8.

The next week for Linael passed in a similar way. Every morning he did a warm-up routine, then ate breakfast and headed into the woods.

He hastily made a bow. Nothing outstanding - just a bent stick with a stretched kapron rope. The arrowheads were made from pieces of thick tin, and the arrows themselves were made from straight rods. Even with such a miserable bow, he managed to get his food in the woods: now a hare or a bird. Now there was no shortage of meat.

Of course, Dima was breaking the law about hunting, because it is forbidden to hunt with a bow, and even without a hunting ticket, but who could control him in the wilderness? Gamekeepers rarely come here. And it can be taken for a bow if you have a great imagination, and to use it is realistic only with the skill of a forest ranger. But that was the idea.

Karpov was not going to pay enormous fines if forest inspectors suddenly found themselves in their territory. It did not matter, envious neighbors, for example, former drinking buddies, out of the goodness of their hearts would denounce it. He could always lie that it was not a bow but a toy for motor training.

Sometimes he was successful at fishing, aided by a small shabby net. It was the result that mattered to the elf, not sitting on the shore with a fishing rod for a long time. He hid the net on the bank of the river and did not carry it with him, in order not to get fined by the fish guards.

From the forest he brought not only meat and fish but also a backpack full of fungus, oak and birch twigs for the bath besom. He prepared meat for preservation: smoked, dried.

But the main thing in the forest walks was something else. Each time Linael found a new tree, which became a donor of life force. One could not take prana from the same tree often, otherwise it would wither away, so he had to wind kilometers.

Healing was slow and creaky... my knees. The knee did not want to heal in any way. A drop of life force wasn't enough to heal an injury like this. It required a serious infusion that an untrained human body could not withstand. Or magic. But for now there was only one option available to the man: to draw the life force of plants for years, gradually increasing his ability to capture energy. So he was faced with a choice: either to use all his powers to heal or to restore his abilities. In principle, there was no choice. Understandably, given the transience of the human's life, Linael chose the latter. In general, his health was in a relatively good condition, and his leg... well, it was limping, and it hurt after the exertion, so it was not a problem. He could endure such inconveniences for decades. He was a hoomane and somehow he can endure life in this body.

The next morning, in addition to warming up, Linael spent an hour and a half meditating, trying to feel his soul. As expected, it didn't work from the get-go. That was why he was not upset, for he had originally hoped for a long time.

In general, elves, because of their longevity, are almost never in a hurry. They do all their work slowly, but with high quality. When you know that a long life lies ahead, there is no sense in haste. But Linael had to adjust to the accelerated pace of mortal life, for he could feel the cold breath of near death in the back of his throat. He had a measly thirty or forty years to spare, which to someone who had lived a millennium was like a few weeks. In the blink of an eye those years would be gone.

No matter how much he wanted to devote all his time to meditation, living in a crib was disgusting to the firstborn. Willy-nilly, he had to make a life for himself.

In the absence of money he had to use improvised means and do the work that did not require financial investments. He devoted the day entirely to the vegetable garden: he uprooted weeds, dug beds, dug up and sawed down trees. In the evening, before going to bed, he meditated again.

There was so much work in the yard that there was enough for the next day. And yet Karpov had no seeds to plant. But it didn't last long. He went to his neighbors, and they kindly gave him various seeds. In this wilderness, people did not go to stores for seeds, but harvested them from their own gardens. Naturally, they had surpluses to share. What is more, the virtuous old ladies shared some of the sprouts that had already sprouted. So the next day he was out of the seedbeds again, planting tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, and herbs.

Subsequently, Dmitry alternated between hikes in the woods for chaga and branches for bath brooms and tending to the vegetable garden and minor repairs. Where the remains of the fence to correct, where the earth to level. The barn was repaired, the house was renovated a bit.

The only thing that remained unchanged was training and meditation. And in the woods, he did not forget to borrow prana from the trees to improve his body, and sometimes to catch an animal or a fish.

Dmitry, unlike his neighbors, did not celebrate the May holidays. He wandered through the woods in his old schedule, despite the rainy weather. Gathering chaga became more difficult, as he could not always hit it with an axe bolted to a long pole with a rope. Sometimes he had to climb the slippery trunks of birches to a height of five or seven meters.