Chapter 177: A Whole Year
Gray was the one who discovered the changes in her body even earlier than Su Ran.
For this kind of change, it showed great joy!
Because whether growing taller or having a larger frame, in a beastman’s eyes, it all represents greater health.
Su Ran actually felt happy about these changes in her own body too!
Living in such a primitive environment, being too skinny would instead affect her quality of life, while being stronger would make her life much easier!
So as long as it didn’t make her grow into a big and burly figure, she welcomed this renewed development of her body.
However, the only thing that worried Su Ran was that she didn’t know how long this body development would last.
She didn’t even know the reason for her body’s renewed development.
But she had some guesses.
As the saying goes, at twenty-three, one grows in spurts.
When she arrived on this continent, she was twenty-three in nominal age and only twenty-two in actual age.
And if she was really still growing because of this reason.
Then during this year, the exercise from running around the forest to stockpile food, climbing up and down, might have just provided some momentum for her renewed body development.
Just like what she had seen on her friend before.
Clearly a year ago, her friend’s hands had very obvious little girl features, slender and fair, but just because she went home after graduation and lived there for half a year, doing farm work for the family the whole time, by the time they met again, one could clearly see that her originally slender fingers had much thicker joints.
And at that time, her friend was exactly twenty-two years old.
So for a girl, at twenty-two or twenty-three, perhaps the bones in her body haven’t fully developed yet?
Su Ran guessed like this, and the worry in her mind about whether she would ultimately grow into a big and burly figure flashed by.
After all, she couldn’t stop whatever happened in the end anyway, and looking at Gray, it probably wouldn’t dislike her.
However… Su Ran raised her hand and touched her smooth cheek.
Just like her previous guesses, certain natural factors in this world really slowed down human aging.
After going through the hot summer, the cool autumn, and the harsh winter, in two Earth years without applying any skincare products to her face, her skin was still smooth and tender as ever, even feeling more delicate to the touch.
Even the skin tanned from last summer had recovered after one winter.
This made her feel relieved about the possibility of her skin becoming dry and rough from the summer sun and winter cold winds; at least for now, there was no need to worry.
Because for her, even excessive changes in body shape wouldn’t matter.
But as a girl, she still didn’t want her face, which was fairly pretty among people, to become rough and unsightly too.
At the end of spring, Su Ran finally took off the sweater on her body.
The clothes on her body changed to a single piece of animal hide clothing, and she would add a single-layer animal hide jacket in the mornings and evenings.
As for the clothes on Gray’s body, they changed to a thin single-layer animal hide short-sleeved shirt made of red-skinned pig hide.
Now it had already entered the end of spring, and in another month or so, the season would turn to summer.
And this transition from spring to summer was also exactly one full year since Su Ran arrived in this world, calculated by this world’s time.
Su Ran carried the backpack and walked and stopped in the woods, and when she reached that familiar red fruit shrub, she lightly and quickly put the picked red fruit into the backpack.
The surrounding scenery was exactly the same as in her memory from a year ago.
After picking the red fruit, she turned around and walked back along the return path.
When passing by the nearby green soap fruit grove, she reached out and picked two slightly larger green soap fruit from the tree and put them into the backpack.
She was reluctant to eat the fruit on the two green soap fruit trees at home, but the ones outside could be picked to vary the taste.
Just as she was about to walk out of this woods, a sound of branches scraping came from above the bushes behind her.
Su Ran turned her head to look, and just saw Gray carrying a white-headed sheep jump down from the treetops in two hops.
It landed steadily on the ground, and the white-headed sheep on its shoulder was still constantly struggling and bleating.
If one looked closely, one could see that this white-headed sheep had no wounds on its body. But its four hooves were tightly bound with tough shrub strips, showing signs of struggling to the point of breaking skin.
Su Ran’s home already had a male white-headed sheep, and this current one was a female sheep, to be brought back for breeding to produce lambs.
Besides the white-headed sheep, for the female four-eared ox at home, Gray had also caught a male four-eared ox to raise together.
And those red birds and white wild chickens that, before spring, had been eaten down to just over a dozen by Su Ran and Gray.
After wild chickens and birds gradually returned to live in the woods recently, Gray quickly replenished the number of red birds and white wild chickens in the bird house.
But besides that, for animals like red-skinned pigs, two-tailed beasts, and dwarf deer, Su Ran didn’t have Gray catch any more to raise.
Because Su Ran felt that raising red-skinned pigs in this season wasn’t cost-effective.
In this season not lacking prey, if an animal had no other outputs from its body, there really was no need to raise it.
And she raised four-eared oxen and white-headed sheep because she wanted milk from the four-eared oxen, and sheep milk and sheep wool from the white-headed sheep!
Now Su Ran and Gray weren’t in the woods near home, but had come to the seaside early in the morning.
During winter, after eating the last bit of stored seafood at home, up until today, it was the first time Su Ran and Gray came to the seaside to “go seaside foraging”.
However, since they came early, Su Ran didn’t rush to look for seafood, but carried the backpack to stroll around the woods first, wanting to see if she could get any forest food mystery boxes.
Unfortunately, this woods had already been fully explored by her last year, with no new discoveries.
Instead, Gray, not long after entering the woods, discovered a white-headed sheep herd not far away, and then caught this white-headed sheep in front of them.
The two returned together to the rain shelter by the seaside, and Su Ran poured the red fruit and green soap fruit from the backpack onto the wooden floor of the rain shelter.
Then she found a rope, looped one end around the neck of the white-headed sheep Gray caught, and tied the other end to a pillar of the rain shelter, to prevent the white-headed sheep from breaking free from the bindings on its legs and escaping while she and Gray went to pick seafood.
Then she picked up the backpack again, turned her head to look at Gray who was squatting on the side drinking water from the wooden jar they brought: “Gray, let’s go to the reef group and see if there are still scallops.”
“Okay, woo~”
Gray tilted its head back, gulped gulp drank more than half the jar of cool boiled water, then nodded, stood up, pulled Su Ran, and walked toward the reef group.
