Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.07

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Sterilizing water by boiling it was the popular approach, and it certainly seemed like it would be lower in difficulty compared to constructing some sort of filtration device that I couldn’t even visualize the blueprints of, but when it came to actually tackling the problem, I found it hard to get my body moving.

My willpower had waned.

In a flash.

I’d succeeded in stoking the fire in the kamado stove to a considerable size, but just as I’d thought at the very beginning, just as I’d poorly conceived at the very beginning, if I used this fire to boil seawater, all that would remain was natural salt.

To the currently dehydrated Nadeko, salt was a poisonous substance on the level of potassium cyanide. She was an eccentric creature that would die from licking her own sweat.

I so very much wanted to separate the salt from the water somehow, but if salt was all that remained, what part of it was sterilization, exactly?

Salt in itself might prove to be useful later down the line, but right now, I had to figure out how to remove it from the water… Um, before that, I needed some sort of container in order to boil the water, didn’t I?

A beaker or a pot or a bottle or a can… Even a plastic bucket or an oil drum was fine. It would be great if such man-made objects could wash ashore, but there was no hope of finding such items on this island.

Just like the island’s population, the number of man-made objects was zero.64

Looking at it like this, the usage of containers or storage was something entirely exclusive to humans, wasn’t it… Then, could I make something out of clay? It would be progressing a little from the days of primitive humans, but earthenware wasn’t so easily made… Becoming an ability user of “earth” alongside “fire” and “water” seemed like a very shonen manga-like theory, but I could imagine it required quite a lot of skill.

Apart from that, it seemed like it would be faster to look for a stone with a nice shape. If I could find something cup-shaped or bowl-shaped or kettle-shaped somewhere around here… It wasn’t going to be that easy.

Though I’d been successful in making that kamado stove… Wait a minute?

Earlier, I’d used stones in place of balls for my pitching practice, but what about the boulder I’d used as the target, as well as a replacement for a chair?

They say faith will move mountains…65 It wasn’t as deep as I’d hoped, but as a result of my single-mindedly continuing to hit the rock with a large number of stones, the boulder’s surface had become gouged out.

In other words, a crater.

It seemed that the boulder had been able to accumulate enough damage. Seeing my efforts take visible shape like this filled me with emotion in a similar way to the first time I’d completed a manuscript (I must have had pretty good control. I might’ve done well in baseball if I tried it), but more than anything else, it seemed like I might be able to store water in this cavity?

The rim was much too thick to think of it as a bowl, but if I could set this boulder on top of the kamado stove, then perhaps I could heat the whole thing up and use it as a stoneware plate…

“I see… I’m going to… Pick up this boulder… And carry it all the way over to the kamado stove I built…”

My elation vanished in an instant.

It surely wasn’t that bad of an idea, but honestly, I was fed up by now—I didn’t want to abuse my arms anymore when I was aspiring to be a mangaka, but I couldn’t turn my back on my stomach, either.

If I were a smarter castaway, I could have used the principle of leverage or such tools as wheels or a pulley in order to move the boulder, but I had exhausted all parts of my brain capable of applying such physics. It was mental labor that I wouldn’t want to perform even in peak condition. Therefore, instead of worrying about the minute details, I lifted the boulder with brute force and transported it totteringly to the kamado stove—even the idea of foolish power in the face of fire was about to run out of gas.

Depending on its weight, it would’ve probably made a better overall route to carry the boulder all the way to the shore, fill it with water, and then bring it to the kamado stove, but it wasn’t at a weight that I could perform such a time-saving operation.

Therefore, in order to transport the seawater and fill up the stone container that I’d moved using my haggard body, I ended up using my torn-up hands as a second container—the water kept leaking and spilling out midway, so it required three or four round trips in total.

It felt like I was torturing myself.

Now, after the initial delight from discovering the cavity in the boulder, I’d proceeded to perform actions one after another as I thought of them, but in the end, this would accomplish nothing but produce salt—what was I, some monopoly corporation?

Producing salt using a stoneware plate would be fine if I wanted to run a steakhouse.

