Chapter 28 – 028 Twin Mountains
Hwanin, who relieved his mental fatigue with a short sleep of about 30 minutes, came out of the cave and began to gather the ingredients for the furnace type smoker.
I learned this while repeatedly making smokers and fighting to secure soul beads, but after being able to handle souls, my resistance to physical fatigue increased remarkably.
Most of the fatigue is a kind of illusion that you feel mentally tired, and you can act comfortably for half a day even if you close your eyes and take a break for a while.
This is the reason why I was able to stay fine for more than 15 days while sleeping through the night.
‘You can take a break after completing the smoker.’
If you start smoking in earnest, you will have plenty of time from then on.
Quack! Cackle!
Food Deok! Padduck!
Hwanin, who was digging the ground flat and straight from a low place on a slightly curved ground, looked up at the night sky at the sound of angry cries and flapping of emergency food.
“…… ?”
Emergency rations are scolding a bird they see for the first time with an angry look.
It seemed that the bird that was being scolded was a nocturnal bird that flew in aiming for the meat that was being dried naturally.
Beep, beep, beep!
Pretty sweet!!
The bird whose feathers were mercilessly plucked by its angry beak and claws eventually started running away in a hurry to the east of the Twin Mountains, and the emergency food, which had been fiercely pursuing it, chased it close to the mountain and gracefully turned and returned as if it had been taken care of.
Hwanin wonders if the emergency rations were that much, but then focuses on what he was doing.
Flat stones found along the river are piled up one after another around the digat-shaped land.
After building the foundation with flat stones, several thigh-thick trees were brought in and the bark was removed with a stone axe.
The left and right ends of the log, which had become a tree, were cut into a straight line shape and stacked on top of each other as if making a log house, forming a furnace shape to some extent.
“Well…….”
Hwanin crossed his arms and thought about the operation principle of the smoker, and then increased the distance between the smoke inlet and the chimney through which the smoke would come out.
In this way, the smoke will cool as the furnace moves from the entrance to the chimney, and the smoke will coat the meat hung on the chimney to prevent the growth of bacteria.
After that, the logs were cut at regular intervals and stacked one on top of another in the shape of a square chimney to a height of 70 cm.
It took 4 hours to get here.
‘Because my strength and stamina are improving, the work speed is ridiculously fast.’
If it had been right after falling into the jungle of this world, it would have taken a whole day.
Finally, in order to fill the gaps in the smoker, the furnace is made into mud by spraying water on the excavated soil to make a ground for the smoker.
It looks like a thick loess thanks to a little sparsely sprayed with water from a crude wooden bowl.
“…….”
After making it, it seemed that the amount was insufficient, so I dug up the nearby land and supplemented it with some more mud. I carefully filled the gaps in the smoker with an amount of mud that could have been dozens of kilograms.
Now it’s time to light a fire and check the flow of smoke.
When the fire is lit at the entrance of the furnace, the smoke flows inward and comes out through the chimney thanks to the slightly slanted furnace.
However, there was also smoke leaking through the gaps, so when we reinforced those places, the perfect smoker was completed.
It is 3:20 am now. It’s been 5 hours since I started smoking in a tent type smoker, and the remaining time of the soul orb is about 2 hours.
It’s time to go hunting soon.
Before that, Hwanin, who was approaching the tent with the intention of adding more smoke chips from the tent smoker, ripped off one side of the hut roughly, frowning at the sour smell that brushed his nose.
Wasasak!
“…….”
The quality of the meat was nothing to look at. The sour smell, as if it had been properly spoiled, was revealing a strong presence among the faint smoke scent.
“Is the temperature the problem?”
Two smokers failed for similar reasons. What they have in common is the temperature and distance of the fire.
The meat has turned into a hard stick, but the color system is intensely red, as it claims to be ‘death if eaten’.
‘The red color must have been related to poison.’
Anyway, the color system of the naturally dried meat is white, so it must have been spoiled by the heat.
Since the furnace side is a low-temperature smoking method, the only thing left is the hot smoking method, which involves burning a fire strongly, but Hwanin did not want to try it anymore.
‘If even the furnace fails, I have no choice but to give up on breaking through the steppes and move along the forests and mountains.’
The meat is buried in the ground, the hut is dismantled and thrown anywhere near the cliff.
After washing his hands thoroughly, he filled the chimney of the furnace-type fumigator with moderately dried pieces of meat and covered it with a pre-made lid.
Even if it was a lid, it was made of long, thin wooden sticks woven together like weaving a twill weave, and a branch with many leaves attached to it was placed on top.
