Apinsig
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Chapter 16 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2022-08-03 08:39:33 +0000 UTCThis time during my morning chores, I checked all my animals with the new skill. It was all to be as expected until I made it to the chickens. Just in case I checked all the chickens, but that led me to a surprising discovery.
Two of the six chickens were actually roosters. It took some chasing around, but I finally cornered one and caught him. I checked again just to make sure that yes, it was a male.
Name: none
Species: Grassland chicken
Gender: male
Age: 0
Health: good
Diet: grass, bugs, worms, seeds
Evolutions: none
At first, I didn’t find any differences until I was able to check under the beak, there was two short red skin flaps instead of the one that the females had. Turns out there is a difference it’s just so small to be almost not noticeable.
This roster doesn’t have signs of being the dominant, like the roosters back on earth. It would be interesting to keep monitoring them to see how that changes their behaviour compared to what I know.
The skill also informs me that I need to feed them proteins as well. Most likely they need it so that they would lay eggs properly. I will have to consider if I will leave eggs in the nest cause if these roosters can fertilize. There will be more chicken that can hatch. Too bad the inspection skill does not tell me if an egg is fertilized.
After making another cheese roll, I was actually done for the day. The planting season was finally over and all that was to do is maintenance, which will not be very time-consuming. That means I have more free time than I currently know what to do with.
Before the goblin troubles, I would have started bringing in a large amount of building wood, but currently that will be pushed back. I can’t remember exactly how many days I’ve been here. I am guessing it’s already been over a month and a half.
It’s time to start the training montage. But first I need to come up with what I will do during that training. For the things that I know exactly what to do are body training, archery, survival and hunting.
For the body I will need to build some equipment to make training more efficient. Fo archery I will need to make targets and just need to shoot a lot. Survival is a double duty. One side is to survive the environment better.
The other side is learning how to defend myself with other weapons besides bows. Hunting will cover all the previous and is meant to put all the different pieces together, so it will work like clockwork.
Now about the side that I’m not so familiar with. On the fantasy side are stats and energy that I will be working on side by side with my previous training plans. But I will also need to add just time for this so I could only be meditating and working with energy.
Then the skills and abilities side. It will be a bit of energy training with abilities and also just training abilities on their own. The aim will be to just make the current abilities better, but also to try and see if I could make my own.
Skill will be the most passive. I can see the benefit of just going the route of skill improvement, but I think this will leave my foundations to hollow.
I will not leave them completely untouched, and I should make some more tests do fully workout how the skill mechanism works. This will most likely be a long-term task. But hopefully it will led to some breakthroughs making my life here easier and safer.
Now let’s start with the first thing, making the exercising equipment. I think this calls for an outdoor gym. I will be using more non-traditional ways to strengthen my body. But I think the standard weight equipment will still have an excellent place for training certain muscle groups.
Since I don’t have iron, all of this will need to be made out of stone and wood. I will be making a dumbbell set, barbell set, training bench, pull up frame and bar, kettlebell set and a pull down machine, of course some accessories too.
But before I got any of this done, I noticed how long the grass has gotten when I was choosing where to build. So, I took out the scythe and spent a few hours cutting all the grass around the farm.
That done, I decided to build the outdoor gym near the smoker, so every time when I needed to monitor the fire or work with hide. I can use the gym during breaks.
Making weights out of stone will make them bulkier than I was used to with the iron ones. At first, I wasn’t going to weigh their weight, I was going to just eyeball them. But I changed my mind when I remembered I could make a simple scale with a piece of wood and some rope.
For the ruler, I had a way to get an exact measurement, but for weight I didn’t have anything I could use as a control. So, I had to make my own. I started with what felt close to one kilogram.
I picked another rock and continue to cut it down until those two pieces were exactly the same weight. The next stone I made I used the two first one to get it to 2 kg.
