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I felt like I’d gone back to primitive days, but a primitive person would probably be more capable. I hadn’t done enough to call myself primitive just yet.
When I went to look it up afterwards, I discovered that flint, or flintstone, was actually a form of quartz. It was a stone that was used as a component in the lighters that I would have liked to have, but in any case, it was a sturdy rock that would set off sparks when struck—or so they said. I wasn’t some sort of rock maniac, so even if I’d had that knowledge at the time, there would have been no way for me to determine if the rock I happened to pick up was quartz or not… However, the important part was that it had nothing to do with the chemical formula of quartz, and there were no special substances within quartz that would undergo some chemical change when struck to cause a fire to start.
What mattered was the hardness.
In other words, as long as any two stones had some level of hardness, then in theory, they would set off sparks… The mechanism should not be so different from the frictional heat caused by rubbing wood together.
Theoretically, if those stones had a high iron content, then there should be a reasonably high probability of setting off sparks, like when swords clashed in a duel. If not, then far from “looking it up afterwards”, there wouldn’t be a future in store for me at all.
It would produce a time paradox, as Ononoki-chan would put it.
To start with the conclusion, I was able to succeed in using some random stones laying around to start a fire.
You might say something like, “There’s no way it could be that convenient for you, you probably had some grill lighter hidden away somewhere, you staged survivalist,” but in that case, instead of having me on this stage, you could try being here yourself.
Apologies. I ended up sounding a bit testy there, but if one were to repeat the arduous task of hitting stones together until the skin of their sunburned hands started to peel, even a timid school dropout like me could lose their temper.
The bad-tempered teenage years.
I could even become Anti-Nadeko.
I had felt like I was training to split rocks, which could be called the king of royal roads in shonen manga—it reminded me of Cologne-chan.
I didn’t say to split it. I said I wanted to see you shatter it.57
Something like that, right?
Just like how Hibiki Ryouga had trained to acquire the technique of the Breaking Point, I’d been repeatedly throwing rocks at the all-too-familiar boulder I’d used as a chair earlier, as though that boulder had become the enemy of my parents or even my parents themselves.
Well, the type of exercise and the amount of exercise I was doing was more like Hoshi Hyuuma, though.
My palms, once soft as paw pads, had become all calloused from pitching…58
But these broken stones would not go to waste.
Using a sharpened stone as a saw, I hacked away at the branches of a nearby fallen tree, diligently producing some wood chips… Rather than being a substitute for firewood, they would serve more as substitutes for rolled-up newspaper balls.
Then, after scattering enough of those on top of the boulder, I continued to throw more rocks—because I was having doubts about whether this would actually cause a fire to start, the physical labor was also taxing mentally, as well.
For example, if there were a gas leak in the science room… Then even dragging a chair against the floor carried the risk of causing an explosion, apparently. In extreme cases, even the simple act of wearing a wool sweater could end up becoming dynamite.
Because of static electricity.
If so, then there was no way this act of turning my arm into a pitching machine would prove to be fruitless… Or so I hoped.
Fortunately, I didn’t have any experience playing baseball or softball, so I wasn’t particular about using my dominant arm. Rather than a double-header, I was a switch-pitcher, using both my arms to the utmost efficiency.
Efficiency?
Or cost-effectiveness?
Well, I was able to assess that, because I was using all the muscles in my body, this had to be easier than the act of rotating a wooden stick, but every so often, the broken stones I’d thrown would ricochet back towards me, inflicting damage upon me.
Both physical and mental.
Perhaps you were expecting that, because this was a novel, the ridiculousness would be somewhat restrained, but please don’t forget that, during the entire time I was performing my pitching practice, I was still completely naked.
If I had a Major League Training Brace,59 I would still want to wear it, for the sake of protective gear.
When stone shards ricocheted back onto my naked (and on top of that, sunburned) body, coupled with the fact that such ricochets had been caused by myself, it was a level of damage that was hard to recover from.
Right now, I would probably open my heart to anyone if they were here to console me.
Maybe I should have prioritized making some clothes… Perhaps the basic needs being listed as “clothing, food, shelter” was the correct order, after all.
In terms of my priorities, after building a fire, I probably needed to prioritize disinfecting my wounds through the heat—fortunately, I had managed to spot a pillar of smoke rising from the wood chips before I could sustain any fatal injury capable of causing tetanus.
When I said that there was a pillar of smoke, well, sorry. That was a lie that I’d learned from Kaiki-san. It would be more precise to say it was “smoldering”. If I stared at it, it seemed like there could be a few wisps of smoke, as though my eyes were just getting bleary, or some unidentifiable garbage had flown into my eyes…
This ended up exposing my foolishness, but I had not come up with a plan for what to do after the getting the tinder to start smoldering—as a result of focusing on dealing with what was right in front of me, I ended up being able to only deal with what was right in front of me. In other words, I had become so desperate to start a fire to the point of getting cuts across my entire body, but I hadn’t thought of a way to keep the fire going.
If I had to devote myself to such hard labor to make even the faintest of fires every time, I would die of exhaustion before I died of starvation.
