Chapter 242 - 108: Future Box (Part 3)
But it's the rainy season, and it's raining. Although there aren't strong winds and big waves at sea, the smaller undulating waves never cease.
Even if he's a master at sea, going out in this weather is like searching for death with a lantern in the restroom.
A single turtle and possibly some turtle eggs aren't worth such a big risk.
The third thing is a reason for celebration.
While heading to the mountain stream to check on the sugarcane and aloe status, Chen Zhou idly wandered around the area and accidentally discovered a wild orange tree.
To be accurate, it was an orange tree.
Thanks to the brave sacrifice of the "test rat," he confirmed that those small fruits on the tree that looked and smelled like oranges were indeed oranges.
However, these wild oranges didn't have the sweet taste of modern oranges and eating them felt like eating lemons.
Moreover, they were filled with seeds, with hardly any fruit flesh.
Despite this, Chen Zhou was delighted to add the oranges to his essential food list.
No matter how bad it tastes, it's still better than lemons.
Peeling and eating them was convenient.
On ordinary days, he would put a few in his pocket or backpack, and when hungry, eat a couple to replenish sugar and water, which turned out to be more cost-effective than cold boiled water.
After eating the oranges, Chen Zhou didn't waste the remaining orange peels and seeds.
He brewed orange peels in water and scattered the seeds in the cleared wooded area near the fields. If those seeds were lucky and hardy enough, in a few years, they could grow into an orange grove, providing him with a steady stream of easy-to-pick fresh fruit.
...
September 10th, with only 20 days left to the first anniversary of landing on the island, Chen Zhou received his twenty-third mysterious reward.
This reward was the second-to-last of the first year, and was the first strange item he'd encountered since arriving on the island—the second being a safe.
Honestly, at the moment he saw this reward, Chen Zhou even thought the Time Travel Administration Bureau finally showed mercy and sent him a piece of "Future Technology."
Because the appearance and nature of the item were simply too sci-fi—
It was fist-sized, emitting blue light, like a 3D model projected from a computer into the real world.
It had the shape of the "Sword in the Stone," with a small handle-shaped grip and half a sword blade on it.
The lower part was a cube, resembling a box.
On each side of this box, there were four small blocks shaped like puzzles, emitting a faint blue light.
When Chen Zhou arrived at the beach, this small box was floating in the air, and the rain fell from the sky, passed through the box like air, directly dripping onto the simple rain shelter below.
That scene was unimaginably bizarre, as if Chen Zhou had been pulled from the real world into a sci-fi movie.
When he touched the small box with feelings of shock, curiosity, and confusion, something even stranger happened.
This thing, which could be penetrated by rain and wind, turned out to be a solid entity in his hand and, aside from the strange blue glow, was seemingly no different from a metal cube.
Of course, the material of this box had nothing to do with metal.
In fact, Chen Zhou had no idea what it was made of, nor what purpose it served. Relying solely on intuition, he felt this thing should be a puzzle similar to the safe.
However, this time, the Time Travel Administration Bureau fixed the "BUG" of violent dismantling, making it impossible for him to obtain the reward by any clever means.
Based on the special phenomenon of rain passing through the box, Chen Zhou judged that even using the Super Space-Time Cutter to destroy this box would be ineffective.
Ultimately, it's a case of scales and demons, as the Time Travel Administration Bureau blocked all his shortcuts, placing this puzzle before him, forcing him to solve it with intelligence.
The most frustrating part was that there were no hints whatsoever about what was inside the small box.
This produced the same doubt as last time with the safe—after laboriously solving this puzzle, the reward inside could even turn out to be a piece of chewing gum.