Misha was gone for a long ti on this trip, and the rewards were plentiful.
Over the entire afternoon, she looted a total of seven supply points: six small ones and one dium-sized one.
Altogether, these supply points provided her with 10 packs of compressed biscuits, 8 bottles of mineral water, 4 daggers of different styles, 1 pointed kitchen knife, 1 wire saw, 1 entrenching shovel, 1 plastic toy monkey that clanged cymbals with a “clack-clack” sound when wound up, 1 sheet of rhinestone-decorated press-on nails, 1 tube of toothpaste, 1 box of extra-large condoms, 1 plastic harmonica, 1 pack of highly elastic stockings, and 1 toilet plunger with a red rubber head.
Food and water were, of course, vital supplies. As for the weapons, aside from the wire saw and entrenching shovel, things like the daggers and kitchen knife could actually be discarded. After all, Everly and Misha already had much better replacents in their hands, and carrying too many blades would only waste space.
As for those seven “blind box” items, they gave Everly quite a pleasant surprise.
Among the seven items, the toy monkey, press-on nails, harmonica, and toilet plunger aside, the toothpaste, condoms, and stockings were all genuinely useful.
The toothpaste’s purpose was naturally to clean teeth… Don’t laugh. If you were like Everly and had gone two days in the wilderness without being able to brush your teeth, you’d appreciate toothpaste too!
This morning, Everly had used a tender twig from beside the river. She first snapped the branch, then rubbed the broken end until it frayed into sothing like a tiny brush. After rinsing it and dipping it in water, she used it to scrub her teeth up and down. Not only did it prick her mouth, but the cleaning effect was diocre at best—better than nothing, really.
At least with toothpaste, her teeth could stay cleaner.
Stockings were also extrely useful tools in wilderness survival. Their elasticity ant they could be used as compression bands to stop bleeding, while their fine sh-like structure could serve as a simple filter. And if you were skillful enough, you could even turn the stockings into a fish trap or a scoop net, making them excellent for catching fish.
Everly tore open the package and pulled out the stockings inside, giving them a stretch.
There were five pairs of stockings in the pack, all flesh-colored. The material was quite elastic—a thin, narrow strip that could be stretched a great deal. The toughness was decent too, though they snagged fairly easily. If she layered two pieces together, that weakness could probably be overco.
Everly had been worrying that fishing at sea would be troubleso. But if she could make a scoop net out of the stockings, it would help trendously!
It just so happened that taking apart the scarf earlier had left her with a lot of yarn. She could use the yarn as thread, fish bones as needles, and make the scoop net herself.
Finally, the greatest haul from this trip was definitely the box of condoms.
Although in most situations condoms were treated as nothing more than “anti-baby tools,” they obviously had plenty of other uses. The simplest example: plenty of kids, just like Everly in her previous life, had probably snuck one from beside their parents’ bed and blown it up like a balloon… ahem!
Alright, back to being serious.
As Class II dical devices certified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, condoms sold on the market must pass strict quality and safety testing before leaving the factory.
These tests include leak testing, burst-pressure testing, tensile testing, lubricant safety testing, and more, with standards far exceeding ordinary daily needs. For example, industrial testing requires a condom to hold 3 liters of water in an environnt of 18±2°C without rupturing.
Three liters of water is equivalent to pouring together six 500ml bottles of mineral water—and that still isn’t even close to the limit of what a condom can hold!
Everly rembered seeing an advertisent from so condom manufacturer sowhere before. The slogan claid their product could hold 10 liters of water, and that even if inflated to over one ter long, it still wouldn’t burst!
The advertisent might have been exaggerated, but the fact that condoms could hold large amounts was absolutely true. After all, they were made from highly elastic natural latex, a material with astonishing stretchability. In fact, a single condom holding two to four liters of water was no problem at all.
The condoms Misha got from the blind box ca in a pack of twelve. If each condom could hold 4 liters of water, that ant a total capacity of 48 liters.
The small base currently had 20 and a half bottles of water stored. The half-empty bottle could be topped off with boiled and filtered river water, bringing the total to 21 bottles, or 10.5 liters. Add the 48 liters the condoms could hold, and the total ca to 58.5 liters—already very close to Everly’s small target of 60 liters of stored water.
At this rate, if Misha went out once more tomorrow morning, they should be able to gather all the water they needed.
Then in the afternoon, the two of them could stay by the beach together, work side by side tying logs into a raft, and boil water at the sa ti, letting it cool before pouring it into the condoms for storage.
Because Misha still had the collar around her neck, Everly and Misha couldn’t speak aloud. The two of them used broken stones to scratch words and diagrams into the ground, taking a very long ti to finish exchanging all their ideas.
After that, Misha sat beside the campfire, removed her hood, and turned her back while eating her delayed dinner. Everly, anwhile, continued dismantling the scarf and braiding cord from the yarn by the firelight.
Early the next morning, after cleaning her mouth with toothpaste and her homade toothbrush, Everly hoisted the axe onto her shoulder and once again set off on her logging expedition.
Yesterday afternoon she had chopped down eight “cedar trees.” Because of the frequent use, the axe had beco sowhat dull, but today she only needed to cut six more trees to reach the required total of fourteen logs. The workload was lighter, so it shouldn’t have been a big problem.
Unfortunately, things rarely went as planned.
At around nine in the morning, a familiar buzzing sound ca from overhead.
At the ti, Everly was crouched on the cape, hacking away at a tree with loud thuds. The mont she heard the noise, she imdiately found a large, leafy tree to hide beneath and looked up into the sky. Sure enough, a familiar helicopter was rapidly approaching the cape from the southeast.
