Distant Mountain Battle Song

Chapter 184: Our understanding of this world is too limited.

The Shehuo Festival is the most important festival of the year in the Han Dynasty.

This festival usually lasts for three whole days. During these three days, adults will paint their faces with various colors, while children will all have their faces painted black.

Each person's mouth is decorated with two huge fangs drawn with grass juice. More particular families will even put the fangs of various ferocious beasts in their mouths, and they are the kind that can move around. If they move around randomly, they can scare children into screaming.

People would also dye tattered clothes and strips of cloth from their homes in various colors, then tie these strips around their waists. When they twisted their waists and swayed their hips, the strips of cloth would flutter up and down in a beautiful display.

Drums were a necessity in the lives of the Han people, not decorations. The louder the drum sounded, the more wild animals it could scare away, and it could also drive away some evil spirits.

Stilts are also a necessity of life. When a person or a few people go to the wild, they walk on stilts. Firstly, it can protect them from being bitten by poisonous insects. Secondly, the person standing on the stilts looks very big, which can scare away many wild animals that have no good intentions towards people, especially dogs.

The production process of the big-headed doll's headgear is very complicated. It takes a lot of time to hollow out a large piece of wood, carve out the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and finally paint it.

However, once someone appears wearing a big-headed doll mask and colorful clothes, jumping around, he will never lack fans.

In times of extreme material scarcity, spiritual life must be rich. Only in this way can people recall only the happy things when they remember those difficult years. As for the hardships and hunger, unless it is used to educate their children, they will automatically shut it off. After all, avoiding recalling hardships is a unique spiritual protective function of human beings.

The celebrations of the Han people are similar to those on Earth, with food being the most important thing. On ordinary days, it is not a problem to eat three or four ounces of wheat, beans, and grass every day, but during the "Shehuo Sacrifice", it cannot be so shabby.

After careful calculation, Eji, Anji, and their group of women concluded that it would be reasonable for each person to receive one jin of grain per day during the three days of the "Shehuo Festival".

As for meat, the chestnut horse, who is most familiar with this land, said that in the first backwater of the Qingshui River, there lives a group of long-nosed elephant pigs. These creatures are huge and slow-moving, but they are also very fierce. Anyone who dares to enter their breeding territory will basically be trampled flat by them.

That's right, this thing is a pure herbivore. As for saying that it moves slowly, only a chestnut horse can say that. If other animals said that to humans, they would easily be trampled to death by elephants and pigs.

Hunting naturally fell to Yun Ce. Ever since he managed to subdue the ferocious beast, known as the king of beasts, with his bare hands, the people here have confirmed that Yun Ce is the true king of beasts.

Yun Ce led a group of people, pulling seven or eight carriages, to the first eddy of the Qingshui River early in the morning. This was a narrow strip of land, fifty miles deep and no more than twenty miles wide.

Surrounded on three sides by the Qingshui River during the dry season, and facing the vast Great Wall wilderness on the other side, the people who came with Yun Ce all climbed the thickest trees when they saw the first half-meter-high pile of elephant and pig dung. This pile of dung was the territory marked by the elephant and pig.

As for the hunt, everyone confirmed that it was Yun Ce and the chestnut horse's affair.

Yun Ce didn't need their help. Although he didn't know what a pig-like creature was, he was certain that the chestnut horse could outrun them, so he felt that he could too. He had raced against the chestnut horse before, and he could even run faster than it. After all, his body was small, so he didn't need to choose his path as much.

He had assumed this place would be lush with water and grass, but the further he went in, the more desolate it became. Yun Ce then realized something was wrong, especially the way the chestnut horse lifted its leg and handled things with a suspicious air, which made Yun Ce raise the alert level by two levels.

Only when he saw a giant boar, almost the size of an elephant, slowly munching on the mud, did Yun Ce feel relieved. He picked up a javelin and, without thinking, threw it with all his might.

At a distance of less than twenty meters, the javelin's force was fierce. With the triangular tip at the front, specially designed for armor penetration, the javelin easily pierced the elephant-pig's skin and continued to penetrate more than a meter before coming to a steady stop.

The elephant-pig immediately knelt down on its two thick front legs, raised its huge head, swung its half-meter-long short nose, and made two "dudu" sounds towards the sky.

Yun Ce had no time to decipher the meaning of the elephant-boar's cries. He went to the elephant-boar, which was already unable to move, grabbed the tail of the javelin, and prepared to pull it out so that he could bleed the elephant-boar.

Seeing how the chestnut horse kicked and punched the dying elephant-boar, and sometimes even bit it, Yun Ce knew that the chestnut horse must have suffered a lot of humiliation from the elephant-boar.

With a "plop," the javelin was pulled out by Yun Ce, followed by a large gushing of blood. The pig's heart must have been under great pressure, because the blood spurting from the wound flew a full three meters away, spraying blood like a faucet.

At the same time, the elephant-pig's body, which was originally kneeling on the ground, gradually tilted down and finally rolled to its side on the ground.

