Thanks to Old John’s past teachings, Everly had very strong practical skills.
After constructing the basic outline of the stocking-made net in her mind, she proceeded step by step, starting from one edge and carefully stitching it together without haste.
It was a task that tested both attentiveness and patience. Before she knew it, Everly beca fully absorbed in it, forgetting everything around her.
While she was sewing, a choking sll of smoke drifted into the cave from sowhere.
Everly checked her surroundings but didn’t see any sparks or flas. She also listened carefully. Since she had begun her stitching work, the sounds of fighting in the steep-slope forest had gradually faded. She had deliberately kept her hands busy, giving those players who had rushed in for the airdrop enough ti to retreat, and had therefore not stopped.
So where was this smoke coming from…?
With curiosity and caution, Everly walked to the edge of the cave, poked half her head out, and looked toward the direction the smoke was coming from—
Damn it, those brainless idiots. If you’re going to steal things, just steal them—why set the mountain on fire?!
About a few hundred ters away, on a jagged headland jutting upward like canine teeth, a fire had started at so unknown ti.
The midsumr heat was already intense, and the forest was filled with dry dead branches. Once a wildfire started, it quickly spread into a vast blaze.
Looking up from the steep slope below, the entire hillside was already engulfed in thick, rolling smoke that blotted out the sky. The orange-red flas were like a roaring beast, devouring the headland and the vast forest beneath it. The sky in that direction had turned crimson from the fire.
No wonder Everly, deep inside a cave at the base of the slope, could still sll the smoke.
Fortunately, there was still a stretch of beach acting as a buffer between the cave’s reef outcropping and the forest. On top of that, it was dayti, and due to the difference in specific heat capacity between land and sea, a sea breeze was blowing from the ocean toward the land. No matter how large the fire in the forest beca, as long as Everly didn’t do anything reckless like running into it, at worst she would only get a bit choked by the smoke—her life wasn’t in danger.
That said, this ant Everly’s logging site, including the three logs she hadn’t managed to drag down to the beach, were completely ruined. Until the fire burned itself out, she wouldn’t be able to continue logging for the ti being. A tight ball of frustration lodged in her chest as she returned to the sea-eroded cave and sat back down on the large rock, continuing to sew her makeshift net.
She could only hope the fire would burn itself out quickly… She rembered that in the original film, there hadn’t been any major forest fire. Could this be the butterfly effect?
…
The ntally taxing sewing work continued for around forty minutes before finally coming to an end.
After finishing the netting, Everly folded the waistband area of the stockings outward by about five centiters. She then stitched around it, leaving a small gap unclosed in the middle.
This part was ant to attach to the rim of the landing net, so it needed to be especially sturdy. For that reason, she even cut the hem off her leather apron with a dagger, slicing it into strips and wrapping them around the outside of the waistband. When she stitched it, she sewed through both the leather strips and the stockings together.
Once everything was finished, Everly reached her hand into the net and tested its elasticity, finding that her workmanship was surprisingly good. Although the seams inevitably showed stitch marks, as long as it wasn’t subjected to excessive force, it would basically hold together well.
She set the finished net aside and walked out of the cave, glancing toward the headland.
Directly above the headland, because Everly had over-harvested the trees, there weren’t many left to begin with. After the wildfire started, the few remaining trees were quickly reduced to charred, skeletal fras. Now that area had already burned itself out, leaving only faint wisps of black smoke slowly drifting upward.
anwhile, in the middle section of the forest, the wildfire continued to rage under the push of the sea breeze, steadily devouring the inner layers of trees piece by piece.
Good news: the nearby fire had mostly burned itself out.
Bad news: the nearby trees had also mostly burned themselves out.
Everly stepped out of the sea-eroded cave and ran down to the beach at the base of the headland to take stock of the logs she had dropped there.
In total, she had salvaged ten logs.
A raft needed to carry two people, and in the case of long-term drifting, sufficient resting space was essential. The shoulder width of an adult was around 40 to 50 centiters, aning two people side by side would require about one ter.
Beyond space for lying down, the raft also needed room to store supplies. These critical materials were best placed in the center of the raft to prevent them from being lost to wind and waves. Assuming each person required about 75 centiters of personal space, and adding another 50 centiters for storage, a width of 2 ters would be just right.
Under these conditions, one raft required roughly 13 logs of 15-centiter diater, plus two shorter 2-ter beams placed crosswise for reinforcent.
The logs Everly had gathered were not enough. She still needed to find five more.
The problem was that the nearby forest had already been burned down. Getting more wood would an going farther away to cut it down, and then transporting those logs back to the base of the headland from a great distance—a workload so massive that just thinking about it gave her a headache.
Her preparation ti had originally been fairly generous, but the intrusion of those uninvited guests had made everything suddenly tight.
Everly sighed.
She also wondered when Misha would return… With everything in such a ss, she really couldn’t handle it all alone.
…
The outbreak of the wildfire had thrown Everly’s logging plan into complete chaos.
If there was any single benefit it brought, it was probably that it left behind a field of charcoal.
Everly climbed up the steep slope and collected a large bundle of charcoal that hadn’t been completely burned in the already-extinguished area of the wildfire, then threw it down onto the beach below.
After that, she gathered the stockings, the charcoal, the folding pot, an empty plastic bottle, and the box of condoms, and made a trip to the river.
