The snow was still falling outside. A few days ago, Wen Qian had built a snowman in the courtyard, and now the snowman had been covered with a white coat.
She sat on the kang (a heated brick bed), leaning against the heated wall, with a quilt covering her lower body. On the quilt lay a book, and she was reading a book about human anatomy.
When dealing with wild animals, she basically understood their structures.
However, she was not very familiar with the structure of the human body, so she needed to learn and understand it.
Sometimes, she would feel her own bones and joints, familiarizing herself with their locations and names.
Here, the chances of seeing people were much higher than in Xia Province, so she needed to prepare early.
If she encountered people who were difficult to get along with or even harbored ill intentions, she would still strike first for self-defense, just like before.
So it was necessary for her to learn how to use weapons and understand human anatomy.
Over the years, she had very little combat experience. Before the disaster struck, she had prepared by making crude firearms and ammunition.
During her time in Xia Province, she rarely used guns because she rarely encountered people, but she had enough materials to make ammunition.
From Xia Province to the Northern Forest, aside from searching for building materials in various cities, she also found abandoned firearms and ammunition along the way.
Some guns were abandoned because they had no bullets. These weapons could be found in the wild, in cities, and underneath some ruins.
Some guns were completely unusable, while some parts were still good. By assembling the good parts of the same type, Wen Qian had amassed quite a few usable guns.
As for ammunition, some were hidden in boxes in certain places, and the people who had hidden them never came back to retrieve them, until Wen Qian found them during her searches.
Now, Wen Qian had a wide variety of weapons in her possession. When hunting in the forest, she used well-made hunting rifles.
Compared to her previous unstable and unsafe firearms, these were much more reliable, and at least she didn't have to worry about them exploding in her hands.
She never revealed these unexpected acquisitions in front of others, and most of the time, she carried an old hunting rifle on her back.
Since she didn't lack ammunition, she didn't try to make it herself.
As for the book on human anatomy, she would flip through it every year to refresh her knowledge.
She often used guns, but if she didn't review the human anatomy for a long time, she would forget it again. And since she had no place to practice, winter was the time when she read the most books.
Wen Qian didn't really love studying. If she had a smartphone, computer, and the internet, she would never bother to look at books.
Unless she had a sudden pang of conscience, felt uneasy, or had a brief burst of motivation to improve herself, she would occasionally bring some books back to read, but she didn't necessarily finish the ones she brought back.
Now, things were different. In the current environment, reading had become an interesting activity to pass the long winter.
Fortunately, she didn't get tired of reading the book on human anatomy every year. Since she lacked practical experience, she had to be familiar with the theoretical knowledge.
While reading, she had placed a small table by the kang, on which was a plate of jerky. When she had nothing to do, she would take a piece and chew on it.
In the winter, although she still wanted to maintain the habit of eating three meals a day, she was indeed less active, and her stomach wasn't as hungry, so sometimes she would only eat two meals a day.
Of course, that was just her intention, but in reality, she ate quite a lot of snacks every day.
Her standard of living was still quite high, unlike her neighbors, who didn't have it as good.
Her neighbors had built a stove in the middle of their house and kept a fire going to prevent the indoor temperature from dropping.
And at night, they had to add firewood, otherwise, the breath they exhaled would be white when lying inside.
During the day, they would gather in one room to keep warm and do their chores.
They had to process fur and skin, make clothes, weave grass shoes, and there were many tasks to divide among themselves.
They would have two meals a day to save food.
At night, the grandmother and two grandsons would sleep together, while the couple slept in another room, so they had to burn more firewood than Wen Qian.
Because the weather had been consistently cold, they cut the fresh meat from their recent hunting into pieces and stored it in snow piles outside their home.
Their home was warm and lively, but not as comfortable as Wen Qian's.
They were constantly discussing what they would do when spring arrived.
Wen Qian was also a topic of their conversation, but mostly about the methods she used for preparing food.
They were quite envious of Wen Qian's standard of living, even though she had never intentionally flaunted it in front of them.
Wen Qian's home was always clean and tidy, and she herself always looked refreshing. When they first talked, Wen Qian mentioned that she was older than them.
However, she didn't tell them exactly how much older she was, and they didn't know Wen Qian's age, only that she looked much younger than them.
They had also speculated about where Wen Qian was from, and they thought she might have come from the plateau region.
After all, when they first met Wen Qian, they noticed that the two red patches on her face were very obvious features.
As she spent more and more time in the Northern Forest, Wen Qian's face didn't look as red anymore.
Additionally, because she had been applying the cheap, domestic moisturizer she had purchased years ago every day, her skin was indeed better than other people her age.
Another reason for her youthful appearance was that Wen Qian had never been married or had children.
Giving birth does not necessarily make a person look older; it depends on the person's family environment.
One of Wen Qian's former colleagues came from a very wealthy family, and her skin looked good both before and after marriage.
What kept her looking young was that after she gave birth, she didn't have to take care of her child 24 hours a day.
Her child had a dedicated nanny, and she was cared for and treated at a postpartum care center.
After the postpartum period, others took over the care of her child.
As a mother, most of the time she saw her child, the child was either sleeping soundly or awake and well-behaved and clean. Even feeding was not something she had to do herself.
Her mood remained stable, without any negative emotions like depression, anger, frustration, fatigue, or resentment.
That colleague looked almost the same before and after giving birth, and some people couldn't even tell that she had been married and had a child.
No matter who it is, spending most of the day taking care of a crying infant and having one's sleep schedule disrupted will inevitably lead to a haggard appearance.
And once that haggard look sets in, it becomes very difficult to recover from later on.
Big Ning touched her own face as she listened to her family members discussing Wen Qian.
Back when conditions were difficult, her two young children were still very small, and she worried and regretted every day.
She felt she shouldn't have brought these little lives into this world.
But in the blink of an eye, ten years had passed, and she was grateful that her two children had grown up safely.
