With a groan, Blake stood up from his seated position on the grass. The sun had already set but he needed to cook the rabbicorn tonight. It had already been sitting out for a day and if he had been on Earth he would have already thrown it out but the spirit realm was not Earth and he was desperate for sustenance. His body had already healed most of the damage from his fight but the healing was slowing down as he got more and more hungry.
Blake had lived alone since he was twelve and knew how to cook. He wasn’t an expert chef or anything but boiling your own rice, noodles and grilling chicken was cheaper than relying on premade meals every day. His landlord had given him free rent and some spending money for doing basic repairs and maintenance on some of his properties but it was by no means enough to eat out every meal.
Cooking rabbit over a fire was not something Blake had done before. His cooking skills were for a modern kitchen with a stove and oven. He might have lived in what the landlord called a storage room but Blake was no animal. Except now he regretted not even thinking about how to cook without modern appliances.
Hoping his Talent would help with cooking he decided to start with only a piece of the rabbit. In theory, once he had cooked it and considered it done he would get feedback on his actions. He could then take that into account before cooking the rest of the rabbit.
Blake immediately ran into a stumbling block. This rabbit was not from a grocery store having been processed and ready for him to cook. There was fur and bones and organs that he didn’t know what to do with. He didn’t think he would be able to do this part piecemeal so his Talent would be no help here. At least next time he would be more prepared. Hopefully.
Blake didn’t want to think about what would have to happen for him to be cooking another one of these. The fight was still too fresh in his memory.
Taking one of his wooden shivs Blake got to work removing the meat of the rabbicorn from the rest of its body. The skin was surprisingly tough breaking one of his shivs before he fully cut the skin open. Using his hands he ripped what meat he could get out of the corpse and placed it onto a large leaf he had prepared beforehand.
It was gruesome work and Blake knew he was missing the majority of the potential food but he couldn’t bring himself to care at the moment. His body was still covered in filth from the fight and the blood and guts from the rabbicorn hardly added much in comparison. As far as he could tell he didn’t screw up the meat he had managed to collect too bad. There was way too little to his hungry body but he was too tired to care by that point.
If there was too little food then that was tomorrow’s problem. For now, he focused on cooking some of it. It was taking all his willpower not to eat it raw. That or to curl up into a ball and sleep. It was late at night by this point and his body still felt like crap following the fight. It was only his fear and hunger keeping him awake at this point. He constantly felt like there was something watching him from the darkness but the fire he had made brought a semblance of comfort.
Taking one of his spears Blake impaled some meat on the end. The meat having been torn out from the rabbicorn’s body by hand was not intact and struggled to stay on the stick but it was good enough for now. He stuck the spear over the fire letting the meat cook.
Blake didn’t know exactly how long he lasted but eventually, his hunger won out and he grabbed the meat off the spear and shoved it into his mouth. The outside was burnt and ashy but the inside was still raw. It was absolutely disgusting but in the moment he didn’t care. He devoured the food so fast that the information from his Talent had only just finished filling his mind.
Blake paled a little at what he learned. The meat had gone bad of that there was no doubt. His Talent only gave him information on his craft and how to use it so he didn’t know how his body would react to it but he could guess. Still, he was hungry. Glancing at the rest of the uncooked meat he grabbed his spear to cook some more.
Blake didn’t spend much time trying to learn from the knowledge his Talent provided so the rest of the meat wasn’t much better off than his first attempt. That was a weakness of Blake’s Talent. It gave him detailed information on what he had done and how his actions influenced the result but it didn’t just hand him the answer. It was no cheat to immediately become good at whatever he did but rather an advanced observation tool for his crafts.
Of course that only applied to half his Talent. The other half of the information provided, the part that told him how to use his built items, did give him specific information and skills. It was just highly dependent on how good he was at making things.
Soon after finishing his meal, Blake collapsed into his leaf bed. He was asleep before hitting the ground.
* * *
The following morning Blake woke up covered in sweat. His sleep had been plagued with nightmares making him feel exhausted despite having slept until the sun was high in the sky.
The most prominent dream in Blake’s mind had been one that he had had for years only now with a new twist. He was twelve and in the car with his parents driving somewhere, he didn’t know where. Everyone was happy and laughing at something when he heard a loud crash.
The car came to an abrupt stop and a rabbicorn the size of a person jumped through the front windshield impaling his mother. It quickly pulled back and stabbed his father as well before he could react. It then gave him a smile with a mouth full of sharp teeth and blood. The smile did not belong on a rabbit’s face even if it was a monster version. That was when the nightmare ended just to be repeated again and again.
Turning to the side Blake retched everything he had eaten the night before. Unfortunately, he was still in his leaf bed which was inside the small ditch he had made to keep its shape. The vomit did not make it over the edge and came back down to cover his body.
Blake tried to stand but stumbled back to the ground as the world spun around him. He tried two more times before giving up. He lay back in the grass staring at the sky. At least he was out of the puke-filled trench that was his leaf bed. Despite no longer moving his head felt light and dizzy. The sun was shining brightly on him and he could feel its heat but could only shiver.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
‘What is happening to me?’ He thought before it occurred to him. Food poisoning.
He had known last night after his Talent had activated that the meat had gone bad but had eaten it anyway. Raw too despite his efforts to cook it. It was no surprise that he was incapacitated now. Sure, he had hoped that being in the spirit realm would prevent such a thing from happening but no luck.
At least he wasn’t hungry anymore and his wounds were fully healed. It seemed what bit of the food his body had absorbed was enough for him to recover. If he hadn’t been in the spirit realm things would have been much worse.
