12. Survival Rule #2: Water Knows the Answer (1)
12. Survival Rule #2: Water Knows the Answer (1)
What were the three most important things on a deserted island?
Water, food, and shelter.
Without those three, it did not matter whether someone was an elderly person unable to walk alone or a human capable of beating a bear to death bare-handed. Everyone died just the same.
Without water, a person died of dehydration within three days.
Without food, a person died within a month.
Without shelter, exposure to wind, rain, or tropical nights greatly increased the chance of illness.
For that reason, those were the three most important things in life on a deserted island.
Without all three, safety didn't matter; your life was on a countdown measured in days. That was why I always put so much effort into securing a stable supply of all three.
I built shelters with my Skill, surrounded them with traps and walls to keep monsters out, and constructed hideouts for emergencies. I caught fish along the shore and rabbits in the forest for food, then supplemented my nutrition with caterpillars.
And for water...
I'd been using a well I dug several years ago.
I'd built the well after spending ages combing the forest for groundwater. Finding it was trickier than I'd expected, and I had to dig deep. Still, finding any at all was what mattered.
Before I built the well, I supplemented my drinking water by boiling seawater to obtain both fresh water and salt. Naturally, I couldn't wash properly back then. Drinking water was far too precious to waste on bathing; if necessary, washing with seawater was better. Still, I was not a cabbage, and being pickled in brine wasn't pleasant.
Anyway, I'd come to the well early that morning to draw water.
The thing was...
Why was the well water purple?
Not reddish-brown or yellow, but purple? The well had turned a color that plainly said drinking it would fuck me up.
"You goddamn bastards..."
These goddamn fucking pieces of shit. Of course snake bastards would pull something like this. I grabbed the Two-Headed Snake corpse that had come up in the bucket and hurled it to the ground. I felt absolutely fucking miserable.
So they wanted to take this all the way?
They poisoned the well?
Was that Hydra bastard seriously going to fight me to the death?
In the near future, I'd turn every last snake bastard into jerky. Once Reni recovered from the injuries the bears had given her, just wait. I'd tie one of those snakes up and grill snake meat right in front of it.
"...Whew. Calm down. First, I need to secure water again."
For now, securing drinking water came first. I laid a plank over the well, then picked up the shovel leaning beside the front door. Since it had come to this, it was time to return to the traditional way of obtaining fresh water. Before that, I needed to tell them before I left.
I opened the door and looked at Reni, lying unconscious on the bed, and Karina, who was nursing her.
"The snakes poisoned the well."
"What? Poison?"
Karina's eyes widened in surprise. Cute... no, that was not the point. I forced myself to remain calm and continued.
"We can't use the well for a while, so don't go near it."
"Then water..."
"I'll go get some. We'll need to conserve water, so it'd be best to hold off on washing."
"Understood. Be safe, then."
Karina saw me off with a worried look, and I left the house. I grabbed a suitable basket and headed for the beach. Even if they'd poisoned the well, it'd neutralize on its own over time. Until then, I'd have to distill seawater for drinking water.
It was an incredibly tedious method.
But it was one of the surest ways to get drinking water on this island. If I didn't like it, I could dig another well... but I couldn't guard it 24/7, and if they snuck poison in again, all that work would be for nothing, so there wasn't any point.
"To think I'd be doing this again..."
I had no idea how much I'd need to distill. This was not for one person but three. I'd probably have to carry four or five basinfuls of seawater to make enough for all of us. Reni hadn't even opened her eyes, so she would use little water for now, but more was always better. Maintaining even minimal cleanliness required it.
"No shipwreck..."
The beach was clean. The wreckage of the derelict ship that had been stuck in one corner of the shore had disappeared, swept away by the waves as always. Normally, wreckage would sit there for ages until it was completely cleared away, but on this island, this was normal. I didn't know the exact reason.
Maybe it was a game-like reason since it was a game world. Maybe it consumed a lot of resources and disappeared after a set amount of time, or it was treated like a limited-time event. There were several possibilities, but without proof, it was all just speculation.
