I came back to find several kids glaring at each other. An argument must have broken out while I was away. It seemed one group had chased down a rabbit that the other group then slaughtered. The former claimed the prey was theirs, since they were the ones to corner it, while the latter claimed that the other group were at fault because they let it escape.
It wasn’t my problem, so I ignored them and went to prepare my meal. I then realized we had no fire. All the meat I had encountered so far had been properly cooked. We children were never fed anything raw, presumably because it would make us sick. At worst, it would kill us.
Relying on the knowledge from my previous life, I started gathering withered twigs. Once I had some of the perfect size, I used my knife to cut through the knots. The woodchips that came off, I turned into kindling. What resulted was a good, old-fashioned fire drill. Finally, I formed a fireboard, and my preparations were complete.
To increase the frictional force, I tried to turn my rod into an arcane tool by imbuing it with the intent of making it more flammable, but it gave me a strange sensation and ultimately failed. There were still so many mysteries when it came to making arcane tools. I charged my essence to strengthen my muscles as much as possible before working to light the fire.
The small size of my hands meant I couldn’t move them very quickly and wasn’t creating much heat. I was panting a little rapidly by the time smoke started forming. The splintered rod was scratching my palms, but stopping meant wasting the effort I had already put in. So, I persevered. As the smoke grew thicker, I picked up some brittle dead leaves and moved the kindling into them. I shook them about so they would catch the wind, feeling them heat up in my hand. They caught fire at last.
Biting back my excitement, I moved the burning bundle in my hand toward a large twig. Meat was on the menu! I turned to prepare my rabbit carcass for cooking, only to see the dragon girl chewing on some raw flesh. Fortunately, she was eating something she caught herself, but that didn’t make me any less worried that she was going to make herself sick.
Our special training came in handy in dissecting the rabbit. I replayed Sister’s lecture in my head as I skinned it, scraped out its guts, and transformed it into a mass of usable meat. I speared the pieces onto a stick and stuck it on the ground near my bonfire. The flames were dazzling against the darkness of the forest in the early evening. The children who’d been arguing earlier were now staring hungrily at my cooking, distracted by the smell of meat. However, knowing that I was Tiger’s enemy, none of them asked to share my fire. Some of them were even risking having their meat raw.
I was wondering how they would start a fire of their own when one kid pulled out his red-hot knife, transformed into an arcane tool by essence.
Wouldn’t carrying that around cause burns?
I dismissed the thought, watching as he thrust the knife into a pile of dry grass and set it alight. Now it was my turn to look on with envy, wishing I had one of those knives for myself.
I suddenly remembered the corpse left in the forest and glanced at it. Sister had warned us about miasma during our special training, so I went over to check. A strong metallic smell greeted me. I moved my face closer to inspect it and felt an unfamiliar reaction from my charged essence. It felt like the essence I had gathered around my feet was melting or being scraped away.
I leaped back reflexively like I had been burned, then checked my legs. The skin had turned gray. I watched it for a bit to see what would happen, noticing that it quickly returned to its normal color. The plant life around the body was darker than my shin and rotting away. When Sister mentioned miasma during her lecture, I assumed it was how this world referred to unsanitary air, but there was something coming off that body, and miasma was the only word I could think of to describe it. It interfered with essence, dissolved it... Chipped away at it? Or perhaps “extinguished” was the proper term.
I pondered over how strangely my essence reacted. This time, I released a fair amount of it and approached the corpse. I felt my essence and the miasma scraping against each other very keenly. The draining force between them was not one-sided—by letting out more essence than was being eroded, it was possible to keep the miasma’s interference in check. Right now, the miasma emanated at a one-meter circumference around the body. It would be bad news if it spread any further. I moved the corpse as far as I could before returning to my campfire.