The day arrived without any travelers visiting the campsite, and morning dawned.
Still, around noon, merchant caravans might stop by for lunch.
Ordinary adults would be wary of street urchins, fearing theft, and unscrupulous ones might try to rob a child with a knife or money on a road without guards.
I decided to believe that Feld was special and that it was best not to trust adults so easily for now.
Even so, I couldn’t move forward by just hiding, so I started training my Utility Magic while picking wild black berries again to survive.
Now that I knew my Mana Capacity, I could use 【Spark (Fire)】 and 【Water】 clumsily, but they weren’t at a practical level yet, and I couldn’t use other Utility Magic.
If I were to learn something useful next, it would be 【Light】, but I wanted to learn 【Harden(Hard)】 first.
【Harden(Hard)】 is a magic that hardens the soil, generally used to shorten construction time by fixing earthen walls in place until they dry… or so it seems.
I say “seems” because it’s an unpopular magic that few people learn, and even that woman only knew about it from “knowledge.”
I looked at the lump of soil in my hand, pondering. What does it mean to “harden”?
If I squeezed it tightly in my hand, the soil would appear to harden, but it would easily crumble if I touched it with my finger, so I couldn’t call that “hardened.”
After squeezing and crumbling it several times, the soil, which had dried and turned from brown to ochre, no longer held together even when squeezed hard.
“……【Water】”
Chanting as practice, a little more water than last night dripped from my fingertips and was absorbed into the dry soil.
This would make it harden again. But this time, there was too much water, and it turned into mud.
Dry soil is like a fine powder, even finer than sand. To harden it, you need something to connect the soil particles, like water.
“……【Harden(Hard)】……”
Chanting as if connecting the soil particles with Mana, the lump of soil in my hand hardened in its original shape.
“……I did it!”
Did I learn 【Harden(Hard)】 with this? Just to be sure, I threw it at a nearby tree to see how hard it was, and the lump of soil shattered easily upon impact, returning to just soil when the Mana was released.
I could use it, but it wasn’t perfect. Maybe I really need to see someone else use it to learn.
In the special training that woman’s master made her do, she was kneading a lump of soil with her bare hands in the same way. But was something different? The soil that woman used was a grayish color.
I put that aside for later and went back to the upper reaches of the stream. I washed the picked berries in the water and ate them for breakfast, then washed the sweat and ash-caked hair that was starting to feel gross in the river, and wiped my body with a wet cloth.
When the ash fell off, my pink-blonde hair, the same as my mother’s, became conspicuously shiny, making me uneasy. If I left the ash on, my hair would become rough, so I wondered if I could use the gray soil by the river as a substitute… wait, what’s this? I found a gray layer in the ground near the stream, dug out that part with a nearby stone, and played with it with my fingers, and “knowledge” told me what it was.
“Clay?”
I tried chanting 【Harden(Hard)】 while channeling Mana into it. But the clay didn’t harden much, and it felt harder to harden than ordinary soil.
What’s wrong? What’s the difference between soil and clay? I thought I was channeling Mana to fill the gaps, but…
“Ah, I see.”
As I played with the clay with my fingers, I realized it was so fine that there were almost no gaps. And that woman’s knowledge told me that clay is made of much finer particles than ordinary soil.
“……【Harden(Hard)】”
This time, instead of channeling Mana to connect the “particles,” I imagined it permeating the gaps between the “particles” and bonding them together.
When I threw the hardened clay at the tree with force, the clay didn’t chip, but the tree trunk was scratched. Moreover, even after I let go, the Mana didn’t dissipate immediately, and it still retained Mana and hardness.
This is 【Harden(Hard)】… I might not have been able to learn it without that woman’s “previous life” knowledge. I picked up the clay to see how long this hardness would last.
I wanted to learn other Utility Magic, but I took out the handwritten herbal dictionary from my luggage while it was still light. It contained detailed information with illustrations, not only about various herbs but also about mushrooms and minerals that could be used in medicine.
But right now, I have “knowledge” but haven’t been able to make it my own. I have to learn the characters like looking up words in a dictionary one by one.
For now, mushrooms were difficult to identify even with illustrations, so I found edible-looking wild plants nearby, spent time searching for them in the dictionary, and read each character to make sure they were safe.
As I continued, engrossed, I faintly smelled a bonfire from afar.
…Is it noon already? Maybe a merchant caravan stopped by for lunch. If they weren’t here at this time, they wouldn’t be able to reach another town by evening.
I went back to the tree near the stream where my luggage was, picking up dead branches along the way. As I approached the campsite, the smell of burning wood became stronger.
Feld told me to feel the surrounding Mana and to smell the flow of wind and scent.
