Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.08

008

My water shortage problem was abruptly resolved.

Through none of my own assiduous efforts.

I couldn’t help but wish that water shortages across the world could be resolved in such a way—but as I lay fast asleep underneath the stars, my whole body was hit with the sensation of being pricked by a thousand needles.

The shock made me feel as though my body was about to become riddled with holes like Nakuna-chan had been, but after the dazzling downpour of starlight, it was not a downpour of pincushions or hedgehogs that followed.

What came pouring down was just normal rain.

No, it wasn’t normal. It was a torrent of rain.

Had my laborious actions, which I had performed while stark naked, been mistaken by the heavens as a prayer for rain? The rainfall, which reminded me of taking a shower before entering a swimming pool, made me rush for shelter—not beneath the eaves, but beneath the leaves.70

And, with the rain coming down in buckets, I once again confirmed that this was within the Okinawa region—this had to be one of those subtropical squalls that I’d heard so much about!

It was not a blessed rain from the heavens in response to my prayer for rain or out of pity for me being stranded on this island, but a perfectly normal weather phenomenon in the form of a guerrilla rainstorm… It was practically meaningless to take shelter under the leaves, and my thirst was quenched in an instant.

Like something dried-up being rehydrated.

I could think of several reasons why rainwater should not be drunk directly, but even with my mouth closed tight, the water seemed to force its way between my lips. And even though the rain was so heavy that, at its peak, it formed a water screen that kept me from seeing barely an inch in front of me, it soon stopped—this was also a characteristic of squalls.

They would come down with a roar, and then disappear in a flash.

If only it had rained just a little longer, then I could have collected some of the rainwater in plastic bottles—was not the sort of selfishness I could express. Because not a single plastic bottle had drifted onto this island.

The “fire”, which I had worked so hard to secure, had naturally been put out by the torrent of rain, much like a fire extinguisher would have done (which meant there was no chance of me boiling the rainwater, either), so in terms of my gains and losses, I’d say I pretty much broke even.

Therefore, I’d begun to seriously worry about crafting a proper container as soon as possible for the next time there was a sudden rainfall… But to start with the conclusion, I would soon learn that there was no need to trouble myself with crafting any containers—because heavy downpours that were just as sudden, or even more sudden than before, began to fall on a daily basis without pause.

Here, it rains thirty-five days a month—was a saying not from Okinawa, but from the island of Yakushima in Kagoshima Prefecture, but here on this uninhabited island, it felt like an infinite sandwich of scorching sunlight and guerrilla rainstorms.

With this, there wouldn’t be any need to work so primitively or act like some yokai that licked the undersides of leaves—since boiling water wasn’t the sole purpose of acquiring fire, my new challenge was to rack my brains and think of a way to build a kamado stove that wouldn’t go out in the rain, but overall, the constant squalls had made my chance of survival rise rapidly.

Okinawa was the best! I was definitely going to live here in the future.

Well, if things kept up like this, there was a considerable risk of that coming true, but not in the way I wanted it to—as you may have guessed, the fact that I was able to recognize the frequency of these squalls meant that my life on this uninhabited island had become prolonged.

At this point, it was no longer a short stay.

Like a prisoner, I’d been laying out one rock on the ground every day, and counting them revealed that already fourteen days had passed since I’d washed ashore.

Already two weeks.

Though more than seventy-two hours had passed, I was still alive, huh.

But at the same time, this was also the number of days that had passed without any sign of rescue, even in spite of the stones I’d arranged in the shape of an SOS, as well as the number of the days that have passed without encountering any other survivors—though I’d been pulling through somehow, the circumstances seemed to be taking a turn for the worse.

It was a war of attrition, with me on a gradual decline.

Of course, unlike the abilities of a shonen manga protagonist, I couldn’t survive on an uninhabited island with just “fire” and “water”. Though it’s rather simplified, allow me to give a brief but informative digest of how I managed to messily survive through two weeks of sunshine and torrential rains.

The problem of water was resolved. (How lucky I was to drift onto an island with lots of rain!) The fire may have fizzled from the blessings of heaven, but since I had already succeeded once, it would be possible for me to be rewarded with the same stroke of luck, as long as I put in the same amount of effort—though it wasn’t exactly the same.

Because the conditions for ignition had become even more strict, now that the wood chips and rock faces were damp from the squalls… There wasn’t anything more strict than this.