To think I’d die from overwork on an uninhabited island.
Even for a Japanese person, that went too far.
It was a black company in the sense that I would get burned out.60
Panicking, I leapt into the nearby brushwood in order to look for things to add to the smoldering tinder—at this point, I couldn’t worry about the cuts on my body. I just needed to watch my step, because there were a lot of stone shards scattered in the vicinity, as though glass had broken and its shards had flown everywhere.
Not only was I bare naked, I was also barefoot.
Who made such a mess, anyway? It was me.
In these circumstances, if I were to injure the soles of my feet, it could simply prove to be a fatal wound—so I quickly gathered dry leaves and dead branches from here and there and scattered them like firecrackers atop the smoldering boulder.
It was a party.
Although, if I had firecrackers, I wouldn’t have had to do anything like this… In elementary school disaster drills, we’d only been taught how to evacuate in the event of a fire, but now I was being forced to improvise ways to get the fire to spread.
Foolish as I was for starting a fire without a plan, it made me a castaway that you might have already lost patience with, but it seemed that I hadn’t run out of dumb luck just yet, because the materials to build a kamado stove were plentiful within reach, without needing to return to the brushwood again.
Needless to say, there were plenty of (supposed) flint pieces that had been used as balls for pitching practice just recently—the me of just a little while ago had done a pretty good job of scattering all of those.
Whether supposed or cremated,61 the majority of the stones had been crushed, but several had retained a size that could be used as materials for the kamado stove, with a decent number of them having rolled around.
It’s as they say, a rolling stone gathers no moss.
Stacking up those stones like lego blocks, I was able to finish constructing a small kamado stove—I might have been taking it too easy in this literal state of urgency,62 but it reminded me of going on a field trip in elementary school and doing outdoor cooking.
I never thought that a field trip would be more useful than any of my classes.
I should have joined more of them, instead of skipping out.
The kamado stove ended up full of gaps and looked pretty unsteady, but I couldn’t waste time on minor details during this emergency—and into that kamado stove, I tossed in a smoldering ember from on top of the boulder.
How, you ask? With my bare hands, of course.
My hands had become covered in blood blisters, with skin peeling everywhere, sunburned to the point that perhaps they wouldn’t even leave fingerprints anymore, and yet I grabbed hold of the fire with those hands. Not chestnuts in the fire, but the fire itself.
It was something that I could hardly recommend, and there was likely a more sensible option, but speed was of the utmost priority—perhaps it was a bit too literal in this case, but they often say you’ll exhibit foolish power in the face of fire.63 “In the face of fire” was literal, and “foolish power” was literal as well.
I was getting to learn the literal meanings, in a way that could not be felt by the words and letters themselves.
You could say that my hands had gotten so numb from pitching practice that I couldn’t even feel much of the heat, but of course I was inflicted with a burn, which I disinfected with salt water after running all the way to the shoreline.
I believed in the power of salt.
It stung so badly that I let out a scream—it was practically a slapstick comedy by now. I’d gotten pretty busy acting out my own little monodrama.
Finally, as a result of sacrificing my hands, I’d acquired the most important item in this uninhabited island survival game, the item known as “fire”—saying that I’d sacrificed my hands was by no means an exaggeration, and perhaps this was what was the most literal. If there were forbidden actions that should not be performed by an aspiring mangaka, then I may as well have done ten or twenty or a hundred twenty of them.
A strict editor would probably reject a manuscript submitted by an applicant who did not value her hands so much—but, my hands would heal, right? Surely.
I would be fine, right? Baseball players did this level of training on a regular basis, after all. And training your fists by plunging them into the fire was kung fu training you often saw in fiction.
Thanks to the advancement of the digital era these days, in the worst-case scenario, I would still be able to draw with the help of an AI assistant… Ah, if only I had an AI assistant with me right now, I wouldn’t have needed to use such an inefficient method to start a fire that was only the size of my pinky finger.
I would have just disassembled it to start a fire with its wires.
Either that, or use the AI to look up the best way to start a fire.
Even while seriously contemplating the further advancement of digital art, I couldn’t carelessly take a break just yet—to be honest, just because I’d accomplished one of my objectives, I wasn’t particularly filled with a sense of accomplishment. All I wanted to do was go back home and go to sleep, but at the moment, I had no home or bed. And before anything else, I couldn’t fall asleep just yet.
While my excitement was still high from this fire festival, I wanted to try and finish preparing the water, too. As you may have guessed, I was feeling extremely parched after this level of overwork.
Not just my throat, but my entire body.
I felt more like a desert than the beach itself.
I was so thirsty that I almost wanted to lick my own sweat, but that was an action I absolutely should not do by this point—though the concentration wasn’t as high as in seawater, human sweat still had a high level of salt.
After fire, next was water.
This was also a method seen in shonen manga. I would take the royal road.
Now that I’d secured fire, making it possible for me to boil water, I would need to produce drinkable water before the sun set or I would be completely at a loss—there wasn’t anything like a ceiling light here, after all.
In the first place, there wasn’t even a ceiling. Nor was there electricity.
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