Village Girl Heroine: Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Hunger gives you unlimited strength

Translator: yuzu

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It was just like this that she struggled to resist her hunger while her stomach growled the entire night. By the time Lin Tinyin suffered until the next morning, she felt like there was a crack in her sanity. Until now, she had always thought that she had sufficient willpower to endure this, but she had grossly underestimated the instincts of Shanoa’s body. Hunger had practically taken full control of her entire brain. On this beautiful sunny morning, Lin Tianyin repeatedly told herself that she had already won against the demons in her head and lasted the night. She had accomplished it! So at the very least she deserved breakfast! As for dieting, that could wait until after eating breakfast…

Trudging her chubby body downstairs, she discovered that that her sister was already sitting at the table. Her sister, along with her parents, looked at her with surprised looks in their eyes. However Lin Tianyin paid no mind to their stares, as her attention was exclusively focused on a bowl of food on the table. Her family was sitting face to face with each other, and the empty seat seemed to be hers. There was a huge bowl as big as a wash basin placed there, and it was filled to the brim with steaming and delicious smelling meat porridge.

“Grumble…”

Lin Tianyin’s stomach gave another miserable cry, and she gulped. Her footsteps unsteady, she scuttered over to her seat at lightning speed.

“Dearie, you didn’t eat anything last night. I heard you want to diet again.”

The woman who seemed to be the mother of the sisters looked at Lin Tianyin with concern. For reasons that weren’t clear, her expression displayed an amount of uneasiness: “Is this really alright? Dearie, you become especially frightening when you don’t eat your fill. Mama is really worried…”

“I realized that about myself too, so I decided…”

Lin Tianyin ravenously stared at the meat porridge in front of her, and she thought to screw dieting. Just as she extended her hand to wolf down her breakfast, Milona suddenly swept away the enormous bowl that was bigger than Lin Tianyin’s face. Then she conscientiously faced her mother and said: “Mom, you need to believe in big sister more. She withstood with her diet so well last night that she didn’t even skin our neighbor Hansen’s chickens alive. I believe that she can control herself.”

“I…” Lin Tianyin watched sorrowfully as Milona scooped a small ladle of porridge out from the huge bowl and placed it in Lin Tianyin’s dinner plate as if doing charity. She encouragingly said: “You can do it Shanoa! I know you’ll be fine this time.”

“…”

“Well said. We should support Shanoa in her desire to lose weight. From today onwards, we’ll strictly control her portion size.” Her parents nodded in approval as they spoke.

“……”

Lin Tianyin creened her neck as she watched her family split her bowl of meat porridge amongst themselves. In the end, all she was left with was a single spoonful. Lin Tianyin lifelessly stared at her own plate and was motionless for a long time, before she finally drank it down in silence.

After humiliatingly finishing this impoverished breakfast that wasn’t even enough to fill a single mouthful, Lin Tianyin decided to ask her parents about the family bloodline. For instance, letting her learn some magic so that when the the demon lord revives, she’ll have the power to fight. However, when her parents heard what Lin Tianyin was thinking, they immediately laughed out loud.

“You must be so hungry that you’ve lost your mind, Shanoa! After the demon lord was sealed one hundred years ago, magic disappeared along with him. Currently, the world is in a low magic era. The healing ability of our family is very rarely seen right now, so remember not to speak too much about it. Don’t let other people discover our family secret.”

“But didn’t you just help heal Uncle Hansen’s hen that broke its leg?” Lin Tianyin’s mouth twitched as she looked at her parents.

“That’s because Mr. Hansen frequently sends us his chicken eggs. Eh, what I mean by not speaking too much about it, is that you shouldn’t let bad guys from the outside learn about it, because that’ll attract trouble. All the people in this village are good people, though.” Her parents lectured with a serious and deadpan look on their faces.

“…” Lin Tianyin quieted down. She discovered that there was quite a generation gap between her family and herself.

