Chapter 279 - 124: One Fish, Many Dishes (Part 2)
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Entering the unused shelter in the camp, lying on a hard wooden board covered with a dirty canvas, he stared at the dark wall—the large fish was hanging there.
Smelling the musty and decaying odor on the canvas, Chen Zhou felt like an unclaimed corpse in a mortuary, waiting for a kind soul to take him away.
Thinking about the cats and mice at home, he turned his body and reached out to touch Lai Fu sleeping beside him.
Lai Fu was initially lying beside him, but with that touch, it fell over on the ground like it was playing dead, revealing its soft belly.
When Chen Zhou rubbed its warm belly, it let out a small hum and licked the back of Chen Zhou's hand as a gesture of flattery.
It was already deep into the night, and various night creatures were making sounds outside the camp.
The leaves were rustling in the wind, and faintly, the sound of rushing tides could be heard.
With his hand resting on Lai Fu, Chen Zhou closed his eyes tiredly, losing consciousness shortly after.
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Having slept on the hard ground for a night, Chen Zhou, who was used to beds and blankets, found it a bit difficult to adjust.
Waking up with a sore back, he went to the river to wash his face with cold water, forcing himself to wake up, and then he went alone to the small lake to gather his leftover fishing gear, bringing it back to the camp before carrying the large fish to the cave.
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After returning home, the first thing Chen Zhou did was not to feed the cats and mice, nor to check on the crops or see how the goats were doing.
He directly brought out two mirrors, took out paper and pen, and hung the large fish on a wooden frame. Standing next to the large fish, he used the mirror to create a "hand-drawn portrait" of himself with the massive creature.
With a simple sketch outlining the figure, he turned the wooden frame to draw several drafts from multiple angles before reluctantly putting away the paper and pen. From the auto repair toolbox, he took out a tape measure and carefully measured the length of this large creature.
Upon measuring, the fish measured 114.5 cm from the tip of its lip to the tail, which was about the same as his visual estimate.
As for its weight, perhaps because it had dried overnight, losing a lot of moisture, or maybe because he had overestimated it from exhaustion last night.
Estimating again, Chen Zhou guessed the fish might not reach forty pounds, at most just hitting forty pounds.
Actually, if he didn't mind the trouble, he could use the 500g bags of fine salt from the annual big gift package or instant noodles to determine a standard weight unit, then create a balance scale to measure the fish's more accurate weight.
Unfortunately, at this moment, Chen Zhou was not at all interested in how much the fish weighed; he was more intrigued by how to eat it.
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Since childhood, he had only seen fish this large on TV programs or videos.
While many people fished for such large fish, few knew how to eat them. Faced with such a gigantic ingredient, he didn't really know how to handle it at the moment.
Moreover, whether this fish was poisonous or not was still unknown.
Although he had caught fish that looked very similar to this large fish before, those fish were at most only a few centimeters long.
This fish's length was a whole ten times that, and Chen Zhou dared not say they were the same species, just like Yao Ming didn't grow to eighteen meters tall, right?
To be safe, it was better to cut off a couple of pieces of meat and let the poison-testing mice play their role first—
The new litter of mice was already sturdy, with six more than the last litter.
And the mother mice were already pregnant with the third batch.
It was foreseeable that if they were not consumed quickly enough, the mice would increase in number, demanding more resources for raising them.
Faced with such fast-breeding creatures, Chen Zhou's attitude was not to feel sorry but to use them vigorously, feeding and watering them for this very purpose.
Due to the fish's enormous size, multiple mice had to work together to test for poison.
Some were responsible for gnawing the head, others for eating the gills, some for chewing the meat, and others for drinking the blood...
Taking out a kitchen knife to gut the fish and clean the blood and organs, Chen Zhou was surprised to find that it was a female fish, and its bulging belly was full of fish eggs.
With the fish being large, so were the eggs, divided into two clusters sufficient to fill a medium-sized clay pot.
The pale yellow membrane had a slit made by the tip of the knife, and the golden-yellow eggs squeezed out from the opening, each distinct, looking incredibly appetizing.
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The fishy smell from dissecting the large fish attracted the little greedy cat still at home.
Unfortunately, Tizi and Tiger Head's mother had gone hunting, and the first to arrive at the scene were Xiao Huihui and Gray Ball, the father-daughter pair.
Xiao Huihui had seen and eaten many things. Though lazy, it was bold, and when craving food, it was even bolder than usual.
The tortoise shell cleaned by Chen Zhou was placed in the storage room. Other small cats at home feared this strange object, even Tizi avoided it.
Only Xiao Huihui showed no fear, even treating the tortoise shell as a new cat bed prepared by Chen Zhou, frequently lying inside to rest, feeling very at ease.
This time, facing a giant unfamiliar creature, Gray Ball showed clear fear of the dead fish. It followed Xiao Huihui a few steps forward, then stopped over two meters away from the large fish, lowering its front body, staring intently at the fish's body, screeching sharply, uneasily wagging its tail, with the fur on its back bristled up, looking like a tiny dinosaur.
Compared to the dramatic reaction of Gray Ball, Xiao Huihui, a seasoned old cat, seemed much more composed.
It walked unhurriedly to the fish, circled around Chen Zhou, and then leaned over the edge of the wooden bucket filled with fish innards to sniff.