However, there were some things you could only discover after you tried it, and when I set about boiling the water in the hopes that everything would work out somehow, I realized that this process could produce water after all—when the salt was left in the container, the evaporated water was essentially pure water, so all I needed to do was collect the water in its gaseous form.

In other words, catching the water vapor.

As someone who’d previously held fire in her hands, it shouldn’t be hard to grab steam, too!

By using this method involving a fire, there probably wasn’t a need for a filtration process afterwards… For example, if I could cover the kamado stove with a shopping bag or something similar—but there were no shopping bags that had washed up, either! If countermeasures against the microplastics problem were going to drive me to death, I couldn’t help but feel a bit ashamed about it, but that probably wasn’t the case here, seeing as no man-made substance, not just plastic, had drifted ashore.

Then… Something from nature that could be used in place of a plastic bag… Unlike a container, this seemed a little easier to prepare. Basically, all that was necessary was for the moisture in the air to condense, so there was no need for it to be that much like a container.

Taking that logic to its extremes, if there were a ceiling here, then water droplets would form, just like in a bathroom—then, could I just take a flattened rock and hold it over the kamado stove?

No, no.

Even a large leaf I’d used for shade should be enough.

However, even if it was just for temporary shelter, I was hesitant to make use of something that was already being used for shade, so I instead headed back into the brushwood and pulled out an even larger leaf—this might as well be considered large-scale deforestation, but when I returned alive, I decided I could make up for it by refusing plastic bags when offered at the supermarket.

I held up the leaf that I’d snapped off over the kamado stove like an exhaust hood, in an attempt to obtain water—because this action was so similar to artificially making morning dew appear on plants, I felt like I was engaging in a very roundabout form of survival.

Roundabout—a detour.

Araundo Uroko…66

It had felt like I was finally confronting the reality in front of me, but even now, there were parts of reality I was still trying to escape from—by now, had Gaen-san started a search or dispatched a rescue team for me (and Kaiki-san and Ononoki-chan)? Or perhaps she’d decided it was the right time for her to prepare to enter Iriomote Island herself?

So as not to let our sacrifices go to waste.

Or, in a sense, without worrying about us in the slightest…

Because of my accumulated fatigue, and because of the sense of relief I got from doing everything I’d set out to do, the high level of excitement that came from drifting onto an uninhabited island had begun to lose its magic, and as I gradually regained my composure, I began to think that, maybe, it was actually better this way.

With no power left in me.

I’d been sent out on a direct confrontation against Araundo Uroko-san essentially to chip away at her defenses, so ending up as a castaway was still probably better than death. I may have been a snake god, but I had never been an immortal oddity, after all—it was a stroke of luck that I was alive, and it was a stroke of luck that I wasn’t dead.

How was it for Araundo-san, then?

Since she was Gaen-san’s real daughter, that had to mean that she was also human, so she probably wasn’t an oddity, let alone immortal… But then again, it was true that Gaen-san was a bit removed from humanity.

The idea that specialists of oddities were beings close to oddities themselves was something that Ononoki-chan, who herself was an oddity, had idly mentioned.

Ending up not being present for the final showdown felt pretty apt for me, considering the events of last year—my drifting onto this uninhabited island was, most likely, because continuing onwards was just not in the cards for me.

I’d assumed that the airplane had exploded in midair, throwing everyone on board in all directions, but what if I had been the only one to fall out from the emergency exit, and the plane had actually landed safely in the ocean? It wasn’t impossible.

I would even hope that that was the case.

It was not entirely out of pure goodwill that I desired that, because if that was the case, there was a higher chance of Ononoki-chan or Kaiki-san finding me after being rescued themselves—but as I was thinking such things, the contents of the stone container I’d heated had completely evaporated.

I was now heating the vessel without anything inside it, but, well, it probably wasn’t as dangerous as doing so in the kitchen… Or, could this boulder explode if it was heated too much?

Before filling up the crater again with more seawater, I first needed to verify the results of my plan—it wasn’t about if I’d managed to produce any salt… It worked! On the underside of the leaf I’d used as an exhaust hood, there were droplets of water clinging to it, even more than I’d expected.

