The little wolf, lay lazily, it wanted to sleep, after the day Rana just had. But its stomach told it that it had to go feed on something. Yawning, the little wolf stood up, the body full of energy but the eyes full of exhaustion. ‘How is my poor soul going to survive this’, he thought.

Today he pickup the scent of some kind of bird. It looked like a some kind of big chicken with a beautiful red feather dress. The little wolf pounced out of a bush onto the bird. The red bird noticed him but it was already too late, as it tried to fly off, its head was ripped off by the wolf jumping by. Blood splatter everywhere, the red bird looking like a beautiful fountain.

Enjoying his lunch, Rana felt the weird energy again. This time it was a thick continues rope of energy flowing through his body, refreshing his soul. The energy this time was different it was a lot stronger, maybe because it was not an old creature? Not only that, it contained something warm, burning even. As he absorbed the energy while eating, his bearing changed slightly without him noticing.

After finishing up and resting, he thought of what he should do with the rest of the day. He decided that he would try to find out how much food there was because he felt that in this closed environment there could not be too much food. He also wanted to give a try at getting out of here.

Knowing the terrain pretty well by now, and having got better at controlling this body of his, he sneaked around looking for the different animals and other food sources around. There were mainly rabbits and hares, intermixed with some smaller preys such as smaller birds and rodents. Sadly there was no other red bird around, that big chicken had been very tasty. All in all, it did not seem he would be able to survive her for long, there was enough food for about a week maybe two…

This mad him feel some pressure he really had to get out before then, Rana did not want to spend weeks in a nightmare in wish he would slowly starve night after night. Thinking about this, Rana shuddered. He quickly left to the spot he had chosen to climb. He slowly climbed onto a rock at the bottom of the wall, from there he jumped onto a small ledge with a patch of grass on it. He then looked around for a ledge that was a bit higher. The little wolf jumped almost missing the ledge, only landing with his front paws. He tried to push himself up, clawing the wall with his back paws, but he slowly slipped off and fell. Luckily he had just started climbing and was not that high yet, so he got away with some minor scratches.

This was definitely not the solution. He had to train his jumping skills first. So he went around to find a place with a good low route that he could use for training. After a while he found a good spot and started training. Two hours later, he fell off the cliff completely exhausted. Lying there he felt the energy he had absorbed this morning slowly rotating around the body of the small wolf, reinforcing his body and soul. Rana felt this was strange, it couldn’t be that this was the infamous Qi all those webnovels wrote about?

He slowly started to try to control the stream of energy flowing around, it seemed possible but somehow he did not have the knowledge and experience needed to do that. He gave up and let the energy run its natural course slowly breathing in and out. His body recovered at a pretty fast pace. But now he felt very thirsty and somewhat hungry. Rana walked to the pond and drank some water. Rana looked at himself, he seemed to have grown already quite a bit bigger. Also, his pelt that had been grey before had turned white. Also, some red pattern seemed to start emerging from it but it was not very pronounced. He was quite happy with his looks that seemed fancy.

He then went and caught a rabbit, which to his surprise now seemed quite easy. By then the sun had set, the sky went from red to starry. Rana went back to his sleeping place under the old oak. He looked up at the sky, the stars were beautiful. He had never seen such a sky before because of the light pollution that was present on earth.

Enjoying the view, as he slowly drifted off into sleep, it seemed to him as if the oak was embracing him, warm energy flowing around him. He fell asleep feeling safe and protected.