Chapter 12: The Smarter The Person, The More They Like To Use Natural Forces
Even if the big tree’s roots had been burned over once, Yun Ce was still very careful when landing, poking the ground with the wooden spear before cautiously placing his foot on the ground.
After hopping a couple of times, Yun Ce grabbed a handful of humus soil. The soil was very fertile, very similar to the real black soil in the Northeast. Just this point alone made Yun Ce think it was very necessary to occupy this land.
For Chinese officials, developing the economy is just a means to seek promotion. Their most important work has not changed at all for thousands of years, which is how to meet the food, clothing, housing, and transportation needs of the population in their jurisdiction.
Actually, clothes aren’t the most important thing either. Food security is always the top priority. It’s no big deal if someone in the jurisdiction runs around naked, but if someone starves to death under the jurisdiction, that’s a big problem.
The most fertile land must be used to grow grain. This is the consensus of every official and basically the consensus of Chinese nationals.
The land burned by the fire still had some residual warmth. Yun Ce kept poking the land ahead with the wooden spear, step by step leaving this giant tree that had given him some safety.
This land was not flat ground, especially after being burned by the big fire, the terrain and landforms were fully exposed. Although it was charred black everywhere, those big trees that hadn’t finished burning and were still smoking nicely decorated this wasteland.
What was smoking was not only plants but also quite a few animals. Along the way, Yun Ce had seen many kinds of burned-to-death animals. Although he couldn’t see clearly the colors and fur patterns of these animals, from their shapes, they were still within Yun Ce’s cognition. Nothing beyond his cognition had appeared. At least, none of the dead animals matched the alien from the movies.
Some animals had at most grown two extra legs, some had bones on the outside protecting their soft internal organs, and some animals had obviously evolved one of their body parts to an exaggerated degree for survival.
Among them, two animals were burned to death embracing each other. One obviously male had very exaggerated genitals, and the other obviously female had genitals in a very accessible position.
1 Such animals clearly had extremely strong reproductive functions, using their large population size to gain the qualification to reproduce in this world. After all, among the burned-to-death animals, the corpses of this toad-like six-legged animal were the most numerous.
1 Their corpses were very intact, unlike some animals whose corpses had been pecked by birds beyond recognition. From this, it could be inferred that the meat of six-legged toad-like animals was either poisonous or very unpalatable.
1 This was of course the result of evolution, and this point was also similar to species on Earth.
1 Having found bad similarities, Yun Ce naturally also found good similarities.
1 In the ashes, there was also a wild beast emitting the aroma of roasted meat. After flipping it over with the wooden spear, Yun Ce frowned.
1 It wasn’t that this animal was strange, but very familiar. He had killed a few when hunting on Earth before.
1 Domestic pigs and wild boars have significant differences in body size, the most obvious being the head. Domestic pigs look kinder, while wild boars naturally look much more ferocious.
1 Yun Ce tapped the wild boar’s everted tusks with the wooden spear and pried open the almost-cooked leg to check the genitals. As he judged, this was a male wild boar, no different from wild boars on Earth.
1 This made the things Yun Ce needed to consider more numerous. When observing animals in this world, he had to be more cautious.
1 “The same tree cannot bear the same fruit, nor can it grow two identical leaves. This is common sense on Earth.
2 What’s more, Yun Ce was very certain that this world was not the same tree as Earth, so the species could not be exactly the same.
2 Now that similarities had appeared, there was only one possibility: this planet and Earth were two fruits from the same tree.
2 The species on Earth and this planet share the same origin.”
2 After leaving that almost-cooked wild boar, Yun Ce repeated his judgment into the recorder.
2 He spoke very loudly, not only to the mobile phone recorder, but also hoping that the small robots in his stomach could hear and bring back the news that he was alive.
2 Following the fire was actually following the wind. The land ravaged by the big fire had no beasts or poisonous insects left, making it very safe.
2 The dark soil stretched endlessly into the distance, with thick smoke rising straight into the sky far away. Even in the daytime, Yun Ce could see the soaring flames in the distance.
2 The bigger the fire, the greater its impact on the air. Then, the fire borrowed the wind’s power, the wind borrowed the fire’s momentum, and the prairie fire momentum had formed. As it looked now, this fire had no hope of being extinguished.
2 If it couldn’t be extinguished, then don’t extinguish it. This outcome was beneficial to Yun Ce. The larger the burned area, the safer it was for him.
