With his shirt off, Lan Jin uses his blade to cut up an inch from the hem and then changes the direction he is cutting to make a long bandage. It’s uneven and thin given that Lan Jin is just wearing a microfiber t-shirt, but it’s over two feet long and good enough for him to work with.
With that done, Lan Jin grabs his bamboo pipe and covers the small hole in the top with his thumb before dipping it into the stream and filling it with water. He then shoves the strip of cloth into the water and summons the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame to his finger before dipping it into the bamboo pipe and swirling around its contents.
His goal is to use the purifying effects of the fire to purify the water, which should help him to purify the strip of cloth as it is swirled around inside the small tube. He doesn’t expect it to be perfect, but he’s pretty sure that he’d burn the cloth into nothingness if he tried to purify it separately, so this is the best solution he has right now. It would be best if he could find a way to boil some water and use that water to sanitize the cloth, but he hasn’t seen anything that would be good as dry tinder and he doesn’t want to waste time looking for it before wrapping his shoulder.
Though he isn’t sure how effective his jury-rigged, two-fingers-wide washing machine is, he does see that a good amount of purple is released into the water and he hopes that means that he will have clean water and a clean wrap for the blister that had popped on his shoulder.
“How is it that fire I can form on the tip of my finger is capable of being completely submerged in water without going out?” Lan Jin asks himself while staring bemusedly at the contents of the bamboo pipe in his hand. He knew it was technically possible to make fire underwater because he’d seen it in his chemistry class, but that involved multiple hoses and tanks of oxygen that he did not have access to here. So what he was doing should likely be impossible. Yet somehow it wasn’t.
“This place is so weird.” He smiles and pulls his finger out of the water while also retracting the fire burning on it.
Inside the bamboo tube is a slurry of what Lan Jin expects to be purified water and a mostly-sanitized strip of cloth. Holding it in his left hand, he brings it above his bare right shoulder and stops blocking the hole he had punctured in it earlier. Water begins to fall down from the hole, splashing on the torn skin of his blister, and Lan Jin hisses.
“Hhhhhh! Agh! That one hurt.” He exhales roughly and turns his head to look at his shoulder.
It looks the same as it did before, but now it’s wet and, hopefully, he got rid of most of the sweat and whatever dirt might have been around the torn blister.
Flipping the bamboo over, he pats it on one end to make the cloth fall out of it and into his waiting palm. He then stretches out the cloth and begins wrapping it around his shoulder before tying off the ends in a bow.
Wrapping his shoulder makes him wince several times, but when he is able to relax knowing that he is at least doing something to prevent his shoulder from getting infected. With his shoulder taken care of for now, he gingerly pulls his shirt back on and swings his hoodie full of pears over his left shoulder this time.
Thinking over his situation, Lan Jin begins to speak to himself, “I need to come up with some survival goals. For the short term, I know I need food, water, shelter, and probably a fire that can actually cook things. I have a sustainable source of water for now, and I can probably subside off of pears, fish, and maybe even bamboo shoots for a little while. So that means I need to focus on finding or making a shelter today and then work on getting a fire going.
As for my long-term goals, I want to meet people, figure out cultivating, and learn what I need to do to survive and live my life in this new world. Though that being said, I should probably add cultivating to both the short-term and long-term goals lists. For now, though, I need to start working on a shelter. I’ve probably only got a few hours of daylight left and I can’t waste any of it.”
Lan Jin looks around to see what he has to work with. The answer is encouraging. There is an abundant amount of resources to work with in the form of bamboo. He even has a blade that he can cut them with. The only problem is that the bamboo stalks aren’t all of uniform size. He believes he can definitely do something with them, and if he could cut the branches off of the stems of the plants, then he could use his blade to split them into workable sections and bind the bamboo stalks together in that way.
Looking further away and across the stream, he also realizes that he is close to a small but steep foothill. It’s only about fifteen or twenty feet tall, but it is fairly large and is covered in grass and bamboo. So, rather than being rocky, Lan Jin guesses that there is probably more soft dirt to it than anything else. He even thinks that if he’s lucky he might be able to dig a shelter into the side of it.
