Chapter 1 He Can Help

As soon as she heard she could help, Lily enthusiastically took Hao Ren to her place. According to her, any task required careful planning, and even if the sky were falling, one had to take the guest home for a meal first.

Although this silly girl, who had wanted to go south to find a big city but ended up walking north to Siberia, was a bit ditzy, her survival skills and motivation in the wilderness were definitely not to be underestimated. After leaving the village, she didn't rush on her way, but instead explored the "outside world" with great curiosity while heading north, stopping and going along the way. If she encountered an interesting place, she would stop and play for a while before continuing. In total, this took her several years.

For a werewolf girl who had lived in a remote mountain village since childhood and had to suppress her nature all the time, these few years of travel were probably the happiest days of her life.

And now she lived with a pack of Siberian wolves, so her residence was naturally far from human habitation: in the depths of a dense pine forest was a small wooden house abandoned by a hunter. The hunter who had built this wooden house was long gone, and the traces of human habitation near the pine forest had also been swallowed by wind and snow. Now, the wooden house in the forest had become Lily's temporary resting place.

The wolf pack had their own resting places near the wooden house. After Lily gave them the order to disperse, the beasts disappeared into the dense forest in the blink of an eye. Hao Ren sensed that they had basically not left the wooden house for more than two or three hundred meters. Following the sound of the wind, he could occasionally hear the wolves' soft barks. Lily pushed open the door of the small wooden house and let her guest inside.

The inside of the small wooden house was not as simple and dilapidated as Hao Ren had imagined.

Although it looked old and even a bit shaky from the outside, it was clean and tidy inside. Several holes and cracks in the walls that let in the wind were blocked tightly with animal fur and roughly made wooden boards. The rotten roof beams had also been reinforced with wood. The hunter's cabin did not have a complicated structure, only a thin wooden board divided it into two rooms, an inner room probably for storing food and for the owner to rest, and an outer room for making fire and processing food, as well as storing a lot of sundries. In a corner of the outer room, Hao Ren saw a lot of messy things: rusty axes, broken wheels, tattered fur, and even an old-fashioned hunting rifle. The barrel of the gun had been twisted into a ball of thread, obviously broken by some husky girl practicing her strength.

These messy things were piled up in the corner like a small mountain, and most of them obviously didn't look like things used by the old owner of the cabin, but more like a pile of collectibles. It seemed that some husky spirit's habit of picking up and collecting things was a historical problem.

Noticing Hao Ren's gaze on the pile of sundries in the corner, Lily was not embarrassed at all, but instead showed off with pride: "Oh, oh, you noticed it, these are all I usually collect! Let me tell you, although I rarely see people here, there are still people passing by occasionally, and they bring all kinds of strange little gadgets from the human world—I let my wolves keep an eye on them in the forest, and if they see anything fun, they go and grab one or two of them for me. But don't worry, I don't let them hurt people, I just take some personal belongings to play with..."

Hao Ren immediately understood what had happened in the ambush he had encountered before: "So, after all that, the pack of gray wolves was planning to rob me?"

Lily scratched her head awkwardly: "Hehe..."

"I was almost robbed by a pack of wolves... where can you go to reason with that?" Hao Ren felt a little dumbfounded, "So, you taught the wolves to run around and change formations when they robbed prey?"

"That's called military strategy, do you understand military strategy?" Lily had a look of "I'm awesome" on her face, "There was an old scholar in our village who said that military strategy is a very powerful thing. Back then, a guy named Zhuge Liang almost killed 100,000 troops with a stone formation. I even borrowed a picture book about the Three Kingdoms from him!"

As she spoke, she rummaged through her clothes, and finally pulled out a thread-bound edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms that looked quite old. The tattered cover had been almost completely worn away, and it was impossible to tell which volume of the book it was. Lily held it as if it were a treasure: "I started pestering the old gentleman for this book after I learned to read, and he only lent it to me after a long time... Ah!"

Hao Ren was stunned: "What's wrong?"

Lily looked distressed: "I left the village in a hurry back then, and I forgot to return it to him..."

Hao Ren: "...You just remembered?"

"Well, anyway, after helping you find the person, I have to turn around and go back. I'll just sneak back to the village and return the book then," the husky girl quickly put the matter aside with her innate ability to be carefree, "Let's eat something first, I'm really starving after fighting you..."

Then Hao Ren watched Lily light the fire pit in the center of the wooden house with flint and tinder, and then take out an old iron pot with potholes from the inner room and set it on the fire. Outside the door was ready-made ice and snow. After taking a few pieces of frozen snow and melting them, and letting it settle for a while, it was half a pot of hot water. On the roof beams of the hut hung dried and frozen cured meat. Lily broke them into pieces with her bare hands and threw them into the hot pot, and then found some beans and grains from who-knows-where and poured them in, and thus cooked a pot of hot meat porridge. Finally, she ran behind the house and dug out two frozen salmon from the snow, skewered them on iron rods after thawing them with the heat of the fire pit, and roasted them on both sides of the iron pot.

