Dropping the ropes and my knife next to the pigs, I thought about how I wanted to do this. Only ever having dealt with yearlings before in the kitchen where I had normally had most of the beginning steps already taken care of for me. While with bigger animals in Alaska, you had to butcher them right away to pack them back to the plane. Seeing as how I planned to be here for the next several days I was thinking the best option was going to be the former and let them hang for a couple of days until rigour had passed.
Taking my knife and putting a couple of slits into their rear legs, I went off to find some branches I thought would hold them. Not finding anything on the ground that could even bear my weight, I headed back to get the saw blade in my ax to cut down something suitable. Hanging onto a branch to make sure it would hold my weight without sagging too much, I used my blade to remove it from the tree and then cut off two four-foot lengths.
Bringing that back to the pigs I pushed one through each pig’s rear legs joining them together. As I tied the ropes to every end of the branches I realized that I was still missing some longer rope to hoist the bastards up. Tired of being tired and forgetting something so basic, I realized I was going to need to make something a lot thicker if I planned on pulling it over a tree branch. It would have to be a lot longer as well. Not to mention needing a pully if I wasn’t able to figure out a harness for the bear. Seeing the project continue to grow, I kept finding myself getting more and more frustrated with both myself and the situation. So I said fuck it, let’s scrap that plan and just start butchering. While the meat wasn’t going to end up as good as it could be if I took the time to exsanguinate them and let them rest before I finally broke them down. I was just going to have to settle for good enough.
In the end, I was mostly going to turn them into jerky by cooking out all of the moisture so that bacteria wouldn’t be able to grow and probably use the fat to further the shelf life by making it into pemmican. Also with these being basically wild, I was sure that the goblin hordes weren’t feeding them any antibiotics or anything else to get rid of parasites. I had no desire to end up making myself sick by risking cooking something to a modern standard medium rare. I might be willing to try curing one of the hams as an experiment, but I wanted to make sure the salt really had a chance to get into the meat and do its work before I took a chance on eating it, which meant years before it was ready to consume so that was out for now as well.
Gently sliding my knife up under the sternum, I was careful not to push it too far in and damage any of the organs. With my taking mine in the lungs and Gaian ripping the throat out of his, there shouldn’t have been any damage to contaminate the meat, so as long as I was careful, most of it should be usable. Drawing the blade down carefully, I found myself jumping out of the way as the organs came spilling out in a mess. Reaching inside to cut them off, I pulled most of them away, only setting the stomach aside. Asking the bear if he was interested in any of the richer organs, I didn’t find myself up for eating them myself. My plan was to roast off some of the tenderloin from myself tonight.
As the bear wandered over and picked out the liver and the heart, I went to repeat the process on the other kill. When I had finished, I removed one of the loins, leaving the rest to fall into rigor I would finish the butchery after I had made a quick and dirty smoke house tomorrow. Dropping the loin onto the pile of salt that I had bargained for, I went back to the wash log to remove my clothes. Wiping my hands off on the grass, I used a stick to pull them out and hang them on some branches before getting elbow deep in the water and washing off all of the blood. Going back to wring out my clothes now that I was cleaner, I left them hanging to finish the drying process.
With all that was left of my goals for the night being to build a fire I really hoped I still remembered how to use a firebow. It had been years, I had always been meaning to teach my son how to do it to keep the knowledge alive and so he would never be without in an emergency, but had never ended up getting around to it. I hadn’t done it since I was a child myself. I had been into survival books at the time and on on one of our family camping trips I had snuck away to practice.
With my being ten at the time and it being the eighties, it had been easy enough to get away and find a secluded area in the woods nearby. After nearly an hour of trying I finally managed to make a coal… Fifteen minutes after that I was screaming for help as several piles of old leaves and a fallen log were going up in smoke. As my dad came running, he quickly turned around to grab the ten gallon cooler of water he had brought for the weekend, and dumping it all over the various blazes, he managed to put everything out.
