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Days, weeks, months, and even years seemed to pass away before anything of any import actually happened to Alexandra. In fact, time seemed to be the only thing that she was not lacking. She had long since run out of the supply of food that Jentus had given her and she was left to hunting and foraging. Even though she was being put through training as a hunter, she was not very good at it.
Eventually she had given up eating meat or even acquiring the smallest of game. There were plenty of animals for her to hunt, she just did not have much if any skill whatsoever. When she had tried to hunt she tended to hit trees with her arrows or make way too much noise and the animals would be very scarce. A moving target these animals were and she could not hit any of them even if her life depended on it and it did depend on it.
Foraging seemed to come easy to her. At least she would not starve. She came close to starving many times, but managed to find enough food to barely keep alive. Keeping up to her training was hard on so little food. Alexandra managed to be able to train moderately while she ate very little, which happened to reduce her womanly figure to that of a wiry frame with a slight feminine twist to it.
She lost a lot of weight and could not maintain any level of fat on her body, bony she was not. Alexandra still seemed to have enough meat on her bones to adequately cover them. It took a while for her to figure out what plants were poisonous and which ones were edible. Her taste experiments had her puking her guts out for days and the diarrhea did not help her much, if at all. Grubs seemed to give her the most pleasure in eating. They just made her throat tickle as the slimy things slipped down her throat towards her stomach.
Grubs could be eaten in many different ways and berries, nuts and seeds mixed in made chewing on them a bit more tasty than one might think. All in all she decided that grubs were an acquired taste and they were just not for anyone. Kind of like dark chocolate not being for everyone. The first few nights of eating them she was constantly throwing up, but now she was ever so fond of them. Her life was spared because of these little creatures and it made her feel good.
She remembered when the L’art’o made her eat all that garbage, and excrement. Anything was better than what they made her eat. In a way she was thankful for them giving her this humility. False humility was not real to her because she knew what real humility was. To be humble was not to fall under her attitude of pride, and succumb to starvation. It was better for her to stay alive and swallow her pride than to die for no real reason at all. There really was no reason to die at all.