Blossom

I woke up to a chilling breeze the day after Irnoma left. I immediately hugged myself, even though I was in a sleeping bag. When I got out of my tent, I shifted my clothes to a thick, warm outfit. I was expecting autumn to come, but did it really have to come this quickly?

After my morning run, I had already taken my jacket off because I was sweating. My stomach growled, and I walked to where Irnoma's house was. But when I got there, the realization finally dawned upon me.

Irnoma had left. And that doesn't only mean that his house wasn't in that clearing any more, but that I wouldn't have my daily breakfast prepared for me. Seriously, why didn't he teach me to make my own breakfast before leaving? I don't even have any ingredients either! How am I supposed to get food?

I cursed out loud, not afraid that anybody would hear me. Feeling cold again, I put my jacket back on and walked into my orchard, gazing at my trees. The berries… they should do for now.

I looked up to Lazarus, my first and healthiest tree. With my hand hovering over its thick trunk, I pushed it, forcing it to grow out berries. The tree flowered in the cold and produced many bundles of dark blue cherry-like fruits. I grabbed a handful, stuffed them into my mouth, and savored the all-too-sweet taste.

But as I ate, I knew one thing: I couldn't rely on eating these berries forever. It wasn't just their sweetness that I couldn't bear eating every day, but also the fact that I needed a balanced diet.

My hand immediately went to the knife Irnoma gave me yesterday. Was this what he had meant when he said it might "come in handy?" Would I have to go hunting?

Suddenly, images of blood on my hand and my knife tearing into a boar's flesh came to me. That sent me all the way back to the beginning. The school shooting. The pain in my shoulders. The blood pooling under me. A headache formed in my head, and the berries I had just eaten started to come up. I shook my head, forcing those thoughts out. For now, I will eat berries, and I will only resort to meat when my body is ready.

In the next few days, the weather changed much quicker than I had planned. One day the trees were lush and green, the next they turned yellow, and after that, they turned bright red and started falling. By the end of the week, very few trees still had leaves stuck to their branches.

The temperature also continued to drop, coercing me to give an upgrade to my tent and sleeping bag. And after another week, snow fell for the first time since I had arrived here. Even more, the last time I had seen snow was probably years ago. It had never snowed back where I used to live, and the only times I had touched snow was during vacations. So now, I looked in amazement as the small white puffs slowly fell to the ground, covering the grass and making the floor white.

But with the thick snow floor came shivering nights, and these felt even worse than those cold summer nights when I had no experience camping outside. When I woke the first day to thick sheets of snow around and even over my small home, my hair was frozen, and my body refused to get out of my mildly warm sleeping bag into the stinging, freezing air.

I was thankful that there were no snowstorms or raging winds, though. The weather only consisted of either the light fluttering of snowflakes or a clear sky that shined blinding light off the white ground. Before long, I had gotten used to walking through the snow in my thick apparel.

Still, I continued to eat berries from my trees. Each time I forced them to grow leaves, flower, and fruit, the leaves would immediately wither and fall the next day. In one extreme case, I was horrified to find a tree dead the day after fruiting it. That taught me to always push trees back into their dormant phase while growing them in the cold winter.

The sweetness of the berries still filled my hunger each time I had them, but I longed for something fresh. I had managed to survive only on these fruits for three weeks after Irnoma's departure before I finally decided to go on a hunt.

After some wandering in the forest now filled with pure white, my feet making a satisfying crunch with every step, I arrived at a small indentation in the land. Here, the ground went down steadily into a place where a group of deer lived. I had found the small herd a few days ago during one of my runs and was quite surprised at how conveniently close it was to my camp. If this place was prepared by Irnoma just to give me some animals to hunt, then I was thankful to him.

I watched the weak animals closely, then looked back at my shining violet dagger. I thought back to the incident with the boars again, but I took several deep breaths as those images started to come back. I couldn't be pulled back by my past anymore. I had to kill these animals to survive.

When I was ready, I bent my legs in a starting position, then ran through the thick snow. The deer immediately noticed me, and without even looking over, they ran.

With their light bodies and quick legs, the deer were able to shoot through the snow, leaving me, who was running like I was wading through deep waters, in the dust. But I already had a plan for this.