My butt will never forget the tanning I got that night after we had driven back an hour to the nearest town to get a refill on our water. I had never been brave enough to ask if he was madder about the drive or my nearly taking out the forest. As I child, I had always thought it was because I inconvenienced him and he had to waste two hours of driving and buy a bunch of water he had gotten from our hose. But as I grew to an adult, I realized now he might have just been terrified of all of his kids burning up. It hadn’t rained in days and as quickly as the leaves went up, I think if it had got to the grass of the campgrounds it would have blazed up even faster. Even if the fire hadn’t gotten to us, there was a good chance the smoke could have finished the job.
The possibility of losing a child is scary enough for a parent, but actually seeing it seconds from happening is infinitely worse. While not knowing their situation is the worst feeling of all…
Sitting with the fire bow I had made from my shoelace, for what had to be half an hour, I just couldn’t bring myself to move and try to figure the process out. I know constantly shoving down my feelings would get to me eventually, but I hadn’t thought it would be some random memory from my childhood that would prick the damn enough to let the flood of emotions come pouring out. All I wanted to do was pick up my club and go find some goblins to smash the shit out of.
Part of me wondered if I had been infected by the troll’s energy after all, or if some of the anger from the exp had managed to sneak past my shields and been able to infect me. But I knew in my heart this was all me. Before I had kids, almost every sentence I would use had multiple curse words in it. Growing up I thought it made me seem more manly but as I had kids and grew older, I came to realize that having control of what you say and how you act is a much greater testament to internal strength than blusteringly forcing your opinions on people. True neutral by natural temperament, I found that it was almost impossible to stay there and throughout my life, I had found myself drifting towards chaotic or lawful depending on the situation.
Right now all I wanted to do was let the chaos take over and just destroy, go out in a blaze of anger attacking and causing as much pain and suffering as I could to see if I could build a blaze big enough to match the one that was burning in my heart. Neutral enough not to betray those who had treated me fairly I had no problems with trying to inflict enough suffering on the goblins that I would be placed into the tribe’s pantheon as the boogie man goblin moms warned their children of.
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Continuing to breathe I found myself falling into the pattern I had used to control my core and I found myself gripping the branch I had made a bow from. As I continued to squeeze into the wood, I looked down to find it splintering apart in my hands. Forcing myself by dint of will not to get up, grab my club and shield, and not take off into the falling night to fuck up some goblins was taking up all of my focus and I couldn’t even bring myself to marvel at the fact that I had just powdered some of the hardwood.
I knew there was a huge part of me that loved this world I had found myself in, I had only been here a week but not having rules and laws stifling me was so incredibly freeing words can not describe it. Being able to choose to kill or let something live isn’t something you get to experience in the modern world. Yeah, we all have that anger spark up that tells us we want to cause pain to another being, but we quickly suppress it, if not because it’s the right thing to do, then because we don’t want to go to jail. We are constrained by more and more laws that wrap around us, trying to suffocate us every year the politicians add more to the burden never taking any away. No one is allowed to be good, they are forced into molds as we slowly start to transition down from a civilized society to something more tribal.
Finding myself starting to shake and scream with rage as my love of this newfound freedom came into conflict with also wanting to return to the cage of earth to be with my children. As I continued to scream out my anger I found my breathing had started to devolve into panting as I let another shout ring out through the surrounding woods. Feeling exhausted from my outburst I let out one last mighty shout and sat down to recover. As I sat down I could feel a pain start to build up in my chest.
Concerned I started to force myself to breathe slower, while forty-five would be young for a heart attack, it wasn’t unheard of and I didn’t have the best diet. Continuing to try and fall back into my breathing pattern, I rolled myself over to where I had left the cores, picking them all up I started holding them up to the sky’s last dying light to try and find the one that represented healing. No more did I have the time to cherry pick the best one for myself, I was afraid I was going to have to try and access its power now.
Feeling like a balloon was blowing up in my chest, this was starting to feel like I had imagined building up the core should have felt like when it was growing so big in the ball that brought me here. As I continued to try my breathing pattern it only seemed to make things worse as the pressure continued to grow stronger and stronger, almost to the point of wanting me to try and find my knife and suicidally dig my own core out of my chest.
As my teeth started the chatter in pain, while my body began to vibrate in turn. I kept trying to breathe in the only pattern I had found to work I was doing anything I could to try and lessen the burning in my chest as screams of pain began to ring out through the woods that had just moments before been echoing with my rage.