She was so skilled that her swift and skillful movements even gave Hao Ren a dazzling feeling.

It turned out that this domestic dog, who usually just sat and waited for others to feed him at home, actually had this skill?

"This fish was sent by a brown bear living nearby. It's very good at catching fish. I often exchange other prey for fish with it," Lily said while stirring the meat porridge in the pot with a long-handled iron spoon, "But the rarest thing in this place is seasoning. I lack oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar. There is a saltwater lake far away from here where I can get some salt, but other things are difficult to find, so just make do with it..."

Hao Ren watched Lily busily preparing dinner, and his heart moved. He unobtrusively took out a package of things from his personal space and handed it over: "I can't just eat yours, try this."

Lily curiously took the package that looked colorful, pinched its plastic packaging, and put it under her nose to smell it: "Sniff sniff—what is this? Can it be eaten?"

"Tear it open from that gap, the outside is the packaging bag," Hao Ren smiled, "This thing is called spicy strip, you should like it."

Lily carefully fiddled with it for a long time before clumsily tearing open the packaging bag. Immediately, a strong and pungent smell floated into her nostrils. She pinched a spicy strip from inside and put it in her mouth, slowly savoring it: "It tastes like big gluten... wuwu... this is delicious!"

Sure enough, she and spicy strips were so compatible from the beginning!

Lily held the bag of spicy strips and gobbled them down. In the blink of an eye, half a bag of snacks had been swept into her stomach, but in the end, she suddenly stopped, holding the remaining half bag of spicy strips with great care: "No, I have to save the remaining half bag, this thing can be used as a seasoning when cooked in porridge..."

Hao Ren laughed when he saw this: "Eat it, eat it, I have more here."

Lily curiously looked him up and down: "By the way, where did you get all these strange things? And those things you used to treat the wolves' injuries before, where are they all hidden? Can you do magic?"

"This is my ability," Hao Ren knew that Lily was now in the easiest stage of her life to fool (in fact, she had always been easy to fool), so he had no psychological pressure to say anything, "Just like you can turn into a half-wolf half-human and are incredibly strong, I can summon all kinds of things."

"Then conjure up Zhuge Liang for me, the one who knows how to set up stone formations."

Hao Ren: "...I don't think you understand what I mean..."

"Then can you conjure up Zhang Fei? I want to compete with him to see who is stronger!"

"There's no need to compare that. Don't even mention Zhang Fei, I reckon no human being in ancient or modern times can spin a stone pillar at the entrance of the Athena Temple into a propeller with one hand like you."

"What's Athena?"

Hao Ren: "...Why do you have so many questions?"

"Oh, then I won't ask," Lily pouted, but after a few seconds, she turned her head again, "Then what's a propeller?"

Hao Ren: "...Let's talk about finding people!"

You must never casually digress when chatting with this husky spirit. This girl's topic divergence is like uranium 235. Give her a neutron and she can develop a chain reaction for you! Hao Ren has been with her for three years, why does he always forget this?

Fortunately, Lily's attention was distracted quickly and recovered quickly. Hao Ren's words still reminded her of this matter again. The husky girl shook her ears: "Oh right, help you find someone, help you find someone. By the way, what kind of person are you looking for?"

"Someone like us, not human," Hao Ren said while thinking, "I'm not sure where she is exactly, I can only roughly judge that she is sleeping somewhere nearby, and the area around where she is sleeping is a large uninhabited area, and there should be some abnormalities in the natural phenomena..."

As he spoke, he calculated in his mind: According to the notes, Vivian's last activity in Siberia was the battle with the Angry Spirit three hundred years ago. Her slumber should have been shortly after that; on the other hand, according to his understanding, Lily's age in the real world is about one hundred years old, of which sixty or seventy years were spent in human society, and the "old version of Lily" in front of him has not yet come into contact with human society...

Combining the two pieces of information, there was a huge time difference in between, at least a two-century time difference.

Why was this?

Was Vivian really asleep for more than two hundred years? Or did Lily get her age wrong? Or in this distorted time and space, was history no longer operating according to the original "scale"?

All three situations were possible.

Lily's voice suddenly rang out: "Why are you daydreaming?"

Hao Ren woke up with a start: "Oh, cough cough... It's nothing, it's nothing. Where were we just now? Oh right, her slumber..."

"Slumber? Is your friend a very sleepy person?" Lily touched her chin, "It doesn't seem like there's a suitable place to sleep in this icy and snowy place."

"Uh, I don't think the slumber you understand is the same as what I mean," Hao Ren wiped his forehead, "Forget it, it's a bit difficult to explain this to you. I have something she used, can you smell it?"