A New Life In The Beast World-Chapter 81: Setting Up Traps

"Oh?" Serena raised an eyebrow. "What seems to be the problem?"

"It’s not much of a problem, but more trying to understand how deep we should dig." Elder Samuel explained. "Perhaps you could check out the one we’ve completed and see how it looks."

"Lead the way." Serena responded.

She was surprised that they were already setting the traps up. She expected it to at least take them a day or two to find the manpower to get the work done. But Elder Samuel somehow managed to get everything organized in just a few hours.

Elder Samuel gave her a smile before he led the way to the trap they were setting up some distance away. Serena spotted three rabbit beastmen covered in dirt standing over some kind of hole under a massive tree.

When they stopped in front of it, Serena gazed down at the deep hole. It was quite wide, enough for a person to fall length wise and even deeper. However, she needed to confirm the depth with the beastmen themselves.

"How deep is the hole exactly?" Serena asked, glancing over at the rabbit beastman.

"About the height of Johnny." The rabbit beastman with white ears answered, pointing over at the tallest beastman.

Serena pursed her lips. Johnny was quite tall, but it wasn’t good enough. They needed to make it deep enough that anyone who fell in would have a difficult time getting out.

"You need to make it a few meters deeper." Serena stated. "Enough that you need to use vines to pull someone out. Once you’re done, you can add the wood sticks, but be sure to bury half the stick into the dirt."

"Is that to make the stick more stable?" Elder Samuel asked.

Serena nodded her head. "Yes.... By the way, have you made them yet?"

"We just started." Elder Samuel answered, pointing at a stack of wooden sticks lying in a pile a few meters away. "Do you want to check on them?"

"Sure." Serena responded, walking over to the pile.

Meanwhile, the rabbit beastmen set back to work digging the hole deeper. Serena knelt down in front of the pile of sticks, grabbing one of the pointed ones. She tested it by touching it with the tip of her finger. A bead of blood quicked appeared.

Much to Elder Samuel’s horror. "Serena?! What are you doing?!"

She set the stick back down, straightening up to look at the elderly rabbit beastman. "I’m just testing to see how sharp they are. I think they work just fine being that sharp."

"Alright... But did you need to test it like that..." Elder Samuel asked anxiously, glancing over at her left hand. "I could have easily done it instead."

Serena lifted up her left hand and showed her index finger which she had tested the sharpest of the stick on. "It’s fine. Look, the bleeding is already gone and it didn’t even hurt."

"That’s not the..." Elder Samuel started, pausing with a sigh upon realizing that Serena wasn’t listening. Instead he continued and said, "You should take better care of yourself... I’m happy you want to help, but not at the cost of your well-being. You may think it’s nothing, but Kiro needs his sister around."

Serena felt Elder Samuel was being a tad dramatic, but figured it was probably because of the whole ’beastwomen are precious’ thing this world had going on. Hard, manual labor and injuries were seen like it was the end of the world.

Granted, this village tended to be more open-minded about beastwomen doing things beyond giving birth, but that was only because every hand was needed to get things done.

Many tribe and village beastwomen didn’t have the luxury of lazing around like the city beastwomen did. Thus they compromised to mostly doing light tasks like watching cubs or making things.

Heavier labour only really happened during the harvest season when everyone was needed to prepare for the cold season ahead. Other than that, beastwomen had a bit more freedom to do what they wanted, leaving the harder tasks to their beast husbands.

"Alright... I understand." Serena finally said to ease the rabbit beastman’s worry. "I’ll be more careful next time."

"Good." Elder Samuel smiled at her. "Now why don’t we head back? I don’t want to waste anymore of your time... You must be busy."

"I’m just doing some foraging." Serena stated, a thought suddenly crossing her mind. "Speaking of which... Do you know any good plants that store easily for a long time? I already have some brown roots, orange roots and purple roots, but I’d like to add a few more plants."

She’d been trying to figure out a way to get more knowledge on good vegetables to get and suddenly realized that Elder Samuel would have a wealth of plant knowledge from his life experience.

And seeing that she was constantly helping out, Serena was sure the elderly rabbit beastmen would be happy to give her some of that knowledge. Of course she could be wrong considering how some beastmen guarded their knowledge, but she doubted Elder Samuel was like that.

"Hmmm...." Elder Samuel furrowed his eyebrows as he thought. He then clicked his fingers and exclaimed, "Perhaps you can try some of those long, orange squash.... I think there was a patch of them a bit east of where you were. Hold on..."

Elder Samuel went over to the other rabbit beastmen and chatted with them for a few minutes. Once he got what he wanted from them, he returned to where Serena was standing.

"Come on." Elder Samuel stated, waving a hand. "I’ll show you where the patch is.... I think you may like them. They work well when roasted, but you can also put them in water and boil them over a fire. And because they’re soft once cooked, if you mash them up, they’re a great food for cubs."

Serena raised her eyebrows. That was certainly some interesting information that she was sure to make a note of. It was always good to have different ways to make something. The same thing all the time could get boring.

Or that’s just me being greedy... Serena silently thought to herself. I used to have the same nutrient pack all the time without a problem, but now I want to eat different types of food. This world really is making me do strange things...