Not that knowing would change anything.
If we couldn't obtain water now, dehydration would mean game over for all three of us.
"If only all this were drinkable water..."
The water was so blue and clear, yet drinking it would kill me. What kind of hopeless joke was that? Having this much water right in front of me and still being unable to use it felt downright cruel.
...Come to think of it, early after I was stranded, I nearly died after drinking seawater out of thirst. If I hadn't lucked into a fruit packed with moisture, dehydration would have killed me. I vaguely remembered learning why in science class. Osmosis, was it? Some phenomenon that supposedly drew even more water out of the body. Remembering the science classes I had always slept through only when I was close to death made the whole life-flashing-before-my-eyes thing terrifying.
Whew. Enough idle thoughts. I had to move quickly; there was not much time.
Distilling seawater into drinking water took a great deal of time. Even if I started immediately, it'd take several hours, and the amount obtained would still be disappointingly small. But with the well contaminated, this was the fastest way to secure fresh water.
Using nearby wood, I made another bucket and filled it with seawater. The clear water shimmered brown in the wooden container. I was thirsty enough to drink it immediately, but I knew exactly how that osmosis-whatever phenomenon would kill me. I had to endure it.
I reached the house with a bucket in each hand and first built a small stove, just large enough to set a pot on and boil water. I stacked bricks into the stove, then made a support about fifty centimeters away.
That formed the base for the still I was about to build.
"Yohan, what are you doing?"
"Purifying water."
"Purifying... water?"
When I started building the seawater-purification device, Karina watched with fascination and asked what I was doing. Of course she'd rarely see anything like this in ordinary society. There was no need to struggle this hard for water there; on land, there were countless ways to obtain it. Unless one lived in a desert, nowhere should have had less water than this island.
Still, the gaze boring into my back made me uncomfortable.
Working in front of someone felt strange. It reminded me of being called to the front of class for a graded presentation: every student staring while I still had to continue for the score. That memory had faded with time.
After finishing the small stove, I brought out a large pot we were not using, filled it with seawater, and covered it with a lid that had a hole in the center.
The hole allowed steam to pass through. Since I planned to obtain water through distillation, I needed an outlet for the steam, while sealing every other route it might escape through.
"Craft."
The plank became a long wooden tube. I placed one end directly over the hole and rested the other on the support, then carefully sealed the joints and every gap with good clay. The steam should not be able to escape now.
The next step required the Skill again.
"Craft."
A clay water container formed on the support, shaped so that the tube passed through it.
The basic setup was complete.
I brought over another bucket and placed it directly beneath the end of the tube.
How long had it been since I last built one of these? I poured the remaining seawater into the cooling container on the support and lit the stove.
Heh. I hadn't gotten rusty. I'd gone through hellish trial and error learning to make this. Just remembering it brought tears to my eyes. I was no fairy, yet I'd survived by sucking dew from leaves while suffering from thirst. Remembering distillation had been a good start, but because I didn't know how to build the apparatus, I'd brute-forced the entire process through manual labor.
A few years later I figured out how to make a well and tossed it all out, though.
"Fascinating..."
"Wait a few hours, and water will collect in this bucket."
The yield would never be large. Water in the pot boiled into steam, traveled through the tube, was cooled by the cold seawater in the container on the support, condensed into liquid again, and dripped into the bucket. The principle resembled distilling liquor, but in the wilderness it was difficult to use unless one had a Skill like mine that could build the apparatus easily.
Making everything from the pot to the containers from scratch wasn't easy.
Its efficiency was poor as well.
No matter how cold the cooling water was, roughly half the water in the pot was still lost. Boiling an entire pot yielded, at most, perhaps two cups.
In other words, it was only a temporary measure.
That meant I needed to put the next plan into action immediately.
"Karina. Keep watch."
"Huh?"
"I have somewhere to go."
Snake bastards, if you ruined my water, I would ruin yours.
We'd see who won, those fucking bastards.
This was war!