Chapter 184: Too Little Cognition Of This World
The Shehuo Festival is the most important festival of the year for the Great Han.
This festival generally lasts a full three days. During these three days, adults will paint their faces with various colors, while the children will all paint theirs into big black faces.
Everyone’s mouth corners will have two huge tusks depicted with grass juice. In more particular households, they will even put real tusks from various beasts in their mouths—the kind that can still move. A casual wiggle can scare the children into crying loudly.
People will also dye the ragged Yi Tree Cloth strips from home into all sorts of colors, then tie these strips around their waists. When they twist their waists and swing their hips, the strips will flutter up and down, looking very nice.
Drums are an essential part of Great Han people’s lives, not mere decorations. The louder the drum sound, the more wild beasts it can scare away, and it can also drive off some bad death spirits.
Stilts are also life essentials. When one person or a few people go into the wild, walking on stilts serves two purposes: first, to guard against poisonous insect bites; second, people standing on stilts look very big, which can scare off many wild beasts ill-intentioned toward humans, especially doggies.
The production process for Big Head Doll headgear is extremely complicated. Hollowing out a large piece of wood from the middle, then carving out eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, and finally painting it requires a lot of time.
But once someone wearing a Big Head Doll mask and colorful clothes appears bouncing and jumping around, there will absolutely be no shortage of admirers around them.
The more extreme the material scarcity, the richer the spiritual life must be. Only by doing so will people, when recalling those hard times, only remember the happy things. As for suffering and going hungry, unless used to educate children, they will automatically block it out—after all, avoiding memories of hardship is a unique spiritual protective function of humans.
The Great Han people’s celebrations are similar to those on Earth: food is the top priority. Normally, eating three taels of wheat, beans, grain for fodder, and such per day is no problem, but during the Shehuo Festival, they can’t be so frugal.
1 After careful calculation by E Ji, An Ji, and a group of women, they concluded that during the three days of the Shehuo Festival, each person could get one jin of grain per day.
1 As for meat, the Red Date Horse, most familiar with this land, indicated that in the first Eddy Bay of the Qingshui River lives a group of long-nosed elephant pigs. These things are huge in size, slow-moving, but with fierce tempers. Any who dare enter their breeding territory will basically be trampled flat by them.
1 That’s right, these things are purely herbivorous animals. As for saying they move slowly, only the Red Date Horse can say that; if other animals or people say it, they can easily be trampled to death by elephant pigs.
1 Naturally, the task of hunting fell to Yun Ce. Ever since he could beat a fierce beast—hailed as the king of beasts—into complete submission with his bare hands, the people here have confirmed that Yun Ce is the true king of beasts.
1 Yun Ce led a group of people, pulling seven or eight horse carriages, and set off early to the first Eddy Bay of the Qingshui River. This is a narrow stretch fifty li deep and no more than twenty li wide.
1 Surrounded on three sides by the Qingshui River in its dry season, and facing the vast Great Wall wasteland on one side, the people who came with Yun Ce, upon seeing the first half-meter-high pile of elephant pig dung, all climbed the thickest trees nearby. This dung pile marked the elephant pigs’ territory.
1 As for the hunting, everyone agreed it was Yun Ce and the Red Date Horse’s job.
1 Yun Ce didn’t need their help either. Though he didn’t know what an elephant pig was, as long as he confirmed the Red Date Horse could outrun them, Yun Ce felt he could too. He had once raced the Red Date Horse and run even faster—after all, his body was smaller and didn’t need to choose paths as much.
1 He had thought this would be a place lush with water grass, but the further in he went, the more barren it became. Yun Ce then sensed something was off, especially seeing the Red Date Horse lift its legs lightly and cautiously, which made Yun Ce raise his alert level by two grades.
1 Until he saw an elephant pig about the size of an elephant slowly munching on the muddy ground, Yun Ce finally relaxed, picked up a javelin, and without thinking, hurled it with force.
2 The distance was less than twenty meters. The javelin’s force was fierce, plus the three-edged head specially prepared for armor piercing. The javelin easily pierced the elephant pig’s outer skin and drilled more than a meter inside before steadily stopping.
2 This elephant pig’s two sturdy front legs immediately buckled to the ground. It raised its huge head, swung its half-meter-long short nose, and trumpeted “dudu” twice toward the sky.
2 Yun Ce naturally had no interest in figuring out the meaning of the elephant pig’s calls. He approached the now-immobile elephant pig, grabbed the tail of the javelin, and prepared to pull it out to bleed the beast.
2 Seeing the Red Date Horse kicking and biting the near-death elephant pig, sometimes simply chomping down, Yun Ce knew the Red Date Horse must have suffered no small humiliation from this elephant pig before.
2 With a “pu chi” sound, Yun Ce pulled out the javelin, followed by a huge gush of blood. The elephant pig’s heart pressure must have been immense, as the blood spraying from the wound shot fully three meters away, like from a faucet.
2 At the same time, the elephant pig’s body, which had still been able to kneel on the ground, gradually toppled over and finally flipped sideways onto the ground.
