Their expressions were spot-on and brilliant. It gave me a small sense of satisfaction. This is just the beginning; challenging me would be the most unwise thing for them.

I'm now fully focused and no longer pay attention to the women's stares; I'm concentrating solely on cooking.

I noticed a detail earlier: when the women cleaned the bamboo partridge, they deliberately did not wash away the blood inside its body.

Not only that, they also used bamboo knives to poke many knife marks on the surface of the cleaned and peeled bamboo chickens, and then smeared some of the blood inside evenly into these knife marks.

I saw all of these actions. They thought their approach was clever, but how could they hide it from my eyes?

It must be said that this Tu ethnic woman named Sou is quite clever. At least she already knows how to use salted blood for seasoning and how to use the technique of making decorative cuts to make the bamboo chicken more flavorful.

For her, as a member of these primitive, uncivilized people, this alone represents a significant step towards civilization.

She said her cooking was the best in the tribe, and that was absolutely true, but all of that was before she met me.

What they consider the most advanced cooking methods are, in my opinion, only slightly more sophisticated than children playing house.

Blood can indeed make food taste better, but the salt content of prey's blood alone is still far from enough to make it taste good.

I'm out of salt now, but I had it after killing that giant deinosuchus.

The salt was still obtained from the blood of the Deinosuchus. The huge Deinosuchus I had brought earlier filled all six large bamboo tubes that Todante had brought with them.

But now I'm not going to use blood as a seasoning like those indigenous women.

First of all, the blood has already coagulated, and as I said, the salt content of blood is too low, and the taste doesn't meet the requirements.

Next, I plan to use this blood to temporarily extract some high-concentration salt.

If it had been processed carefully according to common sense, more salt could have been extracted. However, due to time constraints, I only processed the blood once before starting the extraction process.

The blood has congealed; now I'll pour it all into a jar I brought.

Then I crushed it all by hand, and then put clean water into the jar. I wanted to use the osmotic pressure of the fresh water to dilute the salt in the blood into the fresh water.

After stirring thoroughly several times, I poured the blood that had turned red into the pot and started heating it over high heat.

I continued this process of pouring water into the blood clots several more times until the blood clots were diluted with fresh water to the point that they had no taste. Only then did I stop and focus on boiling the red blood in the pot.

The following process is simple, just like evaporating seawater to obtain salt. As the liquid evaporates, the concentration of the salt water increases, eventually crystallizing into salt.

With the roaring fire in my fire pit, the pot full of bloody water quickly boiled.

At this point, I reduced the heat to a lower level, allowing the large bubbles to continue evaporating without causing the water to overflow.

The indigenous woman across from me noticed that ever since I cleaned up the bamboo partridges, I'd been rummaging through a pot of useless bloody water.

A group of local women, just like the gossipy aunties in the neighborhood committee, started pointing and gossiping about me again.

In their eyes, I was being arrogant, getting complacent after only gaining a slight advantage. They started doing useless things, apparently thinking I couldn't cook this dish today.

However, we can't blame them; they might not even be very familiar with something like salt.

As for my act of refining salt, it was a useless act in their eyes, which is understandable.

The women were very quick. I saw they had also prepared some side dishes, including potatoes and some wild vegetables. I wondered how they were going to grill these ingredients later.

As the water in the pot continued to evaporate, when only one-third of the water had evaporated, a ring of white powdery solids appeared around the edge of the metal pot. This was the evaporated salt.

Now that the water in the pot has decreased, there's no need to worry about it boiling over. I turned the heat up again, and the water evaporated even faster, causing those white-reddish crystals to appear in large quantities.

When I first arrived here, I did consider using this method to obtain salt. However, this method requires too much blood, and whenever we encountered large beasts, we usually didn't have time to collect the blood, nor did we bring a container to hold it.

Ultimately, it's all because of me. Let's not even talk about how troublesome and time-consuming it is to get blood drawn.

Even if I were to collect the blood, wandering alone in the perilous jungle with a large amount of blood would undoubtedly be free advertising to those keen-nosed beasts.

This is like telling them, "There's a fresh and delicious prey here. Come and eat me!"

Soon, under the continuous boiling of the fire, all the blood was evaporated, leaving behind about two large spoonfuls of white and reddish salt crystals in the pot.

I carefully poured them all into a small bamboo tube. This blood salt is very precious and can help me last for a while longer.

When the indigenous women saw me pouring some white dust into the bamboo tube, they were even more puzzled. I was boiling water and pouring in soil, but I hadn't done anything related to food.

They looked at me with pity, their eyes seeming to say that there was nothing they could do to help, and that they wouldn't be surprised if I lost.

I saw it all but said nothing, but Dante, standing to the side, still frowned and asked,

"Sir, after all this time, is what we've obtained related to the food we're making?"

I smiled, handed the bamboo tube containing salt to Dante, and then began to speak.

"Of course, pour some out and try it."

"oh!"

Dante agreed, then curiously poured out a small pinch of salt and put it in his mouth.

"Ptooey! Ptooey, ptooey, ptooey..."

A series of spitting sounds came from Dante's mouth. Dante looked at me with a horrified expression and said...

"Oh my god! What is this thing? It tastes so weird, it's awful."

"No, this stuff is delicious. I'm going to add it to our dish later."

"ah!"

This time, Dante's mouth gaped open even wider in surprise. He couldn't understand why I would add such a disgusting thing to the dish in the competition. Wouldn't that mean losing for sure?

“Sir, you can’t do this. I know we can’t win, but it would be such a waste to waste all this food.”

At that moment, I knew that Dante thought I couldn't win the contest, so he chose to just give up and destroy the food with whatever he had.