An aura formed around my body, and outside, the deer seemed to slow. I knew that wasn't the case, though. I had simply slowed my own speed through the timeline, so now I could run up to five times faster. I smiled, all my worries now gone, and charged at the closest deer.

As I ran, the snow seemed to push out of the way in slow motion. After some effort, I stepped up to the top of the thick snow. With my supernatural speed, the snow wouldn't have enough time to fall down from my weight. Now I could easily run across and reach my prey.

The deer turned its head slowly. Its eyes were filled with distress as I closed in on it. And with one final leap, I sent my dagger into its neck. The deer immediately fell limp. Blood sprayed out and painted the snow red.

I pulled my dagger out with ease and dropped into the snow on my back. The blade had ripped through the skin of the deer without any feeling of resistance whatsoever. Just what else could it do? I didn't expect it could help me this much.

I raised my knife up over me to examine it. A drop of blood dripped down and splattered over my face, and it was only then when the dirty metallic odor of fresh blood finally hit me. I immediately took the dagger away from my vision. No. I couldn't let myself throw up now. I took several deep breaths through my mouth, trying to clear my mind, but the strong smell still came.

Half an hour passed as I tried to calm myself. I took off my bloody gloves and washed my knife in the snow.

An hour passed. I was glad that it was winter because if it were still the hot summer, the smell of rotting dead deer would have become unbearable.

Two hours passed. I really wasn't sure what I was still doing lying there. I didn't want to sit up and look at what I had done to the animal. I didn't want to pick the corpse up and bring it back to my tent to cook it.

Four hours passed. The final thing that got me was a growl from my stomach. My mouth watered. I sniffed in the fragrance of meat. I had to eat. I hadn't had fresh, salty meat in days. What did it taste like again?

With determination, I finally sat up. When I looked at the dead deer, what came wasn't disgust, but hunger. The now pink snow surrounded the deer like a large plate. Dry blood covered its neck like barbecue sauce. A drop of saliva came out of my mouth and I wiped it off with a red sleeve. Maybe in just two hours, no a single hour, I'd finally be able to eat a proper meal.

I quickly slung the large deer over my shoulder and walked back to my home through the sand. At the end of each and every meal for two days after that, I had a full stomach.

***

Three months after I last saw Irnoma, the temperature started to rise again. Slowly, the snow melted, revealing the long-forgotten grass. Now, I could finally grow leaves back onto my trees, but instead, I decided to let them come back to life naturally as spring arrived.

In the past few months, I had grown the trees in my area to become even taller than the trees in Irnoma's forest. And towering above them all was Lazarus, which had grown far stronger and broader than the rest. Its trunk had gotten so thick that it would take over a dozen people together to hug it.

As the leaves came back out from the branches, I admired my work and told myself that this would be enough for now. I wanted to wait for them to all blossom and fruit together. That would be a spectacle I hoped to surprise Irnoma with when he did come back.

I still planted new trees, though. I had to exercise my temporal strength somehow. Now I could grow a batch of over ten trees at a time, which dramatically increased my efficiency. However, I knew it was still not even close to what Irnoma could do.

When the buds on the trees finally started to bloom, I was still waiting for Irnoma's return. Each day went by with me sitting there, admiring the thousands of small red-orange flowers twenty meters high in the branches of Lazarus. He would come home soon, right? He wouldn't miss the blossoms that made my first tree look like it was in flames, right?

Wrong. As spring went on, petals rained down from the tall trees, covering the ground in mixtures of red, yellow, blue, and purple, until they stopped falling altogether. Up in the branches, I saw small green fruits starting to grow in size.

By that time, half a year after he had left, and eleven months since he had taken me in, I had already given up on the thought that he would return.

I continued to live my life, training myself with no end. When the fruits ripened, I picked them from the branches. From Lazarus, I collected basketfuls of dark-blue berries and set them down in the clearing where Irnoma's house once stood in a temporal freeze. They could probably last for months.

And at the one year mark since I had arrived at this world, I had planted a total of a hundred thousand trees. That day, during another typical morning run, I stumbled upon a familiar scene. Emerging from the forest, I gazed in awe at a small log cabin at the center of a large clearing, throwing me back a year ago to my first day.