Favorite of the Beast-world: I Got Rich Through Farming-Chapter 252 - 176: City Lord’s Stone Castle and Wandering Beast Troupe

On this hunt, Xi caught two long-eared rabbits and two baskets of seafood.

Since Ling Hong, the one in charge of cooking, wasn’t home, and Xi wasn’t good at processing the innards of land animals, the very self-aware Little Merfolk stored the two long-eared rabbits in the ice cellar, waiting for An Jin to return and decide what to do with them.

He turned the two baskets of easier-to-handle seafood into a massive seafood platter.

Making the seafood platter was actually simple. Xi had seen Ling Hong make one before and had secretly committed the process to memory.

He just had to clean the crabs, scallops, shrimp, and fish, then steam them directly over the fire until they were cooked, and finally sprinkle on the all-purpose sauce An Jin kept in the kitchen.

For his first attempt, it turned out surprisingly well.

While waiting for her to get home, Xi had already thoughtfully filled two bowls with shrimp meat, crab roe, and crab meat from the two large baskets of seafood.

When An Jin got home, she ate directly from the bowls. Feeling it wasn’t quite satisfying enough on its own, she steamed a pot of fragrant rice. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

The three of them ate the seafood with rice, and surprisingly, it was enough to fill everyone up.

After dinner, Song Yi, who had been on the receiving end of Xi’s hostile glares for quite some time, made an excuse and left.

Every time it rained, especially during a thunderstorm, Song Yi had to take the Eagle Beasts to inspect the rising river levels upstream to ensure the city’s safety.

"It’s getting late. Why don’t you go tomorrow instead?" she said, remembering that eagles don’t have good night vision.

"We’re very fast. It’ll take half an hour at most. We can get back before dark."

Reassured, An Jin nodded. After watching him leave, she returned to her room and lay on her bed to rest.

But she tossed and turned, unable to sleep.

’I wonder how Ling Hong and Gu Yin are doing.’ She had asked about the Chi Li West Continent before. It was the territory of Absurd City, a domain ruled by Wandering Beasts.

By earning Gold Coins from quests, it would take her three months at the very least to save up enough for a Rejuvenation Pill.

Gu Yin and the others had already been gone for a month, yet there was still no word from them.

’The Beast God Fruit... can they really find something so mysterious and elusive, a thing that exists only in legends?’

Tossing and turning, still unable to sleep, An Jin got up in the dark of night, lit an oil lamp, and found a charcoal stick.

She struggled to pull a wooden board from a drawer.

The dim yellow oil lamp cast a faint glow, vaguely illuminating the drawings and writing on the board—a record of her recent plans.

’Writing on a wooden board is so inconvenient,’ An Jin thought, adding the word "papermaking" to her schedule for two weeks from now.

The Beast World had already developed a basic pictographic script, though the number of characters was small and the writing varied between tribes. This didn’t stop them from recording things on beast-hide parchments or wooden boards.

Beast-hide parchment felt similar to ordinary paper when writing, but it was far too precious and rare. It was mostly used for messages between city envoys or for simple scrolls.

If she could create cheap, easy-to-use paper that could be mass-produced, then on a small scale, it would open up another sales channel, allowing her to earn more Crystal Cores.

On a larger scale—

The level of civilization and education in this world would take a massive leap forward!

—Iron smelting, building waterworks, swamp energy, constructing a Stone Castle, papermaking, unifying and developing the written language, establishing education...

The wooden board was completely filled with her plans.

’There’s still so much to do.’

An Jin rested her head on the table and sighed. ’Damn this body of mine. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ She could only tackle these projects one by one.

...

Compared to the warmer regions, the Western Continent had already entered its deep winter. The landscape was a sea of ice and snow, and a profound silence reigned over everything.

Located within a great rift valley with intense tectonic activity, the land was a maze of chasms and sheer cliffs. Countless ferocious mountains, like the fangs of a great beast, pierced the clouds, their slopes covered in thorny brush and grotesque rock formations.

A roaring river surged from the bottom of the breathtakingly vast chasm—which looked as if a sword from the heavens had cleaved the sheer mountains in two—and snaked its way in all directions.

Even cloaked in a pale shroud of ice and snow, with the river mostly frozen over, one couldn’t help but marvel that nature could craft such a wondrous, almost supernatural, landscape.

On the frozen ground, where not a single blade of grass grew, a slender, beautiful Silver Wolf searched. Coiled on a winding rock face above was a vividly colored black-and-red python.

No one had ever seen what a Beast God Fruit looked like. They had only heard that it emitted a faint glow, as if the Beast God himself were descending.

Since it was so rarely discovered, they deduced that the fruit must grow in desolate, inaccessible regions.

Thus, Gu Yin and Ling Hong focused their search on the most precipitous and remote mountains.

But after a month, they still had nothing to show for their efforts.

HISS~ The chaotic sound of footsteps echoed from nearby. Gu Yin, who was on the cliff face, stopped moving. He narrowed his cold, blood-red serpentine eyes and peered down.

A large troop of Wandering Beasts, composed mainly of spiders, scorpions, and pythons, came into view.