From Robinson Crusoe

During the day, the shelter located on the mountainside is always pitch black inside.

When it was being built, neither Chen Zhou nor Paul considered leaving a window for it. They couldn't tolerate a large ventilation opening, nor did they have any glass for letting in light.

If you want the room to be brighter, you'll have to move the heavy wooden door at the entrance.

The sun will be able to shine into the house, but the little bit of warmth that has been accumulated inside will be blown away by the cold wind. When the sun goes down and you return to the house after working, both the bed and the walls will be as cold as an ice cellar.

Therefore, after Paul got up in the morning and went out to work, he would block the doorway with a wooden door to prevent the warm air from escaping.

After completing the genetic modification, his cold resistance was greatly enhanced. In addition, Slavs are naturally adapted to the cold climate of northern Siberia, so the current severe cold is nothing to him, except to increase the consumption of food.

……

After getting up early in the morning and getting dressed in the dark, the first thing Paul needed to do was go out and start a fire.

Although Chen Zhou brought back some coal, saying it could be used to fire a pottery kiln, this work has not yet been carried out.

To avoid igniting the shelter from indoor fire and to prevent death from charcoal poisoning, Paul preferred to cover himself with several layers of thick, heavy animal hides and endure the cold at night rather than light a fire indoors, even if there was a small fireplace.

Chen Zhou hasn't returned yet, and if he causes any accident, there might not even be anyone to save him.

Paul admits that he does have a certain self-destructive tendency, but he does not want to sacrifice himself for no reason.

The cooking pot and baskets of pine nuts were placed inside the house.

When going out, Paul would take his cooking pot with him.

There is no water source on the mountain, but there is snow. The water from the melting snow is naturally not very clean. After it is completely melted in the pot, you can see a lot of small pebbles piled up at the bottom of the pot, and the water also looks a bit turbid.

However, the water will always be hot after boiling. Just wait a little while until all the impurities that float to the surface due to the boiling water settle to the bottom of the pot, then you can scoop out the pine nuts and the minced meat that you threw into the pot and enjoy them.

……

The stove used for cooking was located at the entrance of the shelter. During the time Chen Zhou was away, several snowfalls occurred on the mountain.

In high-altitude areas, snowfall is always much more frequent than in low-altitude areas. Sometimes, only a thin layer of snowflakes falls on the grasslands, while a thick layer of snow accumulates on the mountains.

To sweep the entrance, Paul carefully selected and cut down a pine branch that was thick enough and had dense enough needles, using it as a broom to remove the snow.

This natural broom is quite convenient to use, but pine needles keep falling during the sweeping process, and it becomes bald after only a few uses, so Paul has to find a new broom.

As a result, although the ground at the entrance of the shelter looks clean, you can find many tiny pine needles if you look closely.

The stove is nestled among these rows of pine needles.

The meat that had been stored in advance was frozen on the mountain, wrapped in animal hides, and buried in the snow.

Every two or three days, Paul would take a piece of meat from the mountain and hang it at the entrance of the shelter. In the morning, when he was boiling pine nuts, he would cut off a few pieces with his military knife and throw them into the cooking pot.

The wild animals he and Chen Zhou hunted had very little fat, with more red meat than white meat, so the stewed meat didn't taste good at all. Due to the lack of oil, all you could taste was the dryness of the meat.

It's all thanks to the fact that the cooking pot itself is a pressure cooker, otherwise the meat wouldn't have been cooked until tender in a short time.

What to do if it doesn't taste good?
Then we can only rely on pine nuts and bone marrow.

Fresh pine nuts have a high oil content, and when combined with the bone marrow extracted from crushed bones, pine nut stew with meat can be considered quite nutritious.

Add a small handful of dried berries, and you have carbohydrates, protein, fat, and vitamins—that's it!

……

To make things easier, Paul would prepare all the meals for the entire day in advance.

After breakfast, he took his axe and went out to chop wood.

His leg wasn't fully healed yet, and he still walked with a slight limp.

Despite his young age, Paul still suffered from some lingering injuries to his shoulders and knees. Before the snow fell, his old injuries would ache faintly once the sky darkened.

Due to his injuries, Paul dared not carry too much heavy load. When transporting firewood to the shelter, he preferred to make several trips rather than carry it all at once.

After finishing the morning's work, the leftover rice in the cooking pot had already frozen solid by noon.

Just then, the mud and sand had all sunk to the bottom of the pot and frozen solid, forming a layer.

