Shirou in Another World.

Volume 1: Beginnings CH9

Peaceful and white.

That was the only way to describe the world as it is.

Winter began a month ago, bringing change to the season. Trees lost their auburn colors, animals slowly disappeared for hibernation, and snow started descending from the heavens above, coating the forest and land in white.

The surrounding villages were fortunato have moderate winter seasons. The numerous rivers and lakes near the mountain base mitigated the effects of harsh weather.

Shirou was at one such river, walking over the frozen sheet of transparent ice.

The river was a fifth of a kilometer wide, its origins way up in the mountains ahead. Its banks were covered white in snow, the surrounding trees equally white as the ground they grew on.

It was a winter wonderland.

Shirou appreciated the peaceful scene while carrying his last batch of fish for the day.

Hunting had ended once winter arrived, so the village shifted to other means of acquiring stores. They had managed to gather a sizeable stockpile of meat from autumn. But it was safer to continue foraging for food during winter.

That was the reason Shirou spent the day at the frozen river. He had been busy looking for fish frozen in ice. There was quite a number of fish encased in the clear ice, all Shirou had to do was dig them out.

While it was possible to fish, Shirou didn't learn such skills. Rather, he would prefer to catch them with his hands. Using the river as a training area to improve his control and speed. This was after Shirou learned to swim from one of the fishermen one village over. Different from his exercises, swimming provided a more balanced form of training. After all, swimming needed multiple muscles from different areas to work in tandem.

It was also during the tail end of autumn when Shirou discovered the advantages of swimming. The weather was cold then, but he pushed past the hesitation and maximized the little time left before the rivers became frozen. Shirou got sick from repeatedly dipping in the cold weather, but recovered after he could no longer train in the freezing waters.

A little training during harsh weather conditions always helped in the long run.

Shirou reached the riverbank and trekked towards his hidden stockpile of fish a fair distance from the river. He had collected a decent number, and while he could bring all of them back with reinforcement, his cloth sack wouldn't be able to carry the load before tearing apart. So Shirou decided to bring them in small batches back to the village.

His reinforcement skills had improved slightly. But not enough to be used on objects. His reinforcement lasted a few seconds on rocks and wooden trunks, but he couldn't keep the flow managed for a longer period, causing them to break.

Training your prana circuits to keep a constant output of energy was one thing, keeping them constant while injecting them into an object to improve its durability was a whole other thing. Then again, Shirou was learning all of his magic from scratch. So progress was hard to find.

But once he did, it was only a matter of building on his discoveries with constant practice and determination.

Shirou stopped in front of a pile of rocks, from afar it looked like a haphazard collection of stone, but once observed from a specific angle, it formed the shape of an arrow. The rocks were easy enough to spot due to their large size, simple for him to find if he looked in the particular area.

But the rock formation was only a ruse. The real hiding location was the snow underneath them. The arrow was only there to direct any people who noticed the unnatural formation towards another rockpile which also pointed to another area.