I saw my friend who had been content to leave me alone to deal with my anger come dashing over after he detected the change in my tone. As he stood over me staring down, he tried licking my chest, no doubt hoping to heal whatever was wrong. But it seemed to have no effect, so sitting down he could only stare at me helplessly. Waiting for any part of the equation to change so he could do something else.
Unable to focus, I managed to take the biggest of the green cores which I thought was the one that held the key to regeneration, and shove it into my mouth, but whether it was the size or the agony, I soon found myself spitting it back out into my hands to join his friends. Holding the cores in my hands, I found myself trying to rotate the energy inside of me like I had earlier today when I had formed a vortex to draw the after death energy into me even faster. Trying to let go of the other cores, I found my hands clenching even tighter, as the waves of pain grew even stronger. Despite my best efforts, it felt like I was continuing to blow up like a balloon. With no exp around to drag me along with it to see what was happening in my core I had no idea what could be causing the problems.
Falling to my back, I began twitching on the ground as the pain started to overwhelm my nervous system. All thoughts were driven from my mind and all I could do was scream out in agony as the build up continued. Finally, just when I felt like I couldn’t begin to deal with the pain anymore I felt a popping in my chest, and a wave of energy rushed out as the balloon I had been blowing up finally managed to decompress, sending out a wave of force through every channel I had cut into my body during my first few seconds on this world. Heels, knees, elbows, eyes, mouth, and hands. All of them felt a rush of energy deploying through them while I barely had the presence of mind to make sure none of the outlets were pointing toward the bear.
This felt like nothing else I had felt since entering this world, it had none of the anger or hatred of the death energy; nor the slippery, connivingness of the yellow energy that wanted to corrupt me and have me take over the world. It certainly didn’t have the soothing qualities of the energy I loved to collect after every battle. It was closest in feeling to the Order and Chaos I had first encountered. But while the Qi of those two forces had a certainty to them that nothing could change them from their nature, this felt almost like air as opposed to their solidness. It had an ethereal nature to it, almost like I could tell it how to be or what to do, and that is what it would turn into.
Feeling my hands finally begin to unclench, I looked down to see the cores that I had held had all been blasted to pieces by the outpouring of power. Before I could even begin to lament the loss or figure out how bad the popping in my chest was going to turn out to be. I felt a recoiling of the energy as the vortex I had started began pulling it back into me, taking all of the chips of the destroyed cores along with it back into my channels to drag them along with the recaptured power back to my core.
As I felt my core filling back up with this newest energy, it didn’t fill back to the point it was bursting again. Instead, I began for the first time to feel a constant movement through the channels I had carved. Whereas before everything I had ever taken in had felt like water moving through me, this was so much more insubstantial, part of me began to wonder if I was imagining it. It was so insubstantial there were times that I wasn’t feeling anything at all.
It seemed that for the moment I had very little control over the rotating energy as I was only noticing it when it started speeding up or slowing down. I tried to dive back down into my center to see if I could observe what was happening more directly, but apparently, this new energy wasn’t substantial enough to drag my consciousness down into its movements. I had hoped this new energy could manage to be a substitute for the Order and Chaos that had introduced me to my insides, but it was a no go and it seemed like I was going to need to find another way or stick to diving in with the exp.
Reaching up to feel my chest, I still felt a little bit of pain, but as I looked down at my uncovered skin, I couldn’t see any sign of bruising that would have accompanied any of my veins or arteries actually bursting. As the bear again tried to nose me to either detect if anything was wrong or send his healing touch to help fix me back up. It appeared that everything was okay as the pain in my chest only improved a marginal amount. But I also noticed that the cuts that had formed from clenching the imperfect cores so tightly began healing as well which told me his spell was working.
Using his bulk to help pull me to my feet, I looked around. It seemed like most of the damage had been sent straight up into the air. With only the holes in my elbows pointing at the ground. Looking at what had been carved into the ground I was surprised to see only two shallow gouges in the soft turf. It had felt so much stronger and with enough energy to break apart the gemstone quality of the cores I had been holding I would have thought the damage would be greater. Instead, it only managed to dig into the ground a few short inches.
As I tried to force the energy to swirl faster in my channels and push it out of one of the holes in my palms, I found that it was refusing to listen to my commands.
Just what I needed, another mystery in my life.