6 Chapter 6: Survival training

After we arrived at the forest father told me that I would need to find mom by myself, after all being able to find someone is also vital for survival.

I started right away, the faster I find her the faster I could start the real survival training.

So I started looking for whatever clue she would have left behind for me, after all, she can't expect me to find her without giving me any kind of clue like footsteps of patches of flattened grass, so my search for clues began.

I first started looking at the ground in front of me, and after looking for ten minutes... well I found absolutely nothing, not a single speck of dust was disturbed, so I went on to look at the grass around the place where I was dropped off at, turns out mom did expect me to find her without any clues, or she put the clues further away from where I would start.

So I started looking for clues further away, like for example on the trees, I checked the branches as ninja most often traveled on tree branches and sometimes they would break, but I was disappointed yet again by finding nothing except a couple of birds.

I guess she really did expect me to find her without any help or clues, or this was all part of the exercise, with my mom's personality she would probably want me to be capable of doing things on my own, although leaving a 5-year-old alone in a forest with nothing except the clothes on his back wasn't very safe to my modern mind, to ninja it was perfectly normal to do things like this, this was again a thing that was different between the life I was currently living, here I was expected to be able to kill in a couple of years, in my own life I had seen death only once, and that had already thought me that I needed to be strong.

Now for the first 8 years of my life, I lived with my mother, but after she had died I was basically left all alone as my mother's sister wanted nothing to do with me so the government put me in a foster home where I lived for 6 years and decided to move out to a one-room apartment, I had to learn how to live on my own, so that meant I needed to know how to cook and clean, now cooking would be quite handy right now, but I didn't really have much of an idea what was edible in this forest, our forest had many kinds of herbs in it, including poisonous herbs, so I didn't trust my knowledge to be enough to safely pick eatable herbs.

I first needed to gather some kind of tool so that I could hunt small birds or rabbits, I headed out to find a nice sized rock that I could sharpen, the Nara forest wasn't very far from the mountain that the Hokage faces were carved in, so finding rocks would be a fairly easy thing, and on how to sharpen them, the easiest way would be to use another rock.

after finding two rocks both larger than my hand I started bashing them together making sure that one of them would get an edge, after an hour or so I finished my make-shift knife, now would be the hardest part, I already knew how to skin animals as I was quite a good cook in my past life and I had worked a part-time job at a butcher and there I learned what parts of the animal were eatable and how to skin animals, but one thing I didn't quite know was how to hunt animals, I didn't have the tools to set up a trap and it would take too long to gather the materials used to make traps like ropes.

The easiest thing I could do was hunt as predators did, wait until an animal approached me and take it by surprise, by the time it would think of running I would already have killed it, but again it was already well past noon and the sun would go down in a couple of hours, while it was still summer the days were beginning to get somewhat shorter and night would come faster, so at best I had another 6 or 7 hours of daylight left.

I decided that rabbits would be the easiest thing to catch and find in a small amount of time, I got fairly lucky and managed to find a rabbit in around 20 minutes, now the only thing I had to make sure is that I needed to be silent as possible.

This made me remember the lessons I had with dad, we started the meditation training around 3 weeks ago, since then I managed to silence my steps and breathing considerably, but the same couldn't be said about my clothes, again I was quite lucky as I was wearing dark green clothing giving me some camouflage and I was wearing a T-shirt so I wouldn't make as much sound with clothes, while my pants were long they wouldn't be much of a problem, and ninja sandals were designed to make the least amount of sound possible, so I was quite positive that the rabbit wouldn't hear me.

The meditation training we did was basically replacing sleep with meditation as meditation made me enter a sleep-like state, in the first two weeks I would just fall asleep after sitting in one position for an hour, but in the third week I was beginning to get more and more control over how deep my body fell asleep, the meditation we did basically made our body think we were asleep so our body would slow down, but our brain wouldn't slow down, it would only increase in activity as it saved long term memories, your body would be flooded with hormones, like for example melatonin and growth hormones, the way to stay awake in this meditation process would be to make sure that the melatonin levels in the body don't increase, the blood pressure in the body would decrease and the body would slow down.

Now in the last week, I managed to stay awake and I had basic control over how awake I would be, this, in turn, would allow me to lower my presence, while it wouldn't disappear it would allow me to slow my heartbeat to 5 beats a minute in comparison to the usual 60 to 70 beats per minute, this would make my presence very hard to notice.

I started slowing down my breathing, I still needed to focus very hard on this and it took me 25 minutes, in a real fight this would be unacceptable, my dad could do it in seconds yet it took me 25 minutes, I would need to spend more time training this, but I didn't let that bother me.

I slowly approached the rabbit that had only moved slightly, I kept close to the shrubbery, I managed to get very close, I was basically on the rabbit, I readied my knife and dashed at the rabbit as fast as I could, too bad that I didn't consider that the rabbit wasn't blind, it saw me dashing at him, and just like that, I lost my prey.

It wouldn't do much beating myself up over it, so, I just headed out to search for another rabbit, this time it took me a lot longer to find a rabbit again, but after 30 minutes of searching, I found one.

I again entered meditation mode and approached the rabbit, this time I made sure that I attacked it while it was looking away from me, and this time I actually managed to catch it.

So after two hours, I had managed to catch a rabbit, while it wasn't much it would be enough for the night and perhaps the morning.

The next course of action would be finding some method to set a fire, for that I needed dry wood, which was fairly easy to find, the next thing I had to figure out was how to set the actual fire, I figured I needed leaves and something that I could set the actual fire with.

The only problem was that I didn't know how to set a fire which right now was a big problem, I only had minimal knowledge on how to make a fire, both in my own and the original Shikamaru's memories didn't have much knowledge about fires, the only thing I knew was that I needed to fastly rub two pieces of wood together.

So that is what I did, and lo and behold I managed to light a piece of wood, I quickly put that in the pit of wood and leaves that I had made before starting the fire.

I didn't consider finding clean drinkable water; luckily, the water of the naruto world was mostly uncontaminated, meaning if I could find a fast-flowing river meant that I had safe and drinkable water.

Now for food, I had managed to skin the rabbit relatively well, although I was quite concerned about getting salmonella, I had managed to somewhat clean the meat, I kept the skin and fur as I could store the meat I would make in it.

I quickly set up a rock over the fire, with it I'd be able to fry the meat, I fried all the meat while making sure that the fire wouldn't be put out, I gathered quite a bit of wood so I could keep the fire alive for the rest of the night.

The meat was very bland as I didn't have any kind of seasoning it was still food and I wasn't a picky eater either.

I sat down and started meditating, I managed to get through the first day fairly easily, now I only needed to wait until mom decided that I did a good enough job and actually started teaching me things.

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The longest chapter yet, we will get mom's POV next chapter and something else will also happen although probably not next in the next chapter.