An Jin hesitated.
She rembered the tribe mbers saying they enjoyed gnawing on branches and leaves throughout the forest. They also liked to devour small animals, and their appetites were like bottomless pits.
She didn’t have the ti to find enough food for them.
An Jin sighed. ’Raising animals is so hard.’ After thinking it over, she decided to take a chance. She took the food that was on the verge of rotting from Ling Hong’s tree hollow and tossed it into the enclosure.
The silkworms excitedly surrounded the food, squirming much faster than usual.
In just a few minutes, they had devoured the two or three wild boar carcasses completely, leaving not even a speck of bone behind.
Seeing this, An Jin’s eyes lit up. ’This is a pretty good "garbage disposal" system!’
Normally, to keep up with food demand, the Beastn would hunt as much prey as possible. But without good preservation thods, this resulted in a lot of spoiled food.
Even though food could be cured with salt, salt blocks were rare and expensive. Aside from Beastn of Ling Hong’s caliber, almost no one was willing to waste salt on preserving food.
As a result, most of this spoiled food was simply discarded outside the tribe’s territory.
So of it was eaten by scavengers.
But the rest was left to rot in the open, releasing a nauseating stench and polluting the surroundings.
It was a source of great misery for many nearby Beastn.
An Jin ca up with a plan. She went around persuading the Beastn to give her their unwanted, spoiled food, which she then fed to the silkworms.
The silkworms ate with gusto. Soon, their soft, white bodies were stretched into plump, round balls, and they lay motionless on the ground.
An Jin had not only found a suitable source of feed, she had also solved the problem of what to do with spoiled food. It was a case of killing two birds with one stone. The tribe mbers were delighted, and the few who had previously objected to raising the "white grubs" fell silent.
[Personal Prestige 5, Total 45]
The days passed, one by one.
An Jin spent her ti raising chickens and silkworms, using whatever free monts she had to select seeds and search for suitable farmland.
Ling Hong continued to leave early and return late from his hunts, but he seed even busier over the past few days.
"Is the tribe planning so big event recently?"
Ling Hong nodded. "In one month, the tribe will go out for the trading day. We have to start stockpiling provisions for the exchange now."
An Jin asked in surprise, "A whole month in advance? That’s so early. Won’t the food spoil before then?"
"That’s why our Hunting Team has to travel dozens of miles to the outskirts of the forest every few days to hunt Green-horned cattle. Their at can last for up to a month, but... it doesn’t taste very good..."
"Then why not use salt to cure other ats?"
The more An Jin listened, the more confused she beca. "If you cure the at with salt, it would last for a long ti. You wouldn’t have to work so hard hunting so far away..."
But Ling Hong just shook his head and said helplessly, "The tribe doesn’t have much salt. We can’t afford to waste it like that."
An Jin had always been using Ling Hong’s salt.
Because Ling Hong was the most successful hunter, the amount of salt allotted to him was enough for both of them, even though he didn’t have a mate.
But in reality, the tribe’s salt supply was already critically low. Many of the females couldn’t even get any, let alone use it to cure at.
Every year, the Luoten Tribe had to trade with the outside world for its salt.
Their upcoming trip in a month was mainly to go to Beast Gathering City to trade for salt. But based on past experience, their massive hauls of prey could only be exchanged for a dozen or so jars of it.
The reason was that their goods were too common. Almost every tribe that went to Beast Gathering City traded prey for salt.
Therefore, most Beastn in Beast Gathering City had little interest in such common prey.
An Jin fell silent for a while after hearing this.
She never would have imagined that in the Beast World, a substance as essential as salt could be so scarce.
She wanted to change this situation.
’Even though the tribe is relatively close to the sea, extracting sea salt isn’t a realistic option. Manpower is tight and they lack the right tools. For now, it seems trading at Beast Gathering City is our only path.’
’Trading common food is just not worth it. I need to find sothing rarer, more precious—ideally, sothing no other tribe has. That’s the only way to attract the attention of the Beastn in Beast Gathering City and trade for more salt.’
...
While searching for a certain plant, An Jin ca to the riverbank. The water was as clear as ever, revealing the algae and fish swimming within, but the Little rfolk was nowhere in sight.
It had been almost a month since Xi left.
The "few days" he had promised to be gone had stretched on for much longer.
A wave of sadness washed over An Jin. ’Xi probably isn’t coming back, is he? His Shark Pearl is still here with .’
’Then again, that makes sense. He’s a powerful creature of the deep sea. He never should have been stranded on dry land, wasting his life away...’
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