86. The wilderness is my home

After Katrina had finished her story a light had appeared on the eastern horizon, it divided the dawn and the night in two with the brush in its own hand, the star charts in the night sky gradually faded away in the clouds, the navy blue night slowly became as blue as the sea, our accompanied by the morning breeze to look out, the vision of a soft green like a beautiful fairy tale world, I had never been so close to nature, when my As my five senses stretched outwards, looking at the soft green grass of the fields, smelling the fragrance of the nameless wild flowers in the meadows, listening to the frogs just breaking the surface of the earth, the spring breeze passing tenderly through my fingertips, tickling me, stretching out the tip of my tongue as if I could feel the moist scent of the wilderness, ah! There must be a lake not far away, otherwise where else would there be such a turquoise landscape, such beautiful frog calls and such a moist breeze?

Kuzi stood excitedly on the back of the Yagui beast, pointing his finger at the Urutu River, which meandered like a jade ribbon across the wilderness in the distance, and said to me excitedly, "Jia, this is the Urutu River I told you about, which runs through the entire northern foothills of the wilderness, through the Yelen Mountains to my home, the Gurudin tribe. It continues to flow westwards to the Hundred Falls cliffs at the westernmost end of the Pai Plateau, where it forms hundreds of waterfalls straight down the plateau into the Prancing Horse River at the foot of the mountains. Ha ha!"

The gloom and uncertainty we had felt for days was finally washed away by the river, the first place we had planned to reach, and as long as we followed the clear water westwards, we would not be lost in the wilderness in any way. I don't know how the other hunters who lived in the wilderness survived, but there was a real shortage of water in the wilderness. Without food you might be able to dig holes in the moor and eat grass seeds and roots, but without water you can't make it through the day.

There are a few large lakes and a few inland rivers in the wilderness, many of which dry up in the spring after the snow melts, but the Ulutu is the only river that flows out of the northern foothills. Many hunting beasts walk the wilderness all year round and each has a strange map in their minds of the countless places to camp on this map, places that are undoubtedly not all close to water.

Our beasts of prey drank enough water from the shallow rocky shores of the river and began to nibble eagerly at the soft green grass that grew along its banks. We unloaded our large bags from the backs of the beasts and the four of us sat exhausted on our packs looking out over the dozens of metres of river in front of us, the water not too fast but very deep and even deep black in the middle of the river, indicating that the clear river must be at least a dozen metres deep to the centre. This was the first rift we had set for ourselves, the Urutu!

Taking the sheepskin airbags out of our luggage, Kurtz and I began to inflate these. The skinner had made them perfectly, only the limbs and the head and tail of the whole sheepskin had small incisions, but they had been finely sewn up afterwards and painted several times. The airbag was filled with air.

Kiger and Katrina followed Kurtz's instructions and tied the airbags side by side to the wooden poles, like fat headless sheep tied to a wooden frame with their wool cut off. The orcs of the tribe had worked out a way of crossing the river in the grasslands a long time ago, and the rafts that the wilderness orcs made were very special, made of twenty sheepskin airbags tied together with a bundle of short, strong enough wood, normally used to support tents, but used by the orcs to make rafts that were five or six metres long and three or four metres wide. The rafts were made to be five or six metres long and three or four metres wide, enough to carry a beast of prey across the river.

Even good swimmers like Kurtz and I, who were not afraid of the cold, did not dare to stay in the river for too long, and it was difficult to cross this river, which was nearly 70 to 80 metres wide, without good tools. It is very difficult to cross the river without good tools.

Before the sun dried the water on the clover leaves in the meadow, a raft, just big enough to carry a beast of prey, was built in half a day on the banks of the Ulutu, without even bothering to eat breakfast. Kiger looked at the wide raft and marvelled, "I never thought a raft could be tied up like this, Kuz, are you sure the raft won't tip over when our beast of burden sits on it?"

