Chapter 19

Bushcraft

I've fallen into a comfortable pattern of daily work. Each morning, I get up and wash my face with the last of the clean water I brought up the day before. Then I feed the fire back up for some breakfast.

Honestly, I haven't really let the fire die out since I started it. I'm clearing so much lumber that there's no shortage of scraps and cuttings to feed it with, and I use it for at least two meals a day. On top of that, I build it up to burn overnight to keep any forest critters away.

It's just easier to prop it back up than it is to mess with extinguishing and restarting it all the time. I'm confident in the ability of my fire pit to keep the flames from spreading, and it makes a handy disposal site for trash and food scraps.

Today, as I take note of the level of slag in the bottom, though, I think maybe I should actually put it out and scrape it clean. I can bury the stuff as a reasonable disposal method.

For now, I finish my breakfast and toss the cast iron dishes into the flames to clean them that way. I get up with a long stretch, grab my water bucket and look around.

While Kyuuga hasn't attacked me again since that first day on the property, he's usually keeping a pretty close eye on me. How blatant he makes it seems to vary with his mood, but I can usually pick him out if I try hard enough.

Ah, there's a familiar pair of ears sticking up from behind my log stand.

I toss a wave in that direction. "Heading down to the river," I call out for his benefit. "Your offering's in the usual place."

Unlike Earth bunnies, it turns out horned rabbits aren't actually obligate herbivores. The one morning I thought to make myself fried potatoes and onions with some pressed meat product that reminds me of spam, he practically raided my campfire.

Since then, I've made at least a little bit of it every morning and put it out on a plate just for him, but he's never been so pushy about it since. He always insists on only eating it after I leave.

... Silly tsundere rabbit ...

Ah well, maybe one of these days, it'll prove to him that I'm not a villain.

The bucket's a bit heavy when it's full, but it's plenty of water for me for the day. I have enough to drink when I'm thirsty and still have it left over for cooking in the evening. Since I'm using it for consumption, I'm not washing in it. Instead, I take a bath in the river in the evening after I'm done working for the day.

There's a bath house in town, but as much of a walk as getting to the river is, it's still less hassle than going all the way into town, and cheaper, too. Yorin left me some nice soap from the wagon supplies, so it's enough.

I've been using an item from my points store for cleaning my clothes, though. Technically, it would clean me, too, but it has a chemical smell to it, and after a long day of clearing trees and sorting logs, I much prefer bathing. It's ten points a bottle, but since I'm only using it on my clothes, I can make one bottle last a while. I've been here two weeks and I'm only on my second one.

As I walk the increasingly familiar path through the woods, I think about the rest of my day. Normally, I'd get started clearing the original couple of acres as soon as I get back to the camp, but I'm almost done with that. All of the logs that are straight enough to be useful have been sorted out, trimmed of limbs and cut down to sizes my small frame can handle.

I still had to raise my Strength to manage their weight, but it was a relief to find doing so wouldn't alter my physique. If this job was going to have me coming back out of these woods looking like a lumberjack, I was going to head right out and jump ahead to adventuring.

Instead, despite tripling my physical strength, I still look as slim and soft as when I got to this world. All without lifting a single dumbbell. Ahhh, I could get used to the way this system cheats ...

Though that makes me wonder if it's only because I bought the Strength increase. If I'd done it like non-Heroes still have to do, would it have been biologically the same as back in my world?

Still, it's enough to move six-foot logs without the need for a couple guys to come do it for me, and it makes tasks like carrying a bucket full of water for a mile easy, too.

I've saved the branches that are nice and straight, as well. The sticks are really useful for smaller projects. In fact, they're even making up the racks I made to keep the logs off of the ground. Everything unusably bent gets broken down for firewood.

It took me a week, but I've even moved away from the tent. I used the first round of logs to assemble a very simple dirt floor cabin. It's not fancy, but it keeps the wind and rain out, and two adjoining structures keep my tools and supplies out of the elements and secured against nosy rabbits.

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The more I work, the more I realize that I should have given it a raised floor off of the ground, and that I should really make a stone fireplace inside for heat and better efficiency instead of continuing to use the fire pit outside. My mind's even been taken with ideas of how I could plot out a small garden, but I reject this since I can't say I'll be here to take care of it.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but a lot of this knowledge isn't mine, or rather, it's not knowledge I came into this world with. I'm competent enough at bushcraft that I can handle a camp-out, but a lot of the more advanced stuff came from my General Skills tab.

It's full of a nearly endless array of useful topics, and since points seem to be an infinitely renewable resource, it's easy to justify dumping some to make it look like I actually know what I'm doing. In fact, with all the labor I've been putting in, I've actually made back more than I spent on the inexpensive basic proficiencies.

