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0.75% 48 Hours a Day / Chapter 11: Desert Island Survival V

Chapter 11: Desert Island Survival V

Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Zhang Heng finally started a fire.

That meant that his menu was no longer limited to just coconuts. Shortly after, following Ed's instructions, Zhang Heng found conches on the rocks by the beach, even lucked out and found crabs and oysters.

The latter especially, was fresh and sweet, rich in nutrients—calcium, iron, phosphorus, and vitamin B2—reputed as the milk of the sea. It was pity, however, that the calories they provide were not high; each of them containing only 70 calories. For chowhounds, this was a good thing but on a deserted island, Zhang Heng preferred something with higher-calorie content to provide him with the necessary energy.

He did not need to worry about exceeding his calorie count and getting out of shape seeing that he had been starving these few days.

Thank goodness, they just might able to enjoy a decent meal tonight.

Zhang Heng collected about seventy over little conches, six oysters, and four hermit crabs which were sadly, rather small. Ed had told him that the hermits were edible but tasted average. Nevertheless, the two of them were not dining in a Michelin star restaurant so taste was no longer an important factor.

Zhang Heng even spotted some fishes by the coast but without the right tools, he could only watch them swim about from afar.

To boot, they also had the small puddles of water that he had found two days ago. With the shells of the mollusks he picked up, Zhang Heng was able to scoop and transport the water. But for all that, the pair found themselves having problems with the tools for boiling the water. They did not have bowls and the shells they were using were too well insulated that even under direct heat, the water refused to boil. 

Ed thought for a moment and then said, "Go find some pebbles—not the ones with a lot of holes or stratification."

Zhang Heng nodded and did as Ed instructed. They spent twenty minutes cooking the pebbles until they were burning red, and fastened them to the clams using small branches. Soon, the water inside began to boil.

"There's not a lot of water in here. Two should suffice." Ed said.

The water inside the shells boiled for around a minute, enough to get rid of most of the bacteria.

Zhang Heng put these little outdoor survival skills to memory.

Ed was a good teacher. With the injury to his waist, he could not move about freely. But Zhang Heng was able to benefit from his companion's comprehensive survival know-how, so he had no complaints about having to take on full responsibility of collecting food and water for the both of them.

At the same time, Zhang Heng was careful not to be too reliant on Ed; he hoped that he could make all the knowledge he had picked up from Ed into his own practical skills—not so that he could get rid of Ed later on, of course. As a matter of fact, he was so grateful to Ed that if there was only one morsel of food left, Zhang Heng was willing to give half of it to Ed. 

Having said that, Zhang Heng could not shake off this ominous feeling; he had noticed that Ed appeared to be worse than the first day he came to shore. This period of rest had not improved his condition. Since the last time Zhang Heng bandaged the fatal wound on Ed's thigh, and stopped the bleeding, there was nothing else he could do to tend to the injury.

There were no antibiotics so readily available in the hospitals in the city. Once the wound was infected, it would be untreatable.

Zhang Heng believed that the former captain knew this better than him—yet, Ed never raised the subject in the past few days.

This seemed to confirm the foreboding hunch that Zhang Heng had been feeling. Not knowing what he could do for his companion, Zhang Heng looked after Ed as best as he could.

For the rest of the days, Ed taught Zhang Heng how to make simple stone tools, use wood charcoal to clean his teeth, collect rainwater, make ropes out of tree barks, build a basic raft out of wood, use corals to trap fish…

Compared to the time when the both of them had just arrived on the island, the pair had moved past the most dangerous period, and now had extra reserves. The leftover dried fish was hung from the ceiling of the cave so that should they encounter terrible weather and were unable to go out to scavenge for food, they would not go hungry.

Things seemed to be going uphill, and the forty days no longer seemed like an unattainable goal.

Just when this notion appeared in Zhang Heng's mind, doom showed up.

On the sixteenth night, Ed suddenly developed a high fever. Zhang Heng devoted his time and energy to care for his companion, and gradually, their supply of food and water gradually depleted. Their search range was also greatly reduced. The food they had set aside for a rainy day was immediately put to use in this crisis.

What even more worrying was that Ed's condition did not improve at all.

When Zhang Heng undid the makeshift T-shirt bandage on Ed's thigh, he discovered that the gash that was so deep you could see the bone had festered. 

Since yesterday, the former captain of the British Army had been in a comatose state.

What little food they had in the cave was slowly diminishing. Very soon, they were on the brink of running out of food.

