Ancient Eden

A few days passed in the blink of an eye, and the millet seeds in the crop field could be harvested tomorrow. Mu Qing calculated that today was the twenty-second day since she arrived here.

Since she came to the realization that she couldn’t go back, the only thing she could do was stop worrying and live here for now. So, these days, when she no longer worried about everything, she instead felt that life here was calm and simple. As long as she didn’t think about the distant future, or the past, she felt that she was living a good life here, especially when she was with Li Mang.

But since last night, Mu Qing’s mood became a little low.

At that time, after being intimate with her for a moment, Li Mang wanted her to use her hand to hold that place of his closely, probably to make him feel more comfortable. Just like she had done many times before. She deliberately teased him for a moment, and when she heard him panting like an ox, she then complied to do as he wanted.

While she was eating and laughing, she suddenly remembered that her menstrual period was supposed to come in three or four days, provided that those two times with Li Mang during her dangerous period, had been unsuccessful.

But what if it had succeeded?

Mu Qing’s mood was disturbed for a moment, and her mood returned to the state it was in the days right after the incident happened. Nervous and uneasy.

Li Mang was so nice that she even felt like she was starting to like him a little. But bearing a baby for him now…., she simply could not imagine it.

(22.1)

They started to harvest the millet seeds in the crop fields. Mu Qing originally thought that this was going to be the men’s business. But she found she had been thinking wrong. The men went out to hunt as usual, and some of the women went out to collect wild fruits as usual, while the other women took stone knives or bone knives to go harvest.

Mu Qing followed Naduo to harvest the crops as well.

She very quickly learned the reason why women were the one harvesting the crops. This kind of work required patience and not strength.

The blade was not sharp, they needed to grab the plant with one hand, and cut the green and flexible millet stem back and forth with the other hand, seven or eight times, before they could cut off one millet stem, and every once in a while, they had to rub the knife against the side of a millstone and grind it before it could be reused.

Therefore, some women simply did not cut the millet stem, but directly used their hands to strip the millet stem of its seeds. The progress was very slow, at the end of the day, not even one-fifth of the millet seeds in a large crop had been harvested, and at this rate, it would take at least five or six more days to complete the harvest.

Mu Qing had been cutting the millet stem with Naduo only for a while, before she started to feel that her back and waist were aching, especially the palms of her hands, which were grinded by the thick and hard millet stems and were hurting so bad she felt they were burning.  But she was embarrassed to avoid the work and be lazy, so she gritted her teeth and endured the work.

At noon, when the sun rose over their heads, the women stopped their work and sat down in the shade of the trees to drink water and eat a few fruits. Mu Qing didn’t care about resting, she tied a vine-straw hat on her head and returned to the settlement.

In the morning she thought of a reaping hook.

Even if there was no iron reaping hook, a reaping hook made of bone should still be more efficient than the straight and plate knife that they were using. So, she was now looking for animal bones that could be polished and shaped into a reaping hook.

Every time a prey was slaughtered here, the remaining bones were not discarded randomly, but were piled up in a corner of the settlement. Mu Qing rummaged through it for a while, picked a bone she liked, and planned to wait for Li Mang to come back at night to ask him to work on it. Tomorrow, she would try it to see how it worked.