Chapter 3
Being alive is always worth celebrating for those who want to live.
Jiang Yunu knew her position at the top of the pit had more to do with her having been lifted up and thrown back into the pit. She guessed that this act of lifting and throwing had made her the last to enter. But after all, she had climbed out of the pit by stepping on the children lying quietly there, sometimes even having to cling to their bodies, using those as thin and frail as her own for support.
Jiang Yunu didn't think it was strange for her to pay tribute to the dead child. After all, she hadn't met another living person here, and there was no one else to share her celebration of finding food resources.
After paying tribute to the deceased children and herself, Jiang Yunu pressed her stomach and put away the empty bottles. If she could find other water sources later, she could use these empty bottles as containers.
The bottle is a bit small, but it's better than nothing.
Jiang Yunu was not sure what these bottles of edible liquids were, but considering the few abandoned devices she had seen on the other side of the base, she guessed that they might be the legendary energy replenishing liquid, also called nutrient solution, the kind that can keep you from feeling hungry for hours or even a day or two after drinking one bottle. It is a common supply in the future science fiction world.
The base has simple facilities and usually only staff members come to work temporarily. The staff turnover is high, and there are no long-term reserve supplies. However, it seems logical to put two boxes of emergency nutrient solution to meet basic needs, which further supports Jiang Yunu's previous inference.
"I don't know what you do here," Jiang Yunu sincerely thanked the stranger, "but at least thank you for being normal people who need to replenish their energy."
If the people who came to work here were really "special forces" with low energy consumption and super long standby time, or if they were not humans at all but dispatched artificial intelligence, then Jiang Yunu might not even be able to find these two small boxes, and would really face the dilemma of starving to death as soon as he crossed over.
Jiang Yunu was still unsure how long the small bottle of liquid would last, but she had already decided to carefully control her activity level and try to spend her limited calories wisely.
With her stomach soothed by the nutrient solution, Jiang Yunu took action nearby. She first returned to the edge of the pit and carefully looked at the children who seemed to be "the same kind" as her.
These white-haired children lay silent in the pit. A few of them were unnaturally tumbled to the side, and Jiang Yunu felt guilty seeing this. Because she had been the one who had pulled them out of the pit, twisting their already carelessly tossed bodies even more uncomfortably. She carefully crouched down at the edge of the pit, stretching her arms to reach out and see if she could straighten the twisted and overturned bodies. Unfortunately, Jiang Yunu was still a child, and even with her arms stretched out, her hands were still too short. She could only touch the hair of the children closest to the edge of the pit. She had to settle for the next best thing and touch the white hair of these children apologetically instead.
It was very strange. This was clearly a pit of children who had lost their vital signs, a pit of corpses in every sense of the word. However, Jiang Yunu looked at it without feeling scared.
These children do not seem to be born through normal reproduction. They have a strange "sense of pattern": all of them are the same height, their limbs look the same in proportion, their hair is the same length, and their hair color is the same as their skin color.
Just like products batched off the same assembly line.
Jiang Yunu almost thought that the white-haired children had the same facial features, but when she pushed aside the white hair covering the faces of several children and saw their faces, she found that the children still looked different, but the temperament revealed in their appearance was also very consistent.
They all seemed to have been engraved according to the same set of standards, and then discarded together, lying lifeless in the same pit, just like waste products that were mass-produced and then found to have some deficiencies in the entire batch and were therefore discarded in batches.
Jiang Yunu had been awake for some time. She touched the body of the only white-haired child lying on the edge of the pit and could feel that the other person's body was just cold, without the stiffness that a human body should have after a period of death.
"What are we?"
The question of "Who am I", which was interrupted by hunger before, came back to Jiang Yunu's mind.
And she naturally put herself in the camp of the white-haired children.
But the dead children could not answer her this question, and the information she had collected so far was too little to answer it herself.
The white-haired children in the pit and their pale bodies that did not decay became Jiang Yunu's only companions in the days that followed.
Jiang Yunu explored this small base for the third time. She found an electronic clock in a corner of the base that she had not noticed before. It was a very basic style. The whole thing was a thin piece with constantly changing numbers on it. There was an even thinner battery embedded in the back panel. She didn't know how long the battery would last.
However, perhaps it is precisely because of its basic style and single function that the battery has supported it to this day.
However, Jiang Yunu soon discovered that the digital clock's time zone didn't seem to match the base's location. The first time Jiang Yunu found it, it read "03:15," but by then she had already followed the yellow sand trails in the stone tunnel to the base's entrance. Through the crack in the flimsy gate, she could see that it was daylight outside.
When the electronic clock showed nine o'clock in the morning, Jiang Yunu went to the crack of the base door and took a look, and found that it was dark outside.
Jiang Yunu only used this electronic clock to check the general changes in time.
Relying on the electronic clock, Jiang Yunu estimated that the nutrient solution she found was enough to sustain a child's calorie consumption for 16 hours of activity.
There are 12 small bottles in a box, and 24 in total in two boxes. Excluding the 3 bottles that Jiang Yunu has already drunk, she still has 21 bottles of nutrient solution left. Together with the nutrient solution that is still "effective" in her stomach, she can guarantee herself a calorie supply for at least 340 hours.
Equivalent to 14 days.
"That is to say." Jiang Yunu set a survival timer for himself, "If nothing unexpected happens and I don't find any new supplies, I can still survive for two weeks."
