A day on the snowy mountain begins with shoveling snow. The weather on this island is usually cloudy or snowy. Unless the wind is strong, I head out early in the morning to clear the snow around the hut.
The snow shovel was already in the hut. It was likely an emergency supply. There were various other supplies kept there, enough to survive for at least a few days on a snowy mountain.
I am using them without the owner's permission, but I don't have the luxury of being reserved. When I first discovered the place, the entrance was locked. I wandered around for a while, wondering if someone was inside, but eventually, I gave in to the cold and broke in. Dust had piled up inside, and there were no signs of anyone having used it recently.
Among the supplies, the abundance of clothing and blankets was a lifesaver. My body... the insect body, doesn't seem to handle the cold very well. When I move around outside, my already slow movements become even more sluggish. It wasn't cold enough to kill me, but the girl, who has a human body, doesn't have it that easy.
Humans are creatures that cannot live on a snowy mountain while naked. Compared to other animals, they have very little body hair covering their skin; this is said to be an evolutionary trait to efficiently dissipate heat and increase endurance during exercise. In exchange, the races that expanded into cold regions adapted by creating clothes from animal furs and other materials.
Following that evolutionary process, I thought I would have to hunt animals and make clothes from their fur. However, I couldn't find any animals that looked like they would provide fur in the first place. Even if I did find them, I lacked the confidence to catch them. Finding this hut in such a situation was a stroke of luck.
The girl is wearing an oversized down jacket. Since it's baggy, my main insect body crawls into the gaps to stay warm. Because of that, her back is puffed up and looks a bit awkward. She also wears a full set of winter gear, including a knit hat, gloves, and boots. They were all a bit dingy, seemingly left untouched for a long time, but they were still usable.
Nearly a week has passed since I started living on this island. While there was a good supply of clothing and blankets, there wasn't much food. There were only a few days' worth of preserved foods like canned goods and dried items. Furthermore, though expiration dates were written on them, I don't know what year it is now, so they aren't reliable.
However, this wasn't an issue. My main insect body is an omnivore that doesn't care what it eats; even the bark of the trees growing nearby served as food. As for the girl, she didn't have to endure hunger while waiting for rescue either.
She doesn't grow weak even if she eats nothing. Her nutritional status never deteriorated.
The girl possessed several characteristics like this that were impossible for a human, or any living creature. She had been a mysterious existence since I first met her, but it seems she really isn't a normal human. I conducted some verifications regarding her biology.
First, she can live without eating or drinking. If my main body feels hunger, she feels hungry in sync with it, but if my main body is satisfied, that is enough for her. The same goes for sleep; it is synchronized with the senses of the main body. It is unclear if she herself is asleep while I am unconscious.
However, while she doesn't need to eat, it doesn't mean she requires no energy at all. That energy is the 'life force' held by the main body. This is just a word I've used for something I perceive intuitively, and I'm not certain what its true nature is. I'm calling it life force as a temporary name.
In other words, it seems the girl lives by draining life force from the main body. This is a supernatural interpretation that goes beyond concepts of being human or a biological organism, but there's no other way to describe it. Compared to the human common sense I possess, it is an obvious abnormality.
But then again, that knowledge itself was merely something I inherited, and there is no guarantee it is all true. Perhaps beings like this girl live quite naturally on Earth, and I simply didn't know about them.
Even though my life force is being drained, it doesn't impose a particular burden on me. Normally, the consumption is so small I wouldn't notice it unless I focused on it. However, there are cases where that consumption spikes all at once.
That happens when the distance between her and the main body grows too large. It's fine if we are about five meters apart. If we move further than that, the amount of life force drained increases, and it becomes harder to operate the girl's body. If we are separated by about a hundred meters, I become exhausted and unable to move. We are two hearts beating as one, or perhaps sharing the same fate... it seems she and I have entered a relationship where we cannot be physically separated.
Also, when the girl sustains a wound, a lot of life force is used for her recovery. That regenerative power is extraordinary; small scratches or cuts heal in an instant. Once, while walking around the island, I slipped and fell from a cliff, breaking one of her legs, but even such a major injury was completely healed in a matter of seconds.
The more severe the injury, the more life force is required for recovery. Using too much life force causes fatigue to accumulate, and if pushed too far, my consciousness becomes hazy. Furthermore, since this recovery happens automatically, I cannot tell it to wait, no matter how tired I am. It will drain me mercilessly until the wound is fully healed.