It was as if the strictness had been further constricted.71

However, there was an obvious solution to the dampness problem, which was to dry out the ignition equipment in the sun during the periods of scorching heat. I hadn’t changed my character into a tanned girl just for show, you see.

The paradox of it raining thirty-five days a month on Yakushima could be explained by the fact that squalls didn’t last for an entire day—logically speaking, it made sense to say “It rains thirty-five times a month,” and moreover, if the saying went, “It rains thirty-five hours a month,” that could easily be the case even on the Honshu mainland.

Never before had I ever hung up my laundry to dry (even when I’d started living alone, I used a dryer out of laziness), so who would have guessed that I would be trying to aim for periods of sunshine in order to dry wood and stones… Life could truly be mysterious.

Even more mysterious than oddities.

And with that, though I couldn’t say that the matter of fire was completely resolved (if possible, I wanted to come up with a more efficient way of lighting a fire, as well as a sturdier kamado stove that wouldn’t leak in the rain), it was now possible for me to postpone my renovations for the future—and thus, the next problem I needed to confront was the problem of food.

The problem of food, or rather, the problem of starvation.

As I understood it, this was also a problem that was being confronted by organizations such as the WHO… The luxury of the first class meal, which I had eaten to my heart’s content, had quickly been used up due to a combination of overworking and the fact that it was currently my growth period.

My vitality had been completely depleted.

You could even say that my vitality had been uprooted.72

I needed to figure something out before my hunger got any worse, or I would probably find myself eating the sand from the beach out of desperation. But the act of looking for food felt as dry as sand.73 I’d been hoping that I would conveniently discover trees with apples growing, or, because we were in the south, pineapples or coconuts, but a shallow search of the nearby brushwood failed to turn up any kind of fruit that I could serve for a meal.

It wasn’t that there weren’t any trees bearing fruits at all, but it was impossible for my untrained eyes to judge whether those fruits were edible or not—I didn’t have a basis for this, but I had a feeling that upsetting my stomach was basically a death flag on an uninhabited island.

There would be too much internal damage.

I figured the chances of finding the fruits I desired would rise if I were to trek deeper into the woods, but I still wasn’t convinced at the idea of diving into a forest while naked… I had extremely strong feelings about going any deeper until I could get some protective clothing custom-made.

And if that was the case, then I had no option but to seek materials from the opposite of the mountain slopes—the ocean.

In other words, seafood.

I couldn’t deny that the process of preparing fish seemed more intimidating to me than simply plucking apples off their trees, but it was for the sake of my survival. And, as someone with the prior offense of having chopped up a large number of snakes without even intending to eat them, I was sure I could muster up the courage when it came down to it.

However, the question was if I would even be able to arrive at that immoral-sounding cooking step… Because I didn’t have any experience in fishing. I’d never even touched fishing equipment before, and before that, there were no fishing rods for me to use on this island.

In survival programs, it’s usually a given that there’s some sort of string among the flotsam that washes ashore, but as long as I couldn’t expect to find any man-made items, I would have no choice but to try and make something out of branches and ivy… It really was tough to try and construct a fishing rod when I had never seen or touched one before.

And I didn’t have any bait, either.

If I did, I would be eating it myself.

In that case, the better option would be to use a more direct tool for fishing, the harpoon—not that I’d seen or touched one of those, either, but it was easier to picture because of its simple structure.

It was basically a spear, right?

For the tip, it was probably enough to reuse one of the many broken stones I had mass-produced for the sake of lighting a fire, and if I tied one around a branch, it could more or less be called a harpoon.

When I finished making it, it ended up looking more like a spear than I’d expected, but what was the difference between a spear and a harpoon, anyway? Regardless, it was finally time for the bowline knot that I’d learned from manga to come in handy—the end result was a little too heavy for my weak arms, but because buoyancy would come into play in the water, it probably wouldn’t pose too much of a problem.

What could actually pose a problem was the fact that I couldn’t swim.

There were various levels to being unable to swim, but in my case, I couldn’t even swim a meter’s distance… People capable of swimming really shouldn’t underestimate how incapable of swimming some people were. However, humans were certainly capable of floating in the water, which was how I was able to drift onto this island in the first place. And it seemed to me that the reason that I could not swim a distance that was shorter than my height was not because I was incapable of swimming, but rather because I didn’t feel like swimming and didn’t want to swim, if I did say so myself.

