Felling Trees, Picking Fruit, Good News

The Ancestral Long Fist was divided into four forms:

Small Battle, Grand Battle, Scattered Hands, Combined Battle.

In his previous life, Xia Hong had specialized in this very martial art.

Small Battle used short strikes and focused on defense.

Grand Battle united fist, foot, and waist into one, concentrating all power to break through a single point. It focused on offense.

Scattered Hands did not rigidly adhere to set forms, seeking only to inflict devastating injury on the enemy. Head, fingers, palms, fists, elbows, shoulders, knees, legs, hips, and arms could all be weapons. It emphasized timing and focused on killing.

Combined Battle was a combat style suited for multiple people attacking together.

There was a reason Long Fist had been hailed as the most practical martial arts form in his previous life.

Not only did it combine offense, defense, and killing, but all four combat styles could also be applied to weapons.

Xia Hong had long since mastered all four forms to perfection in his previous life, so teaching Yuan Cheng and the other five was naturally effortless.

After teaching them for a while and observing them, Xia Hong gained a rough understanding of the six men.

Yuan Cheng and Yue Feng were the most burly, both over two meters tall. Though long-term starvation had left them less than robust, they would surely recover quickly once their flesh and blood supply improved.

Small Battle's movements were compact and placed fewer demands on posture, making it clearly more suitable for the two of them.

Lin Kai, Qiu Peng, and Xu Ning had more proportionate builds, with long limbs and greater agility than the first two. They were suited for Grand Battle, which united fists, feet, and waist.

Lu Yang, the smallest of them all, was nimble and alert, with an extremely keen sense for timing. He was therefore better suited to Scattered Hands.

The six men who had learned the martial art were naturally thrilled. Seizing the time and drawing on the energy of the cold beast flesh in their bellies, they began practicing.

After finishing his instruction, Xia Hong waited until nightfall, then took his Stone Axe and left the cave once more.

He had originally planned to go out and search for Crystal Fruit last night, but he had unexpectedly run into Big Stone Camp's hunt. Though he had brought that Snow Mane back without mishap, he had not picked a single Crystal Fruit.

Before they had the ability to hunt, cold beast flesh was an unexpected windfall. Crystal Fruit was their staple food, so Xia Hong still had to go to the Ice Vast Tree and pick fruit.

Besides, the camp's firewood was nearly gone.

When they had moved over from the original cave, only fifteen units of wood had remained.

The fact that it had lasted more than ten days was already remarkable.

The Small Bonfire consumed two units a day. If the camp had not conserved fuel by leaving it unlit at night, that little wood would never have lasted this long.

Compared to the first time, Xia Hong was far more familiar with the route when he entered Redwood Ridge this time.

Relying on his memories from last time, he quickly found the Ice Vast Tree.

Xia Hong approached, surveyed the surroundings, and immediately climbed the tree after confirming it was safe. Taking out his leather bag, he began picking fruit.

The tree was covered in ripe Crystal Fruit, each one the size of a fist and weighing around half a jin. Xia Hong soon filled the bag with more than a thousand jin, and the leather bag in his hands grew heavier and heavier.

Only when the bag could no longer hold another fruit did Xia Hong stop.

With the Crystal Fruit picked, it was time to fell trees.

Xia Hong carried the Crystal Fruit back first. Only when he was nearly out of Redwood Ridge did he begin searching the area for suitable trees.

It sounded like nothing more than chopping down trees, but in reality, it was far from simple.

The Ice Vast Tree absolutely could not be cut down. For one, cold beasts might be up in its branches; for another, it was the camp's source of food. There were already few of them, and cutting one down would be no different from cutting off their own escape route.

Golden Scale Trees were no good either. First, they were too sturdy—his Stone Axe certainly could not cut through them. Second, cold beasts loved sleeping in Golden Scale Trees at night. If he disturbed them, the outcome went without saying.

That left only Crimson Frost Trees as targets.

In this outer area of Redwood Ridge, Crimson Frost Trees were indeed the most common, likely accounting for ninety percent of all trees.

But the problem was that these Crimson Frost Trees were all too large.

