Chapter 183: Special Venison (Patreon)

"It's about time."

Isac looked up at the sky. The emerald curtain had dimmed noticeably, its edges bleeding pink and violet outward.

Going by the last few aurora nights, this one was nearly over.

"So, we..."

Yukinoshita Yukino held her own phone, while Kaguya held Hayasaka Ai's.

"Go ahead and enhance," Isac said, signaling the two of them to buy the low-tier physical enhancement. Hayasaka Ai, following her own wishes, would wait and do hers on the next aurora night.

Frankly, tonight's aurora night had been pretty thin. Aside from the special aurora creature they'd picked up for free right at the start, they'd barely seen any Aurora wolves. After those first three, only a few lone wolves had trickled in. In sheer numbers, it couldn't compare to the northern hunting outpost.

Isac figured it was because they'd killed so many at the northern outpost. One was north of town and the other south, but when you got down to it, both sat inside the same hunting ground around Mountain Town.

A town's surroundings only had so many resources, and being able to feed this many wolf packs already counted as extraordinarily rich land. After the beating Isac and the others had given them, unless the wolves here could respawn like NPCs in a game, it would take years, at the very least, for the population to recover.

And with temperatures dropping year after year, they might well go extinct instead.

Of course, none of that was Isac's problem. All they needed to do right now was get back to the Survival Home, ride out the coming winter there, save up enough survival points to exchange for ferry tickets, head to the coastal town, and finally leave this damned white hell behind.

"How do you feel?"

Seeing the two of them lower their phones, Isac asked anxiously.

"Like... nothing's changed." Kaguya clenched her fist, then closed her eyes to take stock of her body. Strength, everything else, it all felt exactly the same as before the enhancement.

"Just like your guess earlier, I'd say. It probably kicks in after we sleep," Yukinoshita Yukino said thoughtfully.

Isac gave a slight nod. "Then we stick to the plan. Once the aurora is completely gone, Ai and I will head into the woods to collect materials. You and Kaguya stay home and keep watch."

"No problem. Be careful out there."

They stood at the door for a while. The strange glow in the sky gradually dispersed, and the bulb above the entrance began to flicker erratically along with the fading aurora, until at some point the light went out for good.

In front of the outpost, only four kerosene lamps were still burning.

The good news was that there was a moon tonight. Besides the kerosene lamps in their hands, the survival squad could just about make out the road ahead by moonlight.

The outpost was less than a hundred meters from the conifer forest to the east, and the moose had died right at the forest's edge, so the whole trip came to a little over a hundred meters.

That was practically next door. Isac and Hayasaka Ai quickly found their way back to where the special moose had fallen, relying on memory. To spread the lamplight over a wider area, Isac deliberately held his lamp up higher.

It turned out to be unnecessary. The reason was simple: the materials the moose had left behind were impossible to miss.

It wasn't the antlers they'd guessed at, though. It was an enormous moose hide, lying spread out across the snow. Something seemed to be hidden underneath it, because the middle bulged up in a lump.

Up close, Isac and Hayasaka Ai saw that the hide was even bigger than the bed back home, by a fair margin.

"This hide's already been processed," Hayasaka Ai said. She crouched down and ran a hand over the fur. It was soft. She lifted a corner to her nose and sniffed. There wasn't a trace of gamey stink.

"Let's fold it up first." Isac hung his lamp on a low branch nearby, bent down, grabbed a corner of the pelt, and heaved it back.

The hide wasn't just soft, it was heavy too. Isac tested it and guessed fifty or sixty kilograms, well over a hundred pounds.

That made sense. An ordinary moose hide ran twenty or thirty kilos, and the one they'd taken down was easily twice the size of a normal moose, so its hide would naturally weigh more.

"There's something underneath."

Once Isac had folded the hide in half, Hayasaka Ai's sharp eyes caught that something else was hidden beneath it.

