Chapter 6

Chapter 4: I Ultimately Became a Savage

Seeing this scene, Yun Chuan finally felt relieved. In this society, which seemed to share all means of production and face life and death together, the addition or subtraction of one person held no significance.

"From now on, I am a savage?"

Yun Chuan asked himself this question over and over in his mind.

A sudden wave of inexplicable sorrow surged in his heart, causing the tears in his eyes to flow like a flood, carving two white streaks of tears on his dark face.

A child was accidentally bitten by a venomous snake and died. After the elders noticed the child's death, they threw his body off the cliff.

The venomous snake had come out of the cave...

After the terrifying night, the cave no longer provided Yun Chuan with any sense of security.

To him, the cave was a brutal arena governed by the laws of the jungle.

Looking at the children crawling around and the infants crying for food, Yun Chuan unconsciously moved closer to the fire and lit a small branch.

He carefully maintained the spark on the branch and, under the cover of the other children, crawled into the cave.

At that moment, there was no one in the cave.

Even the newborns were left in the scorching sun. Yun Chuan blew the spark to a flame, lit a bundle of grass, and then quietly crawled back to the large platform.

The elders were so old that all their warmth seemed to come from the sun. Under the scorching sunlight, they appeared to be alive.

Then, the cave caught fire.

The cave seemed to be connected, and as soon as the flames started, it turned into a giant chimney. The roaring sound of the fire was terrifying.

Several elders sprang up from the ground and rushed into the cave.

Yun Chuan, however, focused on the livestock pen on the left side of the large platform and another cave. He had seen clearly last night that the other cave was the storage area.

This cave was used for everyone to sleep.

This fire was equivalent to disinfecting the cave!

Such a practice should have been done periodically to clean and exterminate pests.

Seeing their home on fire, everyone rushed back.

The fierce-looking chief, after inspecting the still-burning cave, unhesitatingly threw the five elders off the cliff.

Then, the matter was over, and everyone waited for the fire in the cave to die out.

This process would not be short, as the cave contained bedding for over 260 people and a large amount of firewood and grass.

Moreover, after the cave caught fire, the stones would expand and collapse, and the debris would need to be cleared before it could be used again.

That night, Yun Chuan slept in the arms of a young woman. No men came to disturb her, and she slept very soundly.

Yun Chuan slept even more soundly. The slight mistake in his daytime actions was that he did not expect the fire in the cave to result in the execution of the five elders by the chief.

If anyone felt sad, Yun Chuan would have felt very guilty.

Now, no one felt sad or spoke up for the five elders, who even felt they deserved their fate when they were thrown off the cliff.

Therefore, Yun Chuan could not feel sad or guilty, as both sadness and guilt are forms of empathy.

In the middle of the night, it suddenly started raining.

Yun Chuan thought the chief would let everyone take shelter in the storage cave, but he did not.

The chief led a few women into the cave and closed the door, leaving over 260 clan members to shiver in the rain.

The men occupied a small dry spot by the cliff, while the women, the weak elderly, and the children huddled together under sheepskins in the rain to keep warm.

Yun Chuan did not understand why they did not take shelter in the livestock pen. After a long wait, he noticed that some people preferred to risk the falling rocks and enter the burning cave entrance for shelter rather than go into the livestock pen.

He seemed to understand—here, the status of animals was higher than that of humans.

Yun Chuan buried his head in the young woman's neck. The smell was not pleasant, but it was his only support.

The rain continued, and no one shouted or complained, not even the smallest children cried.

From the distant valley came the cries of monkeys, followed by the howls of wolves. The monkeys' cries were urgent and panicked, almost as if they were putting on a brave front, while the wolves' howls were long and peaceful, without any complaint to the heavens.

Neither the monkeys' cries nor the wolves' howls could drown out the long calls of the elephants, which mixed together like a symphony.

Yun Chuan had to describe the current scene positively.

Before setting the fire, he had expected someone to be punished, but he did not expect everyone to be punished.

