Entering the living room, he found Aya lying on the couch, reading another book.
The sight of the tender girl, in a robe over her naked body, reading children’s fairy tales, touched him so much that he couldn’t help himself, and leaning down, he kissed her on the lips.
“Oh, Kenshin, hi.
Done with your business?” Aya asked, licking her lips after the kiss.
“Not yet, there’s still something left.
Rest, in your condition you need more rest…” Kenshin said, stroking her cute, but no longer so flat belly.
“Mm-hmm…” Aya purred, enjoying the affection and care of her man.
Kenshin headed to the kitchen, and the girl returned to her reading.
In the kitchen, the young man spent about half an hour fiddling with the “cooling” formations in the refrigerator.
He didn’t immediately manage to install a completely different formation from the ones he had made before, but after half an hour, the refrigerator was set to five degrees Celsius, and the freezer to minus ten degrees Celsius.
“Aya, girl, come here.” Kenshin called from the kitchen.
“M?
What happened?” the girl asked with interest.
“Look.
This is a refrigerator.
Reach out your hand, feel it?”
“Umm, it’s cool… What’s this thing for?”
“So that food lasts longer, or stays cold.
Like cold water on a hot summer day… And now look here, this is the freezer compartment, and it’s much colder.
Food can stay frozen here for a very long time!” Kenshin said proudly, pleased with the fruits of his labor.
“Brrr, it really is cold…” the girl shuddered, pulling her hand out of the freezer.
“Alright, sweetheart, just don’t forget to close the refrigerator door so all the cold doesn’t escape.” Kenshin said in a teaching tone, pecked the girl on the back of the head, and headed for the exit.
It was five in the evening, and Kenshin decided to start drawing a huge formation to divert people who wandered onto his territory.
The young man climbed up a higher mountain and surveyed his “domain,” estimating the approximate scale of the formation in his mind.
Then he came down from the mountain and trudged to the right.
After walking about five kilometers, the young man decided that was enough, and mentally shuddered at the enormous amount of work ahead.
“Damn, why isn’t there a way to shorten formations among the knowledge available to me…” Kenshin muttered under his breath as he walked along the designated territory, leaving a noticeable trail in the ground with a large sharpened stick.
He wasn’t worried that by the time he finished the last line, the first one would be broken.
The drawn line of the formation was imprinted on the terrain in an embryonic state and retained its properties for seven days.
The young man knew that master formation specialists had access to more advanced drawing methods, allowing them to set up the main nodes, and the remaining lines would “grow” on their own.
Kenshin guessed that this knowledge would become available at the third level of the “Formation Creation” skill.
After walking about 500 meters with the sharpened stick, spending about an hour on it, Kenshin left a mark at the spot where he stopped and headed for the set snares.
Checking three of the ten snares, the young man found nothing and was about to despair, but in the fourth, a large, long-eared rabbit was firmly caught.
Kenshin jumped up to it with enthusiasm and found it was still alive, caught in the snare by its hind legs.
Seeing the man, the rabbit flinched and, in terror, tried to run in a random direction, but it didn’t work.
When Kenshin got closer, the rabbit squealed and looked at him with its big red eyes.
“Eh, sorry, long-ears, but we need something to eat.
That’s just how life works…” the young man sighed, grabbed the rabbit by the ears, freed it from the snare, then tossed it into a bag reinforced with a formation.
Then Kenshin went to the remaining snares and found another live rabbit and one that had been strangled.
Throwing them in the same pile, the young man adjusted the snares, checked the installed formations, and headed home.
The formations that helped catch the rabbit worked on a fairly simple principle and affected rather stupid animals, influencing their minds and making them go into the trap.
This was one of two formations available to the young man that affected consciousness.
The second was the formation he was drawing along the five-kilometer perimeter, which affected people’s minds, making randomly wandering travelers take a different path.
But it didn’t work on people firmly determined to enter the formation’s area of effect.
“I wonder at what ability level the Thousand Faces formation will become available to me…” Kenshin thought with anticipation.
The Thousand Faces formation was so named because of the hundreds of different ghosts with terrible faces that a person caught in the formation would encounter.
And although this formation was not offensive in nature, being in the formation’s area severely shook a person’s mental health, and the weaker their will, the greater the damage, up to loss of sanity and a painful death.
* * *
Before reaching home, the young man dropped the bag of rabbits, stretched a rope between two young trees, tied it tightly, and with a sigh, took the dead rabbit out of the bag.
He didn’t know if a strangled animal was edible, but decided that if it was “fresh” enough and the blood was drained, then it would be fine.
The young man hung the rabbit upside down, winced, and cut its throat in one motion.
Fresh blood poured onto the ground, and the rabbits in the bag, as if sensing their destined fate, tried to escape in terror and squealed wildly.
Kenshin pulled out one of the live rabbits, lifted it by the ears, looked it in the eyes, and gently stroked its soft fur, then broke its neck in one motion and hung it on the rope, cutting its throat.
The young man decided not to call Aya prematurely, thinking she shouldn’t see the cute animals alive.
After doing the same procedure with the third rabbit, the young man went back up home.
“Can you skin rabbits?” Kenshin asked, finding the girl in the living room.
“Rabbits?
Well… My grandfather used to have rabbits, and I saw them being gutted.
Why?”
“Get dressed and follow me.
I caught three rabbits.
There’s an hour before dark, we need to skin them.” the young man said, and sat down on the couch.
“Wow, caught rabbits that fast?
Okay, I’ll get dressed now!” the blue-eyed beauty declared, slipping off her robe and walking toward the bedroom, elegantly swaying her hips, making Kenshin groan.
“Aren’t you afraid of teasing a hungry husband like that?
I might not be able to control myself, and you’ll be limping all week…” he said after her, admiring the graceful sway of her firm buttocks.
“Oh, you’re all talk…” Aya called out coquettishly from the bedroom.
“More cunning every day, a real fox!
Just wait until she grows nine tails…” Kenshin muttered with a smile, noticing how much he had come to love this girl in such a short time.
After getting dressed, Aya returned to the living room and announced she was ready.
Then, grabbing the necessary things, they left the house and headed for the hanging rabbits.
“Good rabbits.” Aya praised, and to the young man’s surprise, showing no disgust, she began to examine them more closely.
Kenshin decided that life in the village had led to the girl having no illusions about how life worked.
Then the girl, without taking the rabbit off the rope, made several cuts in the skin and skinned it in literally five minutes.
The young man, meanwhile, watched carefully and memorized.
“Did I mention you’re a real treasure?” Kenshin said with a smile, kissing the girl on the neck.
“Mm, you did, but you could say it more often!”
Half an hour later, all three rabbits were skinned, and Kenshin brought two buckets of water from the house to wash away the bloodstains.
Aya, meanwhile, returned home and started cutting the carcasses into several pieces, then put them in the refrigerator.
An hour later, Kenshin and Aya were lying in bed, getting ready for sleep.
The young man was stroking the girl’s now visible belly and thinking that he would soon become a father.
And although the future children, by the “will” of the system, were supposed to be something like small change, Kenshin didn’t like this arrangement at all, and he didn’t want his children to suffer.
“On the other hand — they all have to become shinobi, and war is their element…” the young man thought, took a deep breath, hugged the fragile girl, and inhaling her tender scent, fell asleep.