Everly picked up a piece of broken stone and began scribbling calculations on the ground, figuring out what supplies she and Misha still lacked.
First and foremost, the most important thing was obviously drinking water.
It was still midsumr, the temperature was high, and water consumption was heavy.
Everly rembered that in a milder climate, an adult woman needed to consu at least 1.5 liters of water a day. In sumr, that amount could rise to 2 liters.
Calculated over half a month, she and Misha would need 60 liters of water. But on this island, each plastic bottle only held 500 milliliters, aning they would need 120 bottles.
Everly had a lighter and a pot, and there was also a freshwater river nearby, so drinking water itself was not the issue — she and Misha could boil their own water. The real problem was containers to store it in. Once they were out at sea, there would be no river for them to freely drink from whenever they wanted.
Thinking of this, Everly glanced at the pitiful eight and a half bottles of mineral water sitting on the boulder and sighed.
The ga organizers practically wanted the players on the island to slaughter each other over food, water, and ti, so they had been extrely stingy when placing supplies.
Small buildings around the outer edge of the island usually contained only one bottle of water. Larger buildings had slightly more, but not by much. For example, the abandoned hospital Everly had visited — one of the largest buildings on the island — only contained three bottles.
Judging by those numbers, dium-sized buildings probably held two bottles of water. In theory, if Everly could sweep through every building on the island, she could collect 120 bottles of water.
In reality, though…
Setting aside the fact that she herself could not conveniently move around outside, Misha alone simply could not handle that workload. Just the number and scale of the buildings in the island’s third and fourth rings made it impossible to supply that much water.
And if they entered the second and third rings, they would also have to face threats from the butchers and the other players. By the second day of the ga, many players would realize the importance of forming alliances and would band together for mutual protection. In that kind of situation, no matter how capable Misha was, she could not fight many opponents alone, and Everly naturally had no intention of letting Misha take such a risk.
Another relatively hidden problem lay in transportation.
Simply put, with the level of resources available on the island, the small boat Everly and Misha were hand-building would not be especially sturdy. At most, it could hold so food supplies. Expecting it to carry 60 liters of water without sinking was pure fantasy.
Considering that seawater is denser than fresh water, a bottle of purified water would float if placed in the ocean. Therefore, Everly’s plan was to use ropes, sh bags, or similar tools to keep the drinking water subrged in the sea and tow it along behind them.
Which led to another storage problem.
The mineral water bottles distributed in the killing ga used ordinary screw-top plastic caps. Those caps did not provide perfect sealing. When the bottle openings were subrged, contaminated water from outside could seep into the bottles through capillary action, polluting the drinking water inside. That was why bottled water soaked during floods was considered unsafe to drink.
Seawater was filthy, containing large amounts of bacteria, viruses, algal toxins, heavy tals, and other impurities. If the bottles were left soaking in seawater for too long, the water inside would gradually beco contaminated as well.
Of course, if they beca desperate enough from thirst, a little dirtiness was still tolerable.
So after circling around the issue, the problem returned to the original question — how were they supposed to obtain 120 plastic bottles?
Or rather, was there so other object they could find to replace mineral water bottles for storing water? Better yet, could they sohow build a device capable of converting seawater into fresh water while at sea? That would be even more ideal…
Everly decided that once Misha returned, she would have Misha take the radar and try her luck searching the buildings in the third and fourth rings. The killing ga’s “loot boxes” could produce almost anything. If they were lucky enough, maybe they would even pull a legendary golden prize.
Aside from drinking water, food was naturally another problem.
At present, the compressed biscuits were only enough to feed Everly and Misha for three and a half days. Considering that the nine energy bars could substitute for part of their als, the two of them still needed to find about thirty more packs of biscuits to bring along.
As for that, the urgency was not quite as high. After all, the sea was full of fish and shrimp. With the ocean’s favor on her side, Everly could still manage to obtain so food.
Finally, the third matter was naturally the handmade boat.
Everly rummaged through the pile of miscellaneous junk at hand.
Setting the other trash aside for the mont, that three-dinsional cat scratching board was actually a pretty useful item.
It was a triangular prism-shaped cat scratching post, with all three rectangular sides tightly wrapped in hemp rope. The ropes were glued firmly onto the wooden boards, and they felt extrely tough to the touch.
Everly spent quite a while picking at it before finally prying one end of the rope free from the glue. Holding onto that loose end, she slowly pulled downward along the glue lines bit by bit. By the ti Misha finished transferring ti outside and returned to the cave, Everly had just finished removing all the rope from the scratching board.
Afterward, Everly held up the hemp rope she had taken off and examined it.
The rope was about two-thirds the thickness of a little finger. It was very sturdy and would not snap even when pulled hard. Its total length was roughly eighty to ninety ters.
A rope that long would be perfect for tying together a raft!
Both Everly and Misha had learned raft-building from Old John.
Although limited by circumstances, the two of them had only practiced by making a miniature raft with chopsticks and cotton thread that Old John bought from Chinatown, never getting the chance for hands-on experience. Still, they both knew the key techniques and binding thods involved in constructing a raft.
The island also happened to have many large trees. If not, they could simply gather so deadwood and tie together a simple raft instead.
With that, the tasks ahead temporarily rged into two objectives:
First, gather more food, water, and other supplies.
Second, search for materials to build the raft.
The two tasks happened to divide perfectly between Misha and Everly.
In theory, Everly was supposed to be “dead,” so it would be unwise for her to appear in front of caras. Therefore, the job of searching buildings in the third and fourth rings for supplies was handed over to Misha.
