Although he felt that the pants made by his wife were somewhat unusual, Yuan Jue still left it on with a blushing face.
Using his meager demon energy, he was barely able to stand and walk despite the loss of the lower half of his left leg. However, he didn’t have enough demon energy to spare to relieve his pain, so it had been quite difficult for him to put the pants on.
Bright sweat had fallen from his forehead and down the sides of his head, moistening his black hair on the sides of his head.
His hands were trembling a bit when he tied the uniquely designed strings on the front of the animal skin pants. His ears felt hot. Who knows what the red-faced wolf was thinking?
The pants that Ruan Qiuqiu had made for him ended up being too short for him and didn’t cover his right ankle. In the other pant leg, from his knee downwards, it was very empty. Other than feeling intermittent pain there, there was nothing. And yet, he didn’t find that part too painful.
He tugged the corners of his pants with his lips curving up. His blind eyes were brimming with a smile. He pretended to complain, “Too short.”
He didn’t have much demon energy, and the time he could freely move around was limited. After putting on his clothes, he brought back some snow and surveyed the storage room using his demon conscience. Discovering that there wasn’t much firewood left at home, his eyelashes lowered slightly as he planned out his next move.
Before he left the cave, he thought of something and went back to the bedroom while supporting himself with one hand on the cave wall. He sat down at the edge of the bed and lifted up the animal skin sheet, revealing the smooth surface underneath.
There were a few holes on the bed that he had made last time. Fortunately, these holes were on the outer part of the bed, the side that he lied on, so Ruan Qiuqiu hadn’t discovered these holes.
Yuan Jue pursed his pale lips and slowly stretched out his hand. In a flash, his nails turned into claws. He very seriously studied the part of the stone bed that he lied on, and then he carefully stretched out his index finger. Using his sharp claw, he carved a picture on the stone bed.
He wasn’t sure if he would have enough demon energy left after coming back from hunting. In addition, if push came to shove, he might have to use the fiend energy in his blood. Perhaps, using a little bit more fiend energy wouldn’t cause any harm to his memory and cause him to forget everything he had experienced with Ruan Qiuqiu, but he couldn’t be sure about that. Just in case, he wanted to record these memories.
Yuan Jue was an illiterate wolf, but he could carve pictures. Besides, there was no complete writing system in the primitive world. He was very good at carving pictures, but in order to save time, he roughly carved out the images. He wanted to carve pictures for all of his memories.
A figure with round eyes, long hair, animal skin dress, and matchstick-like arms and legs to symbolise his wife. A wolf with three normal legs and a lamed fourth leg, pointed ears, and large tail, that was him.
In the first picture, the lamed wolf bared its tongue at the long-haired stick figure. That was their meeting.
Yuan Jue closed his eyes and used his demon consciousness to see the picture he had carved on the bed. He softly chuckled and carved out the rest of the images for what happened in the past several days, and then he covered them up and left the cave.
—
On the other side, Ruan Qiuqiu was working on getting medicinal herbs from the opposite cliff.
She didn’t know that Mr. Gray Wolf had gone out or that he had carved a stick figure of herself with round eyes and long hair, much less that he had secretly graffitied the stone bed.
She had gone back and collected several dry vines from the giant tree near the entrance of the passage. She and Little Yu had just finished making a rope from these vines.
“Big sister Qiuqiu, will this rope work?” Little Yu looked at the rope in Ruan Qiuqiu’s hand with worry. This was a thick rope that they had spent half an hour to make by tightly braiding dry vines and animal skin.
“Yes, don’t worry.” Ruan Qiuqiu smiled at the child. She picked up a stone and tied the stone to one end of the rope.
Ruan Qiuqiu looked for a tree that was a few meters tall, and then she quickly climbed up and stuck the end of the rope that had the stone tied to it on one of the tree’s fairly thick branches. Then, she grabbed the rope and jumped down.
If the thick rope could bear the force of her jumping down and her weight, then she would use her spiritual energy to throw the rope on a protruding part of the cliff. Once the stone on the rope was wedged into a crevice of the cliff wall, the danger of holding onto the rope and then swinging over was much smaller.
Translator Rambling: That Yuan Jue would prioritize carving out those pictures first instead of improving their living conditions shows that Yuan Jue’s actions are heavily influenced by him anticipating the worst. In contrast, Ruan Qiuqiu is optimistic (to a dangerous level sometimes) and doesn’t dwell on negative possibilities. Even though she’s aware that their current situation is bad, she’s eternally hopeful that things will improve even when she faces setbacks. She rushes ahead to try out anything that might improve their situation.
An example of Ruan Qiu’s reckless optimism is that she doesn’t even consider what will happen if the rope gets loose and she falls off the cliff wall at such a height. I’m not saying she shouldn’t take risks, but that she should take precautions like Yuan Jue when she does. For example, she can condense healing water beforehand, so that if she does get hurt or fall unconscious, Mo Yu can feed it to her.
Another example is she doesn’t ask Yuan Jue if there are nearby tribes that are friendly to humans. He knows a lot more about this world than her, but she refuses to consider the possibility that he might not make it, so she won’t make these preparations.
I hope Ruan Qiuqiu’s optimism will rub off Yuan Jue and that Ruan Qiuqiu will learn to think through the possible negative outcomes of her actions from Yuan Jue. I think it’s good that their personalities are complementary instead of both of them recklessly optimistic or depressingly pessimistic.
What do you guys think?