Hunting Monsters

"I'd never seen a cheat that called itself evil."

Zhang Ming crawled out of the tent and found that the drizzle had stopped.

He carefully planned out his day. "I have to find food today, then figure out how to start a fire!"

As for water...

He first glanced at the dew collected in the suitcases, and his heart immediately lifted.

After a whole night of collecting, plus the morning drizzle, each suitcase held about 800 milliliters of crystal-clear dew, making 1,600 milliliters between them.

As long as he made another five or six dew collectors, his water problem would pretty much be solved.

Zhang Ming seized every chance to give himself a pep talk. "This is ten thousand times easier than Uncle De's deserted-island survival show. Uncle De was bare-assed, while I have all these tools..."

"Maybe I should enjoy a little relief?"

Two minutes later.

Zhang Ming stood up in the grass, wiped his backside with some dry leaves, and glanced at his stats panel.

[Spirit +1]

As for why he had pooped in the grass instead of on the beach?

Obviously...

If a rescue team showed up and caught me running around stark naked, wouldn't that be humiliating?

Ahem. Time to get down to business.

He gathered plenty of dry leaves and branches and left them out to bake in the sun.

Then he picked up a hollow metal pipe salvaged from the plane-perhaps a water pipe from the lavatory-to use as a weapon, and set off in search of food.

The deserted island was huge.

Dense woods and tangled weeds covered it, and towering palms blotted out the sky, as though he had entered a world inhabited by giants.

So Zhang Ming chose to stay away from the jungle and wander only along the shore.

There weren't many animals living here. Occasionally, a few gulls swept across the sky. Their bodies were perhaps a meter long, with wingspans of about three meters-two orders of magnitude bigger than their counterparts on Earth.

Whatever the case, the presence of birds was better than no signs of life at all.

Squinting, he spotted a gull's nest in a coconut palm.

"I wonder if there are any chicks..."

After a moment's consideration, Zhang Ming decided there was no real need to climb a hundred-meter coconut palm just to raid a nest for eggs.

If a gull went berserk and pecked him, it would be curtains for him.

He continued along the beach and picked up a few little shellfish. They weren't enough for even a mouthful, but something was better than nothing.

He also climbed over a tall rock face. His current physique really was powerful: he had scaled a rock face over three meters high with barely any effort.

Zhang Ming wasn't quite used to it.

Then, from his high vantage point, he spotted a swarm of... crabs!

An enormous swarm!

Thousands upon thousands of crabs crowded the tidal flats, blowing bubbles with "brr-brr" sounds as they happily feasted on vast stretches of algae in the shallow water.

"Food!"

Zhang Ming's eyes lit up. Adrenaline surged through him, and his Spirit soared.

[+1+1+1+1]

Then he noticed something was wrong. Weren't these crabs a little too, too, too... big?

The smallest "baby" crabs were the size of buckets, while the largest were as big as washing machines!

These creatures swaggered across the tidal flats, their long blue-green legs bristling with sharp filaments. Their massive bodies lurched from side to side, looking like giant spiders writhing in the seawater.

A few crabs spotted the peeping intruder standing above them, and actually swarmed toward him together!

"Brr!!"

This isn't right!

Faced with the densely packed crab army, Zhang Ming took to his heels, turning and leaping off the rock face.

With a few soft thuds, several pursuing crabs failed to stop in time and tumbled off the rocks, landing in a heap with all eight legs in the air.

Zhang Ming's heart leaped. He thought a ready-made meal had fallen into his lap.

But to his surprise, these crabs were incredibly resilient. The fall hadn't hurt them at all.

They quickly flipped themselves upright, brandished their enormous claws, and resumed the chase, letting out shrill "brr-brr" cries.

"Why are you chasing me? Don't tell me you want to eat me!" Zhang Ming sprinted for his life.

"Brr!"

Luckily, his current running speed rivaled Usain Bolt's, and he plunged into the coconut grove in no time.

The crabs seemed wary of the forest. Rather than recklessly pursuing him, they retreated.

Then Zhang Ming snuck back out and lay flat on the ground, his blood pumping and his mind filled with crabmeat.

"Maybe there's something terrifying in the forest, so the crabs don't dare venture too far in..."

"But if I don't hunt crabs, what am I supposed to live on? Air?"

After a while, he spotted a relatively small crab that had become separated from the swarm on the beach.

Quietly waiting for his chance, he suddenly sprang up with the little water pipe and swung with all his might at its bulging black eyes!

"Die, you bastard!"

"Brr!"

"What a huge crab!"

"That's practically a monster, isn't it?"

"Can he beat it?"

Countless pairs of eyes stared at the scene in Mirage No. 16, their hearts pounding in time with the crabs' movements.

The chubby driver, Wang Fumin, was no exception. He was sheltering with his daughter in an evacuation center.

It was a large open-air stadium, with over ten thousand tents set up inside.

Every day, the government distributed three meals and posted volunteer assignments. Each family of three had to send one person to work.

His wife, a nurse, had already gone off to volunteer.

With nothing to do, Wang Fumin's main entertainment was watching the Mirage in the sky, playing on his phone, and keeping an eye on his daughter.

For once, he could take it easy and no longer had to struggle to pay the mortgage. Life was rather pleasant.

"Ah! Daddy, the monster's coming!" His little daughter's face went pale with fright as she pointed at the sky. "A crab monster!"

"Then don't look!" The chubby driver covered his daughter's eyes.

He said helplessly to the companions chatting and boasting nearby, "Why would this young fellow go picking a fight with crabs?"

"They're so huge, just like monsters. If he can't beat them, he might get eaten."

"He has no choice. He doesn't have much food." A bespectacled man nearby spoke as he typed on his laptop.

"Even if he rations it carefully, he won't last very long."

The bespectacled man was named Lu Tuyu. A programmer by trade, he was currently half-unemployed.

He was a key fighter in online arguments against emigration enthusiasts beyond the Great Firewall, and a diehard fan of Zhang Ming.

"While he's still in decent shape, he can at least put up a fight against these crabs. If he goes hungry much longer, he'll be dizzy and weak, unable even to run. Then he'll have no choice but to wait for death."

"That's true..." Wang Fumin thoroughly agreed. "If it were me, I probably really would starve to death."

"Haven't you noticed? This young fellow runs faster than ordinary people. He probably has a superpower too. We just don't know exactly what it is."

Lu Tuyu showed them a forum post.