A Month in Review

Chapter 30: One-Month Review

The late-autumn wind carried a few withered sycamore leaves, spinning them down to land at Chen An's feet. He sat in the small courtyard paved with bluestone slabs, his back against the newly reinforced stone wall, a half-finished pottery shard spread across his knees.

His fingertips traced the rough grain of the pottery as his gaze passed through the faint, almost imperceptible barrier at the courtyard gate, settling on the forested hills beyond, gradually painted in autumn hues.

One month.

The thought crystallized with the clarity of yesterday. He closed his eyes, a trace of bitterness rising in his throat—the chaos and despair of that first day still vivid before him.

A month ago, he had been a PhD in engineering, focused on restoring artifacts in a lab. Caught in a spacetime rift by accident, he opened his eyes again to find himself in this unfamiliar wilderness called the Primordial Wastes.

His earliest memories were of overwhelming stench and roaring.

He had fallen into a pile of rotting leaves. Looking up, he saw a massive, scarred python locked in a bloody struggle with a demonic beast resembling a black panther, tangled among vines as thick as a bowl. Blood splattered onto his face, warm and sticky.

As a scholar who had long worked with precision instruments and ancient texts, his instinct was to shrink into a clump of bushes. But he quickly discovered that every inch of this forest hid lethal threats: thorn-covered arthropods hanging upside down from branches, poisonous green mist seeping from rock crevices, and the faint, brutal aura of Demonic Beasts carried on the wind.

Despair flooded over him like a tide. No food, no water, no idea where to go. On the third day, he followed the faint sound of water to a clear spring and found this small courtyard, wrapped in an invisible barrier, beside it.

That barrier was his first salvation. He still remembered how, when he tremblingly reached for the courtyard gate, that unseen "wall" gently pushed him back, then silently closed behind him, muffling the roars of Demonic Beasts into a distant background noise.

The courtyard held a half-collapsed stone house, a dried-up vegetable patch, and a few bundles of firewood piled in the corner—these "leftovers" were like invisible hands, pulling him back from the edge of collapse.

"Survive," he murmured to the empty courtyard. It was the first thing he said to himself after crossing over.

The first step to survival was filling his stomach.

The forest outside the courtyard was fraught with danger, and he dared not venture far. Luckily, the courtyard had an abandoned vegetable patch. The soil was compacted but, left untended for years, had unexpectedly retained its purity.

As a PhD in a science background, he immediately recognized the importance of soil improvement. He used a geological hammer to break up the compacted layer, mixed in humus collected from the stream bank, and used stone shards to carve neat furrows, mimicking a modern drainage system. Then, he precisely spaced and planted the few remaining packets of vegetable seeds (cold-resistant varieties bred in the lab before his crossing), covered them with soil, and watered them—every step carried the rigor of lab work.

The day the seeds sprouted, he crouched by the patch, measuring the height of the shoots with a caliper. Watching the tender green tips push through the soil crust like stubborn little soldiers, he suddenly laughed—in the Primordial Wastes, science was still his most reliable weapon.

In the days that followed, he planned his time like a precision instrument: mornings collecting spring water in a pottery bowl to water the seedlings, noons felling small trees outside the courtyard with a stone axe (selecting wood with good load-bearing capacity based on growth rings and density), evenings building a fence with vines and wooden wedges (calculating load coefficients using material mechanics). He divided the Safe Zone into "Planting Area," "Hunting Area," and "Processing Area," and even sketched a simple map on the stone house wall with charcoal, marking resource distribution and danger zones.

When the first batch of bok choy grew leaves, Chen An began thinking about longer-term goals—how to improve his quality of life with limited resources.

He thought of the most basic items in modern life: containers. Without pottery bowls, he had to scoop spring water with stone shards; without pottery jars, he could only use animal-skin pouches to pickle vegetables, always worrying about spoilage. So he started digging clay and learning pottery.

He immediately noticed differences in clay composition: some had too much sand and cracked easily, others lacked stickiness and were hard to shape. He filtered the clay through a sieve, added quartz sand to enhance toughness, and ground animal bones into fine powder to coat the kiln walls (mimicking the insulation design of ancient kilns).

During firing, he recorded temperature changes each time (using pottery shards to make a simple thermometer), adjusted the frequency of adding fuel and the ventilation rate, and eventually succeeded in firing coarse pottery bowls that could hold water.

Life was gradually "designed" this way. He improved traps using lever principles, drilled observation holes in the kiln roof using optical refraction, and wove stronger nets from plant fibers. The courtyard fence was reinforced with triangular mechanics, and the stone house's hearth was designed with an air intake based on thermodynamics—these modern knowledge points became his sharpest "tools" in the Primordial Wastes.

When signs of spiritual energy resurgence appeared, he was crouched by the vegetable patch recording the fluorescence intensity of the leaves. As a PhD, he keenly detected the free energy fluctuations in the air and speculated they were linked to trace elements in the soil and the flow of underground rivers. He recorded this discovery in a beast-hide notebook, noting "possible clues to a usable clean energy source."

Now, Chen An surveyed the courtyard scene: strings of dried meat hung by the fence (sorted by protein content), jars of green pickled vegetables (marked with pickling days and nitrite test results), a newly fired clay pot on the stone table (inner surface smoothness verified by roughness gauge), and three large sheets of beast-hide notes filled with observations ranging from soil composition to Demonic Beast behavior.

He suddenly remembered his early days after crossing, curled up in the bushes, filled with nothing but despair at the roars of Demonic Beasts. Now, he had a shelter that kept out wind and rain (insulation optimized using building thermal science), food to fill his stomach (selected for planting after nutrient analysis), clothes to keep warm (durability improved with animal-hide tanning techniques), and even scientific notes to guide his next steps.

"One month," he whispered to the evening breeze.

The courtyard barrier glowed faintly silver in the twilight, sealing off the dangers outside. He could hear the distant roars of Demonic Beasts but no longer felt fear—because he knew that this knowledge, these designs, this fortress built with reason, was his sturdiest armor.

"Next, I should try improving the kiln," he said, bending to pick up the pottery shard at his feet, weighing it in his palm. "Or maybe check the cliff face for usable minerals..."

The future was gradually coming into focus in his eyes—not by luck, but by science.

This one month was the starting point from despair to stability. And what he wanted was never mere survival.

It was to live a more brilliant future in this Primordial Wastes, using reason and knowledge.

(End of Chapter 30)