Cuz and I pushed the raft into the water with all our strength and we both stood in the cold, biting water trying to hold it, but I couldn't stand still with such a huge raft sinking and floating on the surface. Seeing that I was too small to hold the raft, Katrina didn't hesitate to jump into the cold water and lift me onto the raft as she took my place. The water was so deep that her round, slender thighs were wrapped in leather armour and she was white with cold in no time. I couldn't bear to leave her standing in the icy water and tried to call out to her to climb up. After all, I had the fire poison of the Burning Fruit inside me, so even if I did jump into the icy water it would just feel cooler, but she certainly couldn't.

"Katrina, come up here, the river is so cold it'll freeze you!" I leaned over the raft to tug at her frozen hands, only to be stopped by the pleading look she gave me, I guess to her seemingly desperate to prove the worth of her existence! Or perhaps I felt a little indebted to her for not being in the battle, but I thought she was one of those rare good girls who had nothing to blame herself for, even if women in the Green Empire had the same right not to join the army. I could see her teeth chattering, but her stubborn eyes were saying to me: I would do this for you.

I hesitated a little while she followed Kurtz towards the deeper part.

Kurtz, at this point, saw that the raft had just smoothed out and hurriedly shouted to me, "Ka, hurry up and get the subjugator up here."

If it hadn't been for it, there would have been absolutely no need to tie up our raft so large. When we bought the animal, I had thought that Kuzi had tried to save money by choosing a small, young beast to buy, and then he was a little reluctant when we chose this young, robust one, but I hadn't realised that by the Ulutu River, I might have been in a much better position now if we had bought back another, smaller beast. At least I wouldn't have had to struggle to drive it up the rickety raft.

I took the beast's reins and Kiger, riding on its neck like a knight in shining armour, commanded the beast to walk slowly up the raft, only to see the raft, floating in the river, sink so hard that most of the sheepskin airbag sank into the water. I crouched down on the raft and watched carefully to see if the twine-tied raft had fallen apart, but so far it looked fine, the method of tying the raft handed down by the beasts was still reliable, and I stood at the very front edge of the raft with a paddle converted from a flying spear in my hand, trying hard to adjust the direction of the raft to little avail.

Kiger sighed to me as he sat on the spine of the subjugated beast, "If only I'd learned the imperial wind technique at the academy, I wouldn't be in such trouble now. At least it would have saved me some effort."

Dripping wet like an agile otter, Kurtz braced his hands on the edge of the raft and scampered up with a graceful flip of his body. Like a wolf-dog in the water, he tried desperately to dry himself off, wrapped the heavy leather jacket around him and lay panting at the feet of the subhuman. Katrina climbed onto the raft with Kurtz, and Kiger threw a blanket down over Katrina's head, which Katrina wrapped around her without hesitation, and I yelled at her in some distress at her wet state, "Don't be like Kurtz, he's never been afraid of the cold. It's no fun! This is the wilderness, not the town of Yemen, and not the bustling empire!"

In my old world, girls were always the ones who were protected, and they were strong enough not to break down in the face of such hardship, so they wouldn't have had the courage to jump into the icy river and hold the raft steady for a large animal. Katrina's face was a little blue from the cold, but she didn't look aggrieved or ashamed at my scolding, and even blinked at me with her red eyes before running to the back of the raft and shivering as she unbuckled her leather armour. Seeing me standing still, she blushingly handed me the blanket and whispered, "When I was a little girl collecting rubbish in the small town of Mount Norrie (an opencast coal mine on the outskirts of the Greene Empire), it was cold like this in winter, and I didn't feel cold even when I was wearing a raggedy dress I had found. "

I took the blanket without a word, she had already undone the buckle straps of her wet leather armour, as it was tailored to Kiger's figure, it was small for Katrina's voluptuous body, which was nearly 175 centimetres tall, but fortunately it was still stretchy enough to fit. Once the leather gaiters were unfastened, a large area of frozen blue-purple skin was revealed and her round thighs looked like dumplings that had been peeled open. I wrapped her in a blanket and she gave me a grateful look.

The raft was carrying us downstream, the river flowing slowly westwards. We could only move a little closer to the other side of the bank.

I think that in this state, if we want to reach the other side, we will have to go at least a few kilometres downstream.

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