I spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening stocking up on spices, especially salt. If I were to begin actively hunting, and not just for my immediate needs, I would also need a way to preserve the meat. Making lots of smoked ham seemed like the best option, but it would need considerable amounts of salt.

I spent the next couple of days around the cave, on some of the less exciting chores that needed doing in order for me to make the cave into a proper home.

I started with carving wooden cups and bottles, to finally be able to properly store the spices I was making, and then continued with making some more furniture. Another table, chairs, boxes to put stuff in. A bed. I didn’t have a mattress for it, but at least I got myself a much more even surface to lay out my bedroll. I carved recesses into the wall for candles and put up a few shelves inside the cave. I also made a roof over the entrance and the firepit. This bumped up covering the chimney in priority. Best would be if I could make a proper oven of some sort, but that would at the very least require clay. For now, I went and built a separate smoking rack a bit further away.

I went to collect bundles of willow branches and made wove them into baskets and mats. I tried multiple ways to set up the squashes for drying, but I wasn’t expecting results too fast.

I stocked up on a lot of the stuff I could harvest and collect from the area, collecting a considerable stock of wild vegetables and spices. I picked fruit and cooked them into jam.

I hunted shriekers and collected their feathers, both the tough outer ones as well as the fluffy down feathers they had underneath. Most of the meat I smoked, but I ended up trying to prepare it in multiple different ways. Their hearts, when just lightly seared, turned out to be rather delicious.

I practiced manipulating environmental ki, not just feeding it into the spice cup, but trying to get it to do other things: ki reinforcement was a basic method, useful for strengthening both the body and external objects. As I wanted way more experience with ki before I seriously went about starting my cultivation, I chose the latter. It worked, sort of. I did the exercises that the book described, and they seemed to work as advertised, but it was much harder work, just compared to feeding the cup. Many of the objects I used for practice ended up warped and shattered, but that was to be expected.

I even realized that I could use ki to affect objects in more complex ways than just strengthening them – purging mold was one of my earliest successes, but I even managed to use ki to rapidly dry out small pieces of wood, or even the carved-out shells of the squashes. This last trick jumpstarted my bottle production.

I built a target to practice throwing my javelins and then redid it multiple times to make it ever more sturdy – in the end I ended up with multiple layers of ki reinforced planks set against a ten-foot think back wall of earth.

I practiced with my axe, studying the techniques the book had about it.

I hunted my first goat by pretending to struggle climbing up yet another ledge and then just bracing a javelin to receive its charge. Given the weight difference, it still managed to make me actually stumble, but now that I was prepared, it couldn’t just bowl me over.

I got two more using the same method with slight variations each time, and a third one when I managed to nail it with a javelin to the chest.

Once their fur was properly tanned, I would use them as rugs around my bed. Their meat was, once again, smoked.

I found some of the other animals that lived in the area. The deer were extremely skittish, so I didn’t manage to kill any of them. There also were some rather stealthy squirrels in the forest that actually made these reinforced burrows for themselves. While these were a bit bigger than their Earth equivalent, they were still too small to actually bother hunting. The giant chinchillas, on the other hand, became a priority target: their meat was a bit too tough and chewy to be worth going out of my way to catch these hyperactive speedballs, but their fur was extremely soft and fluffy, and I made it a goal to get enough to line my bed with. Given that these rodents were about the same size as a capybara, that that wasn’t as daunting as it would have been back on Earth.

I finished the book, going back to study each method and technique in detail, but not committing to any concrete plans beyond first getting good at applying my will and manipulating environmental ki. One of the reasons was that I knew that winter was coming and that it would be long, so I both needed to prepare and knew that I am soon going to have more time on my hand than I knew what to do with. Also, I wanted to give all these new ideas a chance to really set in, to percolate. I wanted to give myself enough time to consider the many questions I had, to theorycraft, and to play around mentally with my options.

I managed to keep myself busy for about three weeks this way, but as the days went on, I was starting to feel that I wouldn’t be able to put off my nature as a werebear any longer. Thankfully, I wasn’t influenced by the phases of the moon. I mean, I went out stargazing on the night of the full moon, and my lycanthropy didn’t act up in any way.