Anyway, it was around the time I was hoping for success this time as I watched the smoke escape through the gap in the lid.
Quack. Quack. Queek.
The emergency rations that flew with the sound of flapping wings sat on Hwanin’s shoulder and squawked in his ear as if he had seen something important.
“Enemy? Which one?”
Quya!
When I saw the emergency rations turn its head to one side and turned my gaze there, I noticed something lingering at the end of the river.
When I strained my eyes, my soul vision opened up and the world was colored in gray, and I could see the pale white that matched the gray world lingering along the river.
After bringing the spear and staff, I waited for a while until I began to hear faint calls of pheasants, kuongs, and land seals, as well as splashing and splashing.
It wasn’t strange. The land seal was moving upstream along the river, which cut through the cliffs of the Twin Mountains.
After a while, a fairly large land seal entered the cliff, as if it had been preceded by it, stopped in shock when it saw Hwanin, and glanced at Hwanin standing tall like a puppy that had made a mistake.
Pheasant, pheasant. Quoong cuong.
The land seal turned around and flopped back to the main base.
It wasn’t long before a burdock-burdock sound began to emerge from the herd of ground seals.
‘Are land seals highly intelligent?’
Sending out reconnaissance ahead of time, or detecting the danger of the entity that went out of reconnaissance and running away in a hurry.
They are no different from humans if you only look at their babbling behavior as if they were having an emergency meeting.
About 20 land seals gathered together and were buzzing, but Hwanin’s heart was calm.
His strength has been fully restored, and the level of his soul orbs is high enough to make him wonder if this has ever happened before.
He also knows the strategy tactics and techniques of the land seal. When a fight breaks out, attack and escape at the same time, and I am confident that I will kill at least five or six of them.
If you try to kill more than that, you’ll be seriously injured or prepared to die. However, if you safely kill four of them, retreat, secure the soul orb, and repeat attacking again, you will be able to kill them all, even if it takes a long time.
“…….”
But I had no intention of starting a fight.
Hwanin knew that even though he had a plan, there were many cases in which things in the world did not go according to plan.
Above all, the disadvantage of being outnumbered cannot be ignored.
It would be foolish to risk your life to only refill the duration of the soul orb to 10 hours and fill all the orbs with the soul of the earth seal.
Hwanin, who had been waiting to see how the land seals came out and act, saw three of them coming out of the group and his eyes lit up.
‘Is it an envoy?’
Clearly conscious of this side and cautiously approaching, it was nothing more and nothing less than an envoy of peace.
I didn’t know that I would be that intelligent, so I thought it might be a trap, and if I had to, I squeezed my cane tightly, thinking of killing only three of them and then escaping…….
Hwanin’s unexpected thing happened.
Quong. Quong.
“…… ?”
After stopping at an appropriate distance, out of the three, only one with a particularly severe wound approached.
There were only three cuts where the red flesh was visible beyond the fat layer. Every time you move, blood flows out and seeps into the river.
The land seal that came close to Hwanin stretched out in front of him and started glancing at Hwanin, while the other two are staring at Hwanin wide-eyed.
Hwanin realized the meaning of this action belatedly.
‘It’s a living sacrifice.’
It was a gesture from the land seals to ask for the rest to be sent as they would pay the toll for their fellow countrymen who were seriously injured and whose survival was uncertain.
The land seals did not choose this method without thinking.
Thanks to his high intelligence, he noticed from the traces around the river that this valley area was the realm of Hwanin.
The group lost about 30% of their power in daytime battles, and the remaining 70% of their strength was not recovered.
Considering the fighting power of the Hwanin shown at that time, the land seals, who concluded that the group could be annihilated if they were serious, thought of a method that would cause the least damage to each other.
If Hwanin had been wounded or dull enough not to notice their approach, he would have chosen a more moderate negotiation, but a group of land seals, unable to live apart from the water, could not choose an option as they were fully prepared for battle. There were only two.
Fight and perish. Or offer a sacrifice and pass through.
Pheasant……. Pheasant Pheasant.
As Hwanin stares at the land seal that is hanging down as if giving his life, the other two land seals let out anxious cries.
“…….”
At that time, Hwanin was calculating with his head which option would be most beneficial to him.
To be honest, even if it was a sacrifice, I wasn’t attracted to it from the perspective of Hwanin.
It wasn’t that we didn’t have enough to eat, and the fact that we had to go hunting didn’t change even with the addition of a soul orb from a ground seal.
Sup – I breathe in, and I smell a strangely sweet smell. It is the smell of the blood of the land seal.
