Chapter 79: Time For A Lucky Draw!
She was way prettier than Amelia and even though Keith didn\'t really prefer her body type, he had to give her credit where the credit was due. Seraphelle was pretty slender now, having only slightly more muscle mass compared to Clara who was the second most "muscular" in the group.
"I\'m ten times stronger right now compared to my muscular form." she said, grinning.
Keith nodded, "Right. Thank you for letting me know, you you said that this was only a part of your ability."
"Yes." she said and returned back to her normal form, "The other part of my ability allows me to gain and preserve muscle better than anyone else. And for some reason, I don\'t really get as tired as the other guys who have the same muscle mass as me. So I guess I also have some energy efficient muscles too."
She then adjusted her clothes that had shifted slightly thanks to her transformation, "And this is one of the problems I have to face when I transform."
Keith smiled, but his thoughts were still fixated on her ability. Two seconds later, he asked, "Why don\'t you just stay in your slimmer form then?"
"That, my child. Is a secret." she said as she patted his head like he was a little kid and got got up, "It\'s a weakness of my ability."
Without elaborating, she left him alone and walked back into her tent.
\'Weakness huh?\'
He continued to think, but his hands were busy crafting the smoker platform. It took him a whole hour to make sure that there weren\'t any problems and once he was done, he went back to the fire pit.
Laura sat there silently with a smoker platform placed beside her. Keith took it to see if it had any faults and sighed as it did. He didn\'t blame her though, and instead he silently grabbed two long sticks that had a Y shape at the top and stabbed them into the ground right beside the fire pit.
With the two sticks in the ground, he tied the smoker platform he had crafted to an almost straight stick before placing the stick on the two Y sticks that acted as holders. The platform was almost a meter away from the ground and that was exactly what he wanted.
He simply wanted the heat to slowly dry out the meats and did not wish to cook them with flames. He grabbed a block of meat and cut it into thin slices before placing them on the smoking rack.
Once that was set, he went back to fix the one that Laura had made.
For the next 40+ hours, Keith got his team to focus on creating two long pits for fire that spanned 5 meters each and were parallel to each other. The ground was dug up by half a meter and there were multiple Y shaped sticks pushed into the ground with smoking racks hanging thanks to their support.
There were 5 smoker racks on each fire pit strip, totalling up to 11 after including the first fire pit and even though there were 11 of them, they were barely enough to smoke half of the meat of one fish.
They could do more if they had thicker chunks of meat to smoke, but Keith preferred to use thinner slices instead as these took less time. Setting all of this up took him one day and testing the results took another, bringing him to the fourth day.
He knew that someone would come at any moment, but he was busy checking out the slices of meat that he had placed for smoking.
"They came out great." he commented and looked at the others before passing out the piece of meat to them, "Here\'s the plan. We catch one fish every morning, eat half of the meat and smoke the other half. In the afternoon, we\'ll catch another one and use it for lunch and dinner.
But that\'s is only possible when we have the time to do the hunting and stuff. We don\'t know what we\'ll be forced to do in the name of training, so we\'ll only follow step one. Catch a fish, eat half and smoke half. In the evening, we flip the meat slices over to make sure the other side loses it\'s moisture too. We save the dried meat for emergencies." he said and the others nodded, happy with his plans.
Seeing that no one had any problem with his arrangements, he let a smile escape, "Well then, I\'ll go take a bath in the river. You\'re sure that there isn\'t anything scary there right?"
Brandon nodded, "Yeah. Those fishes eat some weird looking plants that grow in the river. There are some other smaller fishes that they eat too, but I\'ve never seen them attack me. Though, I suggest that you don\'t go too far downstream. There are some really aggressive fishes there."
"Okay, thanks. All men, assemble." he said as he glanced at Edward, Nathan, Caleb and Brandon, "We gotta feel fresh before we\'re thrown into hellish training. I already feel kinda sticky after not taking bath for three days."
Nathan and Caleb nodded as they too felt the same way, but Brandon and Edward on the other hand, didn\'t have the same feelings. This was because Brandon took a nice bath every time he went out to hunt and Edward was free for the whole day so he too went out to swim in the river.
Caleb had gone out on the second day, but that time, they didn\'t go to the river and tried to hunt on land, which just proved unsuccessful.
But nonetheless, all the guys did rush into the river to have some fun and also clean themselves. Keith followed behind them, but as he stared at the colorful gacha wheel in front of him after waiting for almost two long months, he smiled.