To check it out more clearly, Lan Jin pulls off his shoes and socks and rolls up the legs of his pants. He is immediately assaulted by the stench of his own feet and he realizes he should have probably taken off his shoes before this because now his feet are looking beaten up. Thankfully, it had been pretty warm out for the last couple of days so there is more stench than anything harmful, but he’d have to take better care of his feet from now on.
Shaking his head at himself, Lan Jin steps into the stream and slowly walks across it with his shoes, socks, blade, and bamboo pipe in hand while being careful to step between the large, slippery rocks decorating the stream bed. He finds that the current in the stream is actually pretty strong and, despite only being ten feet at its widest point, it takes Lan Jin more than a minute to cross because he is constantly being shoved by the water. When he finishes, he even feels a little shaky because he had nearly fallen multiple times over such a short distance.
Looking at the stream, Lan Jin says, “Maybe I really should look up that Great Desolates Body Transformation first. If it could make me even a little stronger, my chances of surviving would be a lot better.”
When he thinks about the possibility of falling into the stream and hitting his head on one of the rocks on the stream bed, Lan Jin shivers. He may have only been in this new world for around two days, but he thinks he’s made quite a bit of progress and he doesn’t want it all to be undone by a single, stupid mistake like slipping.
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Shaking off his fears, Lan Jin turns around and begins walking toward the foothill nearby. As it’s only several dozen meters away from the stream, he arrives quickly and begins to run his hand through the soil around its base.
“Pretty sure this is clay.”
After examining it a bit longer, he says, “I think I can dig into this pretty easily with the bamboo and if I flatten out this section of the foothill I can use it as the back wall of a shelter. I might even be able to dig into it a few feet to give myself enough room to lay down and just line the walls and ceiling with bamboo so it doesn’t drop dirt on me while I sleep.”
He thinks about it for a few minutes before deciding to give it a shot. Then, with a goal in mind, he drops his shoes, socks, hoodie full of pears, and little bamboo pipe to the side and walks over to a large stalk of bamboo nearby and cuts it down. He then cuts off a longer section of it and cuts a wedge into one of its ends before returning to the foothill.
Placing the wedged end of the bamboo into the red clay, Lan Jin uses his body weight to push the bamboo up and into the side of the foothill and watches as chunks of clay are sent tumbling down to the ground. He quickly realizes that it will be a lot of work for him to dig a shelter into the side of the foothill, but when he thinks about trying to build a shelter entirely out of bamboo, he doesn’t think one way beats the other in terms of how much time and energy he will have to expend. But considering that digging a shelter into the clay foothill will definitely keep the elements out better, he decides to suck it up and keep working.
***
Lan Jin ends up working for several hours and only has a little progress to show for all of his efforts. He has managed to carve a few feet of red clay out of the foothill, but his hole is uneven and though he thinks he can fit most of his body inside of it, he doesn’t know that it would actually be safe.
What’s worse, Lan Jin is tired, thirsty, and hungry after working so hard and he doesn’t think eating a pear is going to cut it for him at this point.
“I need to start a fire and get some real food going, but how can I get real food? I think bamboo shoots need to be boiled in order to eat them safely and I’d need to set traps to catch fish…”
Lan Jin lets out a heavy sigh and decides he might as well try to make a fish trap and a fire for now.
Grabbing a pear from his hoodie to sate his hunger, he turns and walks back to the stream with his blade in hand. As he goes, ideas flash through his head on how he can catch some fish and make a fire. His dad had taught him several things about surviving in the wilderness; he could make some noose traps, a couple of pitfalls and deadfalls, he knew several different ways to build a fire, and he could even string a makeshift bow together if he had enough time. But, ironically, he thinks that the things most likely to help him right now aren’t the techniques his dad had taught him, but instead, the things he had spent way too many hours watching over long weekends while putting off his homework.