Halfway there, an airdrop crate trailing red smoke suddenly fell from the helicopter. Midway through its descent, the crate’s red parachute automatically opened. The killer rabbit’s smug, irritating grin swayed in the wind as the airdrop slowly drifted down into the forest a little over a hundred ters away from the cape.
Hey, seriously? That counts too?!
As an honest person whose only goal was to escape the island, Everly had never hoped to get her hands on an airdrop. Those things attracted far too much attention—wherever an airdrop landed, conflict inevitably followed.
And objectively speaking, reality itself wouldn’t allow her to take one anyway. Every airdrop crate ca equipped with surveillance caras. The mont she got close, the ga organizers watching from the other side of the screen would discover her.
Under those circumstances, having the airdrop land this close was definitely not a good thing.
Right now was the third day of the ga, with exactly twenty-four hours remaining before the countdown ended. That was more than enough ti for soone to seize the airdrop and then make their way back toward the center of the island.
After several previous rounds of fighting over them, the survivors had probably already realized that airdrops always contained firearms.
Most Aricans knew how to use guns. When everyone else only had one or two lee weapons and had to fight at close range, obtaining a firearm ant leaping straight from the Stone Age into the age of modern weaponry. The increase in combat power would be terrifying.
Not to ntion that besides guns, the airdrops also contained armor and huge amounts of living supplies.
Anyone who had survived until the third day almost certainly had one or two deaths on their hands already. People would risk their lives for profit just as birds would risk theirs for food. When the expected reward was high enough, even if taking the airdrop ca with enormous danger, people would still be willing to gamble for it.
What rotten luck. Why did the airdrop have to fly in this direction of all places…?
Once the helicopter finally left, Everly hurried into action. One by one, she moved the logs she had been drying in the open area and rolled them down the slope between the cape and the mainland onto the beach below.
She had no choice. This place was simply too close to where the airdrop had landed. On top of that, Everly had spent the past two days cutting trees, leaving the top of the cape looking half-bald, with a huge cleared-out patch of open ground.
Standing atop the cape, she could see the smoking airdrop at a glance. Likewise, anyone coming to seize the airdrop only had to look up to spot her as well.
The only fortunate thing was that the airdrop had landed in the island’s fourth ring, while most of the contestants were busy slaughtering each other in the first and second rings. Even if soone happened to be in the third ring, it would still take ti for them to get here.
Seizing this last bit of ti, Everly no longer cared whether the logs might crack from the fall. One after another, she shoved all twenty-sothing logs she had worked so hard to cut down over the edge of the cape, sending them tumbling onto the beach below.
There was a height difference of roughly two to three ters between the cape forest and the beach underneath. Unless soone randomly wandered to the forest’s edge and looked down for no reason, nobody would notice the pile of logs hidden on the beach below the cape.
For Everly, this was currently the best possible solution.
Unfortunately, there still wasn’t quite enough ti.
When she was moving the last three logs, Everly hid behind a tree and glanced into the distance, only to spot several figures sprinting through the forest a few hundred ters away.
Realizing she was out of ti, and wanting to avoid being seen and attracting unnecessary trouble, she reluctantly abandoned the remaining logs. Grabbing the axe, apron, water bottle, and other belongings from the ground, she hurried down the slope to the beach below. Then, keeping close to the steep incline at the edge of the forest, she sprinted all the way back toward the sea cave where they were staying.
The facts soon proved that her decision had been extrely wise.
She had only just left the beach and reached the reef area outside the cave when she heard bursts of “rat-tat-tat” gunfire erupting from the distant forest. It sounded like a submachine gun. Not long afterward, soone fired back with a handgun. One side went “rat-tat-tat,” the other “bang-bang,” exchanging fire back and forth for quite a while. Then ca a loud boom!—soone had apparently thrown a grenade.
After the explosion, only scattered handgun shots could be heard over the next two or three minutes. The sound gradually moved closer, as if a chase was underway.
With such an intense firefight raging outside, there was no way Everly would go out and ask for trouble at a ti like this.
Last night’s stockings still hadn’t been turned into a scoop net, so Everly simply took out a knife, yarn, and fish bones, and began making the netting first.
The thod was simple:
She used the knife to cut open both sides of the stockings’ legs, turning them from the hip downward into four elastic strips of fabric that fluttered in the wind like ribbons. She repeated the process until she had three identically cut stockings.
Next, she layered the three cut stockings on top of each other. This step was to prevent the fabric from tearing later when it was stitched—since stockings alone wouldn’t be strong enough to withstand the tension of sewing.
Once the three layers were aligned, Everly took out a fish bone she had carefully selected the night before. Using the tip of a curved knife, she drilled a small hole at one end of the bone and polished it slightly. In doing so, she fashioned a bone needle. She then threaded the single-strand yarn she had unraveled the previous night, and her needle and thread were ready.
Next ca the stitching process.
Because the legs of the stockings were quite long, if she used the entire length to make the net, the resulting bag would be too deep. If it caught a large fish, uneven force could easily tear it apart.
So after careful consideration, Everly stitched across the middle of the stocking legs—around the calf area—to form the bottom of the scoop net.
The excess fabric below that point was cut off with a knife, resulting in twelve pieces of scrap cloth.
For the main body of the net, she paired the cut stocking legs together to form loops. This created four stitched seams in total. During sewing, she placed three pieces of the scrap cloth under each puncture point to reinforce it, further preventing the fabric from being torn by the stitches and making the stocking net sturdier.
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