Paul then pried up the leftover rice that had frozen into a block of ice, used an axe to scrape off the mud and sand at the bottom, and put the ice block back into the cooking pot to heat it up. This way, it could be stirred and there was no need to worry about it being gritty.

……

Living alone in the snow-capped mountains must be a very difficult life.

However, thanks to the "family fortune" left to him by Chen Zhou, Paul's life wasn't too bad.

Besides the extreme cold inside the shelter after nightfall and the long, unbearable winter nights, what tormented him most was the loneliness.

Paul regretted not letting Chen Zhou leave a saw-toothed tiger to keep him company. He would rather spend more time taking the little saw-toothed tiger out hunting every day, even if he ate less, than be so lonely.

Moreover, this torment intensifies as time goes on since Chen Zhou left.

Sometimes when he couldn't sleep, Paul would have all sorts of wild thoughts, worrying that Chen Zhou might encounter some danger outside.

However, his worries would dissipate due to his trust in Chen Zhou's abilities.

Amidst this cycle of denial and self-doubt, he finally waited for Chen Zhou to return.

……

Returning to its own territory, the place where it had lived the longest since birth and where it had left the most memories, the three-headed saw-toothed tiger was undoubtedly the most excited.

In the afternoon, Paul had just returned to the entrance of the shelter carrying a bundle of firewood.

He inserted the knife into the crevice of the flask's inner edge and skillfully pried at the ice, preparing to proceed with the old steps.

Before he could pry open the ice block, Paul heard a flurry of footsteps, and then the familiar saw-toothed tiger appeared at the bottom of the slope.

Upon seeing the sawtooth tiger, Paul knew that Chen Zhou must have successfully completed his mission and returned safely. Without even putting down the cooking pot in his hand, he grabbed a knife in one hand and the pot in the other and ran down the mountain.

……

From a distance, Chen Zhou could hear Paul speaking Russian with a lot of slurred speech.

He grinned mischievously, patiently waiting to see Paul's reaction when he smelled the stench of excrement on Tiger Two.

As he expected, the most excited Tiger Two ran in the lead. Upon seeing the largest and friendliest member of the pack, Tiger Two immediately pounced and rushed into Paul's arms.

"Oh, good boy~ good boy!"

Paul, unable to hide his joy, threw down his cooking pot and saber and hugged the boy who had grown quite a bit more.

He pressed his thick beard against Tiger Two's head, rubbing it against its head, while simultaneously lifting Tiger Two up to measure its weight.

Soon after, Tiger Big Brother and Tiger Third Brother were also pulled into Paul's arms.

Upon their long-awaited reunion, the 2.3-meter-tall Slavic man wore a childlike smile.

Chen Zhou crossed his arms and waited quietly for Paul to notice something was wrong. However, even after Paul finished cuddling with the saw-toothed tigers, the expected disgust or suspicion did not occur, which made Chen Zhou feel like his prank had failed.

"Am I just too observant, or are the Russians just too thick-skinned?"

Feeling resentful, Chen Zhou greeted Paul and placed the wicker basket on his back at the entrance of the shelter.

……

Winter had been here for a while, and worried that the continuous snow and wind would prevent him from going out, Chen Zhou only planned to rest for one night before setting off again.

Besides taking the longbow with him and giving the antidote to Bi Kai, he also wanted to verify something else on this trip—

The challenge rules state:
"You cannot choose to team up with others before your partner voluntarily gives up the challenge or fails the challenge."

In other words, if he and Paul were indeed in the same group, he would not be able to cooperate with Bi Kai before he gave up the challenge, and the same would be true for Paul.

If, as he guessed, he was the 101st person and not Paul's partner, then the real "free men" were actually Paul and Bi Kai.

He wanted to test whether he could succeed if he consulted Paul beforehand and formed an alliance with Bi Kai with Paul's message.

If he fails, it would prove that he and Paul were indeed the original partners, and that he was indeed constrained to some extent by challenging the rules.

If successful, it would be good news, but it would also bring too much uncertainty.

In Chen Zhou's view, the biggest advantage of not being restricted by the challenge rules is that if he leaves the challenge area on his own initiative, it does not count as a failure of the challenge.

For all challengers, this is tantamount to having a cheat code.

While others suffer in the extreme cold of minus 65 degrees Celsius and eventually can't even find a single living creature, he can "jump out of the three realms" and go out to hunt wild animals.

Even in an Ice Age outside the challenge area, where it is also in winter, the temperatures would not be that extreme.

