(The branches keep increasing, and if I don’t do something, they’ll eventually overwhelm me. Plus, that trick of moving the branches looks very useful. Can I replicate it with ‘chi’? It’s worth trying to capture it to study it…)

Noticing that the deer was cautiously watching him while slowly backing away, the boy knew he needed to get closer. He switched to incredibly fast and sharp movements, which allowed him to approach the massive beast from behind.

The moment he reached the side of the enormous deer, he immediately struck with his right hand, hitting its rear with the side of his machete, producing a thunderous impact sound.

The powerful blow made the deer ‘scream’ and shortly after, it started running in the direction of the traps, bringing a smile to the boy’s lips. He quickly began to follow it, dodging and cutting branches, which never stopped attacking him, using his ‘ethereal’ movements once again.

But that smile vanished from the boy’s face and was replaced by an expression of disbelief when the deer began to nimbly jump and dodge the traps as if it knew their locations beforehand. This was despite him ensuring they were well camouflaged, well enough that he would overlook them if he didn’t know they were there, relying only on his mental map to identify them.

(Shit, it’s trying to escape. I have to stop it!)

After passing the traps, the deer tried to flee deeper into the forest, forcing the boy to make a decision. He didn’t dare go deeper because he had a very bad feeling about venturing beyond a certain point. Combined with the current situation of a deer capable of controlling branches, he was even more certain that the things he might encounter would be terrifying, and letting the deer alert them could be catastrophic and a risk he wasn’t willing to take.

Using large amounts of ‘chi’, the boy strengthened himself to the limit and sped towards the deer using a combination of fast and aggressive movements. At the same time, he applied a trick to his right machete that he learned from carving wood, which was that if he sent a large amount of ‘chi’ and imagined an incredibly sharp edge extending from the blade’s own edge, the tool would become so sharp that it could even cut rocks like butter.

As he got close enough to the deer, the boy leaped towards it with the intent to cut it in half, but at that moment, the machete in his right hand cracked with an audible sound, causing everything to move in slow motion for a moment. This allowed him to see it fracturing into several pieces, which made him open his eyes wide in surprise. But thanks to everything moving in slow motion in his perception, he could react quickly and adjust his movements accordingly.

Without changing the amount of ‘chi’ in his left machete, the boy imagined the sharpest edge he could think of, an edge as thin as an atom, while spinning in the air. This allowed him to cut the deer’s neck in half, slicing through the animal’s skin, muscles, and bones with incredible ease.

After the cut, the boy landed agilely on the ground while the deer took a few more steps without a head before collapsing lifelessly to the ground, along with the branches that had been attacking him, releasing large amounts of blood.

Knowing that the blood could attract predators, the boy quickly put away his machetes, including what was left of his right machete, and ran to the deer. He hoisted it onto his shoulders and ran at full speed towards the beach.

Once on the beach, the boy quickly lit a small fire and heated the remains of his right machete, with which he cauterized the wound on the deer’s neck. He placed it in a relatively safe spot on some rocks, then took several laps around the beach before taking a good bath in the sea and running back to his camp.

Back at his camp, the boy gathered his knives, some ropes, and a clay pot, and ran back to where he had left the deer’s body. There, he made a base with some logs, tied the deer to it, and began skinning it quickly.

After securing the hide, making sure not to damage it—which, along with the rush, left some skin and meat remnants, something he would fix later—he removed the useful meat from the deer and placed it in the clay pot, while burying what he didn’t need near the forest. Once he finished, the boy quickly left the area, carrying the hide, tendons, bones, and anything else he deemed useful.

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Back at his camp, the boy started smoking the venison very well and carefully salted it, ensuring it was well-covered before placing it in clay pots. He sealed the pots and stored them in his small bamboo hut, where he kept his rations.

He also salted the deer’s brain very well and carefully, before storing it in a pot. Then, he cleaned the hide, removing any remaining flesh or fat, stretched it on a wooden frame, and left it to dry in a cool, shaded place. He repeated this process with the tendons while boiling the bones for a while before setting them to dry.

……..

….

..

.

Several months have passed since the boy hunted the deer, and things have changed a bit. First of all, tanning the deerskin was a complete success, so with the leather, he managed to create a full set of clothes and shoes, as well as sheaths for all his tools, a couple of canteens, bandages, ropes, handles, and some small bags.