What I was influenced by was instinct, and a growing need to allow my inner bear out for a walk. Although I called it my inner bear, it didn’t feel like an actual inner beast like many stories back on Earth described it, just a collection of instincts that all had to do with my lycanthropy. On the one hand, this did make controlling myself simpler, but it also failed to provide a clear line of separation between myself and these instincts.

And as the main reason I was trying to put off transforming as long as I could was how I seriously didn’t like my complete lack of self-control and awareness as I was transformed, not being able to blame it all on a separate entity inserted into my mind by Liam was not making it any easier to avoid procrastinating on the issue. I mean, there was a reason why I only got don’t remember last night, black out drunk in my life only once. And it wasn’t that I had done something so troublesome that it ended up traumatizing me, just that I had a deep-seated aversion to how it felt.

And while on a conscious level I knew that waiting would only make the instincts stronger and that much more likely to lose myself completely once again, I still put off dealing with it for as long as I reasonably could.

The only silver lining of being unwilling to face my problems was that I at least had a rudimentary plan in place. Taking only minimal equipment, I would go a couple of miles upstream, so even if I ended up rampaging, at least the cave and the surroundings wouldn’t be sacrificed to my loss of control.

But finally one evening the point came where I realized that I wouldn’t be able to even choose the time and place of my transformation, not unless did something about it. I could hardly sleep after that, both because anxiety and even fear filled me with a restless energy and because my instincts were getting too loud to ignore.

So I set out the next day, with just the clothes on my back and a single javelin. I brought no food and no water, nor anything I couldn’t afford to lose. Usually when I explored, I would be looking around, both to look for potential threats and forage, as well as because the untouched forest in fall colors was simply beautiful to look at.

The exact spot I chose was the same place I came to the first time around, the small clearing that came to be when I ripped a whole tree out of the ground, toppling it. I took my clothes off and hanged them up on some of the roots of said tree, and leaving the javelin stuck into the ground next to my boots.

Then I walked a couple of paces away and sat down to center myself. I would do this on my own terms, and I would stay conscious and keep control this time around. Also, I would try to observe the process as closely as possible.

Ki perception came readily, having had quite a lot of practice with it during the last few weeks. Looking around I could see that the flow of the ki was strong here, even compared to my clearing. The difference wasn’t as stark as between the clearing and the mountain peak I first checked as a reference, but it was still a marked improvement that I could casually spot.

Transforming was not that easy though. It could have been, had I been willing to let go and let instinct take over, but that would have meant surrendering control. And I was not about to do that. On the other hand, I could not trigger the transformation without those very same instincts: I didn’t know how it worked, or what I would need to do specifically. Maybe in the future I would gain that capability, but with nothing more than a single transformation under my belt I was impossibly far from being able to do that.

So I would have to wrangle those instincts, allow them just enough slack to trigger the transformation but not so much that they would completely take over.

To do that I started by getting a better understanding of what those instincts were and how they made me feel. This was made possible by the fact that these instincts were new and strange, born from external influences and not my own mind, making them easier to observe in a detached manner compared to regular feelings. The most easily identifiable pieces were a restlessness that I felt growing for weeks, and a sense of being confined in my body. Similar, but distinct when I examined it was the urge to do something about it, trying to make me give in. What threw me for a loop was that there seemed to be separate undercurrents of emotion in the mixture: the more understandable one was a simmering rage that hasn’t been triggered yet, that was looking for a target, something it could make me act against. The other one was even more primal: aggression, a need for violence, to concentrate on the now, and to meet whatever problem emerged head on.

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They were similar to each other, but still distinct. Some more prodding and internal questions later, I became pretty sure that they differed due to their source: the simmering rage was the nascent emotional core that my abilities as a barbarian were based upon, with only the other set coming from my werebear side.

Once I managed to untangle them, I realized that I could give in to or make us of either one separately, and that each would trigger a different response. For now, I set the barbarian rage aside, not just because I wanted to stick to my plan, but to give myself another chance to examine that one more. I mean, anger was part of the emotional range of your average person – it was certain was part of mine – so I didn’t understand why there was a need to add in an external source for it. Was it a technical need, to have something around that the barbarian abilities could be tied to? Was it to ensure that I could trigger a rage on demand, without having to actually work myself up? Or was it for something completely different? I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out as much as possible before I started experimenting with it. At least I got a response to an unspoken question of mine: why there was no explanation in my book on how I should get into a raging state.