That alone is enough to outlast everyone else.

Moreover, if he could move Paul and Bi Kai to the edge of the challenge zone as soon as possible, enabling them to communicate with the outside world, he could also provide them with food and fuel supplies.

It can be said that as long as he puts in a little more effort, he can completely guarantee that these two will become the final winners.

Of course, everything has its advantages and disadvantages.

What made Chen Zhou uneasy and even fearful was—

Since he can disregard the rules of the challenge, will he still be able to leave this world in the end?

If Paul and Bi Kai survive to the end, will the three of them be teleported away together, or will only two of them be able to go, and will he not be among them?

Staying in 10,000 years ago is far more suffocating than staying in the 17th century.

In the 17th century, at least some glimmer of civilization could be seen, but in the prehistoric world, all he could probably see was barbarity and ignorance.

Chen Zhou was unable to find any interpretation of this in the rules.

As an "outsider," he seems to have to accept both the benefits of bugs and the uncertain risks.

Ultimately, all of this depends on the choice of the Time and Space Administration.

For those high and mighty mysterious beings, teleporting someone away is a piece of cake; whether it can shake their decision depends on his performance.

……

Thinking of this, Chen Zhou couldn't help but sigh.

He has never liked uncertainty, and he dislikes entrusting his fate to others.

However, in the face of the Time and Space Administration, he was even smaller than an insect.

The only saving grace was that, compared to Paul or Bi Kai, at least he had some contact with the Time and Space Administration, and he knew what the Time and Space Administration hated most—

Those who exploit loopholes to disrupt and challenge the established order.

Chen Zhou felt that if he really helped Paul and Bi Kai become the final winners through cheating, it was hard to say whether those two could leave, but he definitely wouldn't be able to leave.

Conversely, disguising oneself as a challenger within the venue and adhering to the rules, or merely slightly crossing the red line and striving to survive in the extreme cold, might earn the favor of the Time and Space Administration.

……

After realizing that he was not one of the challengers, Chen Zhou often thought about this question and repeatedly pondered the challenge rules in his mind.

Compared to the "mystery grand prize" mentioned in the rules, going home was more important; he didn't want to stay in this awful place forever.

……

Chen Zhou moved aside the heavy wooden door blocking the entrance to the shelter, lowered his head, and crawled inside.

Both he and Paul were exceptionally tall, especially Paul, whose height of 2.3 meters caused considerable trouble for the construction of the shelter.

To accommodate two people of similar height, the shelter, apart from having a slightly smaller door, boasts an interior ceiling height of over 2.1 meters.

Therefore, after building the stone walls on the left and right sides, Chen Zhou and Paul dug down a layer of soil to make the interior of the shelter appear sunken.

……

Upon entering the shelter from the cold mountainside, the first thing you feel is warmth.

Since there's no constant wind here, the loss of body temperature stops immediately.

After the warmth subsided, a stench of animal hides mixed with the sour smell of dried berries and the oily aroma of pine nuts wafted into Chen Zhou's nostrils.

The interior of this makeshift shelter built on the mountainside was even more shabby than the exterior, not even as shabby as the first shack Chen Zhou built on the deserted island.

The shelter had no floor, only bare soil studded with gravel of varying sizes.

Long wooden sticks were inserted into the gaps between the stones on both sides, serving as unique "hooks" on which clusters of berries and semi-finished furs hung.

Near the door, there was a small fireplace made of stacked stones and covered with a layer of mud.

When Chen Zhou is at home, he occasionally puts some charcoal in the fireplace.

However, because the fireplace chimney is too small, it often gets clogged when it's windy or snowy, so while people rely on it for warmth, they also have to endure the smoke.

Unfortunately, the fireplace was too small, close to the door and far from the bed. The little heat it emitted could barely counteract the cold wind blowing in, so overall it did more harm than good and was eventually abandoned.

Paul and Chen Zhou's beds were located at the innermost part of the shelter, right next to the wall, placed on either side.

The bed was made of logs covered with animal hides, and the unpleasant smell in the room mostly came from these failed-tanned and slightly stiff hides.

Most of their belongings were hung on the wall to save space in the room. The boxes containing supplies, which could not be hung, were placed at the head of Chen Zhou's bed.

Looking at the damaged longbow on the wall, Chen Zhou, who was about to open the box to take out the antidote, couldn't help but feel a little emotional.

When they parted last time, he never imagined that it would be a separation of life and death. (End of Chapter)