The spring rain was cold, and Yun Chuan wished he could grow up quickly.

When it was light, everyone went out in the drizzle to search for food. Yun Chuan did not want to crawl, so he stood up.

This should have been a natural process, but Yun Chuan's willpower was so strong that his body had to comply, and he really stood up.

This was a process of forcing growth, which was not very stable.

However, Yun Chuan understood that the longer his infancy lasted, the higher the chance of his early death.

In the morning, the woman did not feed him, as she had little milk left, which Yun Chuan had consumed the night before.

A dark-skinned woman was left behind, and she cooked porridge or something else in a clay pot.

Because it was green and slimy, Yun Chuan could not tell what it was.

From the moment the pot started steaming, the woman kept scooping out the contents with a wooden spoon and eating until her belly was full. Then, she added some cold water and poured the green, slimy substance into a naturally concave stone.

The younger infants were crying, and the children who could walk rushed to the stone, surrounding it like pigs and digging out the food with their hands.

Without a doubt, Yun Chuan was the most agile. After digging out a mouthful of warm food, he was almost nauseated by the strange taste. He punched his stomach to stop the nausea.

He ate a lot, trying to eat as much as possible, even when he could not swallow anymore, he stuffed his mouth with the green paste.

Eating too much, Yun Chuan remained motionless like a statue, and no adults paid attention to him. Only a few hungry children surrounded him, one even extending his tongue to lick the residue from the corner of Yun Chuan's mouth.

When several tongues licked his face, he felt like he was the food. Yun Chuan forcibly rolled to one side, but wherever he went, hungry tongues followed.

His stomach was very strong, and the diarrhea he expected did not come. The other children who ate the same food also did not have diarrhea.

It seemed that the children who could have diarrhea had already been eliminated.

The fire in the cave gradually died out, still emitting thick smoke. When the sun came up, the smoke became thinner.

The women who went out to gather food returned, but not with much. In spring, there was not much food, and they only brought back some roots, seeds, and bark. Yun Chuan also saw a piece of something like kudzu or yellow essence.

He wanted it, but the chief took it and sat by a small fire to cook it.

The women looked very tired, sitting around the fire and eating the wild vegetables they had gathered.

Everyone was waiting for the men to bring back more food, as they had done two days ago.

Unfortunately, the men returned with only two wild chickens and a wild rabbit.

The chief was furious, beating each man with a stick and uttering some single syllables that Yun Chuan could not understand.

Dinner was naturally unremarkable. Whatever they could get, they ate. The chief did not intend to use the stored food.

Thus, Yun Chuan once again ate the green paste from the morning, this time with some meat strips added.

Yun Chuan found the woman who could protect him, threw himself into her arms, and affectionately nudged her chin with his head. The woman warmly embraced Yun Chuan and, while everyone was busy eating, put a bird's egg into his mouth.

Yun Chuan's mouth was stuffed, and the woman, worried that others would notice the egg, held his chin and forced it closed.

The egg broke, and Yun Chuan sucked the egg liquid but spat out the broken shell, which the woman promptly put in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

After eating, everyone entered the dark cave. The cave was warm, and unexpectedly, they found a large amount of food.

From the number of scorched centipedes on the ground, Yun Chuan once thought the cave belonged to the centipedes, not humans.

There were not only scorched centipedes but also scorched snakes, millipedes, toads, scorpions, and beetles.

The woman left Yun Chuan and squatted on the ground to pick up the poisonous insects. She was extremely skilled at eating centipedes, twisting off the head and pulling out the white meat from the shell, then putting it in her mouth and immediately picking up another one.

Wherever she went, Yun Chuan followed. When she finally picked up a large, scorched insect, she remembered she had a son.

The insect was black and charred. Yun Chuan bit into it with his few teeth, and the rich juice filled his mouth, very fragrant—the taste of protein.

"Boom"

A large rock fell from the top of the cave, landing next to the woman. She did not seem surprised and continued to search deeper into the cave.