Chapter 21 - Fight (1/2)

Chapter 21 Fight

Xiong He took the warriors of the tribe with him and left to hunt very early in the morning.

They had caught very little prey yesterday and now that they had some injured people, the food that originally already hadn’t been enough was now even more scarce. They had to catch more prey today.

At the same time, the elderly and weak people from the tribe also spontaneously decided to go out gathering-even the warriors from the hunting team had only been allocated one or two kilograms of meat yesterday, and they had gotten even less. If they didn’t find a way to bring some food back today, they would have to go hungry.

Xiong Ye ate the roasted meat that Zhou Ji had cooked for him, then fed the soup Zhou Ji had boiled to Niu Er.

This soup was made up of chopped up elephant bird meat and vegetables and had been stewed for a long time. It was easy to digest and very nutritious.

Niu Er was still in bad condition and couldn’t speak much, falling asleep as soon as he finished eating. Xiong Ye saw this and went off to catch fish after giving Zhou Ji a heads-up.

Zhou Ji also left the cave after Xiong Ye departed.

The atmosphere in the tribe had been very good a few days ago, but it was obviously depressed today. There were no smiles on the faces of the people still in the valley, and several of the children were crying.

The two dozen or so tribesmen who had died included both men and women, most of whom already had children. The children who were crying had lost their parents.

Life in this kind of primitive society was better than how it was during the apocalypse, but it was still full of danger. However, Zhou Ji had seen too much death already and couldn’t muster up many feelings about it.

“Wait.” Someone stopped Zhou Ji. He looked over and saw that it was Xiong Qi, the captain of the salt team.

Xiong Qi’s animal form was a white bear.

White bears were very big and were larger than many brown bears, but Xiong Ye’s animal form was that of a Kodiak bear that could be bigger than white bears after they had reached maturity.

Of course, the barely adult Xiong Ye still wasn’t as large as Xiong Qi at this stage, and his combat power was certainly a little worse than Xiong Qi’s.

Xiong Qi was more than a decade older than Xiong Ye, and ten years of additional combat experience didn’t count for nothing.

Zhou Ji stood still and looked at the other party.

“Who are you?” asked Xiong Qi.

“I am Zhou Ji, Zhou.” Zhou Ji said.

“It turns out you’re Zhou. So you actually look like this.” Xiong Qi looked at Zhou Ji curiously, then asked, “The priest said that Niu Er woke up. Is he alright?” He had seen Zhou Ji go to Xiong Ye’s cave last night after Xiong Ye had brought Niu Er back.

Zhou Ji replied, “He’s fine.”

Xiong Qi hadn’t had much contact with Zhou Ji before, so he didn’t have anything else to say. He nodded to Zhou Ji, then turned to leave.

Zhou Ji went outside and didn’t go to where the gathering team was. Instead, he went in another direction.

He wanted to gather some different plants; healing plants, seasoning plants, or anything delicious; they were all acceptable.

While Zhou Ji was collecting plants, Xiong Ye was busy catching fish.

After the weather warmed up, the fish in the river became more active, and there were fat and delicious fish eggs in the fish… Xiong Ye caught four in one go, then killed them by the river. He scraped off the scales, tossed away the intestines, and cleaned them before bringing them back.

He didn’t usually remove the scales when he ate fish by himself, but Zhou Ji had scraped them off last time… Fish that didn’t have scales in the way were really a lot tastier.

Xiong Ye rushed quickly back to the tribe; he wanted to let Zhou Ji know that he had brought fish back, but he discovered when he arrived that Zhou Ji wasn’t actually there. Only Niu Er was there, covered with a few animal skins as he slept by the fire.

Xiong Ye inexplicably felt somewhat lost.

He hung up the fish in the cave, then went down to the valley where the priest and his three little apprentices were piling up firewood.

Many people from the salt team had died, and the priest needed to hold a ceremony for the dead so that they could go up to heaven and find the Beast God.

When these warriors went to the Beast God, they would become the Beast God’s guards and would henceforth look after their tribe from heaven.

Xiong Ye quietly began to help, and his movements were fast and accurate-he had often helped the priest in return for food in the past.

“Xiong Ye, do you really not want to be a priest?” The priest asked Xiong Ye.

“Grandpa Priest, I want to become the most powerful warrior.” Xiong Ye replied. Although becoming a priest was good, the tribe needed warriors.

“The Beast God will bless you.” The priest said helplessly. He then had Xiong Ye run around to do all sorts of tasks for him, and Xiong Ye was so busy he was spinning around in circles.

Xiong Ye: “……”

The hunting team had traveled out to a relatively far place to hunt today, so they returned very late. They hadn’t managed to catch a lot, but it was good enough.

Xiong He didn’t immediately start to divide up the catch when they returned-the funeral was about to begin.

If they had been able to bring back the bodies of the warriors, the people of the tribe would have buried them next to the tribal grounds after the funeral so that they could help guard the tribe. This time, however, they hadn’t managed to bring the bodies back and so omitted this part of the ceremony.

Zhou managed to return to the tribe before the funeral, so he saw it firsthand. It looked… a little crazy.

The old priest danced beside the fire, then threw some ground up plants into the fire. When the fire rose up, he began to chant…

It was said that this would allow them to communicate with the gods, and the Beast God would be able to hear them, but Zhou Ji couldn’t find the slightest bit of difference when he sensed their surroundings with his spiritual powers.

The Beast God most likely didn’t exist, but both the priest and the people of the tribe were very religious.

After the funeral, Xiong He distributed the salt that the salt team had brought back along with the meat they had obtained today to the people of the tribe.

The amount of meat distributed today wasn’t much, and there also wasn’t much salt, but the belongings of the people who had died were redistributed after the funeral, which improved the atmosphere a little.

The salt team had taken many of the items that the tribe had saved up over the previous year to trade for salt, including animal skins, dinosaur horns, grain that had been collected at the priest’s behest, stone knives made by people of the tribe, and prey that the salt team had caught on the way there.

The salt belonged to everyone in the tribe after it was brought back, so Xiong He divided it up based on everyone’s situation.

Generally speaking, the warriors would be given a bit more, and the elderly and weak would be given very little.

Additionally, some people in the tribe had taken out some personal things and had asked the salt team to help them trade those items for more salt. Salt that was obtained in this way belonged to the individual.

The salt team had set out over a month ago when Zhou Ji was still in a state where he hadn’t understood the language of this place, and he naturally hadn’t asked the salt team to trade anything for salt for him, but Xiong Ye had taken out a lot of things for the salt team to trade with.