It's not just physical injuries; even if I cut her hair, it regrows to its original length in the same way. Parts of the body that have been separated, such as blood from a wound or cut hair, remain on the spot for a while, but they vanish without a trace after a certain amount of time.
There is no end to the mysterious points about the girl. I cannot leave her, my life force is drained, and I still don't know if she is an enemy or an ally. However, there is no doubt that she is an indispensable existence to me. The girl satisfies my self-consciousness of 'being human.' She was the only existence that acknowledged that.
The girl's senses and mine are connected. If I want to walk, she walks; if I want to hold something, she holds it. I could perform actions that looked the part. However, it wasn't perfect yet. I couldn't move the girl exactly as I thought in my head.
Every single movement was awkward and slow. Even if I tried to take a certain action, there was a significant lag before it was executed. And if I tried to take another action before the first one was properly carried out, she would freeze.
She's like a robot with a slow processing speed. I wanted to move her better. I want to be able to move in a more human-like way. To that end, I simply kept moving the body.
The daily chore of shoveling snow is also a part of my training. Once that's finished, I explore the island. The untouched, natural forests and mountains were a grand adventure just to walk through. I don't know how many times I lost my footing, tumbled, slipped, and got injured.
Furthermore, there was a rule to our shared senses. While I can freely toggle most of them on or off, I cannot block the sense of pain. Even if I cut off all other senses, the pain the girl receives always returns to the main body.
I have to experience pain every time I get hurt. At first, I thought it was nothing but a disadvantage. Why is it that the most unnecessary sense is the only one that cannot be disabled? I felt that such a rule wasn't needed.
But I think there was a meaning to it. Pain is a sense necessary for a living creature to survive. It is a signal to quickly perceive an abnormality that has occurred in the body. It is by no means something that is better off gone.
There was pain every time I failed. Because of that, I could learn to be careful next time. If I didn't feel any pain, my progress in training would likely have been much slower. Like a player character in a game losing HP upon taking damage, I might not have felt the reality of it.
Shoveling snow meant getting buried by snow falling from the roof; climbing mountains meant falling; walking in the forest meant getting lost... if I didn't have this body, I don't know how many times I would have faced death. But thanks to that effort, I've become quite accustomed to operating the body. Now, I can finish the snow shoveling in an hour. She is weak, but since the regenerative power keeps her from getting tired, I can manage if I do it efficiently.
I think I've become able to move well enough to lead a daily life. The next thing to consider is how to live from now on.
To grasp the current situation, I meticulously explored this island. I call it meticulous, but it was just an amateur wandering around aimlessly, so I don't know how accurate it is, but I investigated as much as possible. As I suspected, there are no signs of people living on this island.
However, it isn't an untouched wilderness that has never seen a human. I was able to find several man-made objects, such as the mountain hut where I live. On the coast, I also discovered a small wharf for docking boats, a place that suggested travel to and from the outside world.
If a boat comes, there might be an opportunity to leave the island. In that case, I might be rescued if I approach while pretending to be a castaway. Though, a problem arises in that scenario—I wouldn't be able to explain why I'm stranded in a place like this in the first place...
From the top of the mountain, I could see a shadow that looked like land across the sea. With this girl's body, it might even be possible to leave the island by swimming in the worst-case scenario. It really is the worst-case, though. I don't want to swim long distances in the midwinter sea.
I didn't have the confidence to lead a proper life once I left the island. That would mean living within human society. If I were to live all alone, there would be no need to leave this island.
Even if this body looks human, I myself am of a different species. It's beyond a difference in race. It likely isn't a place where I could live while exposing my secrets. How much would I be able to interact with people while hiding my true identity?
It seemed easier to just keep living hidden on the island without meeting anyone. However, before I knew it, I was climbing to the summit almost every day to look at the land across the sea. When I do, I can't sit still. I don't know why, but I become desperate to leave the island. A desire to cross this sea wells up within me.
To put it bluntly, my honest feeling was that I couldn't organize my own emotions. I both want and don't want to leave the island. I intend to stay on this island for a while longer, but I didn't even know what I would do after that.
While my hand had stopped shoveling snow because I was lost in thought, a single sparrow flew down and perched on top of the girl's head. I call it that because its size and cry resemble a sparrow, but its color is a snowy grey. It chirps 'chun chun.'