For this, Everly even contributed her own backpack and electronic radar (as well as a stinky severed finger).
With the backpack, Misha could carry away far more supplies in one trip. However, the bag itself also could not be exposed to surveillance caras, because it belonged to the Bean and Cleaver brothers. Misha would have to carefully avoid outdoor caras, and whenever she entered a building, she would need to leave the backpack outside the entrance.
As for Everly, her task was to search the surrounding area for suitable timber.
Using the simplest type of small wooden raft as an example, she would need to find anywhere from a dozen to several dozen logs asuring roughly 10 to 15 centiters in diater and 2 to 3 ters in length.
The exact number of logs depended on their size.
For example, logs with a diater of 10 centiters were relatively thin. If the raft were to be 2 ters wide, she would need at least twenty of them.
If the logs were thicker, the required number could be reduced accordingly. But thinner logs might only require cutting a couple of notches before being snapped apart with brute force, whereas thicker wood would be much harder to obtain. Even though Everly carried an axe with her, felling trees was still exhausting work, so thicker was not necessarily better.
In addition, the density of the wood would also affect its buoyancy in water. Therefore, the ideal dinsions of the logs would depend on the species of tree.
These were not the sort of things she could figure out while squatting in a cave. Everly needed to head into the nearby forest to inspect the situation personally, try chopping down several trees, and then flexibly adjust her plans according to the properties of the wood and the effort required to cut it.
Communicating by writing with small stones on the ground, the two girls quickly finished discussing everything.
Soon afterward, carrying their respective equipnt, they left the sea cave one after the other.
Everly headed toward a forest south of the cave. That forest sat on a cape that sloped upward diagonally from the sea, giving it relatively high ground. There were no surveillance caras nearby either, so if any players approached, Everly would be able to spot them first, making the area comparatively safe.
As for Misha, Everly had drawn her a map of nearby supply points from mory. Misha was currently hurrying toward the buildings marked on the map.
The two of them spent the entire morning busy with their respective tasks.
By noon, Everly had chopped down more than ten logs of varying species and thicknesses. She rolled them down the sloped side of the cape onto the beach and soaked them in the water for observation. After watching them for a while, she finally settled on one particular type of tree.
The tree looked sowhat like a cedar. Its trunk grew straight upward like a tower, while the branches extended outward from the central trunk in all directions. In terms of shape, it was perfectly suited for building a raft.
More importantly, the wood was moderately soft, making it relatively easy to chop down, and it also had good buoyancy in seawater.
The preliminary preparations had taken far more ti than Everly expected. By the ti she finally finished selecting the timber and looked up at the sky, it was already midday.
The previous day, she had spent the entire ti searching for supplies, killing people, setting traps, and traveling without any proper rest. Barely holding herself together until now, she was already reaching her limit.
Coincidentally, the island’s midday and afternoon sun was extrely harsh, and the temperature was scorching. Staying outside too long could easily lead to heatstroke. Everly decided to call it a day for now, return to the cave for lunch, and get so rest.
To conserve food, she did not eat any of their precious compressed biscuits. Instead, she used the folding pot to fetch so water from a nearby river and boiled a pot of bird eggs.
The eggs were an unexpected harvest from her morning tree-cutting.
There were many birds on the island. So were seabirds, while others lived in the forest. It was late August, and with food abundant, many birds were still in breeding season.
While chopping trees, Everly discovered nurous bird nests hanging in the branches. When selecting trees for testing, she had deliberately targeted the large ones with nests in them.
After all that chopping, she managed to collect twenty to thirty bird eggs. So nests had hatched earlier than others, and even contained several chicks. The little things looked bizarre and ugly, and whenever they saw a person, they would open their abyss-like mouths wide and chirp noisily without stopping.
The chicks were far too skinny — just skin stretched over bones, with barely any at on them. Everly was not cruel enough to eat creatures that had already hatched, so she found a few other trees, climbed up them, and relocated the nests containing chicks onto the branches.
As for the bird eggs that had not yet hatched, she naturally accepted them without hesitation.
In addition to the eggs, Everly also managed to catch a few fish.
These fish had been found in the water pool inside the cave.
The sea-eroded cave was a structure that sloped upward. Judging from the damp marks on the cave walls, during low tide the seawater would only gently cover about one-third of the entrance. During high tide, however, the water could rise deep enough to reach the innermost part of the cave and wet the bottom of the large rock where she and Misha stored their belongings.
Taking advantage of this, after finding the cave, Misha had cleverly collected so heavy, well-shaped stones and built a wall at roughly one-quarter of the cave entrance.
The height of this wall was lower than the high-tide water level but higher than the normal water level. When the tide rose, fish, shrimp, and crabs would be carried in easily by the seawater into the area behind the stone wall. Then, when the tide receded, if those small creatures failed to leave in ti as the water level dropped, they would be trapped in the “pool” behind the barrier.
A tide had co in that morning, and it was now shortly after low tide. The contents of the pool were still quite abundant.
Everly selected several plump fish and crabs for herself and Misha. She scraped off the fish scales with a Nepalese curved blade, gutted them, skewered them on branches, and roasted them over the fire. The crabs were simply rinsed, had their aprons removed, and were boiled together with the bird eggs.
The fish innards that were removed were not wasted either; they were all thrown into the water pool at the cave entrance.
At present, there were not many creatures left in the pool. There was more than enough of the offal to go around. The leftovers, once the tide rose again, would serve as bait to attract more fish and shrimp, leading to another cycle of harvest.
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