I did try to do it myself at first. Not knowing how fast I'd be able to earn points from the actual work, I naturally thought thriftiness the best policy.

... This body did not come accustomed to physical labor. I never really tired, given my high stamina, but everything seemed more difficult than I thought it would be. I realized very quickly just how low 10 Strength really is. Heck, I had spaghetti arms the first time I brought water back.

So long as I have the stamina, I can apparently keep doing anything I have the strength to physically do, but the greater the strain, the faster the drain.

And then there was the constant nagging from the system. Every time I tried to do something, it'd pop a notification about how I wasn't proficient in it and how that would affect the quality, and how the fastest way to fix that would be to purchase the requisite skill.

When I finally folded and followed its advice, it was a surprisingly ... mundane experience. There wasn't some uncomfortable rush of knowledge as my head filled with facts it didn't have before. It wasn't like I was possessed by someone who knew how to do it right and my body just moved like it was supposed to.

Instead, it was like looking at a project I'd just gotten back from a day class on, and I could now understand all of the things I had been doing wrong. I knew how to properly hold my tools. I knew where I was cutting against myself and where I was over-complicating things. The skill never did it for me. It was still on me to hold my tools correctly, to pay attention to what I was doing, but I knew how to get it done.

Interestingly, this actually means that the longer I work with a skill, the more uses I can see for it, and the more efficiently I can use it, even without ranking it up further. Since it only gives me the basic training and leaves its utilization to my own ingenuity, I start out pretty simplistic with a new skill, but the more I learn about it, the more I experience it, the better I get at its application.

So General Skills aren't crafting recipes, so much as they're an instant education. That explains why each topic has so few skills within it, and why they're so inexpensive. To go back to the fear I once had of having to craft my own gun, all of the requisite proficiencies wouldn't have told me how to actually build one. They just would have made sure that I had all of the basic skills necessary to figure it out on my own.

... That's actually a sobering thought. All of the necessary knowledge to create firearms may already exist in Furinshao. The only thing preventing a total revolution of war may literally be that no one has thought of bringing that knowledge together in quite that way yet.

It makes me place a protective hand over the pistol holstered on my hip as, all of a sudden, the very nature of the fantastical world around me seems so much more fragile. Maybe seeking out a master craftsman is a bad idea. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it's never going back in.

Suddenly, Xuhitana's words of the danger my pistol could pose in the wrong hands hits me in a new light. Yeah, sure, it's powerful, but it's just a weapon, or so was my original interpretation. Yeah, sure, someone could do a lot of damage with it, but it'll run out of bullets or they won't know how to maintain it, and then it'll be useless.

Sure, I was aware that people could study it and eventually figure out how it works, then go on to create rudimentary firearms. Y'know, a few decades down the road.

Before this very moment, I'd never thought of my gun as a creative match, just waiting to start a wildfire in someone with the necessary skills to see how it all connects.

I resolve to be a lot more careful about how openly I discuss Earth technology. So far, I've been pretty open about it, generally happy to blab about this or that innovation to anyone who will listen. What'll it hurt if wagons are more comfortable? What'll it hurt if my fellow Heroes understand what a gun is?

What does it matter if I tell them all about technology five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand years ahead of them? Are they even interested, what with magic solving so many of the same problems?

Damn, I've been a short-sighted idiot ...

I shake my head to clear the negative air. It's no use worrying about it now. Where was I before this segue? I was thinking about where to go next once I'd finished clearing out the couple acres.

I don't know that I'll use all of it, but I probably can find uses for it. After all, I'm accustomed to a larger house than the Furinshao standard, plus I'll need a shooting range to keep my skills sharp. If I'm doing a lot of traveling and find any interesting plants, I'll probably want a place to grow them.

There's some oak trees in the area, too, though I don't recognize their exact species. I'd like to clear out around them to get easy access to their acorns. It's a lot of work to leach the tannins out of them and process the nuts into flour, but my mom always bakes with them every fall and my mouth fills with drool at the thought of the distinct taste of acorn cookies.

... Snacks aside, it will be nice to have a little reminder of home, and it's one less thing I have to get from somewhere else.

I'm probably going to need to clear some sort of route from where I want my house back to the village, too. Especially if I intend to have professionals doing any construction, or if I decide to use materials other than forest wood. It's going to need to be wide and clear to get supplies and people in. I should check with Graf and see if there's any legal requirements on how to go about that.

As I'm coming up on the river, I see a fish leap at some morning bug, grabbing a bit of breakfast of its own. I'm going to need a well at the house, obviously, but maybe a pond would be nice, too. Stocked with fat fish that'll keep me fed in the winter.

Of course, a pond is a big undertaking, it's surprisingly expensive to dig a big hole in the ground if you want it to stay there ...

I pause halfway through filling my bucket when I hear a wet plorp behind me.