Finally deciding that at this point I was only procrastinating and delaying the inevitable, I steeled my will and prepared to trigger my werebear instincts, while trying to keep the purely emotional side of it under control.

Unlike the first time when I was completely unprepared, I didn’t lose myself, but remained aware. I could feel how the change started by a buildup of power, of ki more potent than I ever felt before near my heart. I could feel the power washing over me and my body absorbing it, reacting to it. It was at this point that I realized that while I did manage to retain my mind in a strangely detached manner, I actually lost control over my body: I couldn’t consciously move during the shift.

The shock from that realization was enough to shake my concentration and loose my grip on the emotional aspect as well. I could feel the newly freed emotions quickly ignite, filling up much of my mind. I could also feel how the transformation immediately sped up as soon as the emotions were left free to act. The change finished within moments after that, and I heard myself roar, making the surrounding forest grow completely still for a moment before the shriekers started to make a bigger ruckus than I ever heard from them before.

My bear form shook itself and then immediately set off to hunt the nearest bird.

The strange part was that despite the instincts taking over and controlling my actions, I did retain awareness. It felt like I was inhabiting a corner of my own mind, aware, conscious, but unable to act upon my own will. Detached, walled off, exiled to an empty island, doomed to watch without being able to act. It was hell. Worde than waking up and realizing that I didn’t remember the last few minutes or hours.

So I decided to fight. To push against the border of the instincts, to reassert control. These instincts were foreign, they were from outside my mind, and in my own mind, my will was king. Sovereign ruler of itself.

The instincts didn’t care. They didn’t even acknowledge my presence, acted like I wasn’t even there!

It was that callous disregard of theirs that allowed me to break through: it got me mad. I became angry, not in the frustrated manner I felt before due to my state and lack of success, but in a much more personal way. And that the instincts understood. And once they understood me, they reacted. They allowed me in.

It became harder to plan, harder to analyze things, but I gained control. Uncontested control, that felt natural. Instead of observing them from the outside as my werebear self’s instincts, they became mine. They became just another urge, just another feeling, just another emotion. And I had more than enough practice controlling those. True, frustration was my closest friend, which was why it came to me first when I detached myself, but simple anger, a need to be violent, and wanting to act now instead of later were all familiar to me.

So I stopped fighting to suppress them. I stopped trying to maintain my ego as a castle unto itself. I immersed myself in those feelings and let them go. I just stopped acting on them. It was just so easy once I realized how I should be going about it.

I did manage a small thought about the future: that I would have to go over all my preconceptions and prejudices later and see how well they held up to scrutiny. But that was all I managed before more immediate concerns started to occupy my mind.

Things like wanting to rip those bloody shriekers apart, just to stop that incessant noise they were making. So I once again set off towards the nearest one, running with an easy gait instead of the all-out charge the instincts on their own used.

Running as a bear was an interesting feeling that brought to mind adjectives like power, mass, and momentum. I could feel the movement of my muscles, the wind in my face, the fragility of the ground beneath my paws. Caught up in the present as I was, implementation came right after the idea, and I body checked one of the trees in my way. I barely even felt the impact before the tree gave way, splintering and crashing down to the side.

Just seconds later I was upon the bird, and let my instincts guide my body to strike. I reared up a bit, raised a paw, and smeared the bird across the landscape with a single strike. The unexpected brutality of the results was enough to shock me into a moment of stunned pause – not because I was bothered by the gore, but because of the extreme disparity between my unconscious expectations and reality.

I shook my paw to get the bird mush off of it, and when that didn’t work, I ambled over to a tree to scrape it down. The tree ended up with a lot less bark by the end, but at least my paw didn’t squelch anymore when walking.