Finally, on the nineteenth night, Ed's eyes suddenly flew open. He turned to his side, and murmured to Zhang Heng, half-conscious, "Do you know what's the most important thing to survive the wilderness? It's never being satisfied with what you've achieved yesterday. Live each day better than the last. You have to find a way to conquer nature."

Zhang Heng rubbed his eyes, and smiled sadly, "Ed, that's not what you told me the last time."

But Ed made no response.

Zhang Heng put a finger under Ed's nose and discovered that his friend was no longer breathing.

Even though he had been mentally preparing himself for Ed's passing, he was still sad. While the two of them had not spent a lot of time with each other, Zhang Heng's ability to navigate in this wilderness was all thanks to Ed's teaching.

The shared a student-teacher relationship, but they were also friends.

Zhang Heng dug a hole in the forest near the cave, and buried Ed. To prevent wild beasts from damaging the grave, he outlined the grave with some sharpened twigs. 

Only when he had done all that did he drag his starving body to the beach to search for food.

The good news was that he was already halfway into the forty-day goal. Even though he was alone again, Zhang Heng was confident that he could survive the island.

On the noon of the twentieth day, Zhang Heng's coral trap caught him a large two catty1 fish. This meant he could go to bed tonight with a full stomach. 

But just when Zhang Heng thought that his bad luck had finally passed, he suddenly received a voice prompt in his ear.

[Alert! Alert! An anomaly had been discovered in the quest! Critical time error]

[Reporting error]

[Second level authority enabled, verification approved, report canceled…]

[Remove the error permanently from the decision-making sequence]

 [Assignment objective remains unchanged; the return time has been changed from 40 days to 520 days. Please pay attention!]  

Zhang Heng's head nearly blew up at the series of messages. When he finally registered the drastic, unanticipated changes, his eyes flitted to his right hand.

All three hands were pointed upwards.

No way. He had been so preoccupied learning how to survive in the wilderness, and having experienced all kinds of situations, he had forgotten about that twenty-four-dial watch on his wrist.

On the first few nights when he first arrived on the island, he was not able to enter that still world and had thought that it did not apply to this game. He did not think that the game would actually be holding back!

The first thing that came to Zhang Heng's mind was where did the 520 days come from. The extra twenty-four hours he had every day, after being multiplied by 480, left him with the most frightening string of numbers.

  1. catty: unit of measure used in China. 1 catty = 0.5kg.

next chapter

Chapter 12: Desert Island Survival VI

Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

So, this really was all just a game?

In reality, once watch hands pointed to twelve midnight, Zhang Heng would enter Still Time. But here, the wind continued to whistle in his ears, and the coconuts trees swayed along, except for that voice that appeared suddenly not long ago, nothing else had changed. 

Zhang Heng had tried playing several computer games during Still Time.

Following the contact-recover principle, as long as he was not in contact with other people, everything would continue to work.

But now was not the time to talk about such things.

Just as victory was within reach, the difficulty of the game was raised to a hellish level.

Realizing that he had another five hundred days and not twenty days left on the godforsaken island, Zhang Heng did not even have the strength to draw a bitter smile.

Instead, he sat by the beach, staring at the horizon, doing nothing else until sundown. This was the first time he felt like life was full of spite.

But at this point, griping was meaningless.

Even if he wanted to settle scores with whoever, he would have to wait until five hundred days later.

Before dark, Zhang Heng finally roused. He was never the kind of person who was easily knocked down by difficulties. He did as Ed had taught him in between the lessons, to let go, to vent out all his negative emotions first, and then regain his composure.

With the fish and crabs he caught, Zhang Heng enjoyed a full meal, and then early the next morning, devoted himself fighting against nature. 

Fire can be used to cook food and boil water, and keep him warm at night. Simultaneously, keeping the fire burning had become Zhang Heng's responsibility.

Every day, not only did he have to go out to collect food and freshwater, he also needed to find firewood that would burn easily—this task was especially tough after a shower of rain.

He had wanted to collect more firewood and store them in the cave to cope with the rainy weather, but earlier on, he had to focus his energy on scavenging for food; now that Ed was gone, the amount of food he needed to find was halved, leaving with ample time to do other things. 

Other than collecting firewood, Zhang Heng also attempted at fashioning a couple of stone axes. Ed was not very good at making tools, and had only imparted the rough idea of how to put together a stone axe. Before this, Zhang Heng had used the sharper edge of the clams to hack at the trees but it did not work very well—it took him at least two to three hours to cut down a small tree.

That got him thinking about trying out the stone tools so highly favored by the primitive man. But for some unknown reasons, the axes he made either crack after only two chops, or the heads would be separated from the handle at a swing.

