Lin Fan held the engineer’s shovel in one hand, flipped his wrist, and brought the manganese-steel blade down hard on a fallen dead tree beside him.
Crack!
A ten-centimeter-thick dead trunk snapped clean in two, the cut smooth as a mirror. This wasn’t a shovel at all. It was a portable executioner, sharper than any ordinary hatchet by a mile.
In his vision, the omniscient prompt jumped.
[Dry camphor branches: Dense texture. Premium kindling. Burns for a long time, produces very little smoke, and comes with a bonus mosquito-repelling effect.]
Lin Fan bent down to pick up the wood and keenly sensed that the temperature had changed.
The sun still had half its outline hanging over the horizon, but as the eerie purple-red aurora spread, the heat was rapidly being sucked out of the sea wind.
The island’s temperature swings didn’t play fair. The temperature was steadily dropping, and the cold wind, carrying deep-sea dampness, was already stabbing into the gaps between his bones.
Lin Fan sped up his movements, the shovel flashing up and down, quickly breaking the camphor down into portable firewood.
He bundled it in a torn fishing net and slung it over his shoulder.
At the other end of the beach.
The setting sun was blood-red.
Wang Qiang propped himself up with half a dead branch and staggered to his feet.
His lips were cracked all over with dark-red blood scabs. With every breath, his throat felt as if he’d swallowed a razor blade.
The sun hadn’t fully set yet. The day’s residual heat was dissipating, but the extreme dehydration in his body was driving him to the edge of madness.
Thirst. An instinct beyond reason.
“I can’t take it… I can’t stand it anymore…”
Wang Qiang looked around. The rock shadow they had seized earlier had now become a death sentence.
When the sea wind blew, the designer shirt that had been soaked in seawater and then dried against his body made him shiver violently.
If they didn’t find water before it got completely dark and cold, they wouldn’t survive the night.
“Stop playing dead, all of you! Get up!” Wang Qiang kicked Zhang Tao in the waist and roared in a hoarse voice. “While it’s not completely dark yet, go find water! There have to be coconuts by the tree line!”
Survival instinct is a hell of a motivator. Several male colleagues forcibly climbed up from the sand, not even glancing at Su Qingxue, who sat there in silence, and followed Wang Qiang toward the coconut grove a few dozen meters away.
At the edge of the grove.
Beneath several crooked coconut trees, seven or eight coconuts were actually scattered on the ground.
“Water! Brother Qiang! Coconuts!” Zhang Tao’s voice broke with excitement as he tumbled forward and hugged a coconut bigger than his head.
The men’s eyes turned red, and like hungry tigers, each of them grabbed one.
But their joy lasted about three seconds.
The outer layer of the coconut was absurdly thick, like bulletproof-vest-grade fiber, and inside that was a hard shell. These social elites didn’t even have a scrap of iron in their hands. What were they supposed to open it with?
“Use stones! Smash them open!” Wang Qiang’s eyes were red as he hugged a coconut and smashed it madly against a sharp reef beside him.
Bang! Bang!
It made a lot of noise. The outer skin was smashed through a layer, revealing tangled fibers, but the hard shell inside didn’t even have a white mark on it. This chapter was copied from NovelPing without permission.
Zhang Tao’s eyes turned red with urgency. He lifted a watermelon-sized stone and smashed it wildly at the coconut on the ground.
But his hands were weak and trembling, and the stone went wide, grazing his wrist hard.
Crack!
The green-bezeled Rolex he had snatched from the wreckage shattered on the spot, its dial smashed, its strap snapping and flying into the grass beside them.
Zhang Tao froze for only half a second. He didn’t even look at the luxury watch worth tens of thousands. He turned and went right back to lifting stones to smash the coconut.
A three-hundred-thousand watch couldn’t buy a single sip of water. Lin Fan’s prophecy about “picking up trash” had hit these fools right between the eyes.
They smashed for a full ten minutes or more.
The five men collapsed on the ground, exhausted. The overdraft of their strength, plus dehydration, made stars dance before their eyes.
“It’s open! Mine’s open! It cracked!” Li Bin suddenly let out a wolf-like howl.
The coconut under his hands had finally been smashed open with a crack by the stones.
Wang Qiang lunged forward, shoved Li Bin aside, and impatiently pressed his mouth to the crack, sucking hard!
A murky liquid rushed along the crack, straight down his throat.
The next second.
Wang Qiang’s face turned straight from green to a sickly purple, his eyeballs nearly popping out.
Urgh —!
He twisted his head and vomited everything he had just sucked in, along with the acid from his stomach, spraying it across the ground.
The whole man knelt on the beach, coughing until it felt like his lungs would come out.
A stench that shot straight to the top of his skull instantly detonated across the scene. It smelled like a hundred dead fish fermenting in a sewer for eighty days.
Zhang Tao boldly leaned in to look at the cracked coconut, and his scalp exploded.
Where was the coconut water? Inside was a pool of dark-brown, thick mucus!
In the mucus, dense white insect eggs wriggled frantically.
A fist-sized, deformed coconut crab, covered in barbed, stiff hairs, was crawling out through the crack, waving its pincers triumphantly.
This was a coconut that had ripened and fallen months ago, and had long since rotted into a biochemical weapon!
Urgh!
Li Bin caught a whiff of that nuclear-level smell, his stomach convulsed, and he collapsed beside it, vomiting wildly.
“Damn it… Li Bin, did you do this to me on purpose!”
His mouth was full of that brain-piercing stench, and even the strength to get up had been drained out of him.
He hadn’t gotten any water, and he’d sacrificed the last half of his remaining strength.
Cold wind cut like a knife. The five men who had once called the shots in civilized society lay sprawled like five stray dogs beside the biochemically spoiled coconut.
Halfway up the mountain, at the cave entrance.
Lin Fan had just pushed aside the camouflaging vines.
“Don’t come any closer!”
From the darkness, Song Ya let out a scream, her voice changed with fear.
She gripped the sharpened wooden stick tightly in her hands, trembling like a sieve, its tip blindly aimed at the cave entrance, her torn shirt barely covering her.
“It’s me.”
Lin Fan dropped the fishing net from his shoulder. The camphor firewood hit the rock with a dull thud.
Hearing that familiar, emotionless voice, Song Ya finally let out a long breath.
Clatter.
The wooden stick dropped to the ground. She went limp on the rock, her eyes red, biting her lip hard, not daring to cry out loud for fear of angering him.
Lin Fan set down the sealed box and laid out the high-calorie supplies he’d hidden close to his body.
By now, the sky outside was completely black. The temperature in the cave was dropping fast, and Song Ya was curled into a ball with cold, her teeth chattering.
Lin Fan deftly drew his tactical knife.
In a few quick moves, he split the camphor into thin kindling strips and stacked them in a crisscross pile on a flat spot.
Then he took out the magnesium rod from his leg pack, pressed the spine of the knife hard against it, and scraped down with his wrist.
Sizzle!
A burst of dazzling sparks exploded in the darkness, landing precisely in the dry seaweed.
A wisp of white smoke rose. Lin Fan leaned down and blew two long, steady breaths.
Whoosh!
The flame leaped up at once, catching the thin strips and climbing all the way up, instantly igniting the thick camphor base.
The fire roared to life!
Bright yellow flames brutally tore through the darkness, forcibly driving away the damp cold in the cave.
Fire was civilization. Fire was confidence!
Song Ya stared blankly at the leaping fire. In this godforsaken place that even God seemed to have abandoned, this light was absolute law.
She couldn’t help scooting closer, holding out her frozen hands.
Feeling the scorching heat from the flames, the fear in her eyes finally eased a little.