Substitute Alpha Gets Confessed to by Her Ex’s Aunt on a Survival Variety Show – Chapter 44

Treehouse Design Plan

Ribbit, croak. Ribbit, croak.

Hoo-hoo.

            

Living by the river, the ambient noise was filled with the calls of aquatic animals, mostly amphibians and waterbirds.

The early morning sun shone through the leaves. Liu Yinxi sat on her suspended bed and stretched. Sitting high up gave her a long view, allowing her to take in the broad riverbank and the rushing water in a single glance.

She rolled out of bed, stepping on sturdy branches to climb down the tree. She lit a campfire and boiled some kudzu root for breakfast, pairing it with dried fish roasted and cured with sea salt.

            

Below the high ground lay the concave bank of a river bend. The water here was deep and calm, perfect for setting fish traps to catch river fish and crabs.

This way, even away from the beach, they would have a relatively stable source of protein. Moreover, a wide variety of animals frequented the riverside, meaning setting traps on land would also yield a higher chance of catching prey.

Just thinking about eating a richer variety of food made Liu Yinxi happy.

            

From what she had read in the original novel, Huang Heshan had crafted wooden arrows and used the compound bow she had brought along to hunt. She ate wild hare and pheasant, and sometimes, if she was lucky, she even hunted sambar deer. Her food supply had been abundant.

Now there was no need to envy others. Liu Yinxi and Nan Huaixu were going to live the good life too.

Hunting with a bow and arrow sounded cool and effortless, but it demanded extremely high levels of stamina and experience from the hunter. First, drawing a bow and nocking an arrow consumed a massive amount of physical energy, and training for precise marksmanship was incredibly difficult. Second, a hunter had to be intimately familiar with animal survival habits to even find them, and they needed exceptional endurance to track and stalk their prey.

            

Compared to such a time-consuming and labor-intensive survival method that didn’t even guarantee a hit with every shot, Liu Yinxi preferred crafting traps and trading supplies with the other contestants. She wanted to focus her energy on comprehensively improving their living environment. After all, her goal in the competition was to challenge the “100 Days of Survival”—to live as long and as comfortably as possible in the primeval rainforest, not “100 Days of Constantly Scavenging for Food.” Eating well didn’t automatically mean living long; quality of life depended on every aspect of their setup.

She had to find a way to take advantage of nature.

Of course, taking advantage of the other contestants wouldn’t hurt either.

            

For example, she could trade a beautiful bouquet of flowers with Huang-jie for some roasted rabbit. Roasted rabbit legs were incredibly fragrant; Nan Huaixu would definitely love them.

Hiring Yuan Fang to chop wood and fetch water in exchange for roasted lizard was a good idea too. Perhaps when they moved their shelter, she could even get her to carry the crates part of the way, which would let Nan Huaixu rest more.

Liu Yinxi calculated carefully, nodding to herself again and again.

            

Her mind was busy, and her hands weren’t idle either. She picked up an elongated stone and began drawing a floor plan in the dirt.

She needed to head back by 2:00 PM. Since there wasn’t enough time to build the shelter today, she would design the blueprint first and prep a portion of the timber, leaving the rest for next time.

The old shelter on the beach was a simple triangular shelter. It lacked height, the space was cramped, and there was no division of functional areas. Because they hadn’t planned to stay by the sea for long, the shelter had been built rather crudely.

            

According to the original book, the airdrops for the next fifty days would all be deployed along the Toa River, which meant they would be surviving by the river for nearly two months.

The longer they lived away from city life, the more issues would crop up—such as sub-health conditions caused by malnutrition, skin diseases from poor hygiene, minor injuries from daily activities worsening into infections, or suddenly falling ill with a fever from a rainstorm. Stripped of the protection of technology and exposed to nature, the disasters humanity faced were countless; otherwise, the history of human evolution wouldn’t have marched toward highly developed metropolises.

However, they weren’t truly scraping by in a post-apocalyptic world; they were merely participating in a survival variety show. They didn’t have to worry about the material burdens of struggling in the wilderness for the rest of their lives.

            

Liu Yinxi firmly believed that humans faced only two ultimate enemies in the wild:

On a material level, hypothermia.

On a mental level, despair.

            

Hope was like every kilometer marker on a marathon route—it let you know you were moving forward, that every step was a success.

A survivor deprived of fulfilled desires and the encouragement of hope over a long period was doomed to fail.

Therefore, when Liu Yinxi planned this long-term shelter, she incorporated more functional designs. Living well was a massive satisfaction of desire in itself.

            

She drew a horizontal line to represent the ground, then sketched four closely spaced large trees. She planned to use the forks of their branches for weight-bearing support to construct a platform about 1.2 meters off the ground.

