After what seemed like an eternity, which only turned out to be 2 hours, Anemone decided to get up. She knew she should not leave the camp, let alone leave her friend alone in a forest, in the middle of the night. But this got the best of her, so she decided to make a small trip back to the carriage. Once Anemone was at the carriage, she opened the tailgate to look inside, and everything was intact, thankfully. She opened the crate full of raw meat and took out two: one from a cow, specifically the loin, and the other a leg of a sheep. Both were large, but could also be seen as small depending on who you were asking. Anemone knew they would not eat both of these.
'Eh, oh well, we will eat the rest on the road or before getting to Vun,' she thought.
As Anemone walked back to the camp, she began to ponder how she should cook these. She could use the wildlife around here, or she could use the herbs they bought. She didn't want to use their stock, though.
'Oh, wait! We have a botanical encyclopedia, I can use it to study all the life around here and forage for edibles,' Anemone realized.
She then did a one-eighty, walking back to the carriage to grab a basket, which was about thirty centimeters in diameter, and about half that in depth. Anemone then walked toward the camp, not directly to it, but to the right. It was so that her eyes did not see the fire and get adjusted to the bright light. She needed to make sure her pupils stayed dilated. She then grabbed a leather strip she kept on her often and pulled her hair around the back of her neck, then onto the front of her left shoulder, and tied it. It was to ensure her hair didn't keep moving and would stay in one place when foraging.
'Now, where to start... I have never done this before, I feel so new,' Anemone thought.
She decided the best place to start was not near the trail they were following to Vun, but instead, the direct opposite, a place parallel to the trail. The farther Anemone seemed to wander into the forest, the more life she saw. Random animals making leaves crunch in the distance, the fireflies beating rhythmically, and the greenery of the plants.
Anemone decided the best place to look for mushrooms would be a moist area with dead trees. She stumbled toward the place she gathered wood from earlier, and found some, small, yes, but plentiful. She nearly tripped over a log after assessing the first mushroom she saw. It was a bright red cap with white dots spread over it.
'I have always heard the more colorful something is, the more dangerous,' Anemone thought.
She skipped this mushroom and decided to keep looking. Anemone then found an abundance of this very pretty blue mushroom. She pulled out the encyclopedia and looked for a matching description.
"Blue Oyster Mushroom," Anemone muttered to herself, "it's so pretty!"
She then decided to pick a few after finding them not to be dangerous and put them in the bag, around twenty or so. Anemone kept searching and found this strange plant, not a fungus of any kind, but it was very pretty. It seemed to scream its name out, and she didn't even need to look in the book to know what it was.
'Purple Sage, it is so pretty! I have never seen it in the wild,' she thought.
Anemone decided to pick every piece she saw and put it in the basket. She then decided on just one more plant life, and it was not long before she found it. It had a square-like stem and oval-shaped leaves, both were very hairy like. She opened up the encyclopedia and began to search.
'Known as the king of all herbs, Basil is often used for its intense flavor,' the book read.
"This is perfect! Time to go back, I sure am lucky right now," Anemone said.
As she reveled in her newfound luck, Anemone walked back to the camp, looking around for any lucky finds that might make the meat more flavorful. After all, she wanted to get cooking. She had been lugging around these hunks of meat this entire time.
'Wish I had Father's storage key, sure would make life easy,' Anemone thought.
As she got back to camp, Anemone hammered a small nail as silently as she could into the tree, hanging the meat so she could ease her muscles. She sat down with the herbs as she grabbed the mortar and pestle she had retrieved at the same time as the meats. She set it on the ground, then picked up the basket of herbs she had put down. Anemone went over to a nearby stump, around 5 meters from camp, and pulled out a knife she kept on her waist. She began to chop up the mushrooms, basil, and sage, not too much, as she knew she just needed them smaller for the mortar. Once she completed the mission she had assigned to herself, she paced back to camp. Anemone sat back down near the tree she had been near earlier when they assigned this to be their camp, grabbed the mortar and pestle, and put in the mushroom first. She began to crush them rapidly until they became a paste. Next came the basil, as she wanted to draw out as much flavor from the 'King of herbs' as possible. Once it was complete, she did the same with the sage until it became a colorful paste, mellow purple tint along with green and blue, which came from the basil and blue oyster mushrooms, respectively.
'Hm, this won't be enough,' Anemone thought.
Once she decided this would not be enough, Anemone went up to the hanging piece of meat on the tree next to hers and cut off a large piece from both the piece of sheep and the cow. From them, it went from a two-thirds meter loin to around a fourth of a meter. The leg of the sheep she just cut a piece of off, around half a kilogram.