However, as I’d said many times before, my life was on the line here. I had to become my own lifeguard.

This was no swimming school.

Was it really reasonable for me to not enter the ocean, simply because I was afraid? Perhaps I could actually swim very well once I actually tried? Maybe I would awaken a hidden talent of mine, like with pitching.

There was once a time that I had worn a school swimsuit as a uniform, after all.

And in that way, my thoughts began to shift in an optimistic direction. Even so, I was still someone who valued her self-preservation extremely highly, so I began putting all my efforts into the production of a safety apparatus.

Working more precisely, more carefully, more soulfully, I constructed a safety rope… After twisting many strands of ivy into a long, long rope, I tied one end of it to my torso and the other to a massive tree that seemed like it wouldn’t fall over no matter how strong a typhoon there was, a tree that I could never hope to wrap my arms around.

It would’ve been the pinnacle of safety if I’d been able to make a swim ring and a kick board, but of course, even plastic bags and styrofoam were flotation tools made by human hands… If I were to search deep in the forest, I likely would have found trees that could provide materials to help me float more easily, but there was an order to things.

I wanted to make avoiding injury my number one priority.

Though that might not sound very convincing, considering how worn-out my hands were.

Of course, in order to prevent the stupid development of the safety rope tangling around my legs and making me drown, I took great care to ensure there was enough slack before making my way into the ocean—it would make sense to think that I should’ve tested it a little more carefully, but when I thought about the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to see a single fish in this part of the ocean, I figured it would be better if I could confirm that as soon as possible.

In this situation, I wanted to avoid unnecessary work.

After all, this was a beach where no man-made objects would drift ashore, so it wouldn’t be too incredible for some sort of supernatural phenomenon to prevent even the intrusion of living beings—rather, something incredible on that level was perfectly capable of happening.

And in that respect, there’d been a time where I had more or less been something that wasn’t a living being… But regardless, it was a needless worry, if my eyes weren’t deceiving me when I went underwater, for I could make out the shapes of quite a lot of fish.

It was also good news that I didn’t struggle as much in the water as I’d feared.

Perhaps being stark naked had actually made my senses sharper… Had I reverted to a more primal state? However, it was a different question entirely whether or not I’d be able to use my improvised harpoon in the water.

It was true that buoyancy was taking effect, but that buoyancy was actually making it harder to control the spear as I wanted—it would easily slip out of my hands.

Part of it was due to the fact that my grip strength had weakened from overdoing my pitching practice, but I had still been careless. Most likely, a proper harpoon would have had some sort of strap to wrap around my wrist.

That must be the difference between a harpoon and a spear.

Instead of capturing any fish, all I succeeded in doing was dropping my harpoon onto the ocean floor (not that it was that deep. I hadn’t gone that far out), so my motivation fell sharply—seeing as it hadn’t been that difficult to craft compared to the kamado stove, it would have fine for me to just remake the harpoon, but the thought of having to do the same thing again made me give it up as hopeless.

With how quickly I gave up on things, was it a virtue of mine, or a vice?... Well, I could probably get some practice in when I had more leeway, but for right now, I wanted to catch at least a single fish.

I needed to create that leeway myself.

Even just by being able to confirm the presence of fish, it was worth jumping into the ocean, despite being dead weight—perhaps I could even go with the idea of making a net out of ivy and catch a whole bunch of fish in one go.

However, the action I took on the second day of being a castaway was the same primitive action I’d taken on the first, which was to hit a stone against a boulder.

To be more precise, I was hitting the top of a boulder that was half-submerged in the ocean—this was a simple fishing method in which fish hiding around the rocks would be stunned by the impact and float to the surface.

Incidentally, this was prohibited by the law.

Together with the method of running an electric current across the water’s surface to electrocute the fish, this was considered a rather crooked method of fishing, but unfortunately, I had no desire to follow the law to the point of starving to death.

And, it went pretty well.

As expected, there was a reason it was prohibited by law… Fish bobbed up one after another to the ocean’s surface—they were all the size of a goldfish, which meant they were pretty small, but, well, fish were fish.

I’d never gotten my hands on a goldfish bowl, but this was a haul of fish deserving of a gold medal… Although, it would be a lie if I said I didn’t feel guilty using this method.

On top of being at an age where I couldn’t sympathize with the concept of fishing for sport (was it the same as nobles hunting foxes?), I couldn’t help but feel that I’d cheated, even if it was for the sake of my survival.

