Chapter 14
When he entered the living room, he found Aya lying on the sofa, reading another book. He was so moved by the sight of the delicate girl in her dressing gown, reading a children's story, that he couldn't help but lean down and kiss her on the lips.
- Oh, Kenshin, hi. Finished with your business? - Licking her lips after kissing him, Aya asked.
- Not yet, there's still something left to do. Rest, in your position you need more rest... - Kenshin stretched, and stroked her cute but not so flat belly.
- Uh-huh... - Aya purred, enjoying her man's caress and care.
Kenshin headed for the kitchen, and the girl went back to reading. In the kitchen, the young man fiddled with the "chill" formations in the fridge for about half an hour. He was not immediately able to set up a completely different formation from the ones he had done before, but after half an hour, the fridge was set to five degrees centigrade and the freezer to minus ten degrees centigrade.
- Aya, girl, come here. - Shouted Kenshin from the kitchen.
- М? What's wrong? - The girl asked interestedly.
- Look. It's a fridge. Hold out your hand, can you feel it?
- Umm, cool... What's that thing for?
- To keep food longer, or to keep it cold. Like cold water on a hot summer day... Now look here, this is a freezer, and it is much colder. Here food can be kept frozen for a very long time! - Kenshin said proudly, pleased with the fruits of his labours.
- Brrrr, it's really cold... - The girl shivered, and pulled her hand out of the freezer.
- Okay, sweetie, but don't forget to close the refrigerator door so the cold doesn't escape. - Kenshin said in a cautionary tone, kissed her on the back of the neck, and headed out.
It was five o'clock in the evening, and Kenshin decided to start drawing up a huge formation to distract people who strayed into his territory. Kenshin climbed up the mountain and surveyed his "domain", calculating in his mind the approximate scale of the formation.
Then he descended the mountain, and walked to the right. After walking about five kilometres, the young man decided that this was enough, and mentally shivered at the enormous amount of work to be done.
- Damn, and why is there no way to shorten formations among the knowledge available to me..." Kenshin muttered to himself as he walked along the marked area, making a visible mark in the ground with a large sharpened stick. He didn't worry that by the time he finished the last line, the first one would be broken. The drawn formation line was superimposed on the terrain in its infancy, and would remain in place for seven days.
The young man knew that more advanced drafting techniques were available to Formation Masters, allowing them to establish basic knots and the rest of the 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 with a sharpened stick for about 500 metres and taking about an hour, Kenshin left a mark where he had stopped and headed towards the snares set.
After checking three of the ten snares, the young man found nothing, and was about to despair, but in the fourth a large, long-eared hare was firmly caught. Kenshin sprang to it with enthusiasm, and found that it was still alive and caught in the snare with its hind legs.
When it saw the man, the hare flinched, and tried to run away in a random direction out of terror, but it failed. When Kenshin came closer, the hare squealed, and looked at him with its big red eyes.
- I'm sorry, slash, but we have to eat something. The young man sighed, and grabbed the hare by the ears, freeing it from the snares, then threw it into the sack reinforced by the formation.
Then Kenshin went to the rest of the snares, and found another hare alive, and one strangled. After throwing them into a pile, he adjusted the snares, checked the set formations, and went home.
The formations that helped to catch a hare were organised on a simple enough principle, and acted on rather stupid animals, influencing their minds and forcing them into a trap. This was one of the two mind-affecting formations available to the young man. The other was a formation he had drawn on a five kilometre perimeter, and it affected people's minds, causing random travellers to take a different path. But it didn't work on people who were determined to get into the formation's area of effect.
"I wonder at what level of ability, the formation of a thousand faces will become available to me..." - Kenshin thought with anticipation.
The Formation of a Thousand Faces was so named because of the hundreds of different ghosts with horrible faces that a person in the formation would encounter. And although this formation was not of an attacking nature, but being in the area of the formation strongly shook the mental health of a person, and the weaker his will - the greater was the damage, up to the loss of reason and agonising death.
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Before reaching the house, the young man dropped the bag with the hares, stretched a rope between two young trees, tied it tightly, and with a sigh took the dead hare out of the bag. He didn't know if it was okay to eat a strangled animal, but decided that if it was "fresh" enough to bleed out, then it was okay.
The young man hung the hare upside down, grimaced, and in one movement slit its throat. Fresh blood spurted to the ground, and the hares in the bag, as if sensing their fate, tried in terror to escape, and squealed wildly.
Kenshin pulled out one of the living hares, picked it up by the ears, looked into its eyes, and stroked its soft fur tenderly, then in one motion broke its neck, and hung it on a rope, cutting its throat.
The young man decided not to call Aya before the time, thinking it was not worth it for her to see the cute animals alive. He did the same with the third rabbit and went home.
- Do you know how to carve zats? - Kenshin asked, finding the girl in the living room.
- Bunnies? Well... Grandad used to have rabbits and I've seen them gutted. Why?
- Get dressed and follow me. I've caught three rabbits. It's only an hour before dark, so I'll have time to skin them. - The young man said, and sat down on the sofa.
- Wow, catching rabbits that fast? Okay, I'll get dressed! - The blue-eyed beauty declared as she threw off her dressing gown and strode towards the bedroom, swaying her hips elegantly, making Kenshin groan.
- Aren't you afraid to tease your hungry husband like that? I might not be able to resist, and you'll be limping all week..." he said in her wake, admiring the graceful sway of her firm ass.
- Ah, you're only promising... - Aya flirtatiously shouted to him from the bedroom.
- More and more cunning every day, a real fox! Just wait till she grows nine tails..." Kenshin muttered with a smile, noticing how much he had grown to love this girl in such a short time.
After getting dressed, Aya went back to the living room and told him she was ready. Then grabbing the necessary things, they left the house and headed for the hanging bunnies.
- Good hares. - Aya praised them, and to the young man's surprise she didn't show any squeamishness and 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 hare off the rope, made a few incisions in the skin, and in just five minutes she had skinned it. The young man, meanwhile, watched and memorised carefully.
- Did I mention that you're a real gold mine? - Kenshin said with a smile, and kissed the girl's neck.
- Mm, I did, but I could say it more often!
Half an hour later, all three hares were skinned, and Kenshin brought two buckets of water from the house to wash away the traces of blood.
Aya, meanwhile, had returned home, and busied herself with dividing the carcasses into several pieces, and then placing them in the fridge.
An hour later, Kenshin and Aya were in bed, getting ready for bed. The young man stroked the girl's already visible belly, and thought about the fact that he would soon become a father. Although the future children, according to the system's "dictates" were to be something like a bargaining chip, 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 delicate scent, fell into sleep.