand

After running far away from them, Kim Jae-hoon halted his movements and gasped for air.

As for Park Sun-jae, he soon caught up to him from behind and didn't feel tired at all.

Kim Jae-hoon was still in shock and stupefied about what happened to him a while ago. Never in his life he had imagined that he would get hurt by puppy like creatures who were cute and looked docile. Looking at their behaviour, it reminded him of a certain hollywood movie where small cute creatures like these were chaos-makers in a nutshell. Nevertheless, those movie characters were not that violent compared to ones he witnessed a moment ago.

'This world is too strange. I feel like I'm in a fantasy world.' He thought to himself while shaking his head.

"Why…Huff… didn't you warn me about them?" he looked at Park Sun-jae with a face demanding for answers.

"I had no idea. Even I was mesmerized by their outside appearance." Park Sun-jae said in his defense. "Also, I did tell you to be careful around cute things if possible. It was you who didn't listen."

The young man sighed. It was indeed his fault this time, and he learned his lesson on not to judge something just by their appearance too.

He then sat down in the shade of a nearby tree, intending to rest and recover from his injuries.

"Aah!" While he was sitting there, he felt a prickly sensation from the palm of his right hand. When he checked the palm, he widened his eyes in surprise and saw that it was completely covered by the wooden spikes shooted by those plant-like creatures.

Back then, Kim Jae-hoon was busy running for his life that he almost forgot about that he was attacked in that area until now. In addition to that, his hand became numb for some reason that he wasn't feeling any pain either.

"Are you fine? Those needle-like things seems painful to me." Park Sun-jae said with a concerning look in his eyes.

"Don't worry. It's fine." Kim Jae-hoon replied calmly.

Thankfully, the spikes didn't penetrate the skin deep enough to make him bleed or it would be problematic for him during the journey. The young man can't get injured severely while traveling. Otherwise, treating him in the wilderness would be next to impossible since he had no one to rely on nor had any prior knowledge about the medicinal herbs in this world.

As for Park Sun-jae, he was only good as a guide to show the way around. Other than that, he wasn't much of a help.

Kim Jae-hoon immediately tried to remove one of those prickly spikes from his palm when he felt an excruciating pain afterwards that was unbearable. Moreover, from the small dot-like hole where the spike was stuck previously, blood started seeping out.

Upon seeing that, Kim Jae-hoon's face turned pale.

The young man thought the spikes didn't pierce through the skin since blood didn't come out of his hand but when he plucked out the said spike, it did.

"F**k!"

"Oh no! What do we do? This looks serious." Park Sun-jae panicked.

Kim Jae-hoon ignored him and tried to pluck out one more spike from his hand. "Argh!"

"Hey, what the hell are you doing? Are you insane?"

"If I let them be, who knows what will happen to my hand? I'm just taking precautions."

"What!? Precaution?" Park Sun-jae retorted. "Is this what you call precaution?? If you keep doing this, you'll lose a lot of blood!"

"So what!!" Kim Jae-hoon shouted at him with an annoyed look. "These things might be poisonous. If I keep them be, I might have to cut my arm in the end or in the worst case scenario, I might even die. I'd rather lose a tiny bit of blood than my entire dominating arm or my precious life! So, shut up and let me do my work."

"You-"

Park Sun-jae clicked his tongue in annoyance and walked away from there while heading towards the tree far away from Kim Jae-hoon. As for the other person, he kept plucking out one spike after another from his hand even though it was hurting like hell, and the pain would increase each and every time. The higher the amount of spikes removed, the greater the pain was for him.

On top of that, he was losing lots of blood in the process that he felt exhausted and sleepy. But because of the immeasurable pain he was feeling, it helped him be awake all the time.

After enduring the pain for a while, Kim Jae-hoon was able to remove all the spikes from his hand which gave him a sense of relief but was still in great pain. He then took off his shirt and used the image stone from his pouch to tear apart a small piece of cloth out of it.

Later, the young man soaked the cloth with water that he brought along in his bottle and poured some of it onto the open wound for disinfection purposes. When he was done disinfecting the area, he wrapped the wounded part with the same cloth before tying it tightly in the end.

Although it was not much he had done to his wound, the bleeding stopped afterwards and the pain also reduced quite a bit. Kim Jae-hoon then relaxed a bit and rested under the tree for the time being after closing his eyes.

------------

An hour later, Kim Jae-hoon woke up from his slumber and felt rejuvenated with energy for some reason. He got up and looked around for his partner since he felt bad about last time. Sometime later, the young man was able to find his buddy sitting under a certain tree same as him. However, in this case, the ghost was not sleeping.

Kim Jae-hoon approached him with a guilty look on his face and said. "Park Sun-jae, about last time…"

The said person glanced at him a bit before looking away from him again. "Hmph!"