I decided to try for something a bit more delicate next: climbing. Being about two tons in weight, I would need a suitably large tree and lots of caution. There was a more than large enough supply of the first, and caution was not an unknown idea to my instincts, so I soon found myself staring up at a majestic tree. It was one of the local breeds, the type that the crescent nut came from. It had dark, almost completely black bark, with a thick, straight trunk that didn’t start to branch out for over 30 feet.

Back on Earth I had seen bears climb trees on videos. They made it look easy. Trying it for the first time, fully grown, with enough strength to my legs that even the toughest hardwoods would act like they were made of wet paper raised the difficulty level a few steps.

I started by standing up onto my hind legs and hooking my claws into the tree, just to see if the tree could hold my weight. It took a couple of tries to find the balance between hooking my claws deep enough that it wasn’t just the bark they were holding onto and not ripping out chunks from the tree, but a few minutes of experimentation had me halfway up the tree.

It was at this point that the tree lost enough of its thickness that I wasn’t sure if it would hold me if I climbed any further. So instead, I decided to turn back.

Let’s just say that climbing down a tree is even harder than climbing up. You see much less on where to step or grab, making it problematic to judge whether the spot you chose was good enough to hold your weight.

At least I also managed to find out that my bear form is extremely resilient. Falling from 40 feet up left me a little winded and with some initial sprains, but none of my bones broke, and the rest of the damage healed in less than a minute. And now I had another hole I could use as a landmark in the future.

Deciding that while I would need more practice in climbing and that I didn’t want to do it now, I instead tried to shift into my combat form.

I prepared myself again, collecting my thoughts, readying my willpower if I needed to struggle to keep control of the new form.

In the end it was surprisingly easy, both initiating the change and keeping control: while I could feel the focus of the instincts change and become more violent and aggressive, I could also feel how it became easier to concentrate, to think in terms not so rooted in the present. And allowing the instincts to dominate my emotions without letting those emotions dictate actual actions was still more than manageable. It felt like being buzzed: just drunk enough to be affected by the alcohol, but not so much that you loose your wits completely.

The form itself was as I expected it: almost 11 feet, designed for combat. Long arms and massive hands with thick fingers ending in thick, resilient claws. A jaw I could open wider than anything should be allowed to. A thick, rust-red coat of fur. I lost a lot of my mass, but I still ended up at around 1500 pounds if the calculations from back on Earth were correct.

I felt faster and more nimble than as a full bear, and a quick test that resulted in my climbing tree loosing even more pieces showed that while I was still incredibly powerful, if pure muscle-power was required, going bear would be my best bet.

I took the time to familiarize myself with this form as well, to learn how it reacted, what its strengths and limitations were. And I liked what I found: this form was designed to bring out all the best of both worlds, giving a balance between pure overwhelming strength and bipedal adaptability.

I would need to use it in actual combat to really test it, but I was more than satisfied with it for now.

I was about to turn back into my original dwarven form when I got the idea to try if I could sense ki in this form. It didn’t even occur to me to try it in full bear form, but the combat form’s instincts were less constricting.

I originally planned to spend as long as I needed, knowing that it would be almost as big a challenge as first learning the technique was, but while I did feel that I could achieve it in the future, I also found out that letting the emotions that stemmed from my instincts run free made for considerable distractions. I would need to either gain proper control of said instincts or learn to retain mental clarity despite them.

Shrugging mentally, I decided to shift back, just as I had planned before. I found that aside from a bit of vertigo due to the sudden shift of perspective, going dwarf was just as easy as any of the other shifts. Even though I was mentally prepared for it, there was no sudden tiredness assaulting me, no sudden urge to just lie down to sleep. The werebear instincts did become much more quiet, just like during the first days after my first shift.

So I got dressed, picked up my javelin and headed back home. I was getting decidedly hungry, having botched my hunt by pulverizing the bird I was after.

All in all, I judged the day and its experiments a success. I would need further testing, mostly on the limits of shifting rapidly, and certainly more practice, but I was immensely relieved that loosing control completely was not a requirement of shifting.

The relief was so profound actually, that although it wasn’t even properly evening yet, I decided to simply lie down into my bed after a few generous helpings of stew and revel in how much better I felt with the sudden loss of a major worry. Sleep took me fast, and for the first time since arriving in this world, nothing woke me during the night.