Chapter 3 Forest survival.

Two winters had now passed since the sudden and tragic death of Lilis mother. She was a bit taller now and her beautiful hair was already coming down to the middle of her back. Although none of this had really helped her in anyway as she was still just way too small to really do much of anything.

Thanks to this she hadn't even managed to move her mother's rotting corpse out of the house. In turn this had caused the entire place to start stinking quite a bit forcing Lili to move elsewhere and rename her home simply to her mother's tomb.

So now she lived in her own self-made hut on the opposite side of her years from where she could always keep a watchful eye on her mother's tomb.

From there she would watch her old home with a heavy heart wondering and hoping that her mother would awaken. Maybe one day she would walk out that door and all would be well again.

After all living in this new small hut of her own making wasn't all that nice. The chickens gave her warmth, Terminator kept watch, but even still she couldn't help but worry. The forest was full of dangers that now could get to her at any point of time, also the hut wasn't all that warm lacking a indoor fireplace.

So now, left alone in the forest with nothing but the chickens as her companions, life no longer was so lovely living here in the woods with some hardship. No instead her life had now suddenly turned into a real life-and-death struggle. Forced to take care of everything now being as small as she had proven to be extremely hard and dangerous.

Despite her best efforts, small pests, rabbits and even deer kept on coming to eat her garden plants. Due to her small size, the animals were not intimidated in the slightest by her and more often than not she actually found herself fearing for her own life when faced with the big deer. It was only thanks to Terminators assistance that she was able to save some of the garden plants for herself to eat.

Like so her everyday rations had quickly become nothing but little scraps of food, especially as she had to share them with the chickens as well. So in desperation she had now resorted to eating bugs and worms, especially during the winters as there wasn't really anything good for her to eat.

But by some miracle, she had survived through these two winters, although her body had now become extremely skinny and frail. Plus she hadn't grown much at all in height and now feared that her growth might have been greatly affected by this lack of food.

Luckily her teeth had now almost completely developed so she could at least start eating a bigger variety of foods.

The first target on her list was the rabbits who always tried to eat her cabbages. Starting out by building a sharpened stick fence she had hoped to keep the peaky forest animals away from her garden. But sadly this had little effect, rabbits merely hopped over, some fucker had dug under it while the deer just walked over it making the fence completely useless.

Having seen the hopelessness of the situation Lili had then been forced to try something else. Figuring that since she wasn't capable of building a larger fence due to her little size, she had then started building traps for her enemies.

With this in mind, she had quickly begun digging holes and placing sharp sticks into them. After that, she would cover them with small sticks and leaves, lastly she would place a small piece of cabbage on top of the trap as bait. Like so many traps were set around the forest that circled her home.

Along with these traps, she had also started to work on a small primitive fish trap. With great effort she assembled stones into a circle on the shoreline of the small lake making sure to leave one small opening to the trap. She hoped that in time the fishes would swim into the trap and once they did she would simply close the trap with a single stone. Like so the fishes would be easy pickings for her and her wooden spear.

Other than that a lot of her time now was spent on trying to make rope out of plant fibers and learning how to start a fire with a simple stick and a piece of wood. Some of these things she knew something about due to her past memories, but a lot of things required lots of thinking and learning for her. 

Like so she had slowly started to educate herself on these primitive survival techniques. And soon as the fourth winter started to come around she found that her new life had turned into more work and hardship than her previous life had ever been.

Here she constantly found herself having to worry about the most basic of things, like not starving to death, not getting stomped to death by a deer or eaten by a fox or something worse, also during many cold winter nights she constantly felt like she was about to freeze to death. Because of this many of her winter time nights were spent attending to the fire so that it didn't go out and she didn't totally freeze to death.

Also, there was always the fear of injury or simply sickness. Her mother had already died of sickness because there were no medical supplies here or doctors. The only thing she could rely on was herself, nobody was coming to save her if something bad were to happen here. If she ever got hurt or sick and became totally unable to move then that would surely be her end.

But despite everything she had by some miracle survived, none of these things had yet to occur to her and she had managed to keep herself somewhat healthy and alive so far.

Thinking of all of this she did feel quite grateful to be alive and I hurt here, she for sure didn't want to die again. Although she did a lot of the time wonder just what was her purpose here anyway. Why would she be reincarnated to this world only to suffer alone in the forest like this? Was this all just a big joke by God or just a punishment, or maybe this was the afterlife and she was living in hell without knowing it? 

Many of these thoughts haunted her and the few dreams she had, but luckily with so much work her mind was constantly occupied and she wasn't too bothered by any of this. Besides she didn't want to be negative and think of some needless dark thoughts that would just make her feel depressed. After all in the end life here did have some positives to it.

Firstly she did have her chickens here to keep her company and give her tasty eggs and warmth. The air was so fresh and unpolluted here, there was no planes in the sky disturbing the silence within her peaceful forest home and she didn't have to answer to no boss here. Plus she didn't need to pay any taxes, dress properly or anything, she was her own boss and nobody here would say otherwise as there was nobody else here.

Basically life here did have its own type of charm to it. All around all she could hear was just the birds singing, the light breeze of the wind rustling the trees and bushes, her chickens cooing and Terminators howling like some beast, all in all this was like the perfect place to live in seclusion and become a Buddhist monk.

By the simple right of conquest this was her land now and she felt oh so proud to look upon all that she had built here. Nobody was going to stop her, how could they since there wasn't anybody else here, haha haa?

Oh God she was lonely. Despite her boasting, she still didn't help but feel so lonely and worried for her own mental health. After all, only having the chickens to talk to wasn't really good for her mental health since they didn't really say anything back.

