Day 2
My sleep had been good enough. It was uncomfortable, cold, and I tossed and turned... yet my body was so exhausted that even that sleep felt like a godsend. With a stretch I groaned, waking up and looking at the entrance to the cave. It must have been a bit past sunrise, and considering I was still alive, the feathers must have worked or I had gotten lucky. But I didn't have time to think about that. I needed to focus on using all this meat before it rotted. It was time to test the thought I had yesterday.
I crawled outside the cave, being sure to carry a few feathers, and began to look around. I was picking up anything I could use as kindling and wood. Small branches, dead shrubs. There were some trees here and there… but I would have to climb the canyon walls to reach them. For now it seemed like I could get enough just by picking them up off the ground.
It seemed that [Toxin Resistance] was basically a weak catch all poison resistance, it just focused slightly more on diseases and impurities… so by that logic, wouldn't it work on smoke? I already had an enclosed space, all I needed was to start a fire in the cave and wait outside while all the meat in there smokes. Evenly spacing the meat around and removing the bones that weren't attached to any meat, I piled up all the kindle and sticks in the center of the cave.
Using [Prestidigitation], I started the fire and proceeded to crawl out while holding the wolf skin. While all that meat smoked, I would use the time to finish processing the fur, at least as much as I could… I don’t have the materials to properly process it. But I can at least scrape all the flesh off and then let it sun dry….
By night time, I decided to check on the meat, and crawled back into the cave. It was filled with smoke, but I'm sure using one of the giant feathers I would have been able to fan it out. But what was more important right then was the meat. It all seemed reasonably smoked. All that's left was to take a bite. I dug my teeth into it and… it was passable. It wasn't that tasty, and was very gamey, but for a person who hadn't eaten in basically two days, it tasted like heaven. I went to sleep that night with a full stomach and a new fur blanket over me. If I was stuck here, at least I had food now.
Day 8
The meat ran out... I had a lot of it, but the leftovers didn't dry properly and I think it went bad. Even with [Toxin Resistance], I couldn't stomach meat with maggots in it… at least, I didn’t want ot risk it in order to find out. I need to find more food. The water in the cave seems... mostly alright. It hasn't made me sick, but it definitely tastes like sand and stone. Without that resistance, it would definitely make me ill. I wonder if I should just use [Prestidigitation] but for how little water it makes compared to how tired I get, I don't know if it's worth it. My brain had been searching through [Survival Crafting] to try and find something to improve my situation… I think I could use the feathers like a sieve... but I have nowhere to store the water… I would have to just deal with it for now while I think about my food situation. Maybe traps? I spent the rest of the night reading through the survival crafting knowledge, ignoring my stomach the best I could.
Day 11
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I can’t put it off anymore. I need more food. I know I should be able to last weeks without any but I don’t want to get weak in this beast-ridden hellhole. I have to go hunting. I tried building traps… but every time they were broken. That or something else had eaten the prey. If I needed food, I had to claim it as mine the old fashioned way…
Day 12
Hunting is harder than shows make it out to be, and the rabbits here are fucking vicious. It had been a bit large for a rabbit, about 2 feet length wise… but when I tried to pounce on it from behind, it kicked me in the gut hard enough to make me throw up. I was lucky it seems they only use that as a way to stun predators before running. But now my stomach had begun to hurt even more. At the end of the day, all I could manage to catch…. was a mere squirrel…. thing? I think it was a squirrel. When I saw it eating, I took my dagger and used the [Launch] skill to stab it. Apparently the system called it a [Bone Muncher Jerboa]. Well, whatever it was… it was food now.
It was finally time to test my newest idea from the [Survival Crafting]. Going back to my cave, I organized a small fire right in front of the entrance. Stacking rocks on one side and then the other, and finally, finished my little construction by placing a large flat smooth rock on top over the fire. A grill! While I waited for the newly made grill to heat up, I quickly processed the Jerboa for eating. Skinning, gutting, cutting the meat, it was a lot, but it was food and quite frankly it was much easier than the [Rock Knight Wolf]. The sizzle I heard as I placed the first piece of meat sounded like music to my ears, and as I stared at the cooking piece of meat and realized something…
I began to tear up. What was I doing here… I was living in a cave, in a goddamn hellscape full of dangerous beasts… drinking sand filled water, and the sound of sizzling fucking rodent meat was practically divine! This was my life now… I used my knife to turn the pieces of the meat over to cook the other side…. The sizzling now just sounded like mocking laughter to me…
The meat was tasty… it helped the hole in my stomach… but it widened the hole in my heart…
I missed home.
Day 30
It’s been a month since I came to this hell. I know because I’ve been counting days on the cave wall, carving the tallies on the wall… It's all I can do to remember the days. They blur together, and I can barely remember what I did last week. I don’t think I can stay here much longer, though. It’s been getting wetter. Deserts have a flooding season, usually, and the cave is in a valley. On top of that, I’m going to need more food again. I’m tired of eating these jerboa things and the fact they are so cute hurts my sanity to tear them apart. I think I might be strong enough to catch that horned rabbit, so I’ll try that again. It took ages for the bruise on my stomach to heal from the last time, and I could barely move the day after with how stiff it made my abs… so maybe they’d be easier to handle killing.
Day 32
I caught one of the stupid motherfucking bitch rabbits. Fuck these things, fuck this goddamn world. Why can even a bunny in this world be so deadly?! I thought I had snuck up on it, but before I could launch my dagger at it, the rabbit spun around and lunged at me. Its horn took a chunk out of my arm when it hit me! I bashed its head in with a rock I was trying to make flint out of, wasting it as it just turned into shrapnel getting stuff in the rabbit's head. Survival of the fittest… stupid fucking… fuck this place.
On the upside, I was right. It was way easier to mentally handle killing something that fought back… on the downside… I can’t make the bleeding stop…