The river wasn’t far from the forest, with a adow of wild grass lying between them. It was in this grassy area that Everly had first sent up a signal when she ca looking for Misha on her first day.
Affected by the forest fire, the adow had also caught fire. The grass there burned easily, and by the ti Everly arrived, all that remained was a field of ash.
With the forest burned to this extent, there was no need to worry about whether other players were nearby—if there were any, they were probably already dead.
Stepping onto the still-warm ground, Everly made her way to the river. She first gathered stones and built a makeshift stove on the spot, placing the folding pot on top. Then she folded the stocking, widened its opening, and stuffed charcoal into the bottom. She filled the empty plastic bottle with river water, poured it through the stocking, and let it filter through the charcoal and fabric before collecting it in the pot below.
The pot held about two liters. One condom could hold roughly two pots of water. Repeating the process of filling and pouring several tis, Everly soon obtained a pot of preliminarily filtered water.
Next, she needed to boil the water, let it cool, and then use it to wash all the condoms.
The lubricant inside and outside the condoms was, in theory, not harmful to the human body—even if ingested, it wouldn’t cause any major issues—but Everly still didn’t want to consu it. Misha likely felt the sa way.
When it ca ti to start a fire, Everly ran into another problem.
The forest had burned through almost everything, which ant the consequences weren’t limited to just losing logs for the raft—there was also no firewood left for cooking. She would have to cross the river to collect it from the other side.
Fortunately, the river wasn’t very deep, only reaching up to about thigh level at most, and the riverbed was full of scattered stones. As long as she avoided stepping into the mud, crossing wasn’t too difficult.
The other side of the river, like this one, was also a vast expanse of wild adow.
Beyond the adow lay another forest. Everly wanted to check whether there were any “cedar trees” suitable for building a raft, and since she rembered there were no outdoor surveillance caras in this area, she ventured a bit deeper inside.
Unexpectedly, as she walked further in, she ran straight into Misha returning from foraging.
Misha had taken a different route this ti, still cutting diagonally through Third Ring, but she hadn’t gone as far as she did yesterday.
When Everly saw her, Misha was carrying a gray plastic bucket about knee-high, wearing that strangely ugly black mask on her head. She was panting heavily as she staggered forward through the forest, stumbling with every step.
The mont she saw Everly, she imdiately dropped the bucket on the ground, signaling for her friend to help carry it.
Everly walked over, picked up the bucket, and glanced at the label on it—then imdiately burst out laughing. It turned out to be a bucket of premium “Kandi” brand dog food, the kind that supposedly makes fur shinier and healthier!
The two girls, one in front and one behind, carried their respective loads back across the river.
On her way back, Misha had already seen the wildfire on this side of the river. She had a stomach full of questions, but with the collar still around her neck, she couldn’t speak. So she first set her things down, then grabbed the remote control that Everly had obtained from Bean, and hurriedly ran toward the nearby beach.
The reason Misha had not been allowed to remove the collar earlier was because she still needed to retrieve supplies from various supply points. If she were photographed by surveillance at those points without a collar—thus appearing “dead”—it would cause serious problems.
Now that Misha no longer needed to go out scavenging, she could safely remove the collar in advance. This would allow the two of them to communicate freely and improve their coordination efficiency.
As a side note, the script Everly had written for Misha was that, driven to despair by a life of violence and killing, she voluntarily walked into the sea and committed s**cide just before the countdown ended.
Misha had taken off her head covering and, holding the remote control, acted out the scene of jumping into the sea for a while. When she ca back, the collar around her neck had “automatically detached due to the wearer’s death” and fallen into the ocean.
At this point, she and Everly had, in theory, beco two “nonexistent” free individuals.
“Just what happened in the forest? Why is everything burned down?!”
Misha—now essentially “reborn from the ashes”—carried two fish she had picked up from a puddle and jogged all the way back to Everly.
Everly was squatting by the fire at that mont, fiddling with the dog food bucket. When she saw Misha return, she glanced up at her old comrade. Her eyes swept over Misha’s face—and she imdiately burst out laughing.
It couldn’t be helped. After running around under the blazing sun for two days with a mask on, Misha had obvious tan lines around her eyes and mouth. It made her look like she had dark circles and a little mustache, turning a perfectly pretty girl into a walking cody act.
After laughing, and under Misha’s resentful stare, Everly quickly suppressed her amusent and exchanged information with her. The two then split up and got straight to work.
Misha went to the water’s edge and prepared the fish she had caught in the puddle for lunch using a knife, while Everly stayed by the fire, tending it and checking the supplies Misha had brought back.
This trip hadn’t yielded as many supplies as expected.
From the backpack, Everly pulled out three packs of compressed biscuits, three bottles of mineral water, two broken daggers, a pair of children’s scissors, a strip of six button batteries, and a small pig-shaped money bank.
From this haul, it looked like Misha had looted three supply points in total. Aside from food and water, the biggest “harvest” was probably the dog food bucket sitting on the ground.
It was a square gray plastic container, slightly shorter than Everly’s knee. When she unlatched the lid, she saw it was filled to the brim with brown kibble packed inside a transparent bag. According to the packaging, there were a full 8 kilograms of dog food in there.
Not to ntion that dog food itself was already a decent ergency food source—just the container alone was enough to make Everly excited.
She could use that bucket to purify fresh water on the raft.
User Comments
0 comments from readers