At this rate she feared her skills in reading, writing and even speaking were going to disappear. What if she one day met a person again would she seem like some primitive monkey to them incapable of even speaking?

And what if she truly was alone in this world? What happened to Frank? Where was this body's father, surely if he were still alive he would come to visit her at some point, right?

Frustrated by these thoughts she had tried to take her fate into her own hands and so she had started exploring her surroundings. She had done this for at least a good couple of months. But she was still too young and the forest was dense and hard to traverse.

If she wasn't careful she might get lost or hurt badly. So with that in mind, she had set out to explore the forest only during daytime and always with great care so as not to get lost or hurt.

Through her explorations, she had found out that the lake was indeed somewhat small with no streams leading away from it, plus with all the surroundings around her home being nothing but forests all around she had no idea in which direction to search for civilization. Truly this was quite a disappointing discovery in her eyes which is why when her 4th winter approached she had decided to just wait in the safety of her shabby home for her fathers return. Surely the man would come for her at some point.

Then one night after a lot of failed attempts she finally heard the sound of one of her stick traps snapping followed by the painful squeaking of some animal. Hearing this she then took a burning stick from her campfire and using it as her source of light she had run into the forest to see what had happened.

Although as she ran the sounds of the creature had quickly disappeared, but soon as she came to a stop at the trap that had been broken she noticed it in there. There within her little hole impaled by some sticks was her first ever rabbit that she had managed to catch. 

Seeing this she felt mixed emotions, on one hand she was happy to see that her trap had worked, but on the other hand she felt sad seeing the cute dead bunny lying there. After all there was a reason why she still held on to all the chickens despite being in need of food herself and that was simply because she was incapable of killing animals. Never had she killed an animal in her past life before. Just the thought of it felt so wrong to her. Sure the chickens produced eggs that she ate and she did like to eat meat, but to kill something herself felt so, so scary for her.

In defiance of these soft feelings, she shook her head and steeled her heart as she said.

"No, get a grip of yourself, Lili. You ain't no girl, you're a boy, no you're a man. I need to do this, this is a question of survival. I just have to pretend that this rabbit is just another one of those evil gang bangers who deserved to die, right."

With Terminator covering her back once more she then proceeded to pull the dead rabbit out of the hole after which she removed the sharp sticks that were still stuck in its body and proceeded to drag the rabbit back to her home.

Once back in her yard, she proceeded to ready the rabbit for cooking. Remembering her past life she recalled having a conversation about this particular subject with a hunter. The question of how does one ready an animal for eating and how do you skin it? She remembered that the most important thing of all was bleeding the animal dry first.

Tying the rabbits back legs together she then tossed the rope over a branch mad pulled on it lifting the dead rabbit into the air. Tying the rope then to another branch she then left the rabbit hanging there.

After that, she needed to cut its head off so that the blood would then flow out of its body. With the blood spilling out the rabbit its meat should then last longer.

Looking at the rabbit hanging there Lili gulped nervously. All she had was the small knife, with careful maintenance she had managed to keep it clean and sharp, but to cut through a rabbits head would not be easy. She was especially worried about cutting the spine.

Standing to her side were Terminator and his wives who seemed to be looking at her with great curiosity. Not wanting to seem weak in their eyes Lili once more took a deep breath and steeled her heart as she then stabbed the blade into the rabbit. 

For the next hour or so she managed to skin the rabbit with a surprising amount of skill. After cutting the head she had to simply cut the skin around each back foot and carefully slit (or tear) the hide inside each leg while making sure not to damage the meat underneath.

After that she stripped the skin from the carcass by gently pulling downward. The motion was somewhat like that used when peeling a banana but a bit more forceful. Using her fingers she loosened any difficult spots she came across.

With the hide now loose she turned it inside out so that the fur was on the inside and the meaty part on the outside. Then came the simple part of putting the fur into cool water to soak. Using her fish trap that held no fish she placed the hide in there to soak. Soon she would need to clean it fully but now she was hungry.

Taking a deep breath of relief she then proceeded to the part she was most excited about. Looking at the rabbit head she hesitated for a moment. Right now she wasn't sure if she should have actually cut the entire head off or not. 

Nonetheless, she then skinned the head and started to prepare a pot of boiling water. First, she tossed the entire head into the boiling water. Usually, she would not eat such things, but in nature, she didn't have the luxury of being picky or wasteful with her food.

After that, she needed to remove the intestines from the rabbit and separate the meat into smaller bits of meat. With no place to store her food, Lili tossed everything into the pot and left it there to boil except the intestines.

The intestines were then dropped into the fish trap to soak alongside the rabbit pelt. Intestines would need to be washed thoroughly and then boiled for at least 15 minutes to cleanse them of any disease-causing bacteria. After that, they could be fried to soften them up for eating, but right now it was dark and she didn't have the time.

Returning to the pot she then used her wooden scoop to scoop out the rabbit head. Looking at it and its fleshy ears she felt like puking. Managing to hold it in she closed her eyes and blindly bit into its ear. 

The next day as she awoke with a satisfied belly still full of rabbit meat, she found the rabbit meat still safe and sound soaking in the pot full of water. Walking to the lake shore she was met with a surprising sight. Her fish trap was full of fish that were nibbling on the intestines and the rabbit pelt. 

Seeing this she quickly grabbed a large stone and blocked the fish's escape. In her trap, she could see at least 10 small fishes swimming in a circle. Looking at this scene she couldn't help but smile in joy. It seemed that she was finally going to eat well and maybe even survive this coming winter.