The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival: Volume 1 [Parts 1 to 3] by Harunohi Biyori

Author:Harunohi Biyori
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 6: Surviving in the Forest

The night had ended without any more visitors to the campsite. Still, there was a chance that merchant carts and the like would stop by around midday for lunch. Most adults, upon seeing a lone street urchin, would’ve been worried that their belongings might be stolen. Ill-intentioned ones, meanwhile, might try to rob the child, given the road was unguarded. Feld was probably an exception, I thought. It’s best not to blindly trust any grown-ups.

Still, I couldn’t just hide away forever. While picking wild blackberries for sustenance, I began to diligently train in practical magic. Now that I could grasp my own aether, I was able to use Spark and Flow, albeit clumsily—I was still not proficient enough for them to be useful, and I couldn’t use any of the other spells.

While Shine would’ve been the next handiest to learn, I wanted to learn Harden first instead. The spell could solidify soil into a hard mass. Typically, it was used in construction to keep mud walls in place until they dried, thereby speeding up the process, apparently.

I ventured out into the forest and dug up some soft-looking soil with a stick, taking a lump into my palm, pondering. What exactly did “hardening” entail here? When I squeezed the dirt tightly, it looked solid but crumbled easily with the poke of a finger and couldn’t exactly be considered hardened. After I crushed the handful of soil, then took it apart a few times, it dried out and turned from brown to yellowish-brown. In that state, it no longer clumped together, no matter how hard I squeezed.

“Flow,” I chanted for practice. Water dripped from my fingertips—a little more than last night—onto the dry soil, allowing it to clump together once more. I’d added too much moisture, however, and the dirt turned to mud. The dried soil was powdery, finer than sand. To solidify it, something was needed to bind the soil particles together, which was what the water had done.

“Harden...” I chanted, trying to will the soil into coming together with my aether. The lump in my hand solidified, maintaining its original shape. “Did it work...?” Had I just learned Harden?

To check how solid it was, I threw the lump at a nearby tree. The lump shattered easily on impact, reverting to ordinary soil as the aether dissipated.

I supposed that meant it’d worked, though not perfectly. That woman’s master had made her practice exhaustively by kneading a lump of soil with her bare hands, exactly as I’d just done. Was I missing something? The soil that the woman had used was ashen in color.

For the moment, I stopped practicing magic and returned to the nearby creek to eat. I ate the blackberries for breakfast, then washed my hair, now gross with sweat and ash, in the river. After, I wiped myself clean with a wet cloth.

As the ash washed away, my hair, now the same pink-blonde shade as my mother’s, sparkled conspicuously. It made me nervous. Can I use this gray soil near the water instead of ash? Wait.

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