Chapter 62: Discovery of Salt-Fruit

Chapter 62: Discovering Salt-Bark Fruit

In the middle of the night, Xu Yi was awakened by a sound.
It was not a ferocious beast, but a bird.
The kind of bird whose call was thoroughly annoying.
At that moment, Xu Yi wished he had a hunting bow so he could shoot the bird dead and stop it from making such a racket.
Xu Yi got up, walked to the ground, picked up two pebbles, and finally drove the obnoxious bird away.

Because they now had a treehouse, Xu Yi only kept a single bonfire burning at night.
After tossing in some firewood, Xu Yi went back upstairs to sleep.
Su Keke had been sleeping soundly and was not awakened.
In the second half of the night, Xu Yi also slept soundly without being disturbed again.

Early the next morning, when Xu Yi got up, Su Keke woke up right along with him.
After the father and daughter went down to the river to wash up, they brought some fish to the small stream to clean them.
The previous night, Xu Yi had placed a wooden bowl upside down over the water-storage gourd tree, so the water was completely safe to drink directly.
This saved him the trouble of boiling water in the morning, which bought them a bit of extra time.

After breakfast, Xu Yi took Keke along to cut some bamboo.
Originally, Xu Yi had wanted to leave Su Keke behind at the camp to weave a larger basket that could be placed in the river to keep fish alive.
Digging a small pond was unrealistic at the moment, but weaving a large basket and placing it in the river was quite feasible, and two or three days' time would be more than enough for that.
However, Su Keke wanted to follow Xu Yi to cut bamboo, so Xu Yi agreed.

With Su Keke in tow, the two of them arrived at the small bamboo grove.
Xu Yi had already cut down about a quarter of the bamboo in this patch.
It was unlikely that these bamboos would expand much further.
After all, the surrounding area was entirely enclosed by the jungle.
If the vicinity were merely covered in shrubs, the bamboo would have expanded rapidly and turned the entire area into a bamboo forest.

"Dad, can I look around nearby?"
Seeing that Xu Yi was busy working and realizing there wasn't much she could do to help, Su Keke wanted to wander around the neighborhood.
"Don't wander off too far. You must make sure you can still see me, understand?"
Even in broad daylight, the jungle remained quite dangerous.
However, Xu Yi did not want to place too many restrictions on Su Keke.
Granting her a proper sense of freedom would help keep her from feeling too tense.

Parenting was truly a complex science, and trying to cover all bases was exceedingly difficult.

"Mm-hmm, Keke will be careful and won't run too far."
Su Keke replied very sensibly, then grabbed her little spear and walked toward the edge of the bamboo grove.
She wanted to circle the perimeter of the bamboo grove to see if she could make any discoveries where the bamboo met the jungle.

"Hey! Dad, Dad, come here quickly!"
A few minutes after walking away, Su Keke suddenly shouted.
"Salt-bark fruit! Dad, there's salt-bark fruit here!"

Hearing this, Xu Yi immediately sprinted in the direction of Su Keke's voice.
Salt-bark fruit? What kind of plant was that?
Could salt actually grow as a fruit?
Still, for it to make Su Keke this happy, it had to be a plant of considerable value, right?

Arriving at Su Keke's side, Xu Yi saw her standing beneath a tree.
The branches were laden with clusters of greenish-red fruits covered in a layer of white substance.
Upon seeing this, Xu Yi immediately thought of a certain plant.
Rhus chinensis, also known as the Chinese sumac, sometimes called sour salt fruit.
It was very likely the salt-bark fruit that Keke had mentioned.

"Dad, this white stuff on the outside of the salt-bark fruit is actually salt! Taste it—the fruit inside is sour, and it can even be used to brew vinegar!"
There were salt-bark trees in Su Keke's village, and the vinegar brewed from their fruit tasted exceptionally good; it was practically a local specialty of her village.

"So this is the fruit of the Chinese sumac! We won't have to worry about salt anymore, and we can even brew vinegar?"
Xu Yi's face instantly broke into a wide smile as he scooped Su Keke up into his arms, thrilled beyond measure.

[Keke's luck is just on another level. To actually discover a Chinese sumac tree!]
[Did you think the title of 'European Emperor' was handed out for nothing? Good luck is just her default setting.]
[I'm shook. Grandpa Qi just discovered this salt-bark fruit yesterday, and I didn't expect Keke to find it today as well. Looks like this plant is actually quite common after all.]
[The ones Grandpa Qi found probably had less salt on them; the white parts looked very sparse. Look at this tree—if you don't look closely, the fruits look entirely white.]
[Once you take them back, you just need to put these fruits inside the gourd tree and shake them around, and the salt on the surface will come right off.]
[With salt, life has so much more flavor. Plus, you can even use these salt-bark fruits to brew vinegar!]
[Bringing Keke along on No. 1 was such a brilliant move. She knows so many things.]
[My mom grew up in the mountains too, and when she was around ten years old, she didn't know half as much as Keke.]
[Didn't Keke mention before that she often went up the mountain with people from her village to gather medicinal herbs? Isn't it totally normal for her to recognize a lot of plants?]

Right now, Xu Yi had no heart left for cutting bamboo. If they could harvest these fruits first, they would finally have salt to eat.
Without salt, relying solely on the salt content found in meat was completely insufficient.
Xu Yi had been agonizing over the problem of salt all along, having no idea how to resolve it.
For staple foods, he could find cassava.
For vegetables, he could start with mushrooms.
As for salt, he had also wanted to find Chinese sumac. But having never encountered it before, Xu Yi had assumed it would be extremely difficult to locate.
Yet, the moment Su Keke wandered off for a bit, she found it.

This kind of luck made Xu Yi half-suspect that his precious daughter might possess a system of her own.
Otherwise, how could she have entered this parallel world right alongside him, and why was her luck consistently so incredible?
If she didn't have a system, was she simply a pure-blooded European Emperor?

Therefore, Xu Yi secretly queried his own system.
The system stated that it could not sense any abnormal energy fluctuations on Su Keke.
Of course, it was also possible that her energy signatures were shielded, rendering them imperceptible.
However, Xu Yi leaned more toward the explanation that Su Keke was simply blessed with god-tier luck.

Chinese sumac belonged to the category of deciduous small trees or shrubs.
Thus, the trees did not grow very tall, with the tallest reaching only about ten meters.
Compared to the towering canopy of this jungle, a height of ten meters was truly nothing more than a little brother.

Xu Yi climbed up the tree and first harvested the fruits covered in a thick layer of white substance.
The sparser ones were left behind for the time being.
After all, they only had two snake-skin shoulder bags with them, which couldn't hold a massive quantity of fruit anyway.
Besides, the ones with less surface salt could be left to ripen for a bit longer to accumulate more salt before he came back to pick them.

Once one bag was filled to the brim, Xu Yi switched to the second bag and continued picking.
When both bags were completely full, Xu Yi climbed down.
Because they were quite heavy, Xu Yi didn't dare to wear them both on his back at once, planning instead to carry them back in two separate trips.
After all, the distance from here to the camp wasn't very far—only about a twenty-minute walk.

Thus, Xu Yi carried one bag in his arms and led Su Keke back toward the camp first.

Special thanks to book friends Lisheng and for their generous tips to this book.
(End of this chapter)