I unabashedly licked up the water, my tongue darting in and out like a snake’s.

Thinking about it, even if the seawater had been sterilized by boiling, I had not paid attention to the sterilization of the leaf, there were still some hygiene concerns—but it should have gotten heated up by the water vapor to some extent, so I just had to believe that it wasn’t anything to worry about.

What I did need to worry about was my dried-up self.

Even though I hadn’t shed my skin, it ended up feeling like snakeskin, meant to be stowed away in a wallet.67 The title of this novel could become Hoshimonogatari—“Dried Tale”.68

Ultimately, for the sake of hydrating myself, I ended up trying to lick up the moisture from the leaf’s veins themselves (though if that was enough, I could’ve done that from the beginning), but for now, I had just barely managed to moisten my parched throat—I had not nearly drunk as much as I wanted, but I had managed to escape the danger of heatstroke.

I couldn’t shed my skin, but I could shed off that danger.69

If I repeated this, then water was more or less secured—no, this was nothing but a stopgap measure, and if I had to perform this much hard labor in order to obtain such a tiny amount of water, the cost-effectiveness was really poor.

Or rather, my intelligence was really poor.

The foolish power in the face of fire was essentially just an emergency power supply, and it couldn’t last forever—perhaps I could handle it if it were once a week, but there was no way I’d be able to do it every hour of every day.

Like the cavity in the boulder, the damage done to my own body would accumulate, too.

Thinking in the long-term, I would probably have to look for a watering place for non-emergency use… But for today, this was the best I could do.

It was a pretty big achievement to not have died on the first day—in the time it took for me to produce about enough water to fill up a sake cup, the sun that had completely cooked my skin had long since set, and the island had entered into the time known as night.

The senses of the human body truly were arbitrary, making me suddenly feel chilly only after realizing that it had become night, but it wasn’t that I didn’t notice the sun setting just because I was so absorbed in the process of producing water.

It was also because the starlight that poured down from the ceilingless night sky was much too radiant—to the extent that I probably didn’t even need to work so eagerly to finish everything before evening.

It felt almost as though I could be sunburned by the starlight, but I couldn’t help but unconsciously step out from under my shade, as though being lured by the stars—if I were an astronomer, I might have been able to derive the coordinates of this uninhabited island by the positions of the stars, which shone more distinctly than in a planetarium, but alas, the only constellations I knew were Orion and the Big Dipper.

The W-shaped one was Cassiopeia? Was that right?

However, despite my ignorant and unlearned nature, I was still capable of concluding that this island had to indeed still be somewhere within the Okinawa region—because, when we were still aboard the plane, Ononoki-chan had said this.

Taketomi Island, the island that I’d mistaken for Iriomote Island, was the only place in the country whose starry sky was under protection—if Iriomote Island had Iriomote cats, then Taketomi Island had its starry sky, so to speak.

If so, and if I could view such a breathtaking starry sky from here, then it surely wasn’t an astronomical observation born from wishful thinking to conclude that this island was somewhere near Taketomi Island—I couldn’t see any landmasses on the horizon from my current position, but on the other side of the island, I might even be able to see Taketomi Island or even Iriomote Island in the distance…

I wasn’t in the mood to travel such a large distance at the moment, though. And before that, I certainly didn’t have the energy to build a house or search for food or make some pajamas.

However, as I bathed with my naked body in the starlight pouring down from the cloudless night sky, I felt like my energy was being recharged to full—damage wasn’t the only thing I was accumulating. Even if I were to sleep using a rock as a pillow, I probably didn’t need to worry about never being able to wake up again.

Despite there not being any shelves, I was fully aware that I had shelved a great many things, but for once, I wanted to be versatile and allow me, Sengoku Nadeko, to get some rest. There may not be anything more improper than this, but sleeping while stark naked in the embrace of Mother Nature was an experience that all human beings surely wanted to have at least once in their lives.

Good night.

Sleep well, and sweet dreams.