January in Review

Chapter Thirty: January in Review

The late-autumn wind carried several withered paulownia leaves, sending them spiraling down at Chen An's feet. He sat in that little space paved with bluestone in the courtyard, his back against the newly reinforced stone wall, half of an unfinished pottery shard spread across his knees.

His fingertips rubbed over the pottery shard's rough patterns. His gaze passed through the faint, invisible barrier at the courtyard entrance and fell on the mountain forest outside, gradually tinged with autumn colors.

A month had passed.

The thought suddenly became as clear as if yesterday had returned. He closed his eyes, a trace of bitterness rising in his throat—the chaos and despair of the day he had crossed over still seemed to be before him.

A month ago, he had still been a science and engineering PhD focused on restoring cultural relics in a laboratory. Then an accident had swept him into a temporal vortex. When he opened his eyes again, he was already in this unfamiliar mountain forest known as the "Primordial Wilderness."

His earliest memory was of overwhelming blood stench and booming roars.

He had fallen into a pile of decaying leaves. When he looked up, he saw a huge python covered in wounds wrestling with a black-panther-like Demonic Beast among vines as thick as bowls. Blood splashed across his face, warm and sticky.

As a scholar who had spent years dealing with precision instruments and ancient texts, he instinctively hid in a clump of bushes, only to discover that every inch of this mountain forest concealed deadly danger: thorn-covered arthropods hung upside down from the branches, ghostly green poisonous mist seeped from cracks in the rocks, and even the wind carried the faint, savage aura of Demonic Beasts.

Despair swept over him like a tide. He had no food, no water, and no idea where to go. It was not until the third day that he followed the faint sound of water to a clear spring and discovered the Small Courtyard wrapped in an invisible barrier beside its source.

That barrier had been his first salvation. He still remembered how, when he had tremblingly reached out to touch the courtyard gate, the unseen "wall" had gently pushed him back, then quietly closed behind him, isolating the roars of the Demonic Beasts outside into distant background noise.

The Small Courtyard contained a half-collapsed stone house, a dried-up Vegetable Plot, and several bundles of firewood piled in the corner. These "remnants" had been like a pair of invisible hands, dragging him back from the brink of collapse.

"Stay alive." He had murmured those words to the empty Small Courtyard, the first thing he had said to himself after crossing over.

The first step to survival was filling his stomach.

The mountain forest outside was fraught with danger, and he did not dare venture into it lightly. Fortunately, there was an abandoned Vegetable Plot in the Small Courtyard. Though the soil had hardened, it had unexpectedly remained pure after years without anyone tending it.

As a PhD trained in the sciences, he immediately understood the importance of improving the soil. He used a geological hammer to break up the hardened layer, mixed in humus collected from beside the stream, and used a stone flake to draw neat furrows, imitating the drainage system of modern farmland. Then he precisely sowed the last few packets of vegetable seeds in his backpack—cold-resistant varieties cultivated in the laboratory before he crossed over—covered them with soil, and watered them. Every step carried the rigor of laboratory procedure.

On the day the seeds sprouted, he squatted beside the Vegetable Plot and measured the height of the shoots with calipers. Watching the tender green tips break through their shells of soil like a group of stubborn little warriors, he suddenly smiled. In the Primordial Wilderness, science was still the most reliable weapon.

In the days that followed, he planned his time like a precision instrument. At dawn, he used a pottery bowl to draw spring water and irrigate the seedlings. At noon, he chopped down small trees outside the courtyard with a stone axe, selecting wood with good load-bearing properties according to its growth rings and density. At dusk, he built a fence with vines and wooden wedges, referring to material mechanics to calculate its load-bearing coefficient. He divided the Safe Zone into a "planting area," "hunting area," and "processing area." He even drew a simple map on the stone house wall with charcoal, marking the distribution of resources and dangerous areas.

When the first crop of Little White Cabbage grew leaves, Chen An began considering more long-term matters—how to improve his quality of life with limited resources.

He thought of the most basic implements in modern life: containers. Without a pottery bowl, he could only scrape spring water up with stone flakes. Without a pottery jar, he could only pickle vegetables in hide pouches, always worried they would spoil. So he began digging for clay and learning pottery.

He immediately noticed the differences in the clay's composition. Some had too much sand and cracked easily, while some lacked enough adhesiveness and were difficult to shape. He filtered the clay through a sieve, added an appropriate amount of quartz sand to improve its toughness, and ground animal bones into fine slurry to coat the kiln walls, imitating the insulation-layer design of ancient pottery kilns.

While firing the pottery, he recorded each change in temperature, using pottery shards to make a simple thermometer. He adjusted the frequency of adding firewood and the ventilation, ultimately succeeding in firing a coarse pottery bowl capable of holding water.

Life was gradually being "designed" piece by piece. He improved traps using the principle of leverage, opened an observation hole at the top of the pottery kiln using the principle of optical refraction, and wove sturdier nets from plant fibers. The fence of the Small Courtyard was reinforced according to triangular mechanics, while the stone house's hearth was designed with air inlets based on thermodynamic principles. This modern knowledge had become his sharpest "tool" in the Primordial Wilderness.

When signs of the revival of spiritual energy appeared, he was squatting beside the Vegetable Plot recording the leaves' fluorescence intensity. As a PhD, he keenly detected fluctuations in the free energy in the air and theorized that they were related to trace elements in the soil and the flow of an underground river. He recorded the discovery in his Hide Notebook, noting, "There may be clues here to a usable source of clean energy."

At that moment, Chen An gazed at the scene in the courtyard. Strings of dried meat hung beside the fence, classified by Protein content. Green vegetables were pickling in the Clay Jar, labeled with the number of days they had been pickled and their nitrite test results. His newly fired pottery teapot sat on the stone table, its inner-wall smoothness meeting standards according to comparison with a roughness meter. In the corner, the Hide Notebook had already been filled with three large sheets, recording every observation from soil composition to Demonic Beast habits.

He suddenly remembered himself at the beginning of his crossing over, curled up in the bushes, with nothing but despair in the face of the Demonic Beasts' roars. Now he had a house that could shelter him from wind and rain, with its insulation optimized according to building thermal engineering; food that could fill his stomach, selected and cultivated through nutritional analysis; clothes that could keep him warm, made more durable through hide-tanning techniques; and even scientific notes capable of guiding his next steps.

"A month has passed." He spoke softly to the evening wind,

The barrier of the Small Courtyard glimmered faintly silver in the dusk, cutting off the dangers of the outside world. He could hear the roars of Demonic Beasts in the distance, but he no longer felt afraid—because he knew that this knowledge, these designs, and this "fortress" built through reason were his strongest armor.

"For the days ahead, I should try improving the pottery kiln." He bent down and picked up the pottery shard at his feet, weighing it in his palm. "Or perhaps I should check the cliff and see if there are any useful minerals..."

The image of the future gradually became clear in his eyes—not relying on luck, but on science.

This month had been the starting point of his journey from despair to stability. And what he wanted had never been mere survival.

He wanted to use reason and knowledge to live a more splendid future in this Primordial Wilderness.

(End of Chapter Thirty)