Substitute Alpha Gets Confessed to by Her Ex’s Aunt on a Survival Variety Show – Chapter 70
by Little PandaGriddled River Crabs, Rat, and Grasshoppers
A faint light flickered in Nan Huaixu’s eyes at Liu Yinxi’s reply.
She rolled onto her side, her back to Liu Yinxi, her voice playful in a way it rarely was. “I’d never want to turn into a caterpillar. They’re hideous.”
Liu Yinxi apologized at once. “Sorry, I misspoke. Teacher Nan is the most beautiful. What I meant was, no matter what you look like, your fans will adore you.”
“Oh, that meaning.”
“Mm-hmm. Exactly.”
Liu Yinxi let out a quiet breath of relief. She’d put her foot in her mouth again.
How could she have compared Teacher Nan to a caterpillar? She had to stop making mistakes like that.
Sigh.
Honestly, she was terrible at talking to omega friends. Liu Yinxi had plenty of friends, but most were alphas and betas. She’d had omega friends too—things always started off pleasant, but then they’d inexplicably drifted apart until the contact stopped entirely.
Not a single fight, not one crossed word. Liu Yinxi had replayed every interaction countless times and still couldn’t find the crack.
The one that stung most was her former vice-captain. Ten years they’d worked together. Then the woman had resigned and transferred out. Liu Yinxi had reached out afterward, asking why, begging her to be honest. But she wouldn’t say a word. Then one day, Liu Yinxi discovered she’d been deleted.
Over time, she’d grown uncertain of how to act around omegas. She worried she seemed cold, yet feared crossing some invisible line. She had no idea where the balance lay. She was terrified of losing another friend.
But Nan Huaixu felt different. Not just from her old omega friends—from every friend she’d ever had.
No one had ever helped her pick apart the people and situations she encountered, offering strategies and teaching her how to think. Nan Huaixu gave her the net, not the fish.
Where Liu Yinxi had spent her life in the wilderness, Nan Huaixu had grown up in a wealthy, influential family, steeped in complex social dynamics from childhood. She’d absorbed every nuance.
The realization sparked an idea. Whether they were hiking, crafting, or resting, they had hours of downtime every day. Why not use that time to ask Teacher Nan about the problems she’d faced before coming here? She might as well ask.
Liu Yinxi lifted her left arm and tucked it behind her head. “Teacher Nan, I’ve got a ton of little life questions. Mind if I pick your brain?”
Nan Huaixu rolled onto her back again and looked at her. “Mm. How many is ‘many’?”
Liu Yinxi raised her right hand and traced a broad circle in the air. “Countless. I’ll ask whatever comes to mind. Is that okay?”
“Sure. As long as it’s something I can answer.”
“Mm-hmm. Or even just your take.”
Liu Yinxi thought for a moment. “First question. Back in middle school, I had a classmate who was dating this guy. They had a huge blowup once, and she came to me to vent. I comforted her for hours. By the weekend they’d made up, but then my friend stopped talking to me. And when I ran into the guy and said hi, he ignored me too.”
Liu Yinxi frowned. “Teacher Nan, what happened?”
Nan Huaixu mirrored her pose, tucking one hand behind her own head. “Did you tell her to dump him? Go along with her and list everything he did wrong?”
“Pretty much.”
“Your friend repeated every word to her boyfriend. Once they made up, you became the villain trying to break them up from the shadows.”
Liu Yinxi shot up onto her elbows. “Huh? No, I wasn’t trashing him. I was just agreeing with her…”
Nan Huaixu blinked slowly. “It depends on the person. Some people do exactly that.”
She soothed Liu Yinxi with a look. “There’s an old saying: when a couple fights, you urge peace, not a breakup. What relationship is ever perfectly smooth? Everyone needs to work out their friction. When a couple argues, the friend is just a sounding board. Most people vent to release emotion, not to get advice. Urging them to make up isn’t about deciding who should compromise—it’s about knowing your place. Don’t insert yourself into someone else’s karma.”
“Liu Yinxi, your classmate saw you as an outsider. From her perspective, she and her boyfriend were a unit. Different people handle things differently. Some would understand and think, ‘My bestie has my back.’ Others would think, ‘So she’s a gossip who tried to wreck my relationship.'”
