Huh?
Everyone froze.
Even Chun Yi looked over.
No one had expected Lin to have such a bold idea.
“I think it’s a good idea.”
The Cat-ear Elder, who had remained silent all this time, sighed. The Cat Ear Tribe was facing too many difficulties now: resources, Extreme Winter, and the future of their people’s survival.
Every one of them was a serious problem that had to be solved.
After that disaster, most of the Cat Ear Tribe had died. The Warriors had all perished protecting them, leaving them no choice but to flee their Ancestral Land with the children. In the end, they had migrated to this forest, where they managed to cling to life.
In just a few short years, the fifty or sixty of them from back then had dwindled to just over twenty. Only two of her siblings, who had been around her age, were still alive. She simply couldn’t bear to watch the children she had raised grow fated to meet a dead end.
Even if there was only the slightest hope, they wanted to seize it.
The Cat-ear Elder sighed softly.
“If he’s willing to stay, you can give it a try. If he isn’t, don’t force him.”
Chun Yi said nothing more. As a newcomer, she didn’t really care about any of this. She had stayed with the tribe only to repay a debt of gratitude.
She looked up at the full moon in the night sky, already fretting over how much game they would need to hunt tomorrow.
To the east of the Camp, the darkness seemed to be driven back. A familiar light quickly spread, illuminating the sky and reflecting in Chun Yi’s red eyes.
Then a dark figure dashed all around the Camp, cheering excitedly.
The clear voice seemed to pierce the darkness, instantly rousing everyone in the Camp.
“There’s fire! We have fire!”
“Come out and see the fire!”
At the sound, Cat-eared Girls poked their heads out of their Tents.
A gust of wind seemed to brush past their faces, and the Cat-eared Girl who’d been frolicking was gone in a flash.
“What fire? Whoa, it really is fire!”
“Where? Where?”
“That’s wonderful! Fire!”
“It really is! Let’s go take a look.”
Exclamations rang out one after another.
Only when the dark figure rushed up to Chun Yi and the others did they see who it was.
“Hongtao, stop!”
Chun Yi grabbed Hongtao, stopping the Cat-eared Girl who had been racing gleefully around the Camp.
“What happened?” Lin asked.
With her cheeks flushed, Hongtao happily mimed Su Cheng’s fire-making motions. “It was Cheng! He made fire. He went whoosh, whoosh, then blew a few times, and the fire appeared!”
“Who’s Cheng?”
“The man Chun Yi brought back! He said his name was Su Cheng.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ying and I were helping nearby, and so was that new Wolf Ear.”
The firelight illuminating half the sky had already answered them. Chun Yi and the others exchanged glances, said nothing more, and ran toward the eastern side of the Camp.
By then, the eastern side of the Camp was surrounded by Cat-eared Girls.
Their cheers were even louder than they’d been at dusk when they butchered the game.
“Huff, huff, it’s fire! It really is fire! It’s so warm and cozy!”
“Ying, you said that man made the fire. Is that true?”
“Aren’t only shamans able to make fire? How did he do it?”
“Meow, we finally have fire!”
Questions came one after another. Su Cheng, the one responsible for it all, was startled by the Cat-eared Girls surging toward him, and his mind suddenly went blank.
Just then, Chun Yi and Lin pushed through the crowd and came to stand before Su Cheng.
As she had at dusk, Chun Yi scrutinized Su Cheng from head to toe once more. Her gaze finally settled on the heap of flames blazing on the ground.
Lin and the others stared intently at the flames, as if they weren’t fire at all, but the most delicious food in the world.
And that was indeed the case. They would have to trade several baskets of food for a single fire like this.
“You know how to make fire?” Chun Yi suddenly asked.
“Uh, yes.”
“How do you know how to make fire?”
“I’ve always known how. It’s not that hard.”
Chun Yi suddenly found herself at a loss for words, unsure what to ask. The long-missed flames gave her a comforting warmth, and all the Beast-eared Girls were thrilled.
She sat down across from Su Cheng, picked several vigorously burning sticks from the fire, and carefully handed them to the Cat-eared Girls beside her.
“Pass the fire around to everyone. Be careful to protect the Fire Seed.”
Protecting the Fire Seed was a survival instinct cultivated by every tribe from childhood. They instinctively treated its protection as the most important thing.
Once they had the Fire Seed, the Cat-eared Girls didn’t linger. Cheering and bouncing around, they escorted the burning Firewood, lifting it up and treating it like a sacred object. Ying and Hongtao were sensible enough to crawl obediently into the Tent, smacking their lips as they felt the waves of heat blowing from the fire.
Before long, only Chun Yi, Lin, Su Cheng, and the Wolf-eared Girl remained by the fire.
Several fires soon sprang up throughout the Camp, like lights of hope illuminating the whole place.
Before anyone could say a word, Lin took several slices of meat from her Pouch, found a forked branch on the ground nearby, threaded the meat onto it, and began roasting it over the fire.
Lin’s Vertical Pupils shone brightly as she watched the raw meat sizzle over the fire. The flames lit their faces, and brilliant light reflected in everyone’s eyes.
Watching this scene, along with the Cat-eared Girls’ earlier reactions, Su Cheng finally understood.
Holy crap!
So he’d misunderstood from the very beginning. His assumptions had led him to see the scorched earth and burned wood ash in the Camp and simply presume that these people knew how to make fire.
The truth was exactly the opposite.
Watching Lin happily roast meat nearby, Su Cheng inexplicably felt relieved.
So they didn’t actually like eating raw meat.
Come to think of it, this was a primitive society, and so far, he had no idea what stage civilization on this continent had reached.
Good, good.
The Cat-eared Girls he imagined were still cute, soft, and fragrant.
Only then did Su Cheng speak.
“You don’t know how to make fire? Then where did the fire you had before come from?”
Chun Yi looked at him, a hint of confusion in her eyes.
Were they supposed to know how? And who would teach them?
After thinking for a moment, she replied,
“Our fire went out a few days ago, but there’s no shaman in our tribe, so we can only trade food with the Wolf Ear Tribe for a Fire Seed. But they’re asking for quite a lot of food this time, so we’ve been hunting hard these past few days. If we can’t trade for a Fire Seed, we’ll have to wait for rain. When it rains, light falls from the sky, and sometimes fire appears.”
Uh, that was probably lightning.
Su Cheng’s mouth twitched. That was way too dependent on luck.
“What’s a shaman?”
Su Cheng suddenly asked.
At the mention of it, Chun Yi, Lin, and even the Wolf-eared Girl nestled obediently beside them all wore looks of reverence and admiration.