There may be many people in the world who count down their lives, but there are probably not many who can still be optimistic after doing so.
Jiang Yunu wasn't discouraged by the two-week figure. Instead, he patted himself on the back and said encouragingly, "I've suddenly arrived in such a strange place. Surviving for half a month is already quite impressive!"
No one responded to Jiang Yunu's words. She was alone in her abandoned base, talking to herself, and sometimes to the white-haired children in the pit.
After Jiang Yunu encouraged herself and pumped herself up, she devoted herself to the transformation work of limited materials.
Being able to survive for two weeks is already impressive, and Jiang Yunu wants to try if he can be even more impressive.
When she was sure that she could not find anything new that she could use from the base, she set her sights on the entrance gate of the base.
She began to want to see the outside world.
Through the sand and stones brought in from outside the base, Jiang Yunu speculated that the base should be built in a place with desert terrain nearby. The stone path extended from the pit where she woke up all the way up to the ground. The gate of the base had been locked, but the door lock was unexpectedly just a mechanical lock, not the high-tech lock that Jiang Yunu had originally thought.
It was a mechanical lock, which made Jiang Yunu's research on opening the door a little easier.
She no longer needed to struggle with science and technology that might be beyond her comprehension. She only needed to figure out the basic structure of the door lock and then find a way to loosen the lock core and pry open the lock.
The desert landscape also means that the roads outside may not be easy to walk on, and the ultraviolet rays will be very strong during the day.
So while Jiang Yunu was thinking about how to pry the lock of the base's gate, he pieced things together and made a "cloak" out of waterproof tape and a piece of umbrella cloth used to cover a box. He then used the rubber tubes taken from scrapped equipment, cut them in half, spread them into rubber sheets, and pasted them together with tape. He made himself two rubber boots and turned a pair of "plastic sandals" into "plastic boots."
The plastic boots still have a simple and unrestrained style. It seems that even homeless people on the street may not pick them up and wear them, but Jiang Yunu is still very satisfied with them. She has always been good at encouraging herself and feels that it is very good that she can achieve such a result under limited conditions.
After putting on the barely upgraded equipment, Jiang Yunu finally figured out how to pick the lock while making the equipment - the lock core of the base gate was also unexpectedly easy to tinker with.
When Jiang Yunu finally pried it open and used the wire removed from the instrument to move the lock core, she was surprised and couldn't believe that her final way of opening the door was so old-fashioned.
But the door lock was indeed pried open.
With a slight "click", the lock tongue retracted, and the lock pillars of the sky and earth lock inserted into the upper and lower rock walls also retracted neatly.
The gate of the base opened.
Jiang Yunu took a deep breath. She was not sure what she would face after pushing open the door, nor did she know whether there would be supplies in the world outside the door that could extend her "life time".
But she is ready to face anything.
The tip of my nose first felt the wind blowing in from the outside, mixed with a little bit of sand and dust, with a unique smell of a dry environment.
Then comes daylight.
The overwhelming sunlight was like a warm orange blanket, or like a bucket of gold paint poured from the sky. It poured over on people and illuminated the whole body of the little Jiang Yunu who squeezed out from the crack of the door.
Jiang Yunu was wrapped in a cloak she made herself, but a few strands of hair still slipped out from under the hood. The sunlight immediately colored her hair, turning her silky white hair into the golden color of the sun.
Jiang Yunu let the sun shine on her quietly for two minutes before she tightened her cloak. She made two pockets on the inside of the rough cloak and stuffed four bottles of nutrient solution into them. She tied her knife to her leg.
She also had a steel pipe in her hand, which was also pulled out from the discarded equipment. It could be used to block blunt objects for self-defense, or as a long stick to help her walk more smoothly in the sand.
Jiang Yunu suspected he might encounter risks, perhaps encountering people in the world outside the base, or encountering wild animals surviving in the wasteland and desert. He also briefly imagined that there might be a town not too far away, or at least a small human settlement...
But she was wrong about everything.
Jiang Yunu first walked around the base, using a steel pipe as a cane to insert into the sand to help her move forward. The more she circled the base, the more she felt uneasy - because all she saw was yellow sand.
The base seemed to be built in the middle of a desert.
Jiang Yunu calmed himself down and soon noticed that the base was backed by a barren mountain, which seemed to be the highest mountain within a few kilometers.
She stopped circling and, using her steel staff and her own nimble movements, began to climb the mountain, from the sunlight to the horizon where it turned golden and red, and then to the darkness of the sky.
Jiang Yunu finally reached the top.
Standing on the top of a barren mountain with almost no grass, she saw in the distance that there was an obvious connecting layer on the ground, and the area extending further into the distance was shimmering.
The flashes rippled layer by layer, and Jiang Yunu's heart skipped a beat.
She saw that it was the sea.
Jiang Yunu looked around and changed directions several times, and found that from every angle he could see a sea connected to the sandy land in the distance.
This also means that this base is located on a remote and isolated island.
There were no signs of human settlements in any direction.
“…”
Jiang Yunu stood on the top of the barren mountain in silence. She quickly accepted that it would be difficult for her to leave the deserted island on her own and that the difficulty of survival had increased.
Jiang Yunu was still in a good mood, she laughed "haha".
"From today on, I will go from being a person struggling to survive to a savage on a deserted island struggling to survive."
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