Above the platform, she would add a pitched A-frame roof. The four sides of the platform would be reinforced with evenly spaced short wooden stakes for structural support. Inside, the center of the platform would be partitioned by three rows of wooden poles, creating a layout shaped like the kanji for ‘yen’¹. The entrance would feature a small activity space, leading further inside to two bed stalls. Each bed would be roughly the size of a train’s sleeper berth, and the gaps between the wooden poles dividing them would be fitted with banana leaf curtains secured by wooden pegs to protect their privacy.

Liu Yinxi felt her design could just barely qualify as a small treehouse. There was ample space beneath the platform to serve as a first floor for eating, working, and storing supplies.

            

A second-floor resting area, a first-floor activity area, an open-air campfire zone, and an outer defensive perimeter. When it rained, they could move the campfire beneath the platform to shield it from the downpour.

Once they moved over and had more time, she would build two triangular shelters in the woods to serve as latrines. Even keeping cats required one litter box per cat—they deserved the same standard.

Liu Yinxi dropped the small stone, carved marks into the four large trees selected to act as the treehouse’s pillars, and headed into the forest to chop wood.

            

She worked until 2:00 PM. After binding the timber with vine rope and hiding it in the bushes, Liu Yinxi sat by the river for a brief rest before setting off back to the shelter.

While crossing the river, it suddenly dawned on her that she hadn’t prepared a food stockpile yet.

Upon moving to a new location, the first few days would be spent familiarizing themselves with the environment, leaving little time to forage for adequate food. Their food source by the sea was stable, so they had to build up a reserve before making the move.

            

The rainforest was hot and humid, making food difficult to preserve. Root vegetables like cassava were the best options for stockpiling, followed by roasted meat jerky cured with sea salt. Plants like banana hearts and bracken ferns were plentiful in the jungle and easy to gather.

Liu Yinxi decided not to return to the shelter, heading straight for the beach instead to catch more fish with Nan Huaixu.

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The sandy beach by the coconut grove.

            

The stove fire burned fiercely, plumes of smoke billowing into the sky.

With a loud pop, a few blackened pieces of charcoal burst from the stone stove, sending a cloud of dark ash straight into Yuan Fang’s face.

“Cough, cough! Gag, cough, cough, cough!”

            

Yuan Fang lunged to the side, coughing violently, her ash-streaked face turning both black and red.

She hurriedly gulped down two mouthfuls of water and scolded Lu Yiqi, who was adding firewood next to her. “I told you the firewood can’t have water on it. No water, no water, no water! If there’s water, it’ll pop!”

Lu Yiqi inspected the branch in her hand and held it up to Yuan Fang’s face to show her. “No water.” Then, expressionless, she shoved it into the stone stove.

            

Yuan Fang felt her lungs aching. “This one doesn’t have water, but the last one did!”

Lu Yiqi said, “I will remember that.”

Nan Huaixu sat opposite them. She poured out a tin of boiled seawater to begin rendering the second batch of coarse salt water.

            

The bickering opposite her started up again.

“I asked you to help, not to screw me over².”

“Your face is very dirty.”

            

“?” Yuan Fang wiped the ash on her face, only smearing it worse. “Listen to what you’re saying! Does that fall within the realm of human logic?”

“You can understand it, so what realm do you fall into?”

“?”

            

“How did a lazy person like you pass the pre-competition screening? You’re an alpha, too.”

“Online screening.”

“Was I asking about the format of the screening? Qi-mei’er, do you even want the prize money? You just mooch off food and play dead³ every day. Why did you even enter the competition?”

            

“So what am I doing right now?”

Lu Yiqi raised her head, directing her gaze toward the work in her hands.

She was, indeed, working.

            

Yuan Fang clicked her tongue.

Lu Yiqi asked, “Excuse me, does the fresh water you drink every day automatically respawn in your plastic bottle?”

Yuan Fang countered, “Have I never fetched water?”

            

“Do the banana hearts you eat every day snap themselves off and launch their tender cores directly into your mouth?”

“Did I ask you to feed me?”

Lu Yiqi replied, “Your argument is unsubstantiated and your conclusion is invalid. I have the right to overrule.”

            

Yuan Fang laughed in sheer exasperation. “You really are a piece of work. Truly worthy of a top student from the National University of Finance and Economics, an elite from a famous Jianghe firm.”

Nan Huaixu’s mami was from Jianghe.

She asked Lu Yiqi, “You’re from Jianghe?”

            

Lu Yiqi turned to her and nodded.

Nan Huaixu said, “My mother is too. Everyone speaks Mandarin here, so other than Boss Yuan, you can’t really tell anyone’s hometown from their accent.”

Yuan Fang looked surprised. “Is my accent that thick?”

