Desert Island Survival Arc (5)

Desert Island Survival Arc (5)

Zhang Heng finally managed to start a fire.

This meant his diet no longer had to be limited to nothing but Coconut. Following Ed's guidance, Zhang Heng found some sea snails among the reef rocks on the beach, and he was lucky enough to discover crabs and oysters as well.

The latter were especially delicious and nutritious, rich in calcium, iron, phosphorus, and vitamin B2. They were known as the milk of the sea. The only pity was that they were not very high in calories, with each one containing only around seventy calories. Foodies would naturally consider that a good thing, but on a deserted island, Zhang Heng preferred high-calorie food to fuel his body's activities.

He did not need to worry about gaining weight anyway. Over the past few days, he had already grown noticeably thinner from hunger.

Fortunately, he should be able to have a proper meal tonight.

Zhang Heng caught over seventy small sea snails, along with six oysters and four hermit crabs. Unfortunately, the latter were not very large. Ed said hermit crabs were edible too, though they did not taste particularly good. But the two of them were not dining at a Michelin restaurant, so taste had long since been cast aside.

Zhang Heng also saw some fish by the shore, but without any tools, he could only watch them swim around freely.

There were also the small puddles he had discovered two days ago. Zhang Heng used a clam shell he had picked up to scoop water from them, but then ran into trouble over how to boil it.

They were stranded on a deserted island and did not even have so much as a common bowl. The clam shell was too heat-resistant; even placed directly over the fire, it was difficult to bring the water to a boil.

After thinking for a moment, Ed said, "Go find some stones. Avoid ones with lots of holes or layers."

Zhang Heng nodded. Following Ed's instructions, he gathered some stones, spent twenty minutes heating them until they glowed red, then used branches to place them into the clam shell. Before long, the water inside began to boil.

"There isn't much water here. Two stones should be enough," Ed said.

In the end, the water in the clam shell boiled for a full fifteen minutes, enough to kill most pathogens.

Zhang Heng silently committed all these wilderness survival tips to memory.

Ed was a good teacher. Although his waist injury prevented him from moving around, his extensive wilderness survival knowledge benefited Zhang Heng greatly. So even though Zhang Heng now had to gather food and water for both of them, he had no complaints.

Still, Zhang Heng did not want to rely on Ed forever. He wanted to turn everything he learned from Ed into skills of his own.

It was not because he intended to abandon Ed as a burden later on. In truth, in gratitude for what Ed had taught him, Zhang Heng would have been willing to share half his food with him as long as he had even a single bite left. Yet he could not shake a sense of foreboding.

He noticed that Ed's complexion was even worse than when he had first been rescued ashore.

The rest over this period had done nothing to improve his waist injury.

But even more critical was the wound on his thigh. Zhang Heng had given it simple bandaging and stopped the bleeding, but there was nothing more he could do after that.

There were no antibiotics, so common in city hospitals, on this deserted island. If the wound became infected, it could very well be fatal.

Zhang Heng believed the former army captain understood that better than he did, yet Ed had deliberately or unconsciously avoided the subject these past few days.

And that seemed to confirm Zhang Heng's bad feeling from another angle.

There was nothing Zhang Heng could do about it. He could only take the best care of Ed that he could. Over the following days, Ed taught him how to make simple stone tools, clean his teeth with charcoal, collect rainwater, braid rope from bark, build a simple raft, and use coral traps to catch fish...

Compared to when they had first arrived on the island, the two had now made it through the most dangerous period. They even had a little surplus food. Zhang Heng smoked the fish they could not finish and hung it from the roof of the cave, so that they would not go hungry when harsh weather prevented them from going out to forage.

Things seemed to be improving. At this rate, surviving for the agreed forty days did not seem like an unattainable goal.

Just as Zhang Heng had that thought, misfortune struck.

On the night of the sixteenth day, Ed suddenly developed a high fever. Zhang Heng had no choice but to devote most of his energy to caring for the former army captain. As a result, he had less time to go out and collect food and water, and his search range shrank considerably. Fortunately, the food they had stored up in advance kept them from immediately facing a survival crisis.

What worried Zhang Heng even more was that Ed showed no improvement for three days in a row.

Zhang Heng untied the T-shirt around the other man's leg and found that the bone-deep wound had become completely infected and ulcerated.

Since yesterday, the former army captain had been unconscious.

Meanwhile, the food in the cave was steadily running out, and the two of them were nearing the point of having nothing left.

Then, on the night of the nineteenth day, Ed suddenly opened his eyes again and said to Zhang Heng, who was slumped nearby in a half-awake state, "Do you know what matters most in wilderness survival? It's the mindset of never stopping. Never be satisfied with what you achieved yesterday. Live better every day. You have to find a way to conquer nature."

"..."

Zhang Heng rubbed his eyes and gave a bitter smile. "Ed, that's not what you told me last time."

But there was no response from across from him.

Zhang Heng tried placing his fingers beneath the man's nose and found that he had stopped breathing.

Zhang Heng had long been mentally prepared for Ed's death, but when the former army captain truly passed away, he still felt saddened. They had not known each other for long, but Ed had taught him every skill he now possessed to survive in the wilderness.

They had been teacher and friend to each other.

Zhang Heng dug a pit in the forest not far from the cave and buried the man's body there. To keep wild animals from disturbing it, he sharpened several wooden stakes and planted them around the grave.

Only after finishing all that did he drag his starving body to the shore to find something to eat.

The good news was that half of the forty-day mission period had already passed. Though he was alone again, Zhang Heng was confident this time that he could survive on this deserted island.

Especially when, on the afternoon of the twentieth day, Zhang Heng found a large fish weighing two pounds in the coral trap. That meant he could have another filling meal that night. Just when he thought his bad luck had finally passed, he suddenly heard a long-absent voice prompt in his ear.

Warning!!! Warning!!! An anomaly has appeared in the target instance! Severe temporal error!

Reporting error...

Level-two access activated. Review approved. Report canceled...

Permanently removing this error from the evaluation sequence...

Mission objective unchanged. Return time corrected from 40 days to 520 days. Player, please take note!

?!

The barrage of information left Zhang Heng dizzy. When he realized what had happened, his expression changed abruptly, and he quickly looked toward his right hand.

There, the three hands had happened to overlap at the very top of the dial.

No way. Zhang Heng was horrified. He had been living so fully during this period, constantly learning wilderness survival skills before going through one thing after another, that he had completely forgotten about the 24-Scale Starfish on his wrist.

During the first few nights after arriving, he had also failed to enter that Still World. He had thought the thing did not work in the game, never expecting it had merely been charging up for something big.

Zhang Heng almost instantly understood where those 520 days had come from. The extra twenty-four hours he gained every day at 00:00 had been magnified 480 times, becoming an unimaginably terrifying number in this world.