I woke with the sun, with an easy smile on my face. I was a bit wet from all the dew on me, but I didn’t pay it any mind. Instead, I took a moment to find the sensation of ki again. It was much easier the second time, but I still struggled to keep onto the feeling when I got up to start breakfast.
Looking at my quickly dwindling reserves of ready to eat food and still riding the success from managing to feel ki, I once again decided to take a look at my spice cup. Although the book didn’t have any specifics about imbuing items with concepts, I could tell that the cup would be considered a frivolously impossible treasure by local standards: being able to just create different things according to the user’s wishes, and then wasting it all by limiting it to mundane spices and such? No self-respecting spiritual craftsman would be willing to waste time and materials on such a thing.
But Liam was willing and now I had it, so it would be a waste to not make the most of it. And that included learning as much as I could from it, once I got a better handle on all this cultivation bullshit.
Anyway, for now, my goal was to simply get it to work. Liam said I would need to feed it ki. According to what I read the previous night, there were two major options for that: I could either use internal or environmental ki. If I had meridians, the former would be clearly superior, but without them there wasn’t much readily available ki inside my body, so I had to go with manipulating environmental ki.
As the very basis of cultivation was taking environmental ki and internalizing it in one way or another, its manipulation was a necessary and well described process: ki reacts to mental impulses and intent. As such, simply willing ki to do something would get results, but the book did recommend anchoring that will to previously known sensations and ideas. This was why most cultivation techniques based the absorption of environmental ki on breathing exercises and intake gates either in the throat or the lungs, it just made the process more efficient and easier to maintain over time.
As I didn’t want to draw ki into myself, not without having first decided how I would want to go about my cultivation, I needed a different image. So, I decided on setting myself up as a wave-breaker, using my hands as a funnel: last night I saw that environmental ki wasn’t stagnant, there were currents and eddies in it, and that these currents seemed to follow patterns. I had no idea what exactly defined these patterns, but that didn’t stop me from making use of them.
So, I found a place with a strong, straight current, and I sat down in its way, facing the direction it was coming from. Just sitting down meant that I acted as a rock in a river, the current of ki having to flow around me. Next, I put my soles together and put the cup down in between my legs. Holding my hands out as if I was trying to hold on to a large gymball from the sides, I began concentrating on catching as much of the current as I could and funneling it down into the cup.
I could feel it, as I affected the current somewhat. I was pretty damn sure that my efficiency was abysmal, but I was getting detectable results. I lost myself in the process, sitting there for well over an hour.
And I would have continued to just sit and channel ki into the cup had I not heard loud shrieks coming from the woods. Jerking my head up and looking around, I completely lost my grasp on the current of ki, and the loss of sensation left me reeling fir a moment. It took the shriek changing its pitch to finally snap out of it.
I finally zeroed in on where the sound was coming from: I saw what looked like a puffed-up ball of feathers being batted about by an oversized lynx. It was the bird that was shrieking, and others of its kind were repeating its call from further away in the forest.
The lynx didn’t seem to have much luck getting at the actual flesh of the bird, so I decided to do something about the situation. I didn’t have either my axe or any of my javelins on me, just a dagger on my belt, so I started by picking up a couple of nice, fist sized rocks, before getting closer and trying to get a better angle at the lynx.
As it turned out, even just doing this much, I managed to overprepare, as the lynx took off as soon as it noticed me coming closer. The bird, though, stayed where it was and kept on shrieking.
It allowed me to walk right up to it, never even trying to get away, and after I did, I could see why: its feathers were massive, and it had a lot of them, all around its body – I could barely make out its small head, legs, or wings beneath them having pulled them in as close to its body as possible. It seemed to be the size of a turkey beneath the feathers, making it too well armored to kill on the spot and too heavy to drag away. The lynx probably tried to get it from ambush, and having failed, it was just making a half-hearted effort to still try and get at the bird. Probably a young and inexperienced adult freshly away from its mother.
The problem, for the bird at least, was that I would have no problem prying it out from between its feathers: fingers are wonderful tools for such tasks. So I just parted its feathers, grabbed it at the base of its head and lifted it up until it was dangling from my hand. Even extended as far as it would go, the bird had a short neck, with stubby little legs and wings too small for its size. Naturally, it wasn’t happy with me, flailing around as much as it could, but at least with my hand on its throat it couldn’t shriek anymore.
Walking deeper into the woods, I gave it a thorough once-over, and then I quickly broke its neck. After that I used my dagger to fully cut off its head, turning it upside down so it could bleed out as much as possible. Once the blood stopped, I proceeded to carefully cut it open, and removed all of its internal organs. Some of it, like the heart or the liver, was edible, so I saved those, but I wasn’t willing to spend the time and effort to sort out all the rest. And I never really liked gizzards, either. Instead, I went down to the river to wash the carcass, before going back to the cave to finish butchering it.