She carried her lamp closer and saw four chunks of meat in different sizes. The biggest weighed about a hundred kilos by her estimate, and from its shape she took it for a hind leg. There was no bone, and it was extremely fresh. She could even see the muscle fibers twitching.

Maybe it was only Hayasaka Ai's imagination, but the meat not only had no smell of blood, it gave off a strangely sweet, clean fragrance, and the moment she caught it, her mouth started watering all on its own.

She hadn't even tasted it yet, but she had a peculiar certainty: this meat was going to taste incredible.

Without much further thought, Hayasaka Ai started hauling the chunks onto the sled.

Isac had finished folding the moose hide by then. He set it beside the meat and lashed everything down tight with nylon rope so nothing would slide off during the trip back.

When that was done, Isac strapped the tow line around his body and took his lamp down from the tree. Meanwhile Hayasaka Ai circled the area with her own lamp to make sure nothing had been left behind, and then the two of them headed back the way they'd come.

Back at the outpost, Yukinoshita Yukino and Kaguya saw the pair emerge from the trees, shouldered their packs, and stepped outside with their lamps.

Since buying the enhancement, neither of them had shown any abnormal reaction, so the survival squad stuck to the original plan: head back to the Survival Home tonight.

After all, compared to an outpost out in the sticks, the Survival Home, deep in the heart of Mountain Town, was bound to be safer.

By what they knew so far, special aurora creatures spawned like NPCs in the Survival Game, while ordinary aurora creatures came from the local ecosystem being infected.

After two rounds of aurora nights scouring the area, they'd probably killed off most of the predators around Mountain Town. The only thing left to worry about was a randomly spawning special aurora creature.

Once tonight was over, Yukinoshita Yukino and Kaguya would most likely be stuck in bed. With only Isac and Hayasaka Ai to face a special aurora creature, their margin for error would be far thinner than with all four of them together.

Better to move to a safe spot while Yukino and Kaguya could still move.

As long as they stayed inside the Survival Home, even if a special aurora creature spawned, all it could do was stand outside and glare at them.

Fortress-grade security, in short.

…

The hour-long walk passed in a blink.

The trip back went without incident. It was quiet the whole way, with only the footsteps of the four members of the survival squad and the scrape of the sled dragging along the road behind them.

The predators that could threaten them in the area had probably been cleared out, but Isac and the others still didn't dare relax. Not until they'd hauled everything inside and shut the front door did they finally let their guard down.

The living room furniture hadn't been touched since they left. Yukinoshita Yukino added some firewood to the central fireplace, then splashed on a little Accelerant.

Click, click...

The metal rod struck the flint, and the sparks that flew caught the Accelerant clinging to the logs.

Before long, the familiar crackle rose from the hearth. Once the wood had burned for a while, Yukinoshita Yukino tossed in two long sticks of charcoal.

That done, she stood up and turned to look at the other three, who were gathered around the sled studying the moose meat.

"Studying" was generous. A closer look showed that every so often, all three of their throats bobbed in an involuntary swallow.

They were drooling.

Seeing this, Yukinoshita Yukino said helplessly, "How about some chow before bed?"

"Yes."

The vote was about as unanimous as it gets. Even Hayasaka Ai, the squad member least interested in food, couldn't bring herself to refuse when faced with this moose meat and its strange fragrance.

This moose meat was unlike any other meat.

"But first, let's move all this to the kitchen," Yukinoshita Yukino said.

To keep food fresh longer and make it easy to reach, back when they'd remodeled the house they had built a wooden box and mounted it outside the kitchen window.

That way the cold outdoors could freeze whatever was stored inside, and when they needed something they didn't have to go out. They just opened the window and reached in. It was basically an external fridge, and in practice it worked just like one.

It was easily Yukinoshita Yukino's favorite renovation project.

The hour's walk hadn't been nearly enough to freeze the moose meat solid. The surface was only a little firm to the touch, and pressing hard still left a dent.