Another change was his campsite, which he moved to a location closer to the stream, a very flat area suitable for construction. Additionally, his hut changed; it was now made of super-hard logs he had cut from the forest and measured around 70 square meters, with a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, two more rooms for storage, and a good bathroom with a shower.

To supply the bathroom, the boy created a huge water barrel, which took a lot of trial and error to make waterproof. But he succeeded in the end and placed it on a five-meter-high wooden tower, connecting it to his cabin with copper pipes. This also took a lot of work, collecting and processing the copper, but he was lucky to find a small cave full of blue crystals halfway, which were packed with copper.

He had also managed to obtain iron during this time, but something curious he noticed was that tools made of iron were terrible for ‘hardening’ with ‘chi’. Not only did it require a much larger amount, approximately triple, to achieve results comparable to copper, but the ‘chi’ also seemed to dissipate over time.

Therefore, his tools were still made of copper, as it was much more useful to harden and sharpen them with ‘chi’ than to use steel ones. However, he had to be careful not to put too much ‘chi’ into them, as they would break instantly, as happened with his machete in the deer fight.

But he wasn’t willing to waste all the effort it took to improve the furnace and bellows to reach 1600°C, nor all the iron he collected. So, he decided to create iron ingots and smelt iron and coal to make steel, resulting in porous metal rocks that he didn’t bother to work with and simply stored them along with the ingots in his cabin. He also tried hardening them with ‘chi’, but the results weren’t much different from iron.

Another thing he did during this time was make soap, using lye obtained from the ashes of campfires and animal fat he had been storing. Although it was quite abrasive, it was better than nothing. He also made a fairly high fence using super-strong logs he found in the forest and created various carpentry tools, such as saws, files, chisels, and more.

With the carpentry tools and the skins of a few more deer he hunted during this time, the boy also made tables, chairs, plates, cups, cutlery, and even a bed and pillow, which he stuffed with dry leaves and feathers, as well as a couple of leather rugs. Although he knew a bit of carpentry from his life in the countryside, it still took a lot of trial and error to get them right.

Unfortunately, the boy couldn’t replicate the trick of moving branches like the deer did, despite carefully studying the deer he hunted afterward and even trying things himself, such as sending his ‘chi’ into a branch or trying to strengthen it somehow. But it didn’t work; they only became harder, but nothing more, never showing the slightest hint of movement.

“Now I really have a proper house, hahaha.”

Sitting in a wooden and leather rocking chair, the boy commented while looking at his creation with a strip of dried meat in his hand and a big smile on his face, feeling a bit proud of what he had achieved, before continuing to talk to himself.

“But I think it’s time to venture deeper into the forest. After all, my ‘chi’ has sped up about 6 or 7 times during this time, and the amount has increased to incredible levels... Mmmm, if it’s decided, today I’ll go deeper into the forest. It’s not like I have much else to do, and who knows, maybe I’ll find people if I manage to cross the forest.”

After finishing his meal, the boy drank a cup of water, picked up his machetes hanging in their sheaths near the door, and strapped them to his belt. The sheaths now looked a bit different, as thanks to having plenty of leather, he had tied a small ax with a leather cover on the head, some small knives, and a few small leather pouches to the straps, allowing him to carry dried meat and similar items.

Making sure his machetes were securely fastened to his waist, the boy took a leather canteen, which he slung diagonally across his body, letting it rest on the right side of his torso. Then he took a somewhat special weapon in a nice leather sheath, which he had made with wood, bamboo, copper, steel, and deer tendons, and strapped it to his belt on the right side.

The weapon he had built was a repeating crossbow, with a wooden body, a bow made of various sizes of bamboo tied with strings and tightened with deer tendons. Additionally, there was a rectangular wooden box on top where the arrows rested, attached to a steel handle, through which the deer tendon string passed at the bottom, and on the handle, there was a copper trigger.

The operation of the crossbow was simple: the steel handle moved backward, pulling the string and tightening the bow. Upon reaching the end, the string hooked onto the trigger mechanism, which, when activated, would release the string, sending the arrow at high speed. It was just a matter of repeating the process.