Playing in the Mud

He dove twice in succession, but did not see even the shadow of a fish.

He had originally wanted to dive once more to make sure, but he had probably suffered from low blood sugar because he had not eaten breakfast and had also been hungry for most of the previous day.

Now, sprawled beside the lake, he was so dizzy that the world spun before his eyes. If he had not come back up then, he probably would have sunk straight to the bottom.

It took him a long while to finally catch his breath.

During that time, Zhou Xu saw the three tribe members watching him helplessly, apparently just about to go call for help. He laboriously waved a hand.

"I'm fine. How's the mud I had you dig coming along?"

"We've already dug quite a lot."

As he spoke, the tribe member with mud-covered hands pointed to the side.

"Is this enough, Chief? If it isn't, we can keep digging."

Hearing this, Zhou Xu tilted his head and glanced to the side. The mud they had dug out had already piled up into a small hill, but in Zhou Xu's eyes, it was clearly not enough.

"Keep digging."

Relying on just two hands made the work terribly inefficient, but even Zhou Xu could not produce any decent tools for them in such a short time.

There was no helping it. Things had to be done one at a time.

Having accepted the reality that there were no fish resources, Zhou Xu used the time while resting to adjust the plans he had made for the next few days.

Once he had more or less finished making the adjustments, he had basically recovered as well.

Apart from determining whether there were actually any fish in the saltwater lake and digging lake mud, the most important thing on Zhou Xu's schedule that afternoon was to study pottery-making.

As long as he successfully fired pottery jars, they could store fresh water ahead of time instead of being as stretched thin as they were now.

However, Zhou Xu had no intention of simply starting by playing with mud.

To do good work, one must first sharpen one's tools.

Although Zhou Xu had never studied pottery-making before, he liked drinking tea and, by extension, also liked buying teacups.

To avoid getting ripped off, he had done a tiny bit of research and picked up quite a lot of utterly useless knowledge.

Teacups could not really be considered pottery; they were generally porcelain. However, both were fired from earth, so there were still some similarities between them.

And when it came to firing such vessels, what was the most important thing? The kiln. Preferably one enclosed by kiln walls, since that allowed the internal temperature to be higher while also keeping it more stable.

So now he needed to use the stones they had brought back to build a kiln capable of maintaining a stable internal temperature.

He definitely could not make one too large, so he could only put together something that would just about do.

At the same time, the stones could not possibly fit together perfectly. As for the gaps, Zhou Xu's solution was simple: he would smear mud directly over them.

That was also one of the main reasons he had told the three tribe members to keep digging. He still had to build the kiln, and this little bit of lake mud was definitely not enough.

Using a palm-sized, fairly flat piece of Little Bone as a tool for smearing mud, he applied layer after layer inside and out. At first glance, the kiln actually looked fairly convincing.

"That should do it."

Setting the bone slab aside, Zhou Xu looked at the kiln, which was beginning to take shape, patted the mud from his hands, and nodded with reasonable satisfaction.

However, he clearly could not officially begin firing pottery yet.

Firing pottery was not something where you simply pinched some mud and immediately put it in the fire. After shaping it, you still had to wait for it to dry naturally, and that stage alone would take at least two or three days.

At this point, he was still in the preparation phase.

After taking a drink of water, Zhou Xu finished building the kiln and only then ambled over to the lakeside to get some mud.

This feeling really is strange.

After all, playing with mud was something he had only done as a child. Once he grew up, he basically never did such a thing anymore.

He did not start by making anything large. Zhou Xu first took some mud and shaped it into small rice bowls.

After all, he was a complete novice at firing pottery. He had never expected to succeed on his first try, and he was bound to experience failure after failure along the way.

Shaping small bowls was more convenient. If one burned badly, he could simply replace it with another and keep firing, building up experience this way. Once he could reliably fire small bowls, he could then tackle those large pottery jars.

That way, he would not ruin the large pottery jars he had painstakingly shaped due to his lack of experience, leaving all his effort wasted.

The precision of Zhou Xu's two hands was limited, and he was hardly an experienced craftsman. The small bowls he shaped were consequently somewhat irregular; at a glance, not one looked quite like another.

After a little adjustment, they were merely brought up to a barely presentable standard.

Fortunately, playing with mud was not difficult in itself. Besides, it was everyone's first time, so Zhou Xu might not necessarily have done much better than the primitive people.

"From here on, I'll leave it to you. Put the finished pottery bowls over here to dry."

He took the lead in shaping five or six. Once the tribe members nearby had more or less understood and learned the process, the task naturally fell to them.

That was because Zhou Xu discovered that under such harsh conditions, the tribe members' mental states were generally better than his own.

Or rather, their bodies had long since adapted to days when they could not eat more than a few bites of food or drink more than a few mouthfuls of water, while Zhou Xu's body clearly had not adapted yet.

By this point, he was already hungry and exhausted. He had no choice but to sit beside the Fire Pit to drink water and rest, while also taking the opportunity to offer the basket-weaving team some guidance. Whenever he had nothing to do, he would squint and doze for a while.

That continued until the gathering team led by Dashan returned.

"Chief, following your instructions, we picked up quite a lot of stones, and the amount of branches is also far greater than during any previous trip!"

By the end, Dashan's voice carried excitement he could not conceal.

At that moment, the branches brought back by the gathering team were piled up in bundles, forming a small hill that was directly as tall as a person!

With this amount, it felt as though they would not need to deliberately gather branches again for the next two or three days. They could simply pick up a few while doing other things.

The freed-up manpower could be put to other uses entirely.

"Well done. Thanks for all your hard work."

After looking over the wood and stones Dashan and the others had gathered, Zhou Xu did not hold back in praising them.

"Oh, right. How many insects did you catch?"

This was undoubtedly one of the matters Zhou Xu was most concerned about at present. After all, it would directly affect how much food each person could receive that evening.

The results proved that Dashan and the others had achieved quite a lot this time. Judging by the quantity, they had at least two or three times as many as before.

But on closer thought, it did not seem strange.

They had only just arrived yesterday. By the time they reached this place, it was already late, and there had been so many things to do that they simply had not had much time to catch insects.

Today was different. They had officially set out first thing in the morning, and their main tasks for most of the day had revolved around those three things: gathering branches, gathering stones, and catching insects. It was only natural that they had caught more than yesterday.

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