In summary, Lin Tianyin had temporarily ascertained her current situation: it seemed that the demon lord had not yet revived. Even though the original story never mentioned how the seal on the demon lord was removed, it probably wasn’t long until the demon lord returned. As soon as the the demon lord revived, his first actions would be to chase down and kill the descendants of the heroes who formerly sealed him, stamping out the bloodlines that threatened him the most.

Lin Tianyin felt like she couldn’t just sit around and wait for death, so she had to get moving somehow. Since it was impossible to learn black magic in this low magic era, it seemed like her only option was to properly train her physical strength. In the original story, Shanoa’s fat body’s only redeeming trait was that it was quick and ridiculously strong, so it made sense to utilize that to her advantage. At the very least, when the demon lord’s minions come, she’ll have enough strength to protect herself.

Thus, while her little sister Milona played around in the village every day, attracting Villager A, Noble’s son B, and Traveler C’s affections, Lin Tianyin started a training regimen of long-distance running, squats, and push-ups every day. The only problem was that Lin Tianyin was constantly extremely hungry, and after her food portions were restricted, she felt weak and worn-out no matter what she did. Whether she was running or practicing her punches, her head was filled with fantasies about food. Lin Tianyin felt like there was no way she could keep going like this. She got hungry way too quickly, and she was so hungry every day that she’d get dizzy from it. However, she had to persevere. She was beginning to lose weight, so she couldn’t eat!

Struggling on like this for about two months, Lin Tianyin’s body weight finally went down from about 100 kg to 80 kg. Even though she was still fat, the ultra-obese person in the mirror finally looked more like an ordinary fat person. Lin Tianyin cried tears of happiness. After the pudgy swaths of fat on her face shrunk away, she discovered that the heroine’s villainess sister wasn’t actually that ugly. She was only older than the heroine by one year. Before, there was so much fat that you barely see her nose and eyes, but now her face was perhaps vaguely pretty in slight way. If she continued to lose some more weight, it would definitely look even better, and then she wouldn’t have to worry about being looked at hatefully like a cockroach by others.

Overall, she was making good progress. The world was peaceful, and there were rarely any outside visitors that came to their little village. Milona, as before, kept chasing the crowds every day, while Lin Tianyin made her final dash towards losing weight: just a little further until she becomes an ordinary person… just a little further…

That night, a five-minute long earthquake happened on the previously peaceful Faros Continent. Fortunately, the tremors were not too strong, but a strange anomaly appeared in the sky soon after it ended. The sky was covered with a weird fog, and the moon became a blood red color as everyone looked up towards the sky fearfully that night. People couldn’t help but recall the legend that their ancestors had left behind: the third night after the blood moon, the demon lord would return from the ashes and awaken deep underground, once again to rain terror on the Faros Continent.

Of course, legends were just legends. A week after the blood moon appeared, nothing strange happened in the entire world at all, so the majority of commoners soon forgot about this and returned to their ordinary lives. However, Lin Tianyin was certain that the demon lord had definitely awoken, but she didn’t know when he would come to attack their village. Lin Tianyin wanted to urge her parents to go hide, but apparently her ancestors had sealed the demon lord with their own blood, so their blood was inevitably linked with the demon lord. No matter where they ran, they would be found and slaughtered. She really wanted to curse the author for making such a terrible setting! Why don’t the author try out becoming the fat chubby girl from the novel herself? Let’s see if she’ll still write such a disastrous story then!