It was only when I was bending down to grab the cup that I just left in the middle of the clearing that I realized that I have once again acted on knowledge I haven’t learned. It didn’t feel like it was manipulating me, I just thought of tasks that would have been completely unfamiliar to me back on Earth as easily manageable and simply did them. I had the muscle memory, and the detailed knowledge that normally came with using a given skill for months and years on end.
Once again promising myself to be even more careful about these new skills, I set the bird down into one of my buckets and got my axe. I would need more firewood, as well as something to use as a table. Knowing that carpentry was one of the newly implanted skills I had, I paid attention to my own thought process as I went to choose a tree to cut.
I saw multiple ones that seemed suitable, but in the end went for something that looked like some kind of linden, with a trunk about a foot and a half across. Cutting it down was easy, dragging it out from the woods less so. Not because it was too heavy, my new body could easily handle it, but because its size made it hard to maneuver among the trees. I actually ended up cutting down a couple more trees that were in the way, giving me much more wood than I would immediately need.
Having to pay more attention to where I was going, I also saw that one of the most prominent plants in the forest was some kind of vine growing down on the ground that had round, squash like fruit about five inches across that seemed to be getting ripe. Something to investigate later.
Back on the clearing I proceeded to process the trees I cut down, setting the less desirable parts aside and working with just the most suitable pieces. I could afford to be wasteful: both firewood and wood chips were going to be in high demand in my future.
Paying attention, I examined all my reasoning on why I would choose a given piece of lumber, or why I would grab a specific tool for a specific task and found that I could easily see the reason behind each instinctual choice, actually being able to recall why not doing it that way would lead to a less desirable outcome.
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This made my work slower, as I stopped frequently to ask my questions, but it still took less than an hour to throw together a simple table to work on. It was just raw lumber, wet, untreated, and likely to warp, but it would serve for now. The table had the two halves of a two-foot-tall log as its legs, with a thick slab of the linden’s heartwood serving as the countertop. With how straight the tree was, I managed to pretty much keep its entire width, and choose to keep it at five feet long to make it more stable. I even had the time for some basic planing.
Getting back to the bird, I proceeded to pull its entire skin off, feathers and all. Usually plucking it would be better, but I already dressed it, making that impractical, and anyways, I wanted to make soup, and that didn’t actually need the skin all that much. So I just carved up the bird into smaller chunks and chucked those into my cauldron. The only thing I kept separate were its surprisingly large deposits of fat, more in line with what you would expect from a fattened geese than from a turkey. I put that fat in a smaller pot to render later, while the soup was cooking.
I started the fire back up, and got to frying the bird’s meat a bit, before adding water to it. Given the amounts I was working with, it would take time for the water to boil, so I had the chance to go back to the forest to try and forage for some fresh greens and vegetables. If nothing else, I would get one of those squashes and see if those could be used, but I hoped that my herbalism skill would help me pick up more than that.
Conscious that I had limited time, I went directly to the riverbank, believing that would give me the best chance for finding something suitable. I ended up finding some kind of root vegetable that tasted similar to horseradish, but was more like beetroot in color and texture, as well as some creamy nuts with a peppery aftertaste that came in crescent shaped shells that were surprisingly hard – hard enough that I had to pay attention to use just enough force to open them without crushing the whole thing to mush. Let’s just say that I had to learn this from practical experience.
I only found a few of the radishes, but had more of the nuts, so I did end up taking a few of the squashes as well.
By the time I got back, the cauldron was just starting to get to boil, with bubbles appearing along its sides. Giving it a stir, I tried it for taste and was somewhat disappointed, but I shouldn’t have been: it tasted pretty much like unflavored chicken broth. Adding some wood to keep the fire going, I came to the conclusion that I would need spices or at least some salt, otherwise this soup would end up becoming a miserable experience.
And in order to get those spices I would have to get the cup to work. So I picked it up and started to walk back to the same spot I chose the first time. I sat down, just like I did the first time, and I started shifting my perceptions in the particular way that would allow me to sense the ki in my surroundings.
The first thing I saw when I managed to do it was that the cup already seemed to hold some kind of charge, not much, but enough to be noticed now that I was paying attention to it rather than the process of trying to feed it ki. Feeling like a bit of an idiot for not checking it earlier, I tried to will the cup to use that charge to make me some salt.
The inside of the cup, charge and all, was cut off from my senses, and a second or so later I felt a small weight appear in the cup. I opened the lid and there it was: salt. Not a lot, not even half an ounce, I would guess, but it proved that the cup worked.
With the success buffeting me, I quickly set about funneling more ki into the cup and found the process easier than the first time. Having used the cup, I had at least a rudimentary idea on how it behaved, and it seemed like it was made with convenience in mind: instead of trying to force ki into it, like I tried to do the first time around, I could simply command it to take the ki I was feeding it, sparing me most of the effort and making the whole process significantly easier. Periodically I would have the cup produce more salt, trying to test if the creation process was linear. Without precise measurements I couldn’t be sure, but my observations seemed to point towards the answer being yes.
