Substitute Alpha Gets Confessed to by Her Ex’s Aunt on a Survival Variety Show – Chapter 23
by Little PandaRoasting Red Junglefowl, Boiling Coconut Chicken
A figure emerged from deep within the coconut grove, running toward the airdrop crate with a round coconut in each hand.
“Captain! You called me?”
The figure drew closer, and Liu Yinxi cheerfully showed off her results. “The coconut grove over here is great, hey! It has way more green coconuts than our area. Nan-jiejie, look, I’ve only been gathering for a little while and I already have so many.”
Nan Huaixu pointed behind the tall grass, about to tell Liu Yinxi to hurry up and kill the chickens, but she was met with Liu Yinxi’s sparkling eyes staring straight at her.
Nan Huaixu pondered for half a second, then praised her, “That’s a lot of coconuts. You did very well.”
Liu Yinxi’s mouth curved into a smile. “Mhm!”
Noticing Xue Yunshao sitting to the side and starting a fire, Liu Yinxi asked her, “Teacher Xue, where did you get that red mark on your hand? Weren’t you killing the chicken?”
“Oh,” Xue Yunshao said, laughing in embarrassment. “This? The chicken scratched me. Huang-jie asked for your help, you should go. But Xiao Liu, that chicken doesn’t look big, but it’s very strong. You don’t have to force yourself…”
“Mhm, mhm, thanks for the reminder, Teacher Xue.” Liu Yinxi got up and walked toward the grass behind them. She rolled up her sleeves and pulled a length of vine rope from her pocket.
Huang Heshan and Yuan Fang were each holding a Red Junglefowl.1 Seeing her approach, Huang Heshan drew her Mora knife2 and gestured for her to grab the chicken’s feet.
Liu Yinxi greeted them and asked, “Just the three of us?”
Huang Heshan didn’t say a word. She waited for Liu Yinxi to get a firm grip on the chicken’s feet, then pinned its wings and neck, bending it backward.
Yuan Fang, holding the other chicken, said, “Yeah. Should we call Xue Yunshao over to help? My arm is getting sore from holding this thing for so long.”
Huang Heshan cut them off, instructing Liu Yinxi, “Hold it steady.”
Yuan Fang leaned in and whispered in Liu Yinxi’s ear, “Old Sis Liu, you have to hold on tight. Just now, Huang-jie was about to strike three times, but Xue Yunshao couldn’t keep a steady grip. Not only did the chicken escape three times, but it also scratched her.”
“Don’t worry.” Liu Yinxi quickly used the vine rope in her hand to tie the chicken’s feet securely, holding them tight with both hands.
Yuan Fang was surprised. “Whoa! Did you predict the future? You knew there’d be live animals today and prepared a rope in advance?”
“How could I have known? I prepared the vine rope to tie up some firewood after we grabbed the airdrop. It just happens to be useful now.”
Of course I knew, Liu Yinxi thought to herself. The original book stated it clearly: the third airdrop would be unlocked by fingerprint and contain two Red Junglefowl.
In the instant they were chatting, Huang Heshan’s hand rose and the knife fell. She slit the Red Junglefowl’s neck, gripped its neck and wings tightly, and held it upside down to let the blood drain out.
Yuan Fang hastily backed away with her chicken. “Damn, it splattered on my shoe.”
Liu Yinxi also took a step back. A small amount of chicken blood still spattered on her, but it was unavoidable.
After two minutes, the blood had drained completely. Huang Heshan took the second Red Junglefowl from Yuan Fang and told her to take the bled-out one to Xue Yunshao for scalding and plucking.
Liu Yinxi untied the vine rope from the chicken’s feet and tied up the new one in the same fashion.
“Do you need that?” Huang Heshan said abruptly.
Liu Yinxi said, “Huh?”
Huang Heshan plucked a few feathers from the chicken’s neck, revealing the white skin, and delivered a fatal cut to its throat.
As she held the chicken’s neck to let it bleed, Liu Yinxi asked, baffled, “What was that about, Huang-jie?”