After assessing the size of the elephant-boar, Yun Ce realized it wasn't enough to share among the 30,000 people. So he picked up his javelin and prepared to venture deeper into the eddy bay to get two more elephant-boars of that size.

The ground trembled slightly, and the chestnut horse that was beating the dead elephant-pig froze in place. It pricked up its ears to listen for a moment, and then ran off like the wind along the way it had come.

The chestnut horse was afraid of the elephants and pigs, but Yun Ce was not afraid at all. He held a javelin in each hand and waited for the herd of elephants and pigs to come so that he could take the opportunity to shoot two of them. That way, he would have enough meat for the festival.

Huishui Bay is a sloping land. Yun Ce stands on a high place. The land slopes all the way to the Qingshui River. Although the earth trembles more and more violently, Yun Ce still stands firmly in place, waiting for the elephant pig to emerge.

When the elephant-boars started to emerge, Yun Ce's expression changed. When most of the lead elephant-boar's head was fully exposed, Yun Ce dropped his javelin and turned to run.

He was absolutely certain that the approaching elephant-boar could not be killed by the two toothpicks in his hand.

A 1.8-meter-long javelin can kill a 3-meter-tall beast without any problem. However, Yun Ce felt it was absolutely impossible to kill an 8-meter-tall beast with two 1.8-meter-long javelins. So, he simply ran away.

When he flew up the high slope and looked back, even though Yun Ce was always incredibly bold, he didn't dare to stop when being chased by four giant beasts with an average height of over eight meters. He only knew to run quickly towards the mountains on the side.

The earth trembled like a vibrating screen. Yun Ce spun around a few times and disappeared into a pile of boulders.

The giant elephant-boars stopped at the foot of the mountain, their shouts deafening. Yun Ce had to cover his ears, thinking he had escaped. But then the elephant-boars used their thick trunks to pick up rocks and hurled them at Yun Ce's hiding place.

In an instant, rocks flew everywhere where Yun Ce was hiding. Even if he was well hidden, he would inevitably be hit by some broken stones.

The elephants and boars smashed things for a full half-incense stick's time. Just when Yun Ce thought the elephants and boars, having vented their anger, should go back, he was horrified to find that they were actually heading towards the people hiding in the trees.

Those trees were indeed very large, but they were nothing in front of the eight-meter-tall behemoth. With no other choice, Yun Ce had to step out of his hiding place again, shouting at the elephant-boars and occasionally throwing a football-sized stone or two at them.

Perhaps because Yun Ce was tainted with the blood of the baby elephant pig, the elephant pigs abandoned the insects hiding in the trees and once again focused their attention on Yun Ce, the culprit.

Yun Ce continued running up the mountain. Fortunately, the mountain was not high, but it was very steep, which was a big problem for such a huge creature as the boar.

One of them climbed halfway up the mountain, then lost its footing and crashed to the ground. It rolled over on the mountainside, then rolled faster and faster until it was bounced high into the air and slammed heavily into a pile of rocks.

"Dudu, dudu," the other pig-like cries were very sad. The death of their companion finally calmed their anger down.

The lead animal, an elephant-boar with a notch in its ear, barked angrily at Yun Ce twice before cautiously descending the mountain.

Yun Ce watched the elephant-pig herd sadly return to the depths of Huishui Bay, then instructed the people who had accompanied him to begin dissecting the giant elephant-pig that had been thrown to its death.

The baby elephant's carcass remained where it was, awaiting its fate of being dismembered.

"The chestnut horse is back," Yun Ce asked the chestnut horse, gazing into the depths of the eddy bay.

"Is there some treasure in here, or what? You actually had the guts to make enemies with them. You're lucky you weren't trampled to death."

The chestnut horse neighed twice, seemingly in response to Yun Ce's question.

The dog's voice suddenly rang in Yun Ce's head.

"This backwater is strange. It is only fifty miles deep and twenty miles wide, which is not enough to support these giant beasts with huge appetites."

Just look at the desolate state of the backwater bay and you'll know that these giant beasts are starving. And outside the backwater bay is a vast wasteland. Logically speaking, they should be roaming the wasteland to survive.

So what is it that makes them abandon their wild animal instincts to hunt and instead guard this place?

"Yun Ce, aren't you going in to take a look?"

Yun Ce looked at the flat, sloping eddy and shook his head resolutely, saying, "No, provoking those giant beasts in this kind of terrain is suicide."

The dog sighed and said, "Where is the spirit of exploration that your Yun family prides itself on?"

Yun Ce said angrily, "All the ancestors with an exploratory spirit are dead. I am the only one left here. I can't be too careful."

"Didn't you invite Cao Kun to play at your Yun family's place during the Shehuo festival?"

"Don't even think about it. Cao Kun is a model of a wise man who doesn't stand under a dangerous wall. You can't fool him."

"He can lie to others."

"Who else is that?"

"You don't care who others are, as long as it's not us."

　One more chapter

　　
　
(End of this chapter)