Hey, folks. Still Shuta here. You know, that guy who got sent to another world and gets to chop firewood for a living? All I’ve got is a loincloth and a hand axe. I suppose you could call that my work uniform.
It was the middle of spring, and yet another day of me working my way through a pile of logs. The goblin woodcutters gathered lumber, and my job was to chop it up so the villagers could use it as firewood in their homes all through winter. Simple, yeah, but exhausting.
My first day trying it went something like this: First, I set one of the larger pieces of wood on a stump and tried chopping it with my axe. I wasn’t used to this kind of work, so the blade got stuck in the log and wouldn’t come out. I lifted my axe again, log still stuck to it, and brought it down against the stump. That got the thing cut in half.
None of my cuts were even when I started, and my chopping technique was sloppy at best. It only took about five minutes for the palms of my hands to go numb, which was a sign of the calluses to come. Another five minutes, and the friction caused my skin to become hot. Five more minutes, and my arms were starting to give out, then my shoulders. The feeling of exhaustion finally crept down my lower back, and then I was down for the count.
The only reason I got that far was because of all the part-time jobs I’d done before—specifically, the one where I pounded mochi with a giant wooden mallet over New Year’s. It took two hands to swing that mallet, and I eventually learned to make it easier on myself by relaxing my body whenever I took a swing.
That said, it was different enough to give me trouble. I was supposed to use one hand to swing the hand axe, and that was rough stuff. Still, that’s how it had to be done, since it was crucial to give the arm I wasn’t using a break before alternating back to it.
I didn’t know that on my first day, though—I used both hands. It made swinging easier, but it wasn’t as efficient.
Day two came, and work got a bit easier as I figured out the one-handed technique. I realized if I kept brute-forcing it, I’d only slow things down in the end—call it the intuition of a manual labor vet.
By the time day three came around, I’d finally gotten the hang of my work, and I was on my way to becoming firewood-chopping pro.
“Well, well, well. Just like you said, it seems you possess some amount of physical strength after all,” the village chief said as she observed me at work.
Why thank you oh so much, Your Majesty.
I’m not trying to brag or anything, but even if I couldn’t be perfect, I still felt like I’d done enough in my life that I could handle just about any work they threw at me.
It’s my “60 Percent Rule.” You get 100 percent in anything, good for you, you’ll be satisfied with that perfection. What keeps you going is aiming for 60 percent. I’d treat that 60 percent as 50 percent for next time, then aim to give another 10 percent more to reach 60 percent again. Rinse and repeat.
“Thank you for your words of praise,” I replied, making myself sound as humble as possible.
“I didn’t want to start you with farm work all of a sudden. Couldn’t have you eating all the crops, after all,” the village chief said with a reserved giggle.
Honestly, the village chief was kind of cute. She had to be only a year or two into her thirties, with long, waist-length blonde hair.
I remembered reading in some book that humans in the past only used to live until around fifty or so. That’s why they’d get married and have kids so young, climbing the stairs to adulthood faster than I could even imagine. Really, it wasn’t so strange to see a thirty-something woman in charge of a village.
Anyway, she seemed satisfied with what she saw of my work. She winked at the meathead guard in charge of keeping an eye on me before returning to her manor, and he bowed his head as he saw her off.
Back to work, then. The worst part of it was that no matter how much I worked through the log piles, they never seemed to diminish. The goblin woodcutters just tossed new wood on the piles, day after day.
The guard watching over me was always around, but he never lifted a finger to help. He would only ever take his sword out of his sheath to swing it around. How efficient of him—intimidate me and get some practice in. What a guy, right?
On the fourth day, I wound up with an injury from the constant rubbing of my loincloth. I noticed a stinging sensation first, and it turned out my skin had actually split open a little. I hadn’t been able to wash my loincloth in the last few days, either, so when I saw the young girl working at the village chief’s manor, I tried talking with her about it.
“Excuse me, do you have a second?”
She didn’t say a word. She was still completely on edge around me, and I couldn’t blame her. I was almost completely naked aside from the scanty loincloth.
“I want to wash this thing I’m wearing, but is it all right for me to use water from this well to do it?” I cranked up the politeness. Friendliness hadn’t gotten me anywhere with the goblin, so this time I tried to be as well mannered as I could manage.
Nope. In fact, over the course of our little conversation, the expression on her face had gone from anxiety to absolute terror. She lost no time fleeing back inside the village chief’s abode.
“Um, so,” I turned to my meathead guard, “about the well water…”
“No.” He continued to sharpen his sword.
“But I haven’t washed it once since I started wearing it. It’s unsanitary. Maybe I could wash myself a little too?”
“No.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Suck it up.”
Ice cold. Dejectedly, I got back to work. The chafing from my loincloth was getting nasty, and it made me itchy, too, so I just stopped wearing it while I worked. Better to chop wood in the buff.