Taking his blade, Lan Jin uses it to fell a young stalk of bamboo and cut off its top and branches before trimming its base so it is only four-and-a-half feet long. Then, he carefully cuts four grooves into its thinner end to make four prongs. Grabbing one of the branches on the ground, he cuts off two small wedges from it and jams them between the grooves he’d cut to force the prongs to spread out. Finally, he weaves another one of the branches through the prongs to keep the wedges in place and begins carving the tips of the four prongs to make them into points.
A few minutes later, Lan Jin has a passable bamboo spear in hand. He doesn’t think it will last very long since he couldn’t tie off the wedges very well, but he hopes it will work just well enough that he can at least catch one or two of the small fishes for some dinner.
He’s hopeful enough that he even cuts off another, larger, section of bamboo and fills it with water so he can carry the fish back once he catches them.
***
Standing along the edge of the stream with his pants rolled up once again, Lan Jin watches small red-and-blue-scaled fish swimming along in front of him. None of them seem to care that he’s there, oblivious as they are to the existence of the spear hovering above them. But Lan Jin doesn’t try to catch any of them yet.
The reason is that they’re all just way too small.
Instead, Lan Jin has his eyes on some of the relatively larger, silver-scaled fish he has seen. They’re only ten inches to a foot long, but compared to the three or four inches of the red-and-blue-scaled fishes, he thinks they are a much better choice for catching with a spear. It’s just that there are hundreds of smaller fish swimming by him for every silver-scaled fish that swims by, so he hasn’t even had an opportunity to try to spear one yet.
Minutes pass, and Lan Jin continues to wait patiently. Considering he normally hates waiting with a passion, he finds it surprising when he realizes he feels calm and relaxed. In fact, despite not having done anything yet, he finds that he’s enjoying himself. It’s strange for him as he’s always hated fishing because it is just waiting followed by failing or, at best, catching a bottom feeder that he would never want to eat in the first place. But right now, he feels content.
Eventually, Lan Jin sees a larger silver-scaled fish swim by within reach of his spear. He starts thinking about how he should spear it, but as it gets closer to him, he can’t help but shift in the water and startle the fish away. He thrusts his spear after it, but naturally, he misses.
“Tsk!” Lan Jin clicks his tongue. “Next time.”
The next time comes and goes and comes again, but even as Lan Jin tries to spear three more silver-scaled fish, he fails each time. It doesn’t bother him because he thought he wasn’t going to be good at spearing fish in the first place, but he’s still hungry and he hopes to catch a fish soon so he can hurry up and build a fire so he can eat.
He begins to place more focus on trying to spear the fish. Though he fails several more times, he begins to grow used to the movements of the fish and starts to appreciate how they swim even if he still finds it difficult to predict where they will swim next. He finds that the light shining off their scales is fascinating and the movements of their tails even more so. The fact that they can swim so calmly in the swift current makes him envious and, for a brief moment, he wants to swim as well.
It’s with thoughts like these filling in his head that he, more accidentally than not, casually spears the next silver-scaled fish that swims in front of him. He doesn’t even realize he did it at first because he was focusing more on the fish than actually spearing it, so when his hands somehow ended up pushing the bamboo spear right through the side of the silver-scaled fish he was admiring, his heart nearly broke in his chest as his desire to swim fled him.
He stares at the thrashing fish on the end of his spear with a blank expression on his face before he realizes he needs to remove it from the water and store it in his bamboo tube. But once he does realize it he does so in just seconds as he quickly leaves the water and pulls the dying fish from his spear before calmly placing it in the bamboo tube full of water. Then he returns to the stream for another go at spearing a fish.
Several minutes later, Lan Jin succeeds once again. A minute after that, he succeeds once more. He even feels like he could continue spearing fish for the rest of the day, but the growling in his stomach convinces him otherwise and so, having stored all three fish inside of the bamboo tube full of water, Lan Jin picks it up and carries it along with his blade back to the foothill before placing it down by the rest of his possessions.
He then runs back to the stream with two more long lengths of bamboo tubes and fills them both up with water before returning to his meager shelter to make a fire and some food.