His mind was fuzzy from the fever slowing his thoughts to a crawl but he still grew bored as he was unable to move or do anything. His bored mind quickly turned to dark thoughts as his nightmares came forth. He couldn’t remember much by this point as he had never had the best memory for this kind of thing but he had noticed that his memory overall had improved since arriving in the spirit realm and that included his nightmares. Not great.
He kept thinking about his fight with the rabbicorn and how close he had come to death. When he was thinking about it objectively it wasn’t that close, the two wounds he had suffered were not even half an inch deep and it had taken somewhere between ten and thirty seconds between each attack, adrenaline messed with his sense of time making exact measurements of such things difficult.
Blake’s mind did not want him to think things through objectively, especially not in the state he was now. His nightmares teamed up with his fever making him see things in the trees around him. He felt ants crawling across his skin when there was nothing there and voices in the wind. Fever dreams had never been a thing he had experienced before and had always believed it to be an exaggeration at best but he had been wrong. Reality seemed to twist around him to bring terrors to life.
As night set darkness overcame everything. The fire Blake had made had gone out sometime the night before and he was not in a state to remake it leaving him without the comfort of warmth or light. His bed was still ruined and he had no energy to make another leaving him to fall asleep on the hard dirt with eyes in the dark waiting for a sign of weakness.
* * *
The next morning Blake woke up feeling sore but whole. His sleep was little better than the previous night but his fever had broken letting his mind at least try and make sense of things. The hard ground had done nothing to help his aches and pains but there was nothing he could do about that now.
Before Blake had been attacked he had been making a priority list of what to craft. His focus at the time had been around comfort and entertainment. He no longer deluded himself into believing that was a good idea. He was in pain and had been in more pain the day before. Comfort didn’t matter if he kept taking injuries such as these. Really, personal defense could be seen as a form of comfort from the perspective of not feeling like he was going to die.
Blake needed to build a base. A place where he was safe and could sleep without worry. Hopefully, that would keep his nightmares at bay and let him relax. Nothing else mattered in the face of self-defense.
Gripping the spear he had come to carry around since he had arrived back in the glade following his fight Blake began to gather longer sticks and branches. He wasn’t comfortable going far from the glade so he stuck to the immediate area. Surviving in the wilderness might not have been something that he was familiar with but he had seen plenty of shows set in medieval times. The defenses of their castles and fortresses were something he could try and replicate to a limited degree.
His first defense would be a series of sharpened wooden spears stuck in the ground that would surround his glade. These spikes would impale any larger monsters that tried to get close. Smaller monsters such as the rabbicorn would be able to get past those with ease which was where his next layer of defense would come into play. He would dig a trench and fill it with even more spikes. The rabbicorns would have to jump into the trench to get across and would impale themselves on the spikes.
After that, he was thinking a wall or maybe surrounding himself with wood ready to light on fire to burn his enemies alive. He wasn’t sure yet but he couldn’t help but let out a dark chuckle at the thought of rabbicorns writhing in pain as fire burned away their precious fur.
Blake knew he wasn’t mentally healthy. He really did. He had only just started to relax following his introduction to the spirit realm when he was attacked. He just couldn’t bring himself to care. So what if he wanted to burn things alive so that they could feel his pain? They deserved it!
Blake spent the day making his wooden spikes and sticking them in the ground. Before the day came to a close he spent some time remaking the fire. He was running low on fallen sticks in the local area as he wasn’t willing to go far from the glade but that was a problem for later. Once the fire was remade he also made a new leaf bed close by.
As he collapsed into his new bed he couldn’t help but lament that he was covered in various disgusting substances. This new bed would be little better than his old one by morning. He just shrugged at the thought. Who cared? He was alone out here with no one to see or smell him.
The next morning Blake resumed his work on base defenses. His body felt mostly recovered by this point and he suspected that the lingering pain was psychosomatic rather than there being something actually wrong with him. He had more nightmares but other than being tired there were no consequences.
He was hungry again as what nutrients he had gotten from his rabbicorn meal had been used to finish healing him but it wasn’t so bad that he had to search for food immediately. Since he didn’t have any more injuries to recover from Blake’s hunger wouldn’t get any worse and he could survive a little discomfort after the last few days. He felt that he had a much better appreciation for people able to withstand pain without a complaint. Had there been anyone with him they would have had to endure his constant whining.
Blake had mostly surrounded the glade with spikes the day before and was quick to finish up. Before he started on the trench behind the defensive spikes he decided to make something to help him dig. He couldn’t create anything really helpful but he wanted to see if he could create something focused on digging so that his Talent would increase his skill at the task.
He had previously created a chisel to help create the leaf beds but that was meant for more detailed work such as shaping the final design. The trenches’ exact shape didn’t matter so the chisel had limited use outside of removing stones that might be in the way but as that wasn’t its purpose it wouldn’t be much help.
Blake decided to create something like the chisel but more focused on removing big stones and digging up compacted soil. His physics classes shined in helping him come up with a design. His main goal was to create something that could apply more force to the ground than he could with his hands.
The sharpened tip of the chisel could help break it up but didn’t provide any extra force. No, what he needed was one of the most simple but useful tools ever invented, a lever. By extending the handle to create a lever he could multiply the force of his efforts by quite a bit.
In the end, Blake created a tool that was essentially a spear with the tip of the chisel rather than a sharpened point. It was flat with rounded edges on the end so that it wouldn’t break as easily but would still pierce the ground.
By focusing on how he wanted to use it he got exactly the kind of skills he wanted out of his Talent. He now had a better idea of how to pierce the ground and leverage the long handle to pull out heavy rocks. The tool was not well made and was only marginally suited to its purpose so Blake didn’t get much from his Talent but anything was better than nothing.
Now it was time to start digging.
When should I release chapters?
