It was faintly snowing outside of the seaside cave, and sparse snowflakes drifted from the sky.
Kien was sleeping.
Xuelan quietly sat beside him with a blanket made out of a shadowy material wrapped around herself. It was cold, and the black-haired girl was shivering. The climate in this place was strange. Scorching hot days were contrasted with freezing cold nights, and the temperature often seemed to plummet at sundown.
In her semi-delirious state over the past week, she had watched her ex-boyfriend attempting yet failing to craft a clay water distiller to purify the sea water. The design he attempted was something like a misshapen clay jug with a long spout, but Xuelan could tell from a single glance that he was never going to succeed with that sort of strategy. Aside from the fact that they clearly lacked a well-constructed kiln with good temperature control to fire pottery, the silty clay that her ex-boyfriend found in the area was granular and full of impurities, which was liable to crack and shatter at higher temperatures. He did not have a potter's wheel, and instead he was trying to fashion of large jar by rolling concentric rings of clay snakes per the elementary school art class method. It was unlikely for him to craft a long and delicate clay tube using this crude strategy, but Kien stubbornly attempted it again and again each time it fell apart.
He was clearly inexperienced, and this was an utterly hopeless endeavor, but he still didn't give up.
There were actually countless other mistakes that Xuelan immediately noticed in the back of her mind, although she said nothing out loud. When working with natural clay for pottery-making, there was actually a very laborious preliminary process for extracting the impurities from fresh clay dug from the ground. There were dry and wet processing methods, both of which involve many hours/days of kneading and sifting in order to eliminate any contaminating dirt, sand, or tiny rocks. Kien used ocean water to re-hydrate the clay, which naturally re-introduced more impurities, and the sodium chloride would produce toxic fumes and hydrochloric acid vapor if fired in a kiln. There were major theoretical issues with the fundamental design of Kien's oversimplified clay distiller, and the lack of a cold water condenser meant that a majority of the boiled water vapor would escape as steam. Finally, in ancient times it was common to apply a glaze to ceramics to waterproof them, since unglazed "biscuit" earthenware was naturally water-porous. Despite all of his efforts, Xuelan doubted that Kien was familiar with these intricate details of the pottery-making process that had been perfected over many millennia of human civilization.
He was only a street gangster, after all.
Making functional pottery definitely wasn't as easy as it looked in video games.
Truthfully, the easiest method to harvest fresh water in this setting was probably to depend on water condensation. The steep temperature gradient between day and night guaranteed that the dew point was reached every evening, which would cause water vapor to naturally condense into liquid. A simple method like spreading a tarp (perhaps made of the shadowy black bondage fabric?) could collect a surprisingly large amount of water, and in fact it was the preferred survival method in a variety of different inhospitable environments like arid deserts.
Xuelan was a geek, and she knew all sorts of weird trivia from the variety of her far-ranging studies. In fact, studying was the only thing that she was really good at, and her self-identity was closely tied to her performance in school. Most of her self-worth came from the fact that she had always been a top student, and she clung to her grades and class ranking desperately almost like her entire life depended on it.
Even during those dark times when she was emotionally falling apart and cutting her wrists again, Xuelan would contradictorily drown herself in more studying and pull multiple all-nighters, escaping from her problems in the abstract land of equations and textbooks while heavy dreary bags formed underneath her eyes.
Ever since high school, Xuelan had always been the unfriendly, unattractive, and gloomy class valedictorian that nobody liked. It was well-known across the entire campus that she would do almost anything for extra credit, and she was occasionally bullied by rival students who would threaten to sabotage her school assignments or flush her notebooks down the toilet. Later on, she was blackmailed with various compromising photos and other unsavory X-rated details that would surely ruin any of her future aspirations towards medical school. Since she was Asian and furthermore extremely quiet, everyone automatically assumed that she was boring as cardboard, and presumed that somehow her parents must have been involved with bribing the university administration for A+ grades every semester. Most people thought her inhuman scores were a total lie, especially since she was better at multiple-choice exams than practical or subjective exams, and even the faculty were convinced that Xuelan was somehow cheating on the assessments using leaked answer keys.
Even though college hadn't exactly been a very enjoyable experience, grades were the only thing Xuelan clung to for self-worth.
Without school, Xuelan hardly knew who she was anymore.
The black-haired girl stared blankly at Kien's sleeping body while his chest slowly rose and fell.
...none of that mattered anymore, though.
She was a sex slave now, and her only purpose in life was to serve as a flexible sex toy for her Master to farm EXP.
And to be honest, she wasn't totally opposed to it.
+ + +
Was she broken?
Xuelan wasn't actually sure.
Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn't.
Maybe she had always been broken all along, even if nobody realized it.
Kien seemed to think that she was more broken than usual, but Xuelan personally felt like her brain was totally intact. She could still recite the periodic table in her head, and her mind was still entirely functional even if she superficially acted a little bit like a sex-starved bimbo on the surface. Most men that she had been with didn't seem to like it when women were too smart, and there was a certain way that everyone expected masochistic sex slaves to behave in BDSM scenes.
In truth, her current state was very close to her real nature.
Xuelan had a long history of self-harming that she kept carefully hidden from others, and her thirst for masochism was closely tied to this unpleasant aspect of herself. She had an abnormal sex drive, and she often used to secretly masturbate several times a day. It was legitimately true that she was sexually perverted to the extreme, and anyone who knew her intimately for long enough quickly realized that her fantasies tended to run very hardcore. Even her classmates rapidly figured out at she'd soak through her panties when they harassed her, which only caused their interactions to become even more unthinkable and severe. There was even a period of several months when she somehow ended up coerced into dating one of her bullies in a complicated quasi-consensual relationship with plenty of gaslighting.
The only difference from now was that previously she had self-restraint.
And she was deeply ashamed.
Why was she such a pervert? And a slut? Why did her body always react like this?
She tried to desperately hide those parts of herself.
She didn't want to disappoint the people that she cared about, so she tried her best to act like she was normal.
But now Xuelan didn't care anymore.
There wasn't a reason to hide anything anymore. Her future was gone, and she was a sex slave for the rest of eternity. Kien kept repeating he wanted to have the "whole" of her, but Xuelan felt like he was entirely mistaken. He was clinging to an imaginary version of herself. Right now, Xuelan was being the most honest she had been in her life. The previous woman that he had known was definitely a lie. He was deluding himself if he thought she could be somehow "fixed".
If he didn't like the current version of herself, then that meant that Xuelan wasn't inherently likable.
But she had always known that for a fact. Deep down inside, she knew she was an ugly, disgusting, and worthless slut that nobody would ever truly like, and it made sense that he no longer found her attractive when her unfiltered self was showing.
This was who she really was, and Xuelan hated it.
She wanted Kien to brainwash her sooner so she no longer needed to exist.
If he got tired of her sooner, she could finally disappear.
∎
Interesting back story. So she was a closet BDSM slut, a hardcore one at that. Can't wait for her master/ex to finally find out.