‘Did the beasts gather because they were attracted to this smell?’
Although I wonder how delicious the meat is that animals risk their lives to hunt, he is a Hwanin who does not attach much importance to eating.
‘I don’t think it’s the kind of tendency to look down on this side just because it passes……. He’s intelligent enough to even try to negotiate to the point where he remembers this side.’
Continuing his thoughts, Hwanin made a decision, took three or four steps back, and swung his cane from right to left as if telling him to pass.
Do you have a pheasant?
“Take your own people too.”
The two land seals hesitated for a moment as if they were taken aback by Hwanin’s attitude, then returned to the herd with the injured fellow.
The way he looks back several times as he goes is strange because he looks suspicious even though he has read his intentions.
The group of three joined together again, but when Hwanin showed them sitting on a rock in a place away from the river, they started to move cautiously.
Quong. Pheasant.
Pheasant Pheasant.
There are baby seals that are not even half the size between about 20 seals, so moving can be noisy, but the seals are cautious in their movements, as if they are trying not to provoke Hwanin as much as possible.
‘If you follow the upper reaches of the river, it must be true that the great lake comes out. Is it that the rainy season and the dry season are divided in this filthy wide forest?’
If the rainy season and the dry season are separated, it explains that land seals risk their lives and march in battles close to war.
It means that the dry season is approaching and the water is decreasing.
Around that time, the group of land seals had almost left the valley where Hwanin was, and when Hwanin also got up to go hunting, the largest land seal in the group approached with a squeak.
It appears to be the oldest of the group, judging from the heavily wrinkled hide and the white spots on the hide.
Hwanin didn’t seem to be hostile, so Hwanin sat and watched, but the land seal came up to Hwanin, strangled his throat, vomited something out, cried once, and returned to the herd.
“…… ?”
Watching the land seals disappearing into the gray darkness, and the slime lump the old land seal had vomited, Hwanin pricked the slime lump with a branch. Then he felt something hard touch the branch.
He grabbed the slime and took it to the riverside to wash, revealing a pearl-colored stone the size of half a fist.
From the outside, it was something unusual. Moreover, as I hold it, I feel that the flow of warmth and cold energy in my body becomes softer.
I’m not sure how effective it is, but I know it will help you.
Also, it is a valuable item that is difficult to obtain.
“…….”
Satisfied with the cost of his choice, Hwanin put the pearl-colored stone in his pocket and went hunting.
I wandered around for a long time until dawn when the sun slowly rose, but the beast was hardly noticed.
Until yesterday, I often ran into hyenas that wandered around the wide basin in search of food, but tonight I can’t even see them, and as if they couldn’t find an emergency food, they circle the sky and come down on Hwanin’s shoulder to make a fuss.
It seemed that the number of beasts had drastically decreased in the aftermath of yesterday’s large-scale battle.
‘I’ve killed close to 20 of them myself. If you count the number of seals killed, well over a hundred.’
Even if the basin is as wide as Seoul, if there are more than 100, the number of carnivores has dropped to the bottom.
When he takes out a fresh insect from his pocket, the emergency ration he hastily skipped with his beak cries and flies up into the sky again as if he is happy.
Hwanin thought it was difficult and fiddled with the pearl-colored stones in his pocket.
‘If there is no effect of the decree, it should be said that the ability to perform combat is reduced by half…….’
As I searched the basin of the dark dawn with my soul vision, thinking about what to do, emergency food brought me the good news that I had found a beast.
Quack. Quet.
“Good job.”
Quack!
Noticing that the emergency rations were pointing far away, Hwanin climbed a nearby hill and looked in the direction the emergency rations flew.
You can see a herd of horses huddled together in a wide place like a meadow.
A herd of grayish white horses of achromatic color system.
Every bloodsucker.
As if they hadn’t woken up yet since it was early in the morning, the ones that would purr and move away as if they were teasing each other usually had two guards set up and the other eight lying on their sides or sleeping on their stomachs, as if they hadn’t woken up yet.
‘Or I’m tired from the aftermath of yesterday’s battle.’
Maybe it’s because bloodsuckers are carnivores, not herbivores, so they don’t seem to think much of enemy attacks.
He commanded the Blue Leopard twice and used stealth to silently approach the group of vampires.
Fortunately, the wind was blowing from the bloodsuckers and the ground was light grass, so the sound of footsteps was not loud.
There is a sentry, but it’s early in the morning, so they seem to be distracted and neglect their surroundings.
Hwanin sneaked behind the sentry horse, narrowed the distance to about 60m, and commandeered the spirit of the land seal.
