Meanwhile, back at the cabin in the woods.
Yukinoshita Yukino closed her book and added a few more logs to the wood stove.
This was already the fourth time she’d gone through this little ritual.
Which meant that close to six hours had passed since Isac and the others had set out, and outside, night had long since fallen.
Time for dinner, Yukinoshita Yukino thought to herself.
She set the leftover half of the airline meal from lunch on top of the wood stove, planning to heat it up for dinner.
Before placing it down, she added a bit of water to it as well.
This was both to keep the food at the bottom from scorching, and to soften up the dry, hardened rice so it would be easier to swallow.
Over the course of the afternoon, she’d skimmed through pretty much all the books left behind in the cabin, and now had a rough grasp of the surrounding terrain and local features.
On top of that, on the last few pages of that animal field guide, she’d found a simple hand-drawn map.
From the map, she could tell that there was a lake right next to the cabin they were staying in — which got Yukinoshita Yukino thinking about that big open clearing they’d come across on the way here.
Maybe that was the lake marked on the map, just frozen solid because the temperature was so low.
Most importantly, the map indicated that on the far side of the lake there was a small dock, and right next to the dock there was also a fishing shack, which might have some fishing gear stashed inside.
Once Isac got back, it might be worth considering a search over there.
If they really could turn up some fishing gear, they could try chopping a hole through the lake’s surface and ice fishing.
If they actually managed to pull up some fish, then their food crisis would ease up significantly — at the very least, protein definitely wouldn’t be a problem going forward.
If it had just been her and Isac, then with the food stockpile back at the cabin, holding out for ten days or even half a month wouldn’t have been a problem at all.
But once you added Hayasaka Ai and that young lady of the Shinomiya family into the mix, that was no longer a sure thing.
Yukinoshita Yukino knew perfectly well that since Isac had chosen to help out, he was definitely going to bring them back in the end.
In his own words: the more people you have, the better your chances of surviving in this region.
It wasn’t a point she particularly agreed with, actually.
She felt Isac only saw that more people meant more hands for the work, but failed to see that more people also meant more resource consumption — never mind the fact that she and Shinomiya Kaguya were two sick patients on top of it all.
She herself wasn’t so bad.
She just had limited mobility — at least she was still conscious, and she could help out with handicraft-type work.
Shinomiya Kaguya was a different story.
Based on Hayasaka Ai’s description, the girl was currently running a high fever and was probably still unconscious.
She likely wouldn’t be able to help with anything for a while, and someone might even have to be assigned to take care of her.
Most critically, even once she woke up, whether a pampered young lady like her would actually be willing to do any work for them was anyone’s guess. This chapter was copied from novelping dot com without permission.
In other words, if they didn’t want to end up at a loss, Hayasaka Ai would have to do the work of at least two people all on her own.
Could she actually pull that off?
Yukinoshita Yukino had no idea.
And setting aside questions of resources and manpower, the truth was she was a little reluctant about the two Shinomiya mistress-and-servant joining them at all.
How to put it?
It gave her this strange feeling, like her little home was being intruded upon by outsiders — sort of like how a cat reacts when it discovers its owner has brought home two more of its kind, leaving it unable to do anything but hiss.
Of course, that was just a figure of speech.
She wasn’t a cat, and Isac wasn’t her owner.
The reason she felt this way was probably just her instinct kicking in — the natural pushback humans have against unfamiliar people or situations.
Once they’d spent more time together and gotten used to each other, maybe this strange feeling would fade away?
“The Shinomiya family… really is one massive beast of an organization,” Yukinoshita Yukino murmured.
Her own family background wasn’t shabby either.
Her father was a council member in the prefecture, the family ran a construction company, and they had a driver to take them wherever they needed to go — the textbook Nihon gentry class.
But compared to the Shinomiya family, it was no contest.
Calling it the difference between the heavens and the earth wouldn’t be an exaggeration.
The gap was probably even wider than the gap between her family and an average person.
Stacked up against the Shinomiya family, the Yukinoshita family was basically a podunk countryside landlord clinging to a tiny scrap of farmland.
Put it this way: never mind that her father was a council member — if you wanted an audience with Shinomiya Kaguya, you’d have to book it ahead of time, and even then there was no guarantee she’d bother to see you.
Most likely, she’d just pawn you off on Hayasaka Ai.
A young woman of that kind of elite pedigree was, in the very near future, going to be living under the same roof as her.
Yukinoshita Yukino couldn’t help marveling at how strange fate could be.
That said, Yukinoshita Yukino wasn’t all that on edge about it, because she’d basically confirmed by now that this world wasn’t the original one she came from.
Forget the Shinomiya family — whether Nihon even existed here was anyone’s guess.
In this place, everyone had one identity and one identity only: survivor.
…
After eating, Yukinoshita Yukino somewhat clumsily dampened the firewood and, copying the way Isac had done it earlier, packed the wood stove as full as she could.
In the process, she got burned by the stove once — luckily she yanked her hand back fast enough that the skin only turned a little red, no blisters forming.
While she was doing all of this, Yukinoshita Yukino couldn’t help wondering: when Isac had been stuffing the firewood in, had he also gotten burned by the stove…?
Wait — wasn’t his screen time inside her head getting a little too high?
Yukinoshita Yukino gave her head a little shake, trying to fling these thoughts right out of her mind.
But she quickly realized she couldn’t seem to do it. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Instead, the very thought of “don’t think about Isac” caused his figure to grow even more vivid in her mind — the classic white bear effect.
“…”
It was only at that moment that Yukinoshita Yukino realized just how deep an impression this boy — whom she had known for less than three days — had left on her heart.
“He should have found Shinomiya Kaguya by now, right?”
“I wonder if they’ve had dinner yet?”
“They should be back by tomorrow, right?”
These thoughts surfaced one after another in the girl’s mind, and at the very end, another suddenly hit her.
“What if they run into that wolf?”
The moment that thought appeared, all the others became irrelevant.
Worry began to spread through Yukinoshita Yukino’s heart like a vine running wild.
If they really did run into the wolf, would they be able to walk away unscathed like before?
If that wolf was hungry enough to charge at them, then even if Isac managed to kill it with that little hunting knife of his, he’d almost certainly take some kind of injury in the struggle, and that wound could get infected… She should have made him take the iodine along too, so he could disinfect any wounds in time.
What if he couldn’t take the wolf down, or got hurt so badly he couldn’t move?
What then?
What if that maid saw things going sideways and abandoned him, leaving him on his own against that thing?
What then?
What if… what if he never came back?
What then?
That last one Yukinoshita Yukino didn’t even dare to follow all the way through.
She was already starting to regret not trying harder to convince Isac to stay back at noon — and obviously, it was a little late to be bringing that up now.
Yukinoshita Yukino lay in bed.
Faint firelight leaked out through the cracks in the stove door, lighting up the eyes that simply refused to close for the longest time.
The night was still long — and there was no telling whether it could hold all the worry inside the girl’s heart…
____
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