Chapter 4: The Silver Sphere

A distance of three hundred meters was not a problem for Zuo Qingcang in his past life, or for a fully healthy Liu Zhicheng. But for the Zuo Qingcang now, whose body was sore and weak, this was a journey that required gritting his teeth and persisting.

He swam toward the other person bit by bit, then carefully grabbed the other end of the plank. With his other hand holding a stone, he slowly approached the person lying on the plank.

Zuo Qingcang suddenly flipped the man’s body over. The pale, ghastly smile he imagined was not there. Instead, there was a face purple and blue. Zuo Qingcang had seen that kind of face far too many times in his past life—it was the face of a dead person.

He reached out and pressed his hand against the man’s neck, feeling no faint pulse at all.

‘Dead?’

He had no interest in lamenting that the only fellow person he encountered was a corpse. Zuo Qingcang started dragging the body toward the shore, intending to check if there was anything useful on it. Now that he was stranded alone on a deserted island, even a small knife or a pack of dried rations could be a great help to him.

After finally dragging the man’s body to the shore, Zuo Qingcang lay down on the sand and began to pant. The series of movements had made his already exhausted body even more tired.

After resting for about five minutes, he slowly got up and began to examine the man’s body.

It was only now that Zuo Qingcang had the time to take a closer look at the man’s clothes. A red robe, a crystal hair bun on his head, and a jade plaque at his waist. According to Liu Zhicheng’s memories, this person should have been a Canonized Taoist of the Great Qi Dynasty.

The so-called Canonized Taoist was a person of virtue officially recognized and canonized by the Imperial Court, enjoying a status equivalent to officials ranking from the ninth to the first grade. And from Liu Zhicheng’s memories, these canonized Taoist Priests were truly extraordinary individuals who practiced Dao Arts and mystical arts, possessing powerful supernatural abilities.

For example, Ji Xingling, the current State Preceptor of the Great Qi Dynasty, was said to have the ability to summon wind and rain and call upon spirits and ghosts. He was a popular figure in folk legends.

However, Zuo Qingcang came from a technological era and never believed in these tales of ghosts and gods since he was a child. In his view, so-called Taoist Priests and mystical arts were nothing but deceptive tricks used to fool the rulers of feudal dynasties for personal gain. There were far too many such figures in Earth’s past history.

Liu Zhicheng had never witnessed Dao Arts with his own eyes, and many of the legends he heard were, in Zuo Qingcang’s opinion, very similar to the scams throughout Earth’s history.

But the experience on the ship made Zuo Qingcang realize that this world was still different from the Earth of the past. After all, compared to Earth, this place was practically an alien world. It didn’t seem impossible to him that the aliens of this world might have some special abilities.

Without dwelling too much on the identity of the Taoist Priest, Zuo Qingcang directly pulled open the outer clothing of the corpse. He found a Dagger at the man’s waist, and on his undergarments, there was a small pouch. Inside the pouch were a palm-sized box, a booklet, and some small bottles and jars.

He didn’t know what kind of animal skin the pouch was made from, but it seemed to have excellent waterproofing—the items inside were mostly not soaked.

These items were kept close to the Taoist Priest’s body, clearly all very important to him.

Zuo Qingcang attached the Dagger to his own belt, then first picked up the booklet. The writing on it was completely different from that of Earth, but fortunately Liu Zhicheng was literate, so it didn’t hinder Zuo Qingcang from reading it.

On the cover of the booklet were the four large characters “The Flame God Mirror.” Zuo Qingcang flipped through it—it seemed to be filled with mystical nonsense about the Heavenly Dao, nature, and the like, extremely obscure and difficult to understand. He shook his head and casually threw it on the ground.

Next, he picked up the small bottles and jars. There were five of these thumb-sized bottles, colored red, green, yellow, blue, and purple respectively. There were no words written on them, so clearly the Taoist Priest distinguished them by color.

Zuo Qingcang picked up the small red bottle, carefully unscrewed the lid, and looked inside. It seemed to contain some white metallic powder. He then opened the other small bottles one by one—inside were metallic powders and liquids of various colors.

In Liu Zhicheng’s memories, everything about Taoist Priests was mysterious and eerie, so naturally, he knew nothing about these items.

In Zuo Qingcang’s memories, the things before him seemed to match the way Taoist Priests in Earth’s history used various substances to refine elixirs. He guessed these might be materials similar to iron, charcoal, lead, mercury, and the like. These things, extremely precious to Taoist Priests, were of no use at all to Zuo Qingcang at present.

Disappointed, he put the small bottles away, and finally picked up the box. The box was entirely made of silvery-white metal. Zuo Qingcang weighed it in his hand—something inside seemed to be rolling around. Based on the contents of the previous small bottles, whatever was in this box probably wouldn’t be of much help to his current situation.

As Zuo Qingcang opened the box, a silver-white sphere the size of an eyeball appeared before him. The surface of the sphere was extremely smooth; Zuo Qingcang could even see his own face clearly reflected on it, as if it were a mirror. He found it hard to imagine that a feudal society like Great Qi could manufacture something like this.

But why was such a small silver sphere kept so close to the body?