It was as though I’d fallen to the same level of creatures as hyenas—well, there was the idea that hyenas were actually better than lions at hunting, despite their image… Well, before comfortably immersing myself in thoughts of karmic retribution, I may as well fill my empty stomach first.

I grabbed as many of the stupefied fish I could carry (stupefied—it was a word that could have a different meaning for me, as someone who’d aimed for the seat of a god74) and brought them on land, and from there, I went about fileting them and making carpaccio and making sushi… Or so I would like to say, but of course, having been pampered for most of my life, I naturally didn’t possess such cooking skills.

I didn’t even know how to cook rice.

I was the type of person who’d be told to wash rice and end up washing it with detergent—but, for this sort of “kids these days” topic, I felt that, in the first place, it was a bit mean-spirited to use the word “wash” here.

The proper term should be “polishing rice”.75

I was feeling so hungry that I almost wanted to swallow these fish whole, but I swallowed that idea down instead—of course, I meant that I swallowed my hunger, not the fish.

Eating Japanese icefish76 odorigui or ikezukuri77 probably wasn’t bad, but even if I had no skill in the culinary arts, I still wanted to make sure the fish were cooked—perhaps I should have started the fire in advance, but it was only when I grabbed the slippery fish with my hands that I realized that I would need to prepare them, so I wouldn’t have known beforehand.

If only I could have spent a little more time living on my own, I could have mastered the skill of cooking for myself and worked out a better procedure from the start.

Fortunately, with the fortunes of the ocean,78 the sun had been shining the whole time during my difficult struggle, and the dampness in the area had been completely cleared away—a natural dehumidifier. I devoted myself once more to pitching practice even more than the ace of a baseball club would, and thus the work of starting a fire.

It seemed I was more suited to being a baseball player than a competitive swimmer. But in any case, it ended up just being more of striking stones against a boulder for a while (I’d learned a little about making advance preparations, so I had even rebuilt a simple kamado stove ahead of time).

I knew that I should have been preparing the fish in ways like scraping off the scales or removing the innards, but for fish of this size, it wasn’t possible for me to manifest a craftsman’s fastidiousness for such time-consuming work—well, you didn’t need to remove the innards of Japanese icefish, right?

If I were to die here, then we could simply conclude that Sengoku Nadeko could only amount to that much of a person.

To compensate, I made sure to grill them thoroughly (I didn’t have any pans, so I placed some flat stones on top of the kamado stove for some hot stone cooking), and I very gratefully partook in these lives that were so very tiny, but so very large from my perspective—I couldn’t say that this meal was all that filling for my stomach, but I had to say it was an exceptional one.

It was exceptionally extraordinary.79

This was a very wasteful meal, very poor in cost-effectiveness, in which I probably consumed more calories than I gained, but next time, I could probably do a little better—but first, I would need to figure out a way to maintain the fire in the kamado stove before the next rainfall.

I had to build a waterproof kamado stove.

And so, after “fire” and “water”, I even managed to reach the goal of “food”—without taking time for a break, the next matters I needed to rack my brains about were, from the basic necessities of “clothing, food, shelter”, “clothing” and “shelter”.

Of these two options, I could imagine that my preferences would come out in which one I decided to prioritize—but the difference in temperature between daytime and nighttime was just as I’d experienced last night. It wasn’t the kind of environment where I could catch a cold and go, “Lucky that I can skip school!” while making a victory pose—not to mention, I was already a school dropout.

I’d gained a lot of energy from that starry sky on the first night, but when I thought about how often it was cloudy or rainy, I couldn’t afford to keep pursuing my romantic ideals.

For the sake of keeping myself warm, “clothing” and “shelter” were pretty much the same in value, but if I were to prioritize “clothing” first, it would become possible for me to enter into the mountains and harvest their bounties.

I would unlock new areas to explore.

If I were lucky, I might even find some caves or limestone caverns, which would resolve the problem of “shelter” at the same time—considering that, in the future, I would have to explore the entire island to look for other survivors, I felt that I’d be better off starting as early as possible so as to not waste any more time.

Therefore, I had no intention of voting “nay” on the opinion of prioritizing “clothing”,80 but personally, I was more attracted by the choice to prioritize “shelter”.

My “balance” seemed to shift in that direction.81

I’d been treating these squalls as simply blessings from the heavens, but if this kept up, they would end up being a factor in me catching a cold… Being soaked by the rain was also probably consuming a lot of my stamina.