“Using a vine to tie a chicken.”
“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hold it steady otherwise.”
“Your qinna grip3 is pretty strong, isn’t it?”
Liu Yinxi was speechless.
Alright, alright, so that’s what this was about.
She knew it. That Huang Heshan was the type to secretly hold a grudge. Wasn’t it just a minor friction during the first airdrop? It’s been two weeks, and she’s still hung up on it.
Once the blood was drained, Huang Heshan shoved the chicken into Liu Yinxi’s hands. “Go scald it.”
Liu Yinxi hastily took it. “You got it.”
More work, more reward. She had gathered coconuts, helped kill the chickens, and was now going to pluck them. She should be able to get a bit more chicken to eat, right? It would be best if she could snag a drumstick to supplement Nan Huaixu’s nutrition.
The temporary camp was shrouded in smoke, the scorched smell of scalded chicken feathers hanging in the air.
“Cough, cough! Cough, cough, cough—”
“Damn, the smoke’s in my eyes! Ahem!”
Liu Yinxi picked up a large coconut leaf and fanned the smoke away in the direction of the wind.
“Come sit on this side. The wind is blowing northwest.”
“Cough, okay.” Nan Huaixu lifted her head, her eyes red from the smoke. “Is that one done too? Give it to me.”
“Go rest over there for a bit, have a coconut. I’ll pluck this one.”
“Alright. When it’s done, put it on this banana leaf. We still need to gut it.”
Liu Yinxi placed the chicken on the stone stove, opened a green coconut for Nan Huaixu, and saw Xue Yunshao follow her to rest. Nan Huaixu asked if she wanted a coconut, and Xue Yunshao said yes, taking one from Liu Yinxi’s bag.
Liu Yinxi turned back and focused on plucking feathers.
Yuan Fang’s hands were scalded red. She had found a foam box on the beach to fill with water, and every so often she would dip her hands into the seawater to cool them down.
“My illusions are completely shattered,” Yuan Fang buzzed like a mosquito.
“What illusions?”
“Celebrities should just be making money and enjoying the limelight. Why do they have to come on a show like this to suffer for exposure?”
Liu Yinxi paused, glanced up at the drone in the sky, and cleared her throat before continuing to pluck.
She lowered her voice. “We’re live. No bad-mouthing our team.”
“I wasn’t talking about her.”
Not Nan Huaixu? Liu Yinxi wondered. Then what other celebrity is there? It couldn’t be…
Yuan Fang turned her head and coughed, choking as she plucked feathers. “If you don’t have a diamond drill, don’t take on porcelain work.4 All that fumbling around got me burned.”
Only then did Liu Yinxi see the mark of a burn on the edge of her wrist. She quickly took the Red Junglefowl from her. “Go take a break. Hurry.”
“Liu’er, adversity reveals true friendship. Thanks.”
Yuan Fang went to rest by the tree where their bags were. Xue Yunshao thought she wanted water and offered to open a coconut for her. “That was hard work. Boss Yuan, is your hand okay? Let me see. Do you want to apply some medicine from the emergency kit?”
Yuan Fang declined the coconut. “It’s fine, just a small problem.”
Lu Yiqi returned with Ying Luoling and Yu Yan. They had collected a lot of fuel, banana leaves, and banana pith. Yu Yan was also carrying a plastic bucket of fresh water.
Huang Heshan, having washed the blood from her knife and pants at the seaside, saw them return and walked straight over to take the bucket from Yu Yan. Yu Yan said softly, “I can carry it.”
The firewood was added to the stone stove, and the bonfire flared up with a whoosh.
They had built two stone stoves in total. One had a wooden grill rack set up over it, while the other was for boiling coconuts. Liu Yinxi and Yuan Fang gutted both chickens, chopped them into several large pieces to be skewered on sticks for roasting, and cut a pile of smaller pieces to be boiled in coconut water for Coconut Chicken.