Once done, Anemone went to the stump from earlier, putting the pieces of meat down, and began to cover them in the newly made plant concoction. She then quickly went back, groggy now as she had little sleep and was walking nonstop. She grabbed a nearby stick and skewered the pieces of meat, and set the stick in the ground vertically, making sure the pieces of meat weren't touching the ground. Anemone decided it was best to let it sit there a while to soak in the flavor. In the meantime, she would get ready in two ways: by grabbing more firewood and putting the rest of the hunks of meat back in the carriage.
She decided to do the latter first. So, Anemone went to the tree and took the pieces of meat to the carriage, put everything in order so it looked like it did earlier, then returned. It was now one hour and thirty minutes into her break, and she decided the meat could rest for another thirty minutes, then the last two hours it would slow cook over the fire. Over the next thirty minutes, Anemone decided to read. It was a book about humans killing all natural predators who could use magic, including vampires, dwarves, elves, and goblins, until only humans were left. Over a millennium, magic was forgotten. Spells, conjurations, chants, magic circles, how mana circulated, it was all forgotten and disappeared until humans had to rely on something called technology.
After thirty minutes had passed, Anemone grabbed the stick and set up the fire, suspending the pieces of meat over it, turning them over every 20 minutes to ensure even cooking. She added a few pieces of firewood from the pile she had assembled.
As time seemed to crawl by, sleep tried to find its way into Anemone. She knew she just needed to stay up for two hours, but it was a struggle, constantly dozing off, her head slumping. She had even put herself in a very uncomfortable position in hopes it would keep her awake, all for her hopes' demise.
'One hour left. One hour,' Anemone thought.
As she held on to this thought, before she knew it, Anemone had already turned the skewer 5 times.
'Twenty minutes remain,' she thought.
These next twenty minutes moved at a snail's pace. No, even slower, it was as if a snail was crawling compared to its original speed. Anemone's eyelids felt heavy, and then she saw a figure in front of her. She tried to wake to no avail.
"Get some rest, young one," a tender voice said.
At this confirmation, Anemone decided to sleep, forgetting the food, not thinking of anything except her drowsiness.
Time now seemed to fly by at light speed. Before Anemone knew it, she was being shaken, her eyes groggily split apart to look ahead, and it was Father. As her vision unblurred and she looked at her surroundings, Anemone became aware.
'I didn't sleep for four hours, it was more like 6,' she realized.
When Anemone was supposed to have woken up, barely any light should have been present, the sun shouldn't have been visible, except right now, none of that was true. Through the trees, the sun was in its full glory. Heat was radiating off of it.
"I am so sorry I slept too much, Father!" Anemone said.
"It is okay, young one. I made some tea with some herbs around here for the food that you made me finish cooking earlier. I ate a little of both, exactly half; there is plenty left for you," Father said in a warm voice.
"Thank you so much!" Anemone said excitedly.
She then lunged toward it as she was very hungry at this moment. Anemone grabbed her pieces of meat and devoured them like a hungry beast. They were heavenly, she meant, you could say all food was heavenly when you're hungry. But this small meal satiated her thoroughly; Anemone had never felt this satisfied. As she finished the meal, she drank up the tea he had given her. It was a full meal, it was the kind you would get from a high-end tavern. Once Anemone was thoroughly finished, cleaned up, and ready, she grabbed her mortar and pestle, the encyclopedia from earlier, and anything else that might have been lying around, and was now ready to leave.
Anemone faced the carriage from the camp, readying herself to leave. That's when she saw it, a beast, one of nightmares. A lycanthrope, radiating bloodlust, covered in a dark fur so thick that arrows would never be able to pierce it. As Anemone stood there at a distance of about 10 meters, slightly hidden by the trees, she studied it. The beast was on its hind legs, its eyes crimson, reflecting the light that it was hit by. But its eyes were no longer the center of attention; it was its claws, each claw was the size of a human hand, large enough to crush a skull without much effort.
Anemone turned to look at Father, who was packing stuff up, and signed for him to stay quiet by putting a finger over her mouth.
'Scare it away from our carriage? No, I could get myself killed by it the moment it decided not to run away. Should I get Father to kill it? No, his water magic wouldn't be much help. A lycanthrope has incredible senses, so why has he yet to attack us, even though he has sensed us? Lycanthrope... similar to a werewolf, but there is one distinction. Control. It still has human thoughts and emotions. I can try to convince that beast. No, I have to,' Anemone thought.
"Hey, you! If you are hungry, we can get you some food!" Anemone said kindly, trying not to invoke any fear.
The beast instantly turned its head, and its mouth was foaming like a rabid beast.
Anemone then stared into its eyes, then it turned, facing her completely.
'Please listen to me, I don't want to fight,' she thought.
She saw its claws enlarge, its mouth opened in a growl, both hands uncurling as it towered over her at a 10-meter distance. This scene was like something out of nightmares, a beast hunting a human, a predator hunting its prey, the top of the food chain showing that it demanded to be there, the unkillable killing the killable. Then it lunged, closing the little distance instantaneously. Before Anemone knew it, she saw red.