That wouldn’t change even if I were to wear clothes… Rather, if I were to get soaked with clothes on, my discomfort levels might be even higher.

So I couldn’t suppress my desire to put shelter from the rain and sun first—and my situation was such that it was easier for me to imagine the construction of a small hut compared to any clothing.

And maybe I could make better progress with needlework once I was under a roof?

Perhaps I’d discover my talents as a seamstress?

According to Kaiki-san, my (original) mission was to ascertain why Araundo Uroko-san had made Iriomote Island her current location, but irrespective of that mission, it was clear to me that I needed to ascertain where my current location was in the first place.

For this question with no wrong answer, I had decided on “shelter” via the above thought process, but going through all this trouble ended up being comically absurd, because I had been unable to fully complete either of those tasks perfectly.

The question of which one to do first wasn’t important, because I could not do either of them—but it was a matter of course. Things had gone too well up until now.

It wasn’t exactly that things had gone well from the moment I drifted onto this uninhabited island, but seeing as I had managed to check “fire”, “water”, and “food” off my to-do list, it was really quite the accomplishment for me.

I’d used up all my luck.

It was a bit embarrassing to list all my shortcomings one by one, but if I were to only speak of my achievements, it would end up just being cherry-picking. I’m sure you would like to read all about my failures instead, right?

Regarding how my haphazard sustainable strategy for growth ended in failure, it all began when I underestimated the act of building a house—because I’d been able to build a kamado stove, misshapen as it was, I’d gotten carried away, thinking that I could just size it up to make a hut, but that plan hadn’t been any good at all.

Since there was a mountain’s worth of wood and stones around me, I’d been dreaming of combining those as needed to create something like the waiting area at a bus stop, but apparently, mathematically speaking, the logic went that if the size doubled, the weight would increase eightfold.

The square-cube law.

It was knowledge that I wasn’t sure if I’d learned while I still attended school… But to sum it up, if I were to build the real thing while assuming it would be the same as a model, it would be unable to bear its own weight and collapse.

If I were to sleep inside this building (or this crumbling?82), it was basically the same as creating a device to euthanize myself—a humane execution device, just like a guillotine. The ropes made of ivy that I strung together were not strong enough to keep supporting the roof.

Building a house was really this difficult, huh.

Right now, I had run away from home, but this really made me think that my parents were incredible for owning their own home—though it’s not like my parents built their house from scratch.

Regardless, it really sapped my motivation to see something I worked so hard to build collapse on its own… It was the same for the harpoon I dropped onto the ocean floor, but this must be how it would feel if my manga manuscript were to get rejected.

It really drained me of my will to do anything.

In that sense, because tackling “shelter” had ended up being an irrecoverable problem, I had even lost the energy to attempt to create “clothing” at the same time, even though I hadn’t even tried anything.

After all, unlike a shack, I couldn’t even visualize any blueprints for making clothes—or in this case, I suppose they would be called sewing patterns? If I imagined that I’d returned to primitive times, I could also imagine that the trending style was to skin the pelt of a beast and wrap it around their waists… But if I were to encounter any sort of beast, I’d be the one to get skinned.

To encounter a beast in the first place, I would need to head deep into the mountain forest, and to head deep into the mountain forest, I would need to make clothes to protect myself… I was basically going in circles here.

I couldn’t simply go haphazardly.

I didn’t want to receive any retribution, either.83

For the sake of my own safety, I could make clothes out of leaves and tree bark—that was certainly something I was capable of even with my current survival ability.

Even if creating a complex three-dimensional object was difficult, I could still wrap a largish leaf around my body in a coat style, like a yukata or a poncho… But it would take me a little more time before I could brazenly and shamelessly refer to it as clothing.

However, as for whether or not such a flimsy outfit would be warm enough… On top of that, I couldn’t help but feel that wearing prickly leaves and wood in direct contact with my skin, especially with my shoddy handiwork, ran counter to my objective of avoiding cuts and gashes on my skin.

I’d heard that you could make clothes out of fish skin, too… But I figured you probably didn’t use the skin of Japanese icefish or goldfish.

Maybe I could make a seashell bikini?

That seemed like something simple that I could make without needing to try too hard, but if I were to put together such sexy clothes, it didn’t seem all that different from just being naked… I couldn’t deny the fact that, aside from my embarrassment, it would be easier for me to go in and out of the ocean or escape from the rain if I was naked.