Liu Yinxi listened carefully, and the pieces finally clicked. “So that’s what happened.”
She rolled over to face Nan Huaixu. “Teacher Nan, what would you do if a friend came to you venting about their partner?”
Nan Huaixu paused, her bright eyes glinting. “Me? Are you sure you want to know?”
“Out with it.”
Nan Huaixu lowered her gaze, her voice dropping to a whisper. “My friends almost never vent to me about their relationships. We have an unspoken rule: love lives are private, and private problems stay private. But once, my bestie reached her limit. She told me everything about the fight with her wife. I just listened—no commentary. Once she’d gotten it all out, I whisked her off to Paris for fashion week and bought her several haute couture pieces in one go. She loves big, voluminous skirts. She came to me because she felt wronged. All I could do was let her know she had a solid bestie in her corner, cheer her up, and help her shake off the hurt.”
The treehouse fell silent. Nan Huaixu turned. Liu Yinxi was staring at her, wide-eyed.
Nan Huaixu laughed and poked her collar. “Why are you staring?”
Liu Yinxi’s voice came out smaller than usual. “So this is what being rich is like.”
“Don’t think of it like that,” Nan Huaixu said gently. “You give what you can. When I was in school, I saved up my allowance to take my bestie to restaurants she could never afford, or stood in line for her favorite celebrity’s autograph.”
Liu Yinxi’s eyes were shining. “Teacher Nan, your bestie is the luckiest person alive.”
Nan Huaixu tilted her head toward her. “I’m good to whoever’s good to me. Happiness goes both ways.”
Liu Yinxi let out a long breath, and something like clarity settled between her brows—an understanding she’d never had before. “I get it now. Thank you for untangling that.”
“Anytime.”
Liu Yinxi’s head was swimming with strange new ideas—too many to sort through at once. She needed time to let them settle. Looking back on her past with this new perspective would yield all kinds of insights.
She said, a little sheepishly, “Teacher Nan, I need to digest all that. Can I ask you more next time?”
Nan Huaixu nodded seriously. “Of course. In exchange, you’ll teach me how to build traps.”
Liu Yinxi broke into a grin. “You got it.”
After that, the conversation turned to lunch. Out in the boundless green rainforest, the steaming scent of rice was enough to soothe the soul.
Happiness goes both ways. Liu Yinxi looked up from her bowl of purple rice and saw Nan Huaixu sipping soup beside her. Suddenly, those words took on a tangible shape.
Right now.
She was incredibly happy.
The afternoon forest had a lazy, drowsy feel. The tall green leaves gleamed, glossy and bright under the scorching sun.
They’d moved the fish traps to a tributary confluence in the middle reaches of the Toa River1.
Under Liu Yinxi’s guidance, Nan Huaixu hauled on the drag rope and opened the trap. She looked at Liu Yinxi, disappointed. “No fish.”
“Don’t worry,” Liu Yinxi said, encouraging her. “The trap has only been down a day or two. Without good bait, it’s normal not to get anything big. Once we catch some game, we’ll use the guts for bait. That’ll draw them in.”
The downward tilt of Nan Huaixu’s lips reversed. “But we did get a few small crabs.”
Liu Yinxi clapped. “A catch is a catch. That’s great.”
They stowed the crabs in a woven vine net bag2 and carried it with them as they crossed through the trees, checking their four traps one by one.
The first trap had been triggered but held nothing. Liu Yinxi and Nan Huaixu searched the area and found no trace of the prey—either it had escaped or another animal had beaten them to it.
Two traps sat untouched, their bait caked in mud and mostly eaten away by insects.
Only the last trap held a catch—though not a pretty one.
A small animal lay pinned beneath a flat rock, two hind paws and a long, naked tail sticking out.
Nan Huaixu knew exactly what lay beneath the stone from that ugly tail alone.
She looked away, her face a mask of complicated emotions, as if bracing herself.
The flattened little creature was bound to be a grisly sight.
Once, while filming at an eco-park, she’d seen a “hedgehog pancake” on the road. It had terrified her so badly that for two days afterward, she couldn’t keep a meal down.
Liu Yinxi caught the shift in Nan Huaixu’s expression and understood. Her guess last time had been right. Nan Huaixu couldn’t stomach rats.