As he was thinking about this, he saw the silver sphere jump on its own. Then, it instantly melted like a candle and directly burrowed into Zuo Qingcang’s body through his finger.

Zuo Qingcang immediately pulled his right hand back, but it was too late—more than half of the sphere had already entered his index finger. Next, he swung his hand hard, trying to fling the sphere out, but in the process of that swing, the entire sphere completely entered his right palm.

He stared wide-eyed at his own palm, completely baffled by what had just happened.

“Was that thing alive?” Seeing his completely unchanged palm, exactly the same as before, Zuo Qingcang found it hard to imagine that a lump of metal had just entered it.

After observing for about ten minutes, Zuo Qingcang couldn’t figure out where the silver metal had gone. His body showed no abnormalities, and he even began to doubt if he had hallucinated the whole thing.

In the end, he had no choice but to ignore it.

‘The things in this world seem to be getting more and more bizarre.’

After searching the body, the most useful item for Zuo Qingcang now was still that Dagger. He temporarily piled the other things together and headed into the small woods near the beach.

Having temporarily solved the problems of water and plants with coconuts, he needed to light a campfire to help him get through the coming time. Fire was a great source of human progress; it could not only help Zuo Qingcang survive the cold nights but also cook food, send signals, and defend against any possible animals.

In the woods, Zuo Qingcang gathered some relatively dry wood and hay and piled them together.

Then he used the fire plow method to light it: specifically, he cut a wooden handle with the Dagger, then carved a small groove in a piece of wood, using the handle to repeatedly rub the groove in the base. The friction produced charcoal-like dust, which he used to ignite the campfire.

With water, food, and fire taken care of, it meant Zuo Qingcang was temporarily safe for the day.

In the time that followed, his physical condition gradually recovered, and Zuo Qingcang even displayed remarkable wilderness survival skills. He built a bed frame using bamboo from the woods, used a bamboo spear to fish in the shallow waters, and created a beacon fire with the campfire to signal passing ships for rescue.

The reason he possessed such proficient skills was thanks to his past life, where he had learned wilderness survival techniques from a man named Bear Grylls.

In the blink of an eye, two days passed. The area around the beach had completely become Zuo Qingcang’s territory. Relying on coconuts, fish, and sufficient sleep, his body had basically recovered. So this morning, after lighting the beacon fire, with the Dagger hanging at his waist and a spear in his hand, he walked along the beach.

His goal for the day was to walk around the Island and see how big it was, whether there were any humans living here, and also see if he could find a water source.

Zuo Qingcang spent the entire morning circling the Island and discovered that it was not large and was indeed a deserted island. The north side was cliffs and steep slopes, while the south side, where he was, was mainly beaches. Next, he planned to venture deeper into the woods and the interior of the Island to see if he could find a long-term water source.

During the spare time, having nothing else to do, he passed the time by glancing through that so-called “The Flame God Mirror.” He found that it was largely filled with obscure, hard-to-understand text, full of metaphors and jargon. One could say that Zuo Qingcang understood each individual word, but when strung together, he couldn’t make sense of it. So he gave up on reading the booklet.

Although the overall situation didn’t look optimistic, and Zuo Qingcang himself had no idea how long he would have to survive on this deserted island, he still maintained a positive mood. This was a skill he had learned in his past life—never to despair in any situation.

So on the third day of arriving on the deserted island, with ample food, drink, and sleep, Zuo Qingcang took a coconut as a ration, carried a small knife and a spear, wore the Taoist Priest’s robe, and had a rope made of dried grass. Then he set off toward the center of the Island.

The Island was indeed not large. Along the way, Zuo Qingcang found no traces of large animals living there. However, the woods became denser, the path harder to walk, and the light increasingly dim.

After proceeding cautiously for about two hours, Zuo Qingcang made an unexpected discovery.

He found a cluster of structures enveloped by trees. They seemed to be too ancient—a great many vines and trees had grown in the cracks of these broken walls and remnants, eventually wrapping around the buildings, making them very difficult to distinguish from the surroundings.

Zuo Qingcang swung his Dagger, cutting away a patch of vines on a building fragment. He discovered that this seemed to be the top of some kind of structure, extending down into the ground. He suspected that most of these buildings might already be buried by soil, rotting leaves, and rainwater.

Zuo Qingcang hadn’t expected to see traces of human construction on such a remote, uninhabited small island. This indicated that humans had once lived on this island. He carefully examined these building tops among the trees and noticed that on them were many square holes, about the size of a human head.

These holes were somewhat strange—they seemed too small for windows. A person could probably only stick their head out, but small animals should be able to pass through easily.

Zuo Qingcang gave them a few curious glances, then continued walking toward the center of the Island. The further inside he went, the more Ruins and remnants he encountered—various broken statues, pavilions, giving off a strange feeling that was both eerie and magnificent.

Looking at these structures before him, Zuo Qingcang thought to himself, “No matter what people built these, judging from the structures, their level of civilization was not lower than that of the Great Qi Dynasty. It’s unlikely they developed on such a small island.”

But why did they build so many structures on a deserted island, and why did they leave?

Just then, the sound of a snapping branch came from behind Zuo Qingcang. He swiftly turned around, and a ferocious, vine-wrapped green face appeared behind him.