Zhang Heng could only comfort himself that failure is the mother of success.

In a blink of an eye, another twenty days had passed.

That familiar voice, again, sounded in Zhang Heng's ears.

[Task complete…]

[To return after 480 days…]

The sentences were fine on their own but when put together like that, it sounded like a bit of a joke.

Zhang Heng ignored the voice. He had just finished his lunch, and was looking for some shells to carry water. The one he had used was burnt. He was picking up goods from the 'free market' when he suddenly noticed two black dots from afar.

Huh? This was a rather familiar scenario.

What was more familiar were the two people struggling in the water.

Were those option B adventure man and option C laddie in shorts?

Zhang Heng found himself speechless. What kind of humans were they? That was some powerful will and tenacity to live. It had not been easy for him to have survived on this island and yet those two were still living and kicking after drifting in the water for forty days.

Zhang Heng's thoughts immediately went back to the late Ed. Before he breathed his last breath, Ed had thanked Zhang Heng for saving him, and being able to die on land, unlike the two other people who would be swept into a watery grave.

Instead, right now, Zhang Heng felt sorry for Ed.

If he had not 'saved' Ed, Ed might still be alive, floating on the waters with the other two.

This was not the first day Zhang Heng played games. He knew that this situation meant that he was encountering a bug.

The root cause of that was probably that extra twenty-four hours he had that disrupted the quest.

Theoretically speaking, the game should cease to exist after forty days. The other players had probably all returned to reality. He was the only was still stuck in the game—still suffering.

Most games would have crashed or broken down. Yet, this game continued to run. This fact alone was enough to prove that this was no ordinary game.

The bartender lady had said that this was the greatest game in the history of mankind. Right now, Zhang Heng found himself a little convinced of that. Ever since he arrived in this 'world', everything he had seen was extremely realistic, from the plants to the animals on the island, everything was true to the real world. Even Ed did not appear any different from a real person.

Right now, however, a flaw had finally appeared in this impeccable world.

"Is it because the plot has ended, it has no choice but to repeat?"

However, unlike mechanical loops, the Ed whom he had buried in the little forest did not reappear, meaning that the repeat followed a logical sequence.

Zhang Heng peeled off his clothes as quickly as he could; of course, he was not going to miss such a good opportunity.   

Unlike the physically weak and feeble person he was forty days ago, Zhang Heng was well-fed, and was even able to perform some training exercising outside of labor. 

His body had nearly recovered to its most optimal state.

Having gauged the distance between himself and the two people in the water, Zhang Heng decided to save the laddie in shorts, who was further away. Because according to game designers' logic, the more effort you put in, the better the reward.

With Ed's help, he had basically overcome the problem of finding food; now, he wanted to know what kind of changes would saving that young man bring to his life. 

...

Ten days later, Zhang Heng found himself marveling at the brick kiln and tile-roofed house.

There were actually people in this world who could build a house with their bare hands! All throughout, Zhang Heng trailed behind the lad in shorts from finding clay, to constructing beams, firing the bricks in a kiln, to finally building the half a meter tall bricked house. In addition to that, the lad even showed him how to make a proper stone axe, set up a wooden shed, make ceramics, prawn traps, and sandals, and use the fibers from tree barks to weave, make bow and arrows, and slings.

Not having to worry about food, Zhang Heng was able to spend his time taking it all in.

It was a pity, however, that the short pants lad never spoke. He merely did as Zhang Heng requested and quietly demonstrated all the techniques.

Then on the nineteenth day, he accidentally ingested poisonous mushrooms and died in the forest.

Killed by the plot?

Now Zhang Heng understood that the game was designed in a way that the player would have to spend the later half of the game alone. So, no matter what they did, the already injured Ed and the lad in shorts would not last until the twentieth day.

Zhang Heng buried the lad in shorts next to Ed's grave.

Unlike Ed, this lad never spoke a word; so, they did not share very strong ties. In addition, after knowing that it was all just a game, Zhang Heng was not terribly upset.

But, at the end of the day, they were teacher and student. Zhang Heng felt obliged to give him a proper burial.

After that, Zhang Heng digested and began to put everything the lad in shorts had thought him throughout their nineteen days together. In between, the adventurer drifted past twice, but Zhang did not 'save' him.

He would come back again some other time.

If Zhang Heng saved him, he would have only nineteen days left to live.

On the 130th day on the island, an announcement rang in Zhang Heng's ear. 

[Tiled-roof house successfully constructed; Wilderness Survival Skill has increased from level 0 to level 1; Game Points +5; you may view the character panel…]


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