It was true that it made it easier to move.

If I didn’t have to think about entering the mountains, then honestly, in the short-term, it actually felt pleasant.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound—much like that philosophical question, if I was naked on an uninhabited island with no one around, was it really all that disgraceful?

Perhaps the only issue was whether or not I might catch a cold?

If I were in a snowy region, then it would become absolutely necessary for me to make clothing, almost as important an element as “fire”, but this was in the south—what if I just pretended I was on a beach in southern France, made that the reason for my appearance, and stopped worrying about it?

Well, if this were a snowy region, I could potentially have solved the problem of “shelter” through a different approach—when I was in elementary school, there had been a time when I built a kamakura snow hut84 together with Tsukihi-chan.

Kamakura…

"............”

Ah—so there was that option.

Apparently, snow fell even at the Tottori Sand Dunes, but of course, it wasn’t as though I was expecting snow to follow after squalls on this beach—I wasn’t going to perform any prayer for snow while naked, not that I’d performed any prayer for rain, either.

I didn’t need to hope for snowfall, because even if this wasn’t the sand dunes, didn’t this beach have plenty of sand to work with?—though I’d been discouraged by my previous failures, I hit upon a new idea, a new sustainable strategy for growth, of “building a kamakura out of sand”.

Whether I’d hit upon a new idea or I’d lost my mind was something I could leave future historians to decide, but of course, Robinson Nadeko Crusoe was not particularly confident that she could build a pit-house out of sand, even if it was smoother than powder snow.

Not that sand was all that smooth in the first place. If anything, it was as coarse as snow crystals.

For one thing, a normal kamakura probably couldn’t normally be built by someone working on their own—Tsukihi-chan had simply been dexterous, even as a child.

However, if I were to give up on the step of keeping the rain out and focus only on staying warm, then even with just sand as the material, I would be able to build a proper dwelling—not a pit-house, but a cave-house.

It was a very beach-like idea to have, wasn’t it? You know, when you go play at the beach with your friends, they might bury your entire body until only your face is poking out of the sand. It wasn’t meant to be a cruel form of torture, but I could lie face-up and cover my body with sand—that would be a pretty good way of protecting myself from the temperature difference between day and night, right?

It might look pretty similar to a tanning bed, but there was no reason for me to try and get any more tanned in this situation. It wouldn’t exactly make for a sleeping bag to completely protect me from the squalls, but it had to be preferable to being hit by the rain directly, and it would be possible to stay somewhat hydrated while asleep, at least to the extent that I wouldn’t completely dry up—as long as I couldn’t expect to find any sunscreen, it wouldn’t be good for me to get any more sunburns on my skin.

I didn’t want to go as far as covering my face with sand, too, so making a large eye mask or face guard might be good as well.

That sort of easy-to-make handicraft would be manageable even for me.

And, thinking about the sand baths in Ibusuki, perhaps this cave-house could serve as a bathroom, as well? It would also protect my body from bug bites… The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a nice idea to me.

Kamakura, here we go!85

From the point of view of an outsider, I was nothing more than an extreme loner who went playing in the ocean on her own and buried herself in the sand on her own… But the good thing about being on a deserted island was that I didn’t have to worry about how other people saw me—and so I promptly put my plan into action. It was really my lucky day to have thought of this.

But rather than a sand kamakura, it was more like a sand futon.

It would be really coarse against my skin.

Rather than sand, it would feel more like being wrapped in sandpaper.

Though now I was starting to feel less like a primitive person and more like a larva burrowing into the ground… Anyway, as for this construction project that couldn’t possibly fail, it somehow ended in great success.

If I were to harshly look for holes in this plan to make a cave-house, then depending on if the tide was high or the waves were stormy, I could drown to death from being unable to move in the sand, but nothing was going to start if I was going to pick a fight with myself (rather, it was more like the whole thing would end).

Like this, I resolved the problems of “shelter” and “clothing” at the same time—or rather, it might be more appropriate to say that I abandoned them.

Thinking back to when I’d lived in a shiny new shrine as a god, it was a world of difference. But while I was coming up with these stopgap measures for all of these issues, and while I held onto the dream of Ononoki-chan coming to my rescue, a whole fourteen days, which almost felt like an eternity, ended up passing by in an instant.

Uh. Yikes.

I really needed to do something about this…