The Tree Tribe set off east in a hurry, without even bringing a firebrand. In the Black Forest, carrying a torch would have been no different from announcing their location to the enemy.
Dashu felt somewhat uneasy too. Luo Chong had been gone for several days. Where was he now? Was he still alive?
Dashu knew none of this, but if they did not leave now, they could only wait for death. He had no choice left.
The enemies behind them had already found their tribe. The tree houses that had sustained them for generations had now become a sea of flames. Elder Tree had started the fire; there was nothing else he could do. He did not even know whether it would burn to death a few of the enemies who had invaded their tribe.
The Tree Tribe had originally numbered only thirty-two people. After this disaster, only thirty remained, and more than half of them were minors.
The adults carried the wooden buckets and rabbits on their backs, while the smaller children were held by the older ones. When they were hungry, they gnawed on a little dried meat; when they were thirsty, they drank that strange salty tree sap; when they were tired, they climbed up into the treetops to rest for a while. With their heads hanging low, the group hurried nonstop toward the eastern reaches of the Black Forest.
Dashu had not held out much hope of finding Luo Chong, but he had not expected to see so many branches stuck diagonally into the ground along the way, all pointing eastward. What was more, they had all been freshly cut. This gave Dashu a great deal of confidence. He felt they had to be marks left behind by Luo Chong.
Those marks had indeed been left by Luo Chong. But when he had made them, he had only been afraid he would not find his way back and had prepared them as guideposts for his return. He had never expected them to become signposts leading Dashu to him.
When Luo Chong had traveled this route before, it had taken him two days. That was because he had needed to constantly correct his direction and keep cutting branches to leave marks.
Dashu and the others were different. They simply followed the marks, and they were doing so without knowing when the pursuers might catch up with them. As a result, they took only a day and a half to reach the outskirts of the Black Forest.
By the time they emerged, evening had already fallen. The sky had turned crimson beneath the setting sun. The children of the Tree Tribe were seeing the outside world for the first time, their bellies full of curiosity and questions. And it was not just them—even the adults had never traveled so far.
Dashu had questions of his own. He wanted to know where Luo Chong had gone. The marks Luo Chong had left ended here. Where was Dashu supposed to look for him?
However, after they had gone a little farther, Dashu saw some new traces. There were many branches that had been cut down not long ago, as well as small trees chopped down entirely. Luo Chong had made these when he was crafting harnesses, stripping bark, and twisting it into rope.
At the stream below the slope, Dashu also found signs of a fire: a pile of black coals doused by water. There were plenty of animal tracks in the soft mud beside the stream, including Luo Chong's. That was easy enough to confirm. After all, there really were not many people wearing such strange boots.
But Dashu could not find where Luo Chong had gone next. He could only spend the night here with his clansmen and figure out the rest later. He felt that if Luo Chong intended to return, he would certainly pass this way again.
Meanwhile, while Dashu led his clansmen eastward, fleeing their pursuers and searching for Luo Chong, Luo Chong himself was pushing deeper into the swamp.
Across the seemingly endless wetland, Luo Chong paddled his makeshift canoe. He was riding the wind and breaking the waves—no, hacking his way through brambles, cutting through the water plants floating on the surface.
And this was where the true danger of swamp terrain lay: there was no way to know whether the water beneath those plants was actually water or thick mud.
As he slowly paddled forward, Luo Chong carefully scrutinized the plants around him. His focused gaze made the task look as difficult as finding a single grain of sand in a dense pile of millet.
Some might say, "Isn't it just rice? Who in the countryside hasn't seen it?" Even city dwellers could occasionally see beautiful pictures of rice paddies online, especially those tiered, clearly layered fields that were breathtakingly beautiful. BUT those were rice paddies planted with countless identical plants.
What Luo Chong was searching for, however, was wild rice hidden among billions of reeds.
This was simple in one sense and genuinely arduous in another, because wild rice was not particularly rare. On the contrary, the odds of finding it were quite high.
The success of modern high-yield rice could be said to have depended on a certain stroke of fate. Yuan the Elder, the father of Huaxia's hybrid rice, had been that fortunate person.
Hybrid rice, as the name suggested, involved crossbreeding rice with something. What was that something? It was a wild rice plant with a bizarre appearance and astonishing vitality, discovered by the sharp-eyed talent scout Yuan the Elder by sheer chance. After it was crossbred with domesticated, artificially cultivated rice, it eventually gave the great food-loving people of Huaxia high-yield rice they could never finish eating.
And that was not an isolated case. In the mid-1980s, a farmer named Chen the Elder from southern Huaxia discovered a miraculous wild rice plant among the reeds growing in the saline-alkali soil along the coast of GD.
Having cultivated rice for half his life, Chen the Elder did not ignore it. He immediately realized the importance of this powerful organism, which flourished by the sea and possessed extraordinary tolerance to salt and alkali. He rushed over and went on a wild plucking spree, stripping away the plant's only 522 grains of rice.
After repeated planting and experimentation, those few hundred grains finally developed into endless rice paddies. They gave hundreds of millions of acres of barren saline-alkali land along Huaxia's coasts and inland regions a practical use, directly solving the food problem for hundreds of millions of people. The "Sea Rice 86" rice strain also became famous overseas, turning into an object fought over by countries around the world.
What Luo Chong was doing now could rewrite—no, create—the history of this world. It was an epoch-making undertaking that would lead humanity from the age of hunting into the age of agriculture.
So, in this primitive swamp, the odds of finding this kind of rice ought to have been quite high. It was also a food favored by waterbirds. Sure enough, Heaven rewarded the diligent.
Luo Chong took his spear and prodded at the reeds beside him again and again, carefully combing through them in a painstaking, carpet-style search, like brushing someone's hair. Yet he still had not found a damn thing.
But this sort of beating the grass to scare the snakes really did bring to mind that line of poetry: "Row, row, row—we startled a sandbank full of gulls and egrets."
Luo Chong swept his stick through the reeds. Suddenly, a great flock of waterbirds burst from the reeds some distance away with a rustle of wings, startling him badly. He immediately turned to look.
In the reed bed of a shallow shoal not far away, a small patch of "reeds" bearing grain heads stood head and shoulders above all its little companions. Light abruptly burst from Luo Chong's eyes, and joy rose in his heart. It's this one. This is it. Our good friend—wild rice!
Luo Chong grinned when he spotted his target and could not help laughing aloud. He immediately paddled his canoe with all his might toward the shallow shoal.
Once, twice—just as Luo Chong's little boat was about to reach its destination, a burst of human shouting suddenly rang out behind him.
"Hey, #￥%...&**...%￥#￥@#@"
"@##...&())&...%￥"
What? Who the hell is shouting?
Luo Chong turned back in the direction of the voices. Several naked primitives were floating in the water behind him, clinging to a few logs. They waved at him while shouting frantically, their expressions extremely anxious.
The original draft of this chapter was just revised, so the update came late. I'm sorry, everyone. I feel too embarrassed to ask for recommendation votes, so do as you please. I'll try to update on time from now on and won't affect everyone's reading schedule. Sorry!
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