I was lucky to escape injury yesterday. I slid down the tree smoothly and landed steadily on the ground about a meter below.

At this moment, there were many dried and blackened bloodstains on the ground, which must have been left by other wild animals when they preyed on the leopard yesterday.

I approached the leopard, intending to pick it up and examine it. To my surprise, with a single pull, I managed to lift the leopard completely.

To be precise, the leopard had simply become a leopard skin with a head still attached. Because it wasn't clearly visible from the tree, it was assumed that the leopard was still in the same spot and no other animals were bothering it.

It seems I was naive. In this primeval forest teeming with wild beasts, how could anyone leave meat lying around uneaten?

I have to admire these wild beasts; they are natural butchers. They devoured everything edible from the leopard down to its head, even licking and scraping the fat off its skin clean.

Perhaps they saw how difficult it was for me to hunt this leopard, so leaving me the pelt is a kind of honor among thieves.

But that's fine too. Without the fat on the skin, I don't have to put in the effort to process it. I just need to cut off its head to get a relatively intact leopard skin.

I found a relatively fine-grained stone nearby and started smashing it against another stone until it shattered into pieces. I then picked out a few sharp, angular pieces and used them as knives to cut the leopard skin.

The process went smoothly, and I soon had the leopard skin in my possession. After washing it in the stream, I found some branches and stretched the skin as wide as possible before letting it air dry in a shady place.

This type of raw hide cannot be exposed to direct sunlight. Firstly, the high temperature will cause it to smell bad and attract flies. Secondly, if it is exposed to strong sunlight, it will become hard and difficult to carry.

My wild berries were completely gone after yesterday and this morning. I need to find some carbohydrates to eat first, because without sugar intake, my body will soon experience low blood sugar, dizziness, and blurred vision.

I know that those thatch grasses can provide some energy, but digging out their underground roots is a laborious task.

I had a better plan. Instead of digging up the roots of these thatch plants directly, I came to a place by the stream where there were also many thatch plants growing.

The soil here is sandy, so all I need to do is keep hollowing out the sand and gravel along the water's edge with a stick to create a backwater. The flowing water then becomes the cheapest form of labor, helping me to further erode the soil where the thatch grasses take root along the bank.

I sat by like a foreman, watching the water erode the results. Soon, without much effort, I had a lot of white rootlets, which looked somewhat like the roots of houttuynia cordata, but were thinner.

Compared to houttuynia cordata, which can be used for both food and medicine, the biggest advantage of imperata cylindrica is that it is slightly sweet, unlike houttuynia cordata which has a rusty smell and a fishy smell like fish scales that have been fermenting for three days.

However, its drawbacks are also obvious. It's quite hard and contains a lot of fiber. Chewing it is like chewing betel nut or kudzu root. If I could find it, I would still prefer to eat houttuynia cordata.

I ate a few handfuls of Imperata cylindrica roots, but my body wasn't fully replenished with energy. I could only make do for now. Then I went back to the place where I had gathered wild fruits yesterday and ate my fill before running back to get on with the important things I needed to do today.

First, I wove myself a grass skirt and a hooded cape out of willow branches. Then I made myself a pair of rather clumsy straw sandals, also made of willow branches.

I've finally done a makeover, and now I look even more like a wild man.

Yesterday really scared me. Today I swear I have to get a fire going first. Once I have a fire, I'll have plenty of ways to deal with the crabs, fish, and shrimp in the stream.

I hadn't had a proper meal in over a day, and I couldn't just rely on wild berries to fill my stomach. The thought of possibly having grilled fish later brought tears of joy to my eyes.

However, starting a fire is a real skill. I didn't have the right materials or tools, which gave me a real headache.

As I walked along, I observed the vegetation around me and found quite a few plants that could be used to make tinder. For example, a plant called wormwood grows very well here. Its leaves are left to wilt in the sun, and you can rub out the fluffy fibers by hand and then continue to dry them to get excellent tinder.

At that moment, my mind was completely focused on the fire, and I almost tripped over a stone because I wasn't paying attention. Luckily, there was a pine tree in front of me, and I caught myself on the trunk as I fell.

My head was very close to the pine tree at that moment, and the fresh fragrance of pine plants entered my nostrils.

This suddenly gave me a flash of inspiration: rosin!

I quickly looked around the pine tree and found some shiny, amber-colored rosin. However, it wasn't very large, and some of it was cracked, which wasn't what I wanted.

Rosin is an important material that has been used in various fields for a long time, and it is also one of the most primitive and easiest resins to process.

The older generation said that they used to heat rosin and mix it with a certain amount of lime and sawdust to seal the hull of wooden boats together with tung oil, which could achieve a very good waterproof effect.

However, I know that the uses of resin go far beyond this. In modern industry, this material can also be used directly as a flux for casting and as a turpentine for refining and diluting paint.

However, I only know a little about these complicated things, and they're not very useful to me right now. What I value is its light transmittance; high-quality resin, after polishing, can achieve light transmittance comparable to glass.

I don't have the tools for fine polishing right now, so I definitely can't achieve that high translucency effect by polishing those stream stones. However, I have a better way to solve this translucency problem in a short time.

That's one of the advantages of being born in the countryside; unlike children in the city, they don't have access to many things at will.

However, in the resource-scarce rural areas, what they have no shortage of is imagination. As long as there are suitable materials, the older children can always tinker with all sorts of strange and wonderful little gadgets.

Rosin reminds me of a game I used to play as a child, and it might help me solve the fire problem.

In the deeper parts of the stream, I saw some clams. I don't know if these clams produce pearls, but I do know that the inside of their shells is very smooth, comparable to a mirror.

So I waded into the stream and retrieved a clam shell about the size of my fist. I carefully opened the shell, took out the clam meat, and obtained my first industrial product from nature.

Next, I will use this smooth side to make industrial molds, and the raw material is pine resin.