As I stepped back one step at a time to check, I felt the strength of the scent. When I compared the Mana Particles I felt around me with the flow of that scent, I felt like I could “see” the movement of Mana a little.
“……【Wind】”
Chanting as I channeled my Mana to match the scent and the movement of Mana Particles, the scent dissipated slightly.
I thought I would learn it quickly because I had been practicing feeling the Mana of Wind, but I mastered it more easily than expected.
If I didn’t know anything, I might have become interested in Wind and thought my attribute was “Wind.”
I was going to hide in the depths of the forest if travelers came, but I changed my plans and started collecting clay because I could use 【Harden(Hard)】.
I was kneading the clay for a while, and the smell of burning wood that had been drifting had disappeared. Using clay was surprisingly fun, but I wasn’t just playing around.
I took the rabbit meat wrapped in leaves, a little food, and the dead wood and wild plants I had collected from the forest from my luggage, and headed towards the campsite with caution. No one was left.
I approached the bonfire remains and touched the ground. It was still warm, but annoyingly, the bonfire had been put out with water, so I couldn’t use that spot.
I picked up some stones and dug a hole in the ground next to it. I couldn’t dig much with the unsharpened stones, but it didn’t matter since I wasn’t digging deep.
“……Phew”
When I had dug a shallow hole, I laid fresh leaves in it, crumbled the dried cheese over the rabbit meat, wrapped it in leaves again, placed it in the hole, put fresh leaves on top of it, and covered it with soil.
Then, I put dead leaves on top of that and placed a small amount of dead wood. The preparations were done, but I didn’t light the fire yet.
“【Harden(Hard)】”
I cast 【Harden(Hard)】 on the prepared distorted clay pot to harden it, then carved wild plants and dried meat into it with a knife, and poured water over it with 【Water】.
“……Ugh…”
My head felt a little dizzy. I had used too much Mana today, but I wouldn’t be in a state of starvation if I used it one more time.
“……【Spark (Fire)】”
I placed the clay pot next to the new bonfire and lit it. Sparks scattered, and smoke rose faintly from the dead leaves.
It was hard to use 【Spark (Fire)】 one more time, so I blew on it and gradually covered it with well-dried dead leaves, and I was relieved when it caught fire successfully.
My Mana Capacity is 13, and I used Utility Magic eight times today.
Utility Magic seems to consume 1 Mana per use, so my remaining Mana is 5. I felt the amount of Mana left in my body, remembering that sensation, thinking that this was probably the limit.
The pot was just placed next to the bonfire, so it would take time for the wild plants to cook.
But the clay hardened with 【Harden(Hard)】 only lasts for about an hour. I hoped it would cook by then, and in the meantime, I started carving a spoon by whittling the picked-up tree branches with a knife.
“…………”
The blade of the knife wasn’t very thin, so I couldn’t carve it well with my weak strength. In the first place, my hands were still clumsy, so I was afraid I would cut myself if I put too much force into it.
Still, as I persevered, I created a spatula that was distorted and bent rather than a spoon… Well, it was better than nothing.
The wild plants seemed to be cooked quite a bit… or so it seemed. But considering the time of 【Harden(Hard)】, it was probably reaching its limit.
I carefully used a tree branch to move the pot away from the bonfire, then poked at the nearly extinguished fire and pulled out the rabbit meat from inside.
“……Ugh…”
The leaves were gooey from the heat and the meat’s fat.
I carefully peeled off the leaves with the tip of my knife, revealing properly cooked meat, which I pinched with my fingers and took a bite.
…Well. It’s pretty mediocre.
Thanks to the cheese, the taste isn’t bad, but it still lacks salt, and it has a strange leafy flavor. I might need to wrap it in some kind of herbal wild grass.
Next, I tried the wild grass stewed with dried meat.
This is…awful. The side closest to the fire was cooked, but the rest was undercooked, and the bitterness of the unsavory wild vegetables was intense. The salty dried meat gave it some flavor, but not enough to eliminate the bitterness and strange smell.
I need to be more selective about the wild grasses I use for cooking…
This time, I was afraid to eat the cheese and dried meat that had been left in the forest for a whole day, even though they were supposed to be preserved, so I tried cooking them for the first time to heat them through.
I think it was a failure, but I learned a little about what to do next time, so I guess I gained some experience.
The wild grass soup was even worse than the salty soup that old woman at the orphanage made, but it wasn’t poisonous, so I ate it all. When I think about it, they’re both awful, so there’s not much difference.
More than that, eating wild grass instead of just meat made me feel somehow calmer.
After finishing my meal, I wrapped some fresh ash in leaves and returned to the forest to practice with my knife without using mana.
I’m gradually learning various things.
Next time, Mid-length.