Eight people gathered around the bonfire. The aroma of roast chicken and Coconut Chicken slowly spread until the entire grove was filled with the scent of tender meat.
Everyone was starving, eager to feast, but no one moved their chopsticks since the distribution hadn’t been settled.
The “more work, more reward” method had been proposed by Nan Huaixu, so she spoke first. “Everyone contributed. Killing the chickens and plucking the feathers was the hardest work, so the drumsticks and wings should go to them. For the rest, how about two pieces of roast chicken and one bowl of Coconut Chicken per person?”
Ying Luoling said, “Teacher Nan, our group’s Yunshao both killed the chicken and plucked feathers, and she also helped build the stone stove. Shouldn’t she get a bit more?”
Xue Yunshao quickly waved her hands. “Hey—it was what I should do. I think what Teacher Nan said is very fair. Let’s divide it her way. Does anyone else have an opinion? Let’s discuss it together.”
“I also think Teacher Nan is right. You were subbed out, so you can’t count that as killing the chicken, only plucking. As for building the stove, that was Teacher Nan’s contribution; you just lent a hand. You can take a wing as a token gesture.” Yuan Fang held her meal box and chuckled, then reached out with her chopsticks to take a drumstick and a wing. “I killed a chicken and plucked feathers, so I won’t be polite.”
Lu Yiqi silently ladled a bowl of chicken soup. Yuan Fang tossed the wing into her meal box.
With Yuan Fang breaking the ice, everyone else stopped being so reserved. Ying Luoling gave Xue Yunshao a drumstick and a wing, Huang Heshan took a leg, a wing, and two pieces of roasted chicken breast, and Liu Yinxi also took her team’s share of the food.
After the food was divided, Huang Heshan left the bonfire to eat alone under a nearby tree. The other guests also sat in their team units. Yuan Fang was closer with Liu Yinxi, so she sat next to her and Nan Huaixu to eat. Yu Yan sat with Lu Yiqi, quietly drinking soup. The difference was that, besides a wing, Yu Yan’s bowl had half a drumstick more than Lu Yiqi’s.
Yuan Fang and Liu Yinxi chatted and laughed. The two of them were the most talkative on the entire beach, absolute chatterboxes. They went from their neighbor’s dog who could fake a limp to get ham, to the love triangle their hairdresser Tony5 told them about involving another client…
After a while, Nan Huaixu tapped Liu Yinxi on the back, signaling her to eat properly. Liu Yinxi immediately stopped talking and focused on gnawing on her chicken bones.
Having lost her mealtime chat buddy,6 Yuan Fang turned to find someone else to talk to.
She sat back down next to her teammate and struck up a conversation with Yu Yan, who was beside Lu Yiqi. “Big Sis, you’re in Huang-jie’s group, huh.”
Yu Yan swallowed her food and looked at her with a shy smile. “Mhm.”
Yuan Fang asked quietly, “Does Huang Heshan get angry easily? Are you scared being in a group with her?”
Yu Yan’s clear eyes blinked. “Heshan just doesn’t like to talk much.”
“Ooh~ Big Sis, where are you from? I’m in the mink—Hiss! What was that? That hurts.”
Yuan Fang suddenly cried out, her facial features twisting together in a painful expression.
“Ah… it hurts like hell.” Yuan Fang jumped up. Forgetting about the filming drones and robot dogs all around, she lifted the back of her shirt. “Lu Yiqi, can you check for me? Is there something on my back?”
Her cry drew everyone’s attention. Lu Yiqi held the hem of her shirt and rolled it up, exposing a large patch of skin. The other women instinctively averted their eyes to avoid intruding on her privacy.
Liu Yinxi quickly finished her chicken, ready to pack up and head back to the shelter, when she heard Lu Yiqi say, “You’ve been bitten by a bug.”
Yuan Fang asked in horror, “It’s not a leech, is it? Get it off me, quick!”
Lu Yiqi looked for a tool to pick the bug off. “It’s not a leech. It’s round, and there are several of them. They’re swollen from drinking your blood.”
