Chapter 307 - 203: To Add Insult to Injury

Chapter 307: Chapter 203: To Add Insult to Injury

"Huh? Looks like your luck isn’t so good."

Erica craned her neck curiously to peek into Lin Chen’s bamboo basket. Seeing only two small sardines inside, she patted his shoulder comfortingly.

"Don’t worry about it. You lent me so much food yesterday, so this meal’s on me. My treat~"

The soot on her face had been completely washed away by the rain, though her white tank top was now stained a grayish-black.

She glanced down at her clothes, her brow furrowing, and then looked over at Lin Chen.

"Do you mind if I take off my top to wash it?"

"You should wash it by the stream. Seawater damages fabric fibers. It can even cause them to harden and break. To avoid ruining your top, we’d have to soak it in freshwater later anyway, so you might as well just wash it there from the start."

"Oh, I see. Okay, whatever you say."

When they reached the stream, Lin Chen had planned to let Erica wash her clothes upstream while he cleaned the seafood downstream. But Erica insisted on watching him do it, claiming it was an essential part of learning how to cook.

Having no other choice, he could only wait. In the meantime, he took off his own pants and gave them a good scrub in the stream to wash out the salt.

’I really don’t want them to suddenly rip open while I’m wearing them. Just the thought of that is terrifying.’

While Erica was gone, he walked over to the tobacco field and glanced at his bamboo hut from a distance. After confirming it was still intact, he returned to the stream.

’If we’re going to cook, we’ll have to go back to the cave. We have dry firewood there, along with all the ingredients and spices we’ve gathered. Most importantly, the sea salt is there too.’

’Besides food, I also want to make a trip over to the soapnut tree and pick some berries. We can use them for soap and shampoo.’

By the time the two of them returned to the area near their cave shelter, the rain had stopped. The sky was clear again, with only a few lingering gray clouds.

Even though it had only been one morning, when the warm sunlight fell on them again, it felt like a lifetime had passed.

Erica slid down an opening on the side of the slope first. Her movements were so practiced, it was obvious she’d taken this route many times before.

When it was Lin Chen’s turn, he had just put one foot down when he heard a scream from below.

"Oh my god!!!!!"

The sudden scream startled him. He tried to push off, but the slick, rain-soaked soil had turned to mud. He promptly fell on his butt and slid the rest of the way down the slope.

"Oww! My butt!"

On the way down, his backside seemed to scrape against a sharp rock hidden on the slope. He clutched his butt and hissed in pain.

"What was all that screaming about... Huh?"

Following Erica’s gaze, he saw that the slope above the cave had collapsed. Half of the entrance was buried under a pile of fallen earth.

"How could this happen!"

Erica jogged over to the cave entrance, switched on her Hat Lamp, and crouched down to shine it inside for a moment. She stood up, her face grim.

"It collapsed on the inside, too! All our food is still in there. What are we going to do?"

"We dig. What else can we do?"

Lin Chen shrugged and sighed helplessly at the situation.

Already exhausted from half a day’s work, he could only drag his weary body forward. He unwound the Mulberry Tree bark rope wrapped around the handle of his bamboo knife.

Once unwrapped, the handle revealed itself to be just a piece of a split bamboo tube. Its curve could serve as a makeshift shovel.

The earth from the collapse was soaked with rain and was sticky and gooey. It was less like dirt and more like wet cement.

This wet soil was heavier to dig, but the upside was that it didn’t crumble like dry dirt. Every scoop came out in a single clump.

The digging was easy enough at first, but after a while, his fingers where he gripped the bamboo began to ache, rubbed raw from the constant pressure.

The raw skin on Erica’s hands from before hadn’t fully healed yet. After being soaked in the rain for so long and handling all that seafood, her hands were already red, swollen, and aching.

She didn’t let it show, however. She just gritted her teeth and kept digging beside him.

’This is going to be my shelter from now on, my home. How can I just stand by and watch my idol do all the work? That would be completely unacceptable.’

After a full ten minutes of digging, Lin Chen shook out his aching forearms and wrists. He glanced at his own reddened knuckles, and then, as if realizing something, he suddenly reached out and grabbed Erica’s arm.

"What’s wrong?"

Erica tilted her head, confused.

"Let me see your hands."

"See what? Haven’t you ever seen a woman’s hands before?" Erica’s pupils quivered, and she tried to casually swing her arm to shake him off.

When she failed to shake him off after two tries, she swallowed hard. Her eyes darted around. "Wow, you’ve really changed. You’ve gone from an innocent little boy to someone who’s brave enough to take advantage of me right out in the open. You just wanted to hold my hand, didn’t you?"

’Based on what I know about Lin, there’s no way he can handle this level of teasing. He should let go any second now.’

However, Lin Chen remained stone-faced. He used his left hand—the one still holding the bamboo knife—to pin her arm and stop her from struggling. With his right hand, he took hold of her little finger and gently bent it back.

Erica never expected that by just bending back her pinky, she would lose all strength in her hand. He easily forced her fist open.

As her palm was forced open, more than a dozen cuts were slowly oozing beads of blood. The rain-puckered skin around the wounds was peeled back, creating a rather gruesome sight.

"The other hand."

His voice had lost its usual casual kindness, replaced by a stern edge.

Erica, taken aback by his change in tone, obediently held out her right hand like a schoolgirl who’d been caught misbehaving.

On camera, her two small, fair hands were a bloody mess. A dense network of red marks covered the area between her knuckles and palm.