#1063 - Chapter 1063: Soft-footed Shrimp

"What to do? How can we get more food?"

The boy thought about this problem every day.

One day, a person who had been missing for several days suddenly returned. He brought back good news.

He said that he had found many insects far to the south.

But it was too far away, and it would take three days to go back and forth.

After thinking about it, the boy decided to migrate south.

So, on a sunny morning, they abandoned their homes and, taking the women and children, embarked on their migration.

Along the way, when they were hungry, they reluctantly ate some fern leaves. Although astringent, at least they wouldn't starve to death.

And, in this trial, they even discovered two kinds of refreshing and delicious tender-leafed plants. Not only did they not have an astringent taste, but they also tasted sweet.

So they gave this plant a name, called 'sweet vegetable'.

The sugar in the sweet vegetables gave them plenty of strength. Three days later, they finally arrived at their destination.

Sure enough, there were many, many insects here.

They should be a kind of amphibious insect, able to live in water and on land.

Because their shells were snow-white and shaped like shrimp, and they were white, fat, and didn't like to move, let's call them 'soft-footed shrimp'.

These soft-footed shrimp were over a meter long and looked extremely clumsy.

Now, they were lying on the beach one by one, not knowing what they were doing.

Anyway, they couldn't be sunbathing.

The boy quietly walked over, but these soft-footed shrimp didn't react at all.

They weren't afraid and didn't run away. It seemed that because they had no natural enemies, they had developed a habit of fearing nothing.

What else was there to say?

Heaven was rewarding them with food, so they had to eat it well.

The boy called the people in the tribe and moved them one by one to a far away place. Then they started a fire and began to cook.

Now, they had mastered another cooking method: boiling.

They used clay to make many three-legged pottery pots, and then put them in the fire to be calcined. After burning, they became extremely hard. When cooking, they put water in the pottery pot and then put it on the fire to bake.

In this way, the water in the pottery pot would boil.

Using bone knives to cut these crystal shrimp into small pieces, they threw them into the water. After a while, they could be eaten when the shells turned red.

It has to be said that inheriting the memory of the La Venta tribe allowed their technology to develop very quickly.

In just ten years, they had gone from the period of eating raw meat and drinking blood to the Neolithic Age.

This was not even fast. In fact, the boy had wanted to refine bronze a long time ago.

With bronze, they could make bigger pots, sharper weapons, and bigger houses.

However, they had been short of food, and the men needed to go out hunting every day. Under such circumstances, there was no surplus labor to do this.

Now, when he saw so many soft-footed shrimp, his long-considered plan could finally be put on the agenda.

The boy gathered the people in the tribe and told them:

Only when collecting food can you approach that beach. And you need to be careful and take only what you need. Only in this way will there be an endless supply of soft-footed shrimp on the beach. Moreover, the task of catching soft-footed shrimp will be the responsibility of the women.

In this way, the men could free up their strength to refine bronze.

Soon, they set up earth kilns on the plains. Using pottery pots as vessels for refining copper ore, and using oil-rich plant branches carbonized as fuel, they began the work of refining bronze.

With the successful demolding of the first bronze knife, it marked the official entry of the Nata tribe into the Bronze Age.

In a few days, they successively made various bronze knives. Some were used to cut branches, some were used to cut meat, and some were used as weapons.

There were also some small arrows that could be tied to branches to make bows and arrows.

Of course, they also spent a lot of effort forging the tribe's supreme sacred object: the Ding.

The original purpose of making the Ding was, of course, to replace the pottery pot as a vessel for cooking food.

This was already the most important vessel for a tribe.

With more advanced tools, they could build more solid houses.

Gradually, they took root here.

If nothing unexpected happened, as long as there were enough soft-footed shrimp on the beach, they could live here for generations to come.

Of course, if nothing unexpected happened, accidents always happen.

For some reason, starting from a certain day, the soft-footed shrimp on the beach disappeared one after another.

In just a day or two, there were none left.

This was a catastrophe for the boy's tribe.

Without food, the castle they had built would become meaningless.