King of the Wilderness

Fourteenth day.

When Lin Yu’an woke up, he found the outside world utterly silent, the sky exhibiting a blue unique to the aftermath of a snowstorm.

He stepped out of the shelter, taking a deep breath of the cold, fresh air.

Another bout of heavy snow had fallen last night, covering the entire world with a new white blanket.

”A perfect sunny day.” He squinted, adjusting to the glaring snow light.

”But the colder the weather happens to be on such days. Now, I must go see how the night’s plummet in temperature and snowfall has impacted our food sources.”

When he reached the coast, the scene before him made his heart sink to the bottom.

The tide was at its lowest point of the day, but the vast grey mudflat that had been there was now completely gone.

In its place sprawled a broad white ice field, covered with countless ice floes and accumulated snow!

Last night’s low temperatures had thoroughly solidified the ”ice porridge” and ”sea ice mud,” connecting them with the snow on the shore.

He cautiously stepping onto the near-shore ice surface, swung his ice axe hard downwards. ”Bang!” A muffled sound echoed as it left just a shallow white mark on the ice, which was at least several centimeters thick.

”It’s over.” He stood on the ice, looking around as if making a heavy proclamation.

”The intertidal zone is entirely sealed off. From today onward, the benefits of shore harvesting have been entirely confiscated by nature. I can no longer easily obtain any mussels or sea snails from here.”

His gaze turned toward the direction of the lake.

When he reached the lake side, the situation was equally grim. The entire lake surface was encapsulated beneath a solid layer of ice blanketed with white snow except for a small ink-like spot in the center that remained unfrozen.

The three resilient fishing rods he had pinned his hopes on were firmly frozen in the ice, resembling three small tombstones.

”The avenue for acquiring freshwater fish is virtually cut off; I can only wait a few more days for ice fishing, but in the short term, there’s no way I can gain anything from here.”

Lastly, he made his way to the coniferous forest, where beneath a thick pile of snow, he struggled to find the traps he had just reset yesterday.

He brushed away the snow, revealing four carefully disguised white lassos, still quietly resting in their places without any sign of being triggered.

Aside from his own footprints, no new animal tracks were visible in the surrounding snowy land.

”Last night’s blizzard drove all the rabbits back into their cozy burrows. The land traps, once again, are aviation troops.”

Ocean, lake, land.

In a short morning survey, Lin Yu’an witnessed firsthand the simultaneous failure of his three main food procurement routes.

Lin Yu’an stood silently in the snow for a long time.

He knew that from today onward, he would enter the most challenging phase of this survival game—a pure consumption phase. Perhaps most of the time would rely entirely on the food he had stored before to get through the lengthy remaining forty-plus days.

Back at the shelter, his gaze lingered on the two cattail baskets brimming with mussels.

These hundreds of pounds of mussels were no longer just food in his eyes but his only hope for survival in the future.

”Now, processing them has become the most urgent task.” He spoke to the camera, his tone utterly solemn.

”I must process them all into cooked food and then freeze them, because once mussels perish, they become extremely dangerous.”

”First is the issue of decay. Everyone see, live mussels have shells tightly closed, which is due to their adductor muscle exerting force.”

”Once they die, these muscles relax, enzymes within begin to decompose the proteins, producing cadaverine, putrescine, and other substances. Although in the current low temperatures, this process is incredibly slow, not immediately producing toxins.”

”But you cannot distinguish between one freshly dead and one that may have been dead for many days in this basket; consuming anything not fresh can lead to mild gastrointestinal discomfort or severe vomiting and diarrhea, and this is disastrous in the wilderness.”

”But above these, there’s something even more terrifying.”

He intoned gravely: ”The most terrifying is a danger that’s invisible, untouchable, and cannot be removed even through cooking—paralytic shellfish poisoning.”

”Many mussels accumulate this neurotoxin in their bodies by filtering micro-algae in seawater while alive.”

”This toxin is heat-resistant, whether you fry, sauté, cook, or roast; it still exists. It can directly paralyze your nervous system and severely lead to respiratory failure.”

”So, what I need to do now is conduct a large-scale cooking operation to ensure every bite of food I freeze for storage afterward is 100% safe.”

”It’s impossible to cook these hundreds of pounds of mussels pot by pot with my little pot, that’s too slow.”

He spoke to the camera about his plan: ”Therefore, I need to build a more efficient cooking device!”

First, he cleared a plot of land in front of the shelter, sweeping away the snow entirely to reveal the solid frozen ground beneath.

Then, he began gathering large quantities of flat stones of suitable size nearby. With them, he constructed a rectangular structure on the land resembling the long strip grills commonly seen at barbecue stands domestically.

This ”grill” was approximately two meters long, forty centimeters wide, and thirty centimeters high.