Once the whole thing was filled up, I went back to the cauldron and poured in about half of it. The rest I just left in the cup for now, but I would have to find or make something to store it later. Also, I would have to start to build up a stock of the more common spices later.
But for now, I busied myself with the fire: it took more time than I originally anticipated to fill up the cup with salt and I had let the fire die down in the meantime. The embers kept the soup warm, but not at the low boil that I wanted it at.
Once I was done with that, I added the legumes I had soaking, then proceeded to peel and cut up the fresh ingredients I found before adding those to the soup as well. In the case of the squashes, they had a bland, off-white flesh with small seeds like those of a watermelon. Once I carved out their insides, I set aside the shells in the hope that I could dry them out for later use.
As the soup was cooking, I went back to feeding the spice cup ki. This time, I didn’t move away and just tried to do it from where I was next to the fire. While it did work, I could see a marked drop in speed. I don’t know how much of that was me splitting my concentration by paying attention to the cooking food, and how much the less ideal location, but the results were conclusive: a clear mind and dedicated attention were needed for working with ki.
By the time I decided that my soup has finished cooking I managed to put enough of a charge into the cup that to make another quarter cup of salt.
The soup turned out to be serviceable. Not great, not without a bunch more spices, but much better than I anticipated my first experiment with new ingredients to turn out. And it was plain enough that it could improve it later easily enough. Some thyme and estragon, and maybe a bit of cream would do wonders for it. For now, it was hearty enough, and perfect for softening up my hard bread.
When I was done eating, I went back to home improvement. I started with a proper firepit, lined with stones, set into a small nook of the cliff wall, just a couple feet off the entrance of the cave. This way it would be much less in the way and easier to move around, compared to its current position of right at the entrance. I actually took the time to carve into the cliff, making a sort of chimney to help clear away the smoke. I wasn’t sure that it would work as intended, but I once saw a video back on Earth on how a single tall rock on one side of a firepit could help direct where the smoke would go, so I figured actually carving out a nicely defined indent would help for sure. And given how easy carving the stone was for me, I saw no reason not to try it out.
I’ll be the first to admit that I got kind of caught up in the process, so I ended up with way more than I first imagined: a chimney about 8 inches wide and just as deep, going up at least 15 feet. And this time I couldn’t even blame any new skills: I didn’t get anything specific for either mining, stone carving, or anything similar. Not even masonry – I expected that I would have to rely entirely on carpentry to build myself a loghouse, had Liam not put me next to a convenient cave.
Next, I made a small lean-to to store firewood. Just a quick roof that jutted out maybe seven feet from the cliff I set one end into, a frame of straight, three-inch branches and large pieces of bark to serve as shingles. Then I remembered that I planned to have a similar roof above my toilet, so I did that as well.
Once I was done, I set to something a tad bit more complex: making a door for the cave. I started by carving out a frame for it, making the walls of the entrance as straight as I could reasonably get them, and then cutting away about four more inches of rock on the outer side of it, to a depth of about a foot. This would set the door right into the wall, both making it fit better, as well as allowing me to add holes where I could put in a crossbeam to hold it closed whenever I left the cave. It wouldn’t stop humans, but it should be enough to keep away any animal not strong enough to just burst through the door. From the inside, I planned for a much simpler latch, just enough to keep the door closed so that the wind couldn’t just blow it open.
For the door itself, I didn’t plan on doing anything too fancy, because I lacked proper hinges. Instead, I just carved two holes in the stone, one on the floor, the other right above. I made the one on the top twice as deep, so that I could slide the pole in place. From then it was easy to nail a couple of rough boards together and fit them to the pole. The pole itself would have to turn in its holes to move the door, but it would work better than anything else I could come up with on a short notice. If I wanted to last, though, I would have to remember to coat it with oil or better yet pitch if I could find some sap to make it once it dried out. Here’s to hoping it would not warp too much, or I would have to start again.
After that I rebuilt my fire in my new pit and reheated my soup. I was happy to see that the chimney did seem to help some, even if it was far from perfect. Maybe if I could find something to close it off with, some slate, or clay tiles, maybe.
As the soup was warming up, I set to clean up a bit. The more useful pieces of lumber went into the cave, to allow them to dry a bit, while I piled my firewood under the lean-to. Wood chips went into a sack, either to use for fire starting, or to throw them down into the toilet to help soak up the smell. The same with the ash. Later on, I might keep some to try and make soap, but that would require experimentation, as I didn’t know anything about it beyond the basic idea that ash and fat makes primitive soap.
Speaking of soap, I washed down the table and put the bird’s skin – with feathers still attached – into one of my smaller pots. I would put it onto the remains of the fire for an hour or after dinner.
The sun was down, and the soup was more than hot enough by the time I was done. Then, after I was done eating, I set myself up with as many small containers as I could find and settled in for a night of spice creation.