So far, it is the only animal I have seen on this island. It is quite used to people, and some even approach like this. Perhaps they've been fed by someone. Although, when I tried offering it a can of herring, it didn't even look at it.
"Chun chun!"
I make it a point to greet it by mimicking its cry whenever I see this bird. When I do, it chirps back at me. I can't help but feel a profound sense of emptiness at the sight of myself engaging in a chirping contest with a small bird. However, the fact that there is someone—even if it's just a bird—who gives some kind of response serves as a bit of emotional support.
Originally, birds started gathering when I was making sounds for vocal practice, and before I knew it, it had shifted into mimicking bird calls. Producing a voice is actually quite difficult. No animal uses as diverse a range of vocal expressions as humans do. I still haven't been able to manipulate my vocal cords and the shape of my oral cavity as I wish to utter words.
I have knowledge regarding language, but expressing it through a physical body requires a different kind of effort. It's probably close to the sensation of a foreign language that you can read and write but cannot speak. However, I felt that if I were in an environment where I could converse with humans, I would naturally become able to speak.
So, mimicking the bird is like a rehearsal for that. I'm definitely not just playing or doing something useless. Definitely.
"Chun..."
Under the snow clouds, upon a sea that was darker and deeper than ultramarine, there was a single boat. The small motorboat moved toward a certain island, carving white waves in its wake.
"Professor! Let's try some safe driving for a change! My tools of the trade are gonna get covered in salt spray!"
There were two men on the boat. One was a young man who looked to be in his twenties. The first thing that struck one about him was the large tattoo carved from his neck to his cheek. It was a design reminiscent of roaring flames. Despite his thug-like appearance, he was complaining to his companion in a pathetic voice.
The luggage the man called his 'tools of the trade' was photography equipment. An old SLR camera hung from his neck. He was hurriedly moving his gear further back where the spray wouldn't reach it, but it was a fact that the boat was traveling at a considerable speed.
The other man operating the boat showed no signs of slowing down. The man called 'Professor' was a middle-aged man with a sturdy build. He wore a grey flat cap and round glasses, and quite a few white hairs were mixed into his stubble and eyebrows, creating a mottled pattern. If he were made to hold a pipe, he might even look like a famous detective of old.
The deep wrinkles etched between his brows came from the expression he had kept scowling for many years, and they were now so deep they couldn't be smoothed out. His sharp gaze stared only at the boat's destination.
The name of that place was 'Shirosuzume Island.' Maintaining its maximum speed, the boat arrived at the island shortly after. As soon as he stepped onto the pier, the Professor was convinced that his 'bad feeling' had been right.
"There's an intruder."
"Eh? Seriously? How can you tell?"
"There are footprints right there."
The tattooed man looked where the Professor was pointing, but he couldn't see any footprints. Even if there were, it was currently snowing. They would be buried in fresh snow and vanish without a trace within a few hours. To find such traces so nonchalantly was abnormal.
—Chichichichichi.
Suddenly, the Professor made a sound like a bird's chirping. It was a cry so accurate one would mistake it for a small bird starting to chirp right then and there. When he finished, he remained silent and strained his ears.
To an ordinary person, it was an action that would make them wonder what on earth he was doing, but the tattooed man knew that he must not point that out now. Nothing could be heard by the man's ears, but the Professor was in the middle of listening to the 'voices' returning from the forest. To interfere with that would be to incur his wrath.
"...It seems the thief is still on the island."
The Professor pulled a rugged block of wood from his luggage. It was a crossbow. Compared to the one-meter base, the bow part was thick and spread wide horizontally; from a distance, it felt almost like a pickaxe. From its appearance, it didn't look like something that could be drawn by human strength. The bolts it fired were more like harpoons in size and shape than arrows.
"You stay hidden for a while."
"Don't need a hand?"
"Don't meddle. It would be a different story if you could keep up with my 'hunt,' though."
As soon as he left those words behind, the Professor vanished from the spot. It was a masterful 'Zetsu' that made it seem as if he had truly disappeared. And his technique of blending into the snow and forest trees, tracking and cornering his prey from the slightest traces, spoke of the fact that he was a natural-born hunter.
"Phew! As expected of a 'Single-Star' Poaching Hunter... scary, scary."