Everywhere he looked were trunks four or five meters in diameter, even six or seven meters wide, with heights of fifty or sixty meters common as grass. Deeper in, Xia Hong even spotted trees over ten meters in diameter—some even more outrageous than that.

Looking at these towering giant trees, Xia Hong did not know whether to laugh or cry.

It was foreseeable that as the Camp System advanced, the resources needed for upgrades would only increase. Thus, these inexhaustible, limitless giant trees before him should have been wonderful news.

But the problem was that he could not take away a single one of them right now.

He did want to choose a thicker one to cut down, but leaving aside whether he could even cut it through, even if he did, he would not have the strength to carry it back.

After searching for more than an hour, just as Xia Hong's fear of enormous objects was about to erupt, he finally found a suitable Crimson Frost Tree.

"Over three meters thick and more than twenty meters long. It's about the same as the ones burned in the previous cave. Carrying it back shouldn't be a problem."

Xia Hong set down the leather bag filled with Crystal Fruit, pulled the Stone Axe from his waist, scraped away all the ice crystals on the outermost layer of bark, then spat twice into his hands and began the earnest great undertaking of chopping wood.

Crack... crack... crack... crack...

Three hours later.

Boom...

The giant tree crashed down, sending countless sprays of snow into the air.

Soaked from head to toe, his waist aching and his arms weak, Xia Hong walked over. As he looked at the Crimson Frost Tree lying on the ground, his panting face was filled with disbelief.

Only now did he understand why Xia Ding and the thirteen members of their Lumber Team could bring back at most five or six trees each night.

He had just broken through to the Lumbering Realm, yet after three hours, he could only fell one tree.

And he had nearly exhausted himself doing it.

Moreover, he could clearly sense that his body could not possibly endure another bout of exercise this intense anytime soon.

That meant a single person in the Lumbering Realm could fell at most one tree a night.

And that was only if safety could be guaranteed.

Crimson Frost Trees were already the easiest trees to cut in this outer area.

Before coming out tonight, Xia Hong had not been without thoughts of gathering the two hundred units of wood needed to upgrade the Small Bonfire in one go. As for the other fifty units of iron, he could worry about those later.

But only after truly chopping trees did he realize just how difficult those two hundred units of wood were to obtain.

The instant the giant tree was cut down, the Camp System's resource panel changed.

Resources: Wood 5 Coal 0 Iron 0 Silver 0 Gold 0

After working all night and exhausting himself to the point of near collapse, he had gained only five units of wood.

"We can only increase efficiency by increasing our numbers. Once Xia Chuan and Yuan Cheng both break through, things should speed up. Slowly, slowly. No rush."

Xia Hong comforted himself for a few moments. After resting for a while, he rose, tied the bag of Crystal Fruit to the tree, then hoisted the tree onto his shoulder and returned to camp.

After seeing that Snow Mane, the people of the camp barely reacted when Xia Hong brought back a tree along with more than a thousand jin of Crystal Fruit.

Of course, with the dwindling wood and food supplies replenished once more, everyone felt much more at ease.

Xia Hong knew that without improving their strength, there would be no major changes in the camp.

Thus, in the days that followed, aside from cultivating with the remaining cold beast flesh, he went out every night.

Of course, not every trip yielded something.

The Ice Vast Tree whose location he knew was picked clean after three harvests.

No one knew when it would bear fruit again, so Xia Hong began expanding his search range.

Fortunately, over the following period, he discovered two more trees in succession, both laden with Crystal Fruit.

He brought back the Crystal Fruit from those two trees in six trips total, and the camp's Crystal Fruit supply suddenly rose to over seven thousand jin.

With more food, the camp members could not only fill their stomachs, but smiles gradually appeared more often on their faces. They no longer seemed as lifeless as before.

Besides Crystal Fruit, Xia Hong brought back one felled tree every night.

Twenty days later, the wood resource had climbed all the way from five to eighty-seven.

Though coal, iron, silver, and gold were still all at zero, at least gathering wood was no longer difficult. Xia Hong was still very happy.

Things continued steadily until the twenty-fourth day. Xia Hong had just dragged a tree back to camp and entered the cave when he heard some good news.