"Keep the smallest piece. The rest goes in the fridge outside," Yukinoshita Yukino said, directing the other three as they started carrying meat.

While hauling, Isac found a blind spot in the plan.

"Reporting, chief. This hind leg is too big. It won't fit through the window."

"Then cut it up."

"Yes, chief."

Once she saw Isac had it handled, Yukinoshita Yukino turned to the piece they'd kept.

It was the smallest of the four, but only in relative terms. It was far from small: long and tapered, thin at one end and thick at the other, like a stretched-out radish. It ran about one point four meters, roughly four and a half feet, and was thirty centimeters, about a foot, across at the thickest point. It weighed thirty kilograms, over sixty pounds.

Yukinoshita Yukino guessed it was the moose's tenderloin, the prime cut of the whole animal.

One glance was enough to put several cooking methods in her head.

But it was the middle of the night, and the meat was top quality, and premium ingredients usually call for the plainest preparation.

Yukinoshita Yukino decided to cut four steaks from the thickest end and cook them the way she would beef.

The main reason was that she'd never cooked moose before, so pan-searing it like steak was the only method she had.

After all, cows have horns and moose have horns. Cows have four legs and moose have four legs. What are the odds of a coincidence like that?

So surely the cooking method would be about the same.

As for whether the meat was safe to eat, Yukinoshita Yukino wasn't worried. It was obviously processed, with even the surface membrane stripped away. If it weren't edible, why would the system have left it for them?

On this point, all four of them trusted the Survival Game, more or less.

Sure, the crash had probably been staged by this Survival Game, but at least it hadn't been trying to kill them, and it had given all four of them entirely new possibilities.

Just the physical enhancement alone was something money couldn't buy, never mind the skills.

Without exaggeration, if Yukinoshita Yukino could return to her old world right now, she could at the very least become a world-class zoologist and botanist, and with some systematic study, maybe even move into pharmaceutical research.

Of course, all of that assumed they could get back.

Her thoughts drifted, but her hands didn't slow down at all.

The other three, starving and waiting to be fed, had already lit the kitchen stove, so all Yukinoshita Yukino had to do was cook.

Sizzle...

The glistening moose meat hit the scorching pan with a mouthwatering hiss, and a deep, rich aroma of meat rolled through the kitchen.

Isac and the others were one thing, but even Yukinoshita Yukino, the cook herself, found it hard to keep her composure once the smell reached her.

Fragrant. So fragrant.

And everyone in the kitchen could clearly feel that their craving for this piece of meat was about more than mere appetite. It felt more like an instinctive hunger for evolution itself.

This meat is way too weird, Isac thought as he swallowed his drool.

It felt like eating it would make you evolve.

Like the flesh of the Tang Monk in Journey to the West, the legendary meat that grants immortality to whoever eats it.

The searing took only a few minutes, and that was only because it was Yukinoshita Yukino's first time cooking moose and she'd kept it on a little longer, afraid it wouldn't cook through.

But even a few minutes felt agonizingly long to the four people in the kitchen.

"Cook eats first."

Everyone was desperate for a bite of the finished steak, but they hadn't quite lost all reason. The other three silently, in unison, gestured for the cook to go first.

Yukinoshita Yukino didn't argue. It would let her check how done the steak was and adjust the cooking time for the rest.

Since it was only for herself, there was no need to fuss over plating. Yukinoshita Yukino simply cut a piece right in the hot pan.

The crust on the surface, browned by the Maillard reaction, kept weeping fat. The center was cooked all the way through, and the pinkish-white meat had a translucent, jade-like sheen.

Yukinoshita Yukino blew on it gently, then put it in her mouth.

The next instant, her beautiful eyes flew wide. A flavor beyond words swept over her taste buds.

"How is it?" Isac asked quickly.

Yukinoshita Yukino didn't answer. She just cut her steak into several pieces and gestured for everyone to help themselves.

Before long, the palm-sized steak had been devoured.

And the meat's effects slowly began to take hold…