Lin Tianyin felt like her head hurt a lot. She was inherently a good person, so she didn’t want to see the village that she lived in for three months to go up in flames. Perhaps she should go to the capital and tell them that the demon lord was coming, so please send troops to protect their village? Let’s be serious, it be weirder if they didn’t burn her at the stake for being a fear-mongering witch… the original story was seriously too vicious the way it didn’t leave the slightest bit of breathing room. Was the only choice to allow the village to be destroyed like it was in the original story? The most troubling part was that she had flipped through and skimmed the part where the village was destroyed and the protagonists met the prince, so she actually had no idea what was going to happen…

Even though the future was filled with anxiety, Lin Tianyin continued onwards with her diet. In truth, it wasn’t that Lin Tianyin wanted to keep dieting herself, but rather her ridiculous parents thought that this was all she could eat now they she had already lost this much weight. For close the three months, Lin Tianyin hadn’t eaten anything other than wild herbs, and her parents were very satisfied by how much she had succeeded in losing weight. They seemed to decide that they wouldn’t allow her to eat meat until she became as skinny as her younger sister.

Passing every day in near starvation, Lin Tianyin felt like she couldn’t think of anything besides food. She was most normal after she just finished eating. She felt like if this kept going for any longer, maybe she’d even roast her little sister and gobble her up before the demon lord had a chance to appear. However, her family strictly control the food she had access to, and she could never find anything to eat inside of the cold storage cupboard. Even their neighbor Uncle Hansen had reinforced and repaired his chicken coop when he heard that she was going on a diet. This was almost as if he really thought she would steal chickens to swallow whole… okay fine, maybe she actually would have done it.

In short, Lin Tianyin felt like she couldn’t continue any more. One evening at the end of the day, while lying on the bed tossing and turning restlessly, she started become delirious. At this rate, if the demon lord came, she wouldn’t even have the energy to run away. Lin Tianyin decided that tomorrow she’d go into the mountains to find something to eat, but at this moment, the light of fire suddenly appeared outside of her window. Then, she heard a high-pitched panicking shriek.

“A dragon!! A dragon appeared!”

“Riding on top of that dragon! It’s the demon lord’s troops! The legendary demon lord has awoken!”

Lin Tianyin was still in a muddle-headed daze. Very quickly, a storm of frantic footsteps sounded from within her house, and Milona burst into her room with a face filled with anxiety. She shouted at Lin Tianyin in panic: “Dad told us to hide in the basement! Hurry!”

Lin Tianyin still did not return to her senses. When Milona found that she had no reaction, she couldn’t help but rush forward to drag her along. However, Lin Tianyin suddenly pulled the window curtains aside and slowly stuck out her head to look outside.

The scene was simply a sea of flames, and a red dragon as tall as three people was spewing flames non-stop. Riding on top of it was an armored skeleton. Milona immediately cried out in alarm, and her body started to tremble as she tightly grabbed Lin Tianyin’s arm and started to pull. But for inexplicable reasons, at this moment Lin Tianyin was seeing a hallucination in her eyes. That flame-breathing red dragon merely looked like an incredibly enticing enormous turkey…

“It must be delicious…”

Lin Tianyin gulped saliva in her trance as she spoke something completely unfathomable. It made the shaking Milona immediately freeze.

“Huh?”

Milona had no idea what Shanoa’s words were supposed to mean, but at the next moment, Shanoa abruptly pushed aside Milona and jumped out of the window at a terrifying speed. She charged as straight as a bullet up to fire dragon that was wrecking havoc in the village.

“Come back, Shanoa!” Milona shouted helplessly after Shanoa’s back, as she watched in despair as her older sister rushed straight in front the red dragon, and then launched a single punch towards the skeleton soldier that was riding on the dragon. All she heard was a loud “crunch”, as Shanoa followed through her punch and held that posture. Meanwhile, the skeleton crumbled into a pile of fragments. Nobody present was able to process what had just happened. Lin Tianyin abruptly seized the dragon’s neck, and she sturdily executed a perfect shoulder throw¹ by sending the red dragon straight into the ground.

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Author’s notes:

This… is only the beginning…

That said, I don’t have a book cover yet! Anybody want to make one for me?

Translator’s notes:

1. The exact term used in the novel corresponds to “Seoi nage” which is the shoulder throw in Judo.

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