2 After walking nearly four hours, Yun Ce arrived at the mouth of a V-shaped valley.
3 There was a bright small stream in the valley, but now the small stream was blocked by layers of wild beast corpses and couldn’t flow smoothly, only overflowing those beast corpses blocking the waterway and continuing to flow downward.
3 Yun Ce just glanced at the mountain of piled-up wild beast corpses and didn’t take it to heart. He thought it was better to assess how much lethality these wild beasts had against humans than to mourn their fates.
3 Unfortunately, most of the dead wild beasts here should be herbivores. The judgment was entirely based on their horns on the head, shovel-like teeth, and armored hooves.
3 These herbivores weren’t large in size, about the same as wolfdogs on Earth. It seemed they tried to hide in the water to escape the fire, but the stream water preserved their corpses while the burning fire took away the air they needed to survive…
3 With the herbivores dead, the beasts’ fate wasn’t much better. In short, for the short term, Yun Ce should be the fiercest wild beast on this land.
3 With ground threats gone, birds in the sky increased. These birds were not like the ones Yun Ce saw yesterday; not only were they much larger in size, their wingspans exceeded all birds of prey he had seen before.
3 They had no fear of Yun Ce, this living human, and directly landed on some dead wild beasts to feast. During feeding, they always cast their gaze on Yun Ce, as if Yun Ce were their backup food.
3 Facing such birds of prey with faces as big as basins, leopard eyes wide open, mouths full of tusks, and suddenly descending from the sky, Yun Ce naturally had to steer clear. However, with abundant food now, there was no need to hide.
3 Many birds came to devour the wild beast corpses, of different kinds. The birds that had fought each other yesterday could now peacefully feed together, so Yun Ce felt he should be safe too.
3 Moreover, these birds of prey seemed to prefer these charred, half-cooked wild beast corpses over his fresh meat.
4 With an opportunity to observe these birds up close, he naturally didn’t want to miss it. Soon, he discovered that most birds here didn’t have hard beaks, and the larger and fiercer-looking ones lacked beaks entirely. Conversely, the smaller birds had more prominent beaks.
4 The birds of prey looked cruel and ugly as they pinned animal corpses with their claws and buried their heads to eat. Yun Ce watched for a while, then leaned on his wooden spear and walked step by step downstream along the stream.
4 The small stream would eventually flow into the river, the river into the sea, and rivers could nurture civilization. This seemed like a theorem. If he followed the big river to the sea and still encountered no civilized world, Yun Ce would deem this planet a barren one.
4 Yun Ce walked for a long time, but the sun in the sky hadn’t moved much. He habitually positioned the sun’s rising direction as east, but positioning south, west, and north based on the sun was harder.
4 He found that the sun here didn’t follow a smooth arc, not rising in the east and setting in the west, but a more perfectly round circle. This was likely due to the planet’s rotation or the sun’s rotation differing from his previous cognition.
4 At some point, the faint full moon at the horizon became even fainter, while the originally blurry half moon gradually appeared in the sky. As for that crescent moon, it was almost invisible unless he deliberately looked for it.
4 As is well known, the moon beside Earth is Earth’s satellite, orbiting Earth, while Earth orbits the sun. Thus, Earth in its movement blocks sunlight to the moon, and with both having regular trajectories, the single moon beside Earth can show multiple phases.
4 Unlike the moons here, though there were three, they were not as dynamic as Earth’s moon.
4 The moons here rotated synchronously with this planet, but the three moons took turns appearing. There must be profound reasons behind this, which he planned to figure out after encountering civilization.
4 The sun kept moving, but the three moons remained still. Yun Ce thought using the moons for positioning here seemed more reliable.
5 The position where the sun first rises has no moon, calling it east is fine. The full moon position as south, half moon as west, crescent moon as north.
5 With direction, Yun Ce felt his life had direction too, and he walked more lively.
5 He didn’t remember how long he had walked, only that the half moon directly west was getting brighter, the heat from the sun’s radiation was decreasing, and Yun Ce knew night was coming soon.
5 At crescent moon time, the night was extremely cold; at full moon, the night was warm as spring. By this pattern, at half moon, the night should have some chill.
5 After the stream turned several bends in the hills area, the view suddenly opened up. The land scorched by smoke and fire abruptly ended here. The small river less than ten meters wide finally halted the flames, preserving the lush green vegetation on the opposite bank.
5 Once large grasslands appeared in the hills, the female characteristics of mother earth became very obvious. The curves of the gentle soil slopes draped in green floral clothes would involuntarily soften even the most violent like fire.