Back at the old shelter, Nan Huaixu had panicked at the mere mention of rats one evening. Touching one with her bare hands was out of the question—let alone putting it in her mouth.
Plenty of people feared rodents, especially those hairless, naked tails. Revolting.
They also carried disease, stole food, destroyed property, and spread illness in human settlements—one of nature’s most infamous pests.
But to anyone who survived in the wild, rodents were an accessible source of protein. In this rainforest, they were as viable as plump, white red palm weevil grubs3 for emergency rations. The key was handling them properly and cooking them through.
Liu Yinxi crouched down, positioning herself to block the rat’s tail from view. She lifted the slab and used two sticks to pry the flattened rat free, dropping it into a black plastic bag.
She rebuilt the trap, gutted the rat, and set some of the innards as fresh bait. The rest went into a plastic bottle for the other traps and the fish trap.
Liu Yinxi picked up the bag, her peripheral vision catching Nan Huaixu behind her. She fell into thought. As expected, away from the coast, food was harder to come by. This was the reality of a survival competition.
Relying on their traps and cages was a gamble. They needed to hunt actively and start stockpiling dried meat. No more living hand-to-mouth.
If Nan Huaixu wouldn’t eat rat, Liu Yinxi needed to find something else to fill her stomach.
Liu Yinxi checked her bracelet. “Teacher Nan, it’s three. We can still make it to the beach.”
Nan Huaixu gazed downstream, where the water flowed on and on.
She thought for a moment. “It’s too far to go now. Let’s forage on the way back. We have river crabs and the rat, plus cassava and banana stem core.”
Nan Huaixu’s response caught Liu Yinxi off guard. “Teacher Nan, you’re okay with eating rat?”
“I’ve watched every previous season of 《Survivor》 and plenty of survival videos. I knew what I was getting into. But those big, fat grubs are still a hard no. I’d have to be starving to death before I could swallow one.”
Liu Yinxi looked at her with something like awe. “Teacher Nan, that’s real fortitude.”
“You’re exaggerating, Classmate Xiao Liu. Food is heaven for the people4.”
They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
On the way back to the treehouse, Liu Yinxi—with Nan Huaixu’s permission—caught several large grasshoppers and stowed them in a plastic bottle to grill later.
The river crabs might carry parasites, so she boiled them first and set them aside. She skinned the rat, removed the tendons and bones, separated the meat, and rinsed it clean. The grasshoppers were beheaded, quickly rinsed, and threaded onto wooden skewers.
Liu Yinxi lit the star-shaped campfire5 at the outer campfire area and set a smooth, thin flat rock slab6 over it. Once the slab was hot, she drizzled on a little oil from an instant-noodle seasoning packet and let it sizzle. Then she added the parboiled crabs, rat meat, and grasshoppers, flipping them with wooden spatulas until they cooked through. Finally, she sprinkled them with sea salt and crushed wild pepper. The griddle sizzled and steamed, filling the air with the savory smell of protein.
Nan Huaixu brought over boiled bracken fern and roasted cassava from the Dakota fire hole and sat down beside Liu Yinxi. “Rat and grasshoppers may look ugly, but they smell amazing once they’re grilled.”
“Chef Xiao Liu’s secret seasoning~” Liu Yinxi used wooden chopsticks to lift a bite of grilled rat and held it to Nan Huaixu’s lips. “Teacher Nan, try this.”
Nan Huaixu looked down at the meat, hesitating. She was a little afraid.
But…
Then she glanced at Liu Yinxi’s eager face, parted her lips, and took the bite.
“It’s good.”
The author has something to say:
Bestie: You’re terrified of rats, and you’re actually eating this?!
Man: A successful woman doesn’t sweat the small stuff.
Footnotes
- The largest river in the Migna Tropical Forest Park competition area, where the contestants have set their fish traps.
- A mesh bag woven from vines, used for gathering shellfish underwater. Also called a portable vine net bag.
- The larvae of the red palm weevil (Rhynchophorus ferrugineus), a large beetle considered a delicacy or emergency food in some tropical regions.
- A classical Chinese saying (mín yǐ shí wéi tiān), meaning that food and sustenance are the most fundamental necessities for the people.
- A simple campfire where logs are arranged in a star pattern and pushed to the center as they burn.
- A smooth, thin flat rock slab used as a griddle for cooking over the campfire at the outer campfire area.
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