Chapter 91 - 33: Detonation_3
"Explosion is art!
Explosion, exhilarating!"
On the deserted mountainside, Chen Zhou let himself loose, loudly shouting a cliché popular on the internet, surrounded by dust and the smell of gunpowder, as he swung his wooden shovel to clear the shelter.
Bucket after bucket, just loading the scattered sand and soil from the explosion into wooden buckets and dumping them onto the platform took an entire afternoon.
Working until the sky turned dark and his arms started to ache, Chen Zhou finally cleared out the soil pile outside, packed up his tools, and returned to the cave.
Between November 29 and December 3, the mountainside echoed with a roar every day.
The nearby wild goats might have been startled and relocated their base; Chen Zhou hadn't seen them on the platform these days.
However, the birds in the forest gradually adapted to this change, and recently, fewer flew up after a blast.
The shelter construction progressed like a rocket, racing ahead.
Half a month of arduous digging didn't match the sound of one blast of gunpowder.
The space inside the shelter had expanded from the initial 13 square meters to roughly 70 square meters, larger than the cave Chen Zhou lived in.
One barrel of black gunpowder was nearly used up; it was estimated that two more barrels would be needed to complete most of the lower level's expansion.
However, the stability of the mountain's structure remained a significant concern.
Seventy square meters without load-bearing pillars could still hold, but 300 square meters was uncertain.
If load-bearing pillars were erected, they would be affected by the gunpowder explosions.
Weighing the pros and cons, Chen Zhou decided to first carve out the initial shapes of the kitchen and storage room on the left and right sides of the main living room, totaling about 140 square meters.
After this, for safety reasons, he would abandon using black gunpowder and return to manual excavation.
With 140 square meters of pure usable area, without any shared space deductions, it was far more than the old apartment his parents lived in, and sufficient for his needs.
If it weren't necessary to expand a warehouse for material storage, the work could actually stop now.
Having made his plan, he worked another eight days.
The day before the fifth mysterious reward arrived, on December 12, Chen Zhou completed the basic engineering of the shelter as scheduled.
He blasted out an 18-meter long, over 7-meter deep strip space under the rock wall, totaling about 140 square meters, with roughly 90 plus cubic meters of sand and earth left unremoved.
The use of black gunpowder came to an end here.
Once the finishing work of clearing the sand was done, he had to study how to create load-bearing structures, build walls, install windows and doors, and design the interior decoration.
These days, besides the scheduled work of fetching water, feeding sheep, detonating gunpowder, and dumping sand and stone, Chen Zhou found a new task for himself—
Every day, climbing to the high point of the sunny slope to observe the northeast corner of the mountain's beach through a telescope.
Cannibal Tribes might land on the island in December.
Even though there was no need to create slaughter now, he needed to gather intelligence to gain an advantage in the highly probable future conflict.
"Know yourself and your enemy, and you will never be defeated," this is the wisdom passed down from the ancestors.
At the same time, to ensure he could deal with attacks from the Cannibal Tribes, Chen Zhou preloaded all matchlock guns in the cave with lead bullets, placing ignition bottles within arm's reach on the bedside table.
As soon as he noticed any unusual movements from the tribes or them coming up the mountain, he would quickly light the match cord and pour in the gunpowder to deliver a thunderous strike from above.
If the number of tribes was overwhelming, he also prepared an escape route into the dense forest.
It was an extremely narrow path with a three-square-meter spike trap dug in the middle.
If the tribes spotted the trap and continued forward, an explosive buried in the soil awaited them.
If any tribesmen were fortunate enough to survive the explosion, Chen Zhou had a final insurance—two sharp axes.
In the dense forest where bow and arrow were less effective, none of the tribes' melee weapons could confront these two high-carbon steel weapons directly.
Their prized Iron Tree Spear was like a toothpick before the sharp axe blade.
This was tested by Chen Zhou; the hard iron tree couldn't withstand these two axes' chopping.
Furthermore, the tribes' armor, crude to the point of nonexistence, allowed the axes to exert their full power, and even if their combat skills and ferocity surpassed Chen Zhou's, with the disadvantage of height and weapons, they would struggle to match him.
Especially since Chen Zhou understood well that the probability of such an encounter was extremely slim.
Even if the Cannibal Tribes dared to attack him, they would likely be terrified by the first gunshot and flee directly.
Upon returning to nearby islands, they might even spread tales within the tribe about a monster that thundered on the island, terrifying the entire tribe from returning.