Huh? Was she really that aloof?
Seeing the girl across the way holding up her board, the corners of her mouth slightly raised in an almost-smile, Nick couldn't tell for a moment whether she was serious.
He thought of the secret liquor recipe and still JD had left him. Although potato vodka didn't exactly count as a Russian specialty, he had reason to believe that some of his predecessors stationed at the East and West Towers hadn't strictly followed the ban on communication either.
Over this time, Nick had inspected every inch of the watchtower several times and confirmed that there were no surveillance devices.
In other words, the so-called rules here depended entirely on the tower keepers' self-discipline. If negligence left a gap in the canyon's defenses, they would pay with their own lives. The "stray dog program" JD had mentioned was there as a fallback.
If she didn't want to chat, then so be it. Nick was just a little disappointed. Seeing that she was still standing at the telescope watching for his reaction, he raised a hand and waved, then went back inside.
What Nick didn't know was that after he turned straight around and went back to sleep, the girl in the East Tower across from him widened her eyes in surprise, her red lips parting slightly, before puffing out her cheeks in irritation at a certain man's clueless behavior.
Over the following days, Nick began brushing up on some of the hunting skills he had learned in the military in his previous life, such as making wire snares to catch rabbits, identifying game trails in the woods, distinguishing different animals' tracks, and trying to follow them.
After two weeks of effort, he had bagged a pile of wild rabbits, a buck that had just reached maturity, and a wild boar weighing three to four hundred jin.
Rabbit meat wasn't very nutritious, but spicy rabbit heads and cold spicy rabbit made excellent snacks to satisfy his cravings. There was no way he could eat the deer and wild boar by himself, and they wouldn't fit in the refrigerator either, so he could only salt all the meat.
Still, these two large animals, fattened up for autumn, provided him with plenty of fat, enough for his everyday cooking.
Unfortunately, almost all the pelts went to waste. Nick tried cleaning the deer and boar hides with wood ash and then curing them with saltpeter, but all he ended up with was a stinking pile of rubbish that he could only throw into the canyon.
His only finished product was one hideously ugly rabbit-fur hat, and it didn't smell particularly good either.
Another month passed in a flash. By the time Nick finished his second routine report, November had arrived.
The rain grew more frequent, each autumn shower bringing another chill. As temperatures near the canyon gradually approached freezing, Nick rarely left the watchtower anymore except for his daily patrols, exercise, and tending the vegetable patch.
His winter supplies were nearly ready. All he had left to do was harvest the last crop of radishes before the temperature dropped below zero and store them in the bunker's armory.
Other crops, such as potatoes and chilies, would have to wait until next spring to be planted.
These days, the fireplace at the top of the tower never went out. Nick stayed tucked away in his warm room, working out how to make liquor, and had achieved some results.
But as the weather grew colder, the girl in the East Tower across the way also wore more and more clothing, leaving a certain someone who occasionally went to the observation scope to check on his female neighbor a little disappointed.
For over a month, neither side had made contact again, but every so often, they would take a look at each other.
Yes, Nick wasn't the only one who frequently checked on the heroine who needed rescuing. She, too, would secretly watch with interest while he was busy skinning and butchering his game, tending his vegetable patch, or making a scarecrow.
Nick knew because the day after he put up a scarecrow in his vegetable patch, made from worn-out clothes and a battered hat, along with dead branches and dry grass collected from the forest, a similar scarecrow went up across the way.
She had even put a little more care into hers than he had, decorating it with pretty pheasant feathers. There was so little green in that vegetable patch, though, that having a scarecrow made little difference.
The girl across the way, whose thoughts were rather hard to fathom, reminded Nick of the girl who had shared his desk at school in his previous life. For reasons he hadn't understood, she had refused to speak to him. They had sat on opposite sides of the dividing line drawn across their desk without exchanging a word, yet the little details of their everyday interactions had held a certain unspoken understanding.
To this day, Nick still couldn't figure out why that girl had secretly taken his hand during class, only to ignore him afterward as though they were strangers.
Just as he couldn't understand what the girl across the canyon was thinking now. He had clearly sent a friendly message, only to receive an icy rejection.
They might be the only two humans within dozens of kilometers. Even if they couldn't speak, chatting across the gap with writing boards would help relieve the boredom, wouldn't it?
After days of steady, overcast rain, the sun had finally shone brightly today. Even after nightfall, the sky remained clear, with the moon hanging high like a jade platter.
Nick had moved the dining table out onto the terrace. On it sat tonight's late-night snack: a few hand-torn strips of air-dried pork jerky, the last serving of spicy rabbit heads, and a small flask of potato vodka JD had left him.
The new liquor made according to his "predecessor's secret recipe" needed to ferment at around twenty to twenty-five degrees for at least twenty days. Nick had placed the glass fermentation jars beside the fireplace. In another two or three days, they should be ready for the still.
As he enjoyed his food and drink, leafing through Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, he looked up and noticed a light on the observation terrace of the East Tower across the way.
Something stirred in Nick. He got up and went over to the observation scope for a look, only to see the girl across the way lowering her head to blow out candles.
The candles were stuck into something that looked like a cake, and beside it stood a freshly opened bottle of red-label vodka.
Was today her birthday? Come to think of it, when had he last celebrated his own? Nick returned to his seat, a little dazed, and suddenly realized that he didn't seem to have celebrated a birthday in years.
After reaching adulthood in his previous life, he hadn't paid much attention to little things like birthdays. After he transmigrated, Aunt Mary had never celebrated his birthday either, worried that it would remind him of his parents, who had died in the car accident-the original owner of his body had been in that accident on his birthday.
By that reckoning, his last birthday celebration might well have been thirty or forty years ago.
Why did he suddenly feel like he'd become some ancient monster? Nick counted on his fingers. Adding his two lives together, he really was in his fifties and heading toward sixty.
He had never thought about this before. His mental age seemed to have always followed his physical age. At least so far, he hadn't felt like an old man. At most, he sometimes thought things through a little more and wasn't as prone to acting on impulse as he had been when he was young.
A bang from a gunshot interrupted Nick's wandering thoughts. He hurriedly wiped his hands, got up, and went to the observation scope, where he saw the girl across the way holding a writing board toward him.
"What's your name?"
The scene felt familiar, except that a month later, their roles had been reversed.
Nick thought for a moment, then went inside to find his own writing board and swiftly wrote a line on it: "We're not allowed to communicate!"
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