Yuan Fang’s legs trembled with fear. “Good heavens, grandma!7 That’s disgusting.”
Lu Yiqi picked up a wooden chopstick, intending to pry the bugs off Yuan Fang. Holding up her shirt, she said, “Don’t move.”
Seeing her action, Liu Yinxi forgot her manners and ran over to stop her. “Wait—”
Yu Yan beat her to it. She stopped Lu Yiqi’s hand and carefully observed Yuan Fang’s back. Her voice was soft but calm. “You can’t just pick it off. Let me handle it. These are ticks. They bury their mouthparts deep in the skin to suck blood. Pulling them out by force will break the head off and cause a much larger injury.”
Yuan Fang clung to her like a life-saving straw. “Yu-meizi, you’re my savior, thank you! Help me get these bugs off, and you can have any of my supplies you want.”
Yu Yan helped her sit down. “It’s alright. Just relax, it’ll be over soon.”
Liu Yinxi relaxed. With Yu Yan, a nurse, on the case, a few small ticks were a piece of cake.
She turned around to see Nan Huaixu walking over, watching carefully how Yu Yan removed the ticks.
Yu Yan fumbled in her pocket but couldn’t find what she needed. She told Yuan Fang to wait a moment and went to get her bag from Huang Heshan.
Yu Yan asked Yuan Fang, “You have a lot of mosquito and insect bites on you, and several are blistering and festering. You’ve been competing for so many days, haven’t you made any insect repellent at all?”
Yuan Fang sighed. “We couldn’t find the right plants, and even with a survival guide, I can’t recognize the herbs.”
Ying Luoling, who had come over to learn, added, “Yeah, even if you try to identify them on the spot with a book, you can’t be sure you’re right. I have a lot of bites on me too.”
Yu Yan comforted them, “It’s not easy. Later, I’ll teach you how to identify a few medicinal herbs that are very common in the rainforest. When you get back, find them and boil them into a compress. The insects in tropical regions are very venomous. If you don’t treat the bites in time, they can cause allergic reactions and get worse and worse.”
“Thank you, Yu Yan.”
“Thank you so much, Yu-meizi. If it weren’t for you, I’d be sucked dry…”
Nan Huaixu had thought the eczema and bug bites on her own body were bad enough. It was only after seeing the ghastly skin, too-horrible-to-look-at skin of the other guests that she realized just how smoothly her days had been—she ate her fill, slept warmly, had insect repellent ointment, medicinal soup to regulate her stomach, could even bathe and wash her hair, and even had a beautiful moon scallop shell to do her nails with…
And all of this good fortune—could she have achieved it all on her own?
Nan Huaixu pondered for a moment. The answer was obviously no. She even had a strange intuition: no matter which of the other guests she partnered with, her life wouldn’t be as good as it was now.
Nan Huaixu stroked the inside of her arm, which was coated with a pale green ointment, and looked at Liu Yinxi with a deep, profound gaze.
Footnotes
- The original is 茶花鸡 (cháhuā jī), Camellia Chicken, another name for the Red Junglefowl, the wild ancestor of all domestic chickens.
- Mora knives are a brand of affordable, high-quality fixed-blade knives from Sweden, very popular in the bushcraft and survival communities.
- Qinna (擒拿): A Chinese martial arts technique focusing on joint locks and grappling.
- A well-known Chinese proverb (没有金刚钻，别揽瓷器活) meaning one shouldn’t take on a job they aren’t skilled or equipped enough to handle.
- In modern Chinese slang, ‘Tony’ has become a generic, slightly mocking name for a male hairdresser, often associated with stereotypical styles and sales pitches.
- The original term is 下饭 (xiàfàn), which literally means ‘to go down with rice’. It refers to anything, from a savory dish to good gossip, that makes a plain meal more enjoyable.
- Original: 老天奶 (lǎo tiān nǎi). A folksy, northern Chinese exclamation of shock or distress.
0 Comments