2 Sizing up this elephant pig, Yun Ce felt it wasn’t enough for over thirty thousand people. He picked up the javelin, preparing to venture deeper into the Eddy Bay to get two more of this size.
2 The ground began to tremble slightly. The Red Date Horse, which had been beating the dead elephant pig, froze in place, pricked up its ears to listen, then bolted back along the path like the wind.
2 The Red Date Horse feared the elephant pigs, but Yun Ce naturally did not. With a javelin in each hand, he waited for the elephant pig herd to charge, planning to seize the chance to spear two more— that would suffice for the festival’s meat needs.
2 The Eddy Bay was a sloped land. Yun Ce stood on high ground, the land sloping down all the way to the Qingshui River edge. Though the ground tremors grew fiercer, Yun Ce stood steadily in place, waiting for the elephant pigs to show themselves.
3 When the elephant pigs began to emerge, Yun Ce’s expression changed. When the lead elephant pig’s head was fully exposed, Yun Ce dropped the javelins and turned to run.
3 He was absolutely certain the charging elephant pigs couldn’t be killed by the two toothpicks in his hands.
3 A one-point-eight-meter javelin could kill a three-meter-tall beast, no problem. But hoping two one-point-eight-meter javelins could kill an eight-meter-tall beast? Yun Ce thought it impossible.
3 So he just ran.
3 By the time he flickered past up the high slope and looked back, even Yun Ce, usually bold as brass, didn’t dare stop his steps when chased by four giant beasts averaging over eight meters tall. He only knew to sprint as fast as he could toward the nearby hills.
3 The ground shook like a vibrating sieve. Yun Ce twisted and turned a few times, then vanished into a boulder pile.
3 The giant elephant pigs stopped at the foot of the mountain, their collective shouts deafening. Yun Ce had to cover his ears. Thinking he had escaped, he was shocked to see the elephant pigs use their sturdy noses to roll up stones and hurl them at his hiding spot.
3 For a moment, stones flew around Yun Ce’s hiding place. Even well-hidden, he couldn’t avoid being hit by some shattered fragments.
3 The elephant pigs hurled stones for a full half incense stick’s time. Just as Yun Ce thought they had vented their anger and would leave, he was horrified to see them heading toward the people hiding in the trees.
3 Those trees were indeed big, but in front of eight-meter-tall giant beasts, they were nothing. With no choice, Yun Ce stood up again from his hiding spot, shouting and yelling at the elephant pigs, occasionally throwing soccer-ball-sized stones at them.
4 Perhaps because Yun Ce carried the scent of small elephant pig blood, the elephant pigs abandoned those insect-like people in the trees and turned their attention back to Yun Ce, the culprit.
4 Yun Ce continued running up the mountain. Fortunately, the mountain wasn’t high but very steep, posing a huge challenge for colossi like elephant pigs.
4 One of them climbed halfway up, then slipped on a step. Its massive body crashed to the ground, rolled once on the slope, then rolled faster and faster, finally bouncing high off the ground and smashing heavily into the boulder pile.
4 “Dudu, dudu”—the other elephant pigs’ calls were full of sorrow. Their companion’s death finally calmed their rage.
4 The lead elephant pig, with a notch in its ear, trumpeted angrily at Yun Ce twice, then carefully descended the mountain.
4 Yun Ce watched the elephant pig herd sadly return to the depths of the Eddy Bay, then had the people who accompanied him start butchering the giant elephant pig that had been dashed to death.
4 The small elephant pig’s corpse was also left in place, awaiting the fate of being divided up.
4 The Red Date Horse returned. Yun Ce glanced toward the depths of the Eddy Bay and asked it.
4 “Is there treasure inside or something? You actually had the guts to make enemies with them. Not getting trampled to death means you’re lucky.”
4 The Red Date Horse neighed “hin hin” twice, as if responding to Yun Ce’s question.
5 Doggy’s voice suddenly sounded in Yun Ce’s head.
5 “This Eddy Bay is strange. A mere fifty li deep and twenty li wide area is simply insufficient to support these giant beasts with their enormous appetites.
5 Just look at the barren state inside the Eddy Bay—you should know these giant beasts are going hungry. Outside the Eddy Bay is the vast wasteland; by rights, they should wander the wasteland for survival.
5 So, what is inside that makes them abandon the wild beast instinct to eat and instead guard this place?
5 Yun Ce, you don’t plan to go in and take a look?”
5 Yun Ce looked at the flat, sloping Eddy Bay and firmly shook his head. “No way. Provoking those giant beasts in this terrain is suicide.”
5 Doggy sighed and said, “What about the spirit of exploration your Yun Clan prides itself on?”
5 Yun Ce angrily replied, “The ancestors who had that spirit of exploration are all dead. I’m the only one left here—can’t be too careful.”
5 “During the Shehuo Festival, didn’t you invite Cao Kun to your Yun Clan to play?”
5 “Don’t even think about it. Cao Kun is the epitome of ‘a gentleman does not stand under a dangerous wall.’ You can’t fool him.”
6 “He can fool others.”
6 “Who are the others?”
6 “Doesn’t matter who, as long as it’s not us.”
6 One more chapter.