            

Nan Huaixu replied, “The moment that ‘Sis’ leaves your mouth, everyone knows you’re from Songbai Province.”

“Hahaha.”

Even running into a half-fellow-townsman in a foreign land was grounds for a good chat, let alone meeting one in the wilderness.

            

Nan Huaixu and Lu Yiqi had somewhat compatible personalities, so she took the initiative to chat with her.

“Xiao Lu, you studied in Jing City. Did you not stay there after graduation?”

The region where a university is located typically has stronger ties to employment resources. Moreover, Jing City was more prosperous than Jianghe, so many graduates chose to stay and grind it out for a few years.

            

Lu Yiqi’s attitude when speaking to serious people was visibly much more humble and respectful. “Mhm, no, I went back to my hometown. I originally thought about staying in Jing City during my third year of grad school, but my mom’s health wasn’t doing too well, so I went home to take care of her.”

“Oh… is Auntie doing alright now?”

“She’s fine. Thank you for your concern, Teacher Nan.”

            

“Did you say earlier that you’re twenty-three this year?”

“Yes.”

Nan Huaixu sighed in admiration. “You finished your academic master’s and joined the workforce at twenty-three. That’s so young.”

            

Lu Yiqi lowered her head to add firewood. “I started school early, and skipped two grades in between.”

Nan Huaixu couldn’t help but feel a surge of respect. Even though the people around her always praised her as a top student⁴, she knew full well that Lu Yiqi was the real deal.

【Lu is actually a massive top student!】

            

【Really??? But she looks so adorkable!】

【She looks so easy to bully~ I love her even more hhh】

【I feel like Lu Yiqi belongs in the academic god⁵ category. She looks like she’s slacking off in the competition, but she’s actually taking great care of herself. She’s just too lazy to deal with Yuan Fang (laugh-cry)】

            

【Hahaha only Lu can fatally counter Yuan Fang’s trash-talking. Their daily bickering in the livestream cracks me up. Sorry, my sense of humor is really low (bowing)】

【Huh? Lu Yiqi finished her master’s and started working at twenty-three? I’m twenty-three and still a college senior (sweat)】

【I’m from the National University of Finance and Economics! Lu is my senior by two years. Her professional skills are insane!】

            

【Is anyone from the Jianghe accounting and finance circles here? Anyone know which firm Lu is at?】

【I’ve worked as an auditor in Jianghe for fifteen years and I’m familiar with all the firms. Polaris brought in a few young talents last year, and one of them was surnamed Lu. Not sure if it’s her.】

【Polaris!!! The top of the Big Four! Sister Lu above, please accept this little sister’s bow! Help me out during this year’s autumn recruitment⁶! (kowtow)】

            

【Qi-mei’er and Manman get along so harmoniously. They’re much more pleasing to the eye than Liu.】

【I’m siding with Liu Yinxi on this one. Even though I don’t like Liu’s personality, this is a survival competition. I choose the one with strong survival skills, so it’s still better for Manman to be grouped with her.】

【Oh wow, “it’s still better for Manman to be with her.” Some Liu anti-fans sure change their tune fast. Now you admit Xixi’s skills are strong, but how did you attack her before?】

            

【Where’s Xixi? Where did Xixi go?】

【Liu Yinxi is currently on her way to the beach.】

Nan Huaixu praised Lu Yiqi sincerely, “You’re so impressive.”

            

Lu Yiqi said softly, “Thank you. Teacher Nan is very impressive too.”

Yuan Fang crossed her arms and looked at them. “Teacher Nan is also a top student. If you ask me, you two massive top students should be grouped together. Liu’er and I should be a team.”

Nan Huaixu narrowed her eyes.

            

Just as Yuan Fang’s words fell, a shout rang out from the coconut grove: “Teacher Nan!”

Liu Yinxi ran over, carrying her backpack.

“Aha, Boss Yuan is here!” She skidded to a halt and looked at Lu Yiqi in surprise. “Teacher Lu is here too! It’s so lively today!”

            

The moment Yuan Fang saw Liu Yinxi, her eyes lit up. “Liu’er! My Liu’er! I’ve been wishing upon the stars and the moon, and you’re finally here!”

Liu Yinxi pointed at her ash-blackened face and laughed. “How did you tan so fast?”

“Hahaha, your sister’s rapid tanning⁷ regimen~”

            

“You certainly understand the art of tanning. Hurry up and wipe it off. I’ll get you some water—”

Liu Yinxi’s voice cut off abruptly. She instinctively turned her head, meeting Nan Huaixu’s amiable smile.

Liu Yinxi slowly reached into her backpack, pulled out a water bottle infused with a vitamin tablet, and meekly handed it over.

            

“Teacher Nan, the water I brought for you. Please drink.”

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