Time Travel: My Comfortable Life After Going to the Countryside

Liu Xiangyang returned home and went inside. The house was warm and cozy.

Xue Bingbing, Le Qi, and Le Yao sat cross-legged on the kang (a heated brick bed), with a game of checkers on the kang table.

The three of them had clearly just taken a shower; their faces were flushed, like ripe peaches, and their hair was wet and draped over their shoulders.

When Xue Bingbing saw him, she immediately jumped off the kang (a heated brick bed), shuffled over to him in her slippers, and grabbed his hand: "Why did you take so long? Are you going to take a bath now?"

Liu Xiangyang felt a warmth in his heart. He gently rubbed her still damp hair and frowned slightly. "Your hair isn't completely dry. Dry it off so you don't catch a cold. I can prepare the bathwater myself."

Xue Bingbing shook his arm: "I'm not that delicate."

The two poured hot water into the bathtub and added a few pieces of firewood to the small stove at the bottom of the tub. Steam filled the air, making the whole space misty.

"Don't go," Liu Xiangyang said with a smile in his eyes, "Come on, give me a back rub."

Xue Bingbing glanced at the ajar bathroom door and muttered under her breath, "They're all outside."

Liu Xiangyang looked completely innocent: "Comrade Xue Bingbing, what's going on in your little head all day?"

"Is it really just a simple back rub?" Xue Bingbing asked seriously.

The two sisters could clearly hear the sound of water splashing against the walls of the bathroom. Their faces flushed, and they spat out a few words in unison.

Without even packing up the chess pieces, they said, "We're going back now," and fled back to their own little courtyard.

……

The next morning, Liu Xiangyang, holding a steamed bun in one hand and chopsticks in the other, looked at the two sisters whose cheeks were flushed and said, "Why did you two sneak off so early last night? Bingbing was looking for you..."

Before he could finish speaking, he was pinched in the waist and said painfully, "Bingbing wanted to play checkers with you, but you all left."

Just then, Zuo Qingqing burst in, wrapped in a thick cotton-padded coat, looking like a freshly cooked rice dumpling.

"Liu Xiangyang! When are you taking me hunting?" Her voice was clear and bright. "You promised me last time! You said you'd take me after the autumn harvest!"

Liu Xiangyang put down his bowl, looked her up and down, and said with suppressed laughter, "Comrade Zuo Qingqing, please objectively assess your current situation. Dressed like that, you can hardly walk properly, can you?"

Zuo Qingqing reached into the bowl, picked up a piece of pickled radish, and put it in her mouth, saying indistinctly, "I don't care! You promised me, are you going to go back on your word? Are you even a man?"

Whether I am a man or not is not for you to decide; it will be up to my future wives to decide.

At this moment, Le Yao interjected, "Liu Xiangyang, why don't we go catch some fish? The villagers say that once the river freezes over, we'll only be able to fish."

"Go now, and if you catch a big fish, you can make soup. If you catch a small one, you can dry it into dried fish, which is fragrant and can be stored for a long time. It's delicious."

Liu Xiangyang looked at her: "But we don't have any tools right now. We can't exactly go into the water to catch fish, can we? We'd freeze to death."

"I have a way!" Zuo Qingqing immediately raised one hand.

"What's your idea?" the four people at the table asked almost in unison.

"We can use long sticks to poke the fish! That's how we catch fish at home." Zuo Qingqing raised her chin. "My grandfather often did that."

Xue Bingbing frowned: "But none of us know how to spear fish with sticks, and where would we get a spear?"

Liu Xiangyang's heart skipped a beat. He nodded: "Spears aren't difficult to make. How about this, you guys play for a while, I'll go get some suitable wood."

After saying that, he quickly shoveled the remaining food in the bowl into his mouth, put on his shoes, and went out.

He wasn't just thinking about catching fish; he remembered seeing someone on TV killing wild boars with a short spear. Last time he went into the mountains, the moment a gun fired, all the animals within miles vanished, and he returned empty-handed.

Using a short spear is completely different. It's silent and stealthy. With my superhuman strength and abnormally good eyesight, as long as I practice my aim, it's definitely a better and more concealed weapon than a gun.

The sturdy oak wood in the space was an excellent material. Deconstructing and shaping it was a piece of cake for him. The only difficulty lay in the spearhead. A pure wooden spearhead was too easily worn down; it would be best to equip it with an iron tip.

"Looks like I'll have to go to the county," Liu Xiangyang thought to himself. "I'll buy a few cheap old kitchen knives and try to melt them down. If that doesn't work, I'll try my luck at the scrap metal recycling station and see if I can find a suitable piece of iron in return."

Liu Xiangyang arrived at a corner near the village, looked around to make sure no one was there, and then, with a thought, the huge oak tree, more than ten meters long and over half a meter in diameter, appeared in the open space.

He drew his machete, roughly measured the length, and marked it at 1.5 meters. Using his decomposition ability, he divided the oak tree into 1.5-meter sections, each section further breaking down into extremely uniform sticks about three centimeters in diameter.

He picked up a stick, found a few more stones, and carefully fused the stones with one end of the stick using his fusion ability, shaping it into a sharp spearhead.

After finishing, he casually picked up the freshly forged oak spear, poked it on the ground, weighed it in his palm, clenched his fingers, firmly grasped the center of gravity, turned sideways, raised his arm, and fixed his gaze like a lock on a small tree about twenty meters away, as thick as a bowl. Then, he suddenly exerted force from his waist and abdomen, and swung his arm like a fully drawn bow, shooting the spear out like a real javelin!

"Bang!"

With a dull thud, the oak spear shot out like a loaded bullet, instantly piercing the trunk of the small tree! The spearhead protruded more than ten centimeters from the other side of the trunk, and the end of the spear was still trembling slightly from the enormous impact.

He stepped forward, forcefully pulled out the short spear, and carefully examined the tip. Sure enough, the spearhead, formed from molten stone, had been blown away by the violent impact with the tree trunk, but the shaft itself was unharmed.

"Spearing fish should be no problem, but it's unrealistic to rely on it for hunting or for repeated use. The spearhead has to be reshaped and refused after each throw, which is too time-consuming. To make this thing truly handy, it needs to be fitted with an iron spearhead."

Nevertheless, he proceeded to make nine identical oak spears from the remaining eight pieces of wood in the same way. Then he found some sturdy vines, tied them together, carried them on his shoulder, and hurried home.

As soon as I entered the courtyard, I heard Le Yao's triumphant cheers coming from inside: "Hahaha! I'm number one! I won!"

Liu Xiangyang leaned the bundle of short spears on his shoulder against the doorway, making a soft sound.

"The tools are ready," Liu Xiangyang said with a smile, brushing the mud off his hands. "Let's go try our luck by the river."

Filled with excitement and curiosity, the five set off with their newly made short spears. They walked until they reached a place where the river narrowed, where the villagers had built a simple embankment using large stones, mud, and aquatic plants, making it much deeper than the rest of the river.

Liu Xiangyang stood on the riverbank, scanning the clear water. His eyesight was far beyond that of ordinary people, and he could clearly see the patterns on the underwater pebbles, as well as the occasional fleeting dark shadows of fish.

The next moment, Liu Xiangyang thrust his short spear into the water! With a soft "plop," it disappeared into the water.

Liu Xiangyang pulled up his short spear, and a large, fat fish on the spearhead writhed violently.