So on I went until I needed to make a stronger scale. With the new scale, I was able to get a 50 kg stone. So now I had a measurement of 50 kg, 40 kg, 30 kg, 25 kg, 20 kg, 15 kg, 10 kg, 5 kg, 2 kg, and 1 kg stones that I marked with the correct numbers onto them with dye.
I wanted my weights to be changeable so that I to not have to make so many of them. This way, I can only make a few handles and bars to have a whole range of different weights for different muscle groups.
The handles and bars I made out of oak wood. But for the bigger weights, I will need to come up with a different idea. The dumbbells will be fine because their bars are short, but as the bar gets longer, the less weight it can handle, and the oak wood will not handle that. I do not think if I had steel, it will even then be strong enough.
Luckily, like I said, I will also be doing some non-traditional stuff. Like pulling my sled and cart with rocks loaded into them or trying to lift extremely large logs. This will help offset my lack of equipment.
For archery targets, I just used some wood and punched up hey. This is how it was made back in the day and will serve well. I made four of them, one large, two medium and one small sized, so I could put them in different places.
It would be good to practice not to just hitting one target in one spot. With this, I was currently done with building equipment and started do actually train. First things first, running.
I didn’t take the easy choice do just run down the road. I want my body to get used to running on rough terrain. So, I geared up just in case and started running towards the hills.
I did a circuit of the hills. It took me about two hours and when I got back home, I fell down completely exhausted. But I only let myself have a small water and food break before I went and started weight training my muscles.
My training aim was not to bulk up, but to gain lean muscle that’s strong and fast. So yes, I was using heavy weights, but I forced myself to move them fast. That way there will be last bulking up and more actual strength gain.
After that was possibly the most important part, stretching. I didn’t just do this so that I wouldn't have cramps, but so I would still stay flexible even after all the weight training. What's scarier, an opponent that is massive but the slow or an opponent that is big but fast.
Speed is a very important part in the formula for creating powerful movement. If you move faster, you generate a lot more strength. I want my training to make me extremely strong, but I don’t want to have overly large muscles.
I still want to be flexible enough that any rogue will be jealous and be fast enough that any ranger will be scared. Not an easy goal, but one that I think I can pull off with all the knowledge i have and with how young and strong I currently am.
After the stretching, I went for a swim. Now I had worked not just my body but also my energies. Not so much tuning them, but simply helping them flow. I relaxed in the water and started to dive deeper into what I was calling my energy body.
It feels like a second me inside of me. But this version was only a shell where energy moved inside, loosely mimicking how my body moved. So, my first step was just to help it move more like my body, and that did help.
But it wasn’t an easy thing. There was resistance, so I needed to push through it and if I did that, I could feel myself moving faster or striking harder. But the energy didn’t multiply. There was always a ceiling on how much I had in totally.
Only times this ceiling moved up was when I gained stats. It could diminish, but it always returned. Most energy was used up when using abilities, but simply helping it move faster also extended some of the capacity.
I could make my abilities more efficient so they will use less energy but still be as strong or stronger, but it will still use up energy. Now the interesting part with helping energies move better inside my body was that once improved energy moved faster without my help and without being used up.
Meaning I could keep training this part by using up my energy and making it better and better, so later I would be a lot better stat usage without having to spend up energy.
In a long fight, this may be a tipping point towards life or death, so it’s an extremely important part. The tuning was more specific for a certain movement, so a certain action to be even more powerful, and it worked the same way as just moving the energies.
You could teach energy moving like you could teach your body to do actions on instinct in both cases, it’s a long journey to make that happen.
Interesting thing was that while I was working on my energies and swimming, I actually got a skill basic swimming level 1. It was an interesting gain. But not because I got the skill but because I think it happened quicker and easier thanks to me constantly using my energy while doing this skill action.
I now think that stats and skills are more connected than I first thought, but that's how far I could get this revelation without getting further insight or guidance from somewhere else.
At the end of the day, I did some light archery. I was not going for speed or power but more practicing accuracy. I didn’t want to get sweat again before dinner and bed.
