His whole body had shrunk drastically; the height he once prided himself on was now, at most, one meter forty. The scruffy, bearded old face was gone, replaced by a youthful face still carrying baby fat. As for the four-year-old little rascal lying in the pile of clothes, eyes darting mischievously—who else could it be but Jack Cooper?

"Your pants are open." Jack Cooper stretched out his tiny finger, pointing at Henry Clark's already split zipper and laughing gleefully. He seemed to be quite enjoying the current situation.

"Teacher, I’ve now completely become a minor. You can apply for hardship assistance for me. I really need it right now, and I’m also hungry." A child speaking like an adult was bizarre—no matter how you looked at it, he seemed like a little monster.

Not only was he hungry, Henry Clark was hungry too. He hadn’t eaten anything before leaving in the morning. Standing on the sandstone, he looked around and was quite certain there couldn’t possibly be any people here. Watching a group of wild boars snorting as they passed under the sandstone, completely unafraid of humans, Henry Clark knew these wild boars had never encountered hunters before.

He took off his oversized clothes and put on Jack Cooper's clothes. Although the little one protested, bare-bottomed, Henry Clark stuck to his decision. He put his own undershirt on him, tied a rope around his waist, and just like that, a cute child in a dress appeared.

Once everything was packed up, Henry Clark carried Jack Cooper to the edge of the bamboo forest. In spring, the bamboo forest was lush and green, with many fresh bamboo shoots just poking out of the ground. Grabbing a bamboo stick, he dug furiously, and after quickly digging up three bamboo shoots, Henry Clark dashed back up the red sandstone. There was a small cave here. Carefully placing Jack Cooper inside, he sat at the entrance and began peeling the bamboo shoots. Jack Cooper tried to help, but soon realized this wasn’t a job his little hands could handle, so he could only wait for Henry Clark to finish. When the two of them were about to eat the raw bamboo shoots, Henry Clark suddenly snatched Jack Cooper's shoot and put it on the ground. He had just realized that at this age, Jack Cooper was at most four years old and couldn’t eat raw bamboo shoots.

"Hang in there. You can’t eat raw bamboo shoots—getting sick would be even worse. I’ll make a fire and see if I can roast them for you." Henry Clark didn’t dare go far, so he gathered some dry grass and firewood from nearby. Perhaps heaven took pity on these two helpless souls, because Henry Clark actually found a few eggs of some unknown bird in the grass—bigger than quail eggs, smaller than chicken eggs, and looking quite fresh.

To roast bird eggs, you have to coat them in mud and bury them in hot ashes to cook slowly, or else they’ll explode. Having done this since childhood, Henry Clark was very skilled. He munched on bamboo shoots while Jack Cooper sat drooling, staring at the mud lumps in the ashes.

When Henry Clark peeled the cooked egg, blew it cool, and handed it to Jack Cooper, Jack Cooper didn’t take it—he wanted Henry Clark to eat first. But Henry Clark roughly stuffed the egg into his mouth and went back to gnawing on bamboo shoots himself.

Everything had happened so fast, so strangely, that from beginning to end, Henry Clark hadn’t had a moment to really think about what was going on. How had he gone from a small city on the northwestern frontier to this picturesque southern land in an instant?

"Teacher, there’s a scientific explanation that’s a lot like our current situation: the time-space tunnel. I used to have a dream of building a machine that could go back in time, to before my father died, so I could see what he looked like. That’s why I studied time-space tunnels carefully. Actually, the famous American Professor John Bukele had an interesting hypothesis: the time-space tunnel and the human world are not on the same time system. Entering another time system, you might go far into the past or into the future, because in a time-space tunnel, time has directionality and reversibility—it can go forward or backward. We’re lucky; we encountered a reversal, so we both became children."

Henry Clark smiled as he wiped the egg yolk from Jack Cooper's mouth, ruffled his hair, and said, "I never believe in hypotheses, only in facts. Our situation is very strange right now, and I need enough time to verify things. Jianqiang, your name is a good one—strength is something both of us need right now."

Chapter Two: Unmoved Even if Mount Tai Collapses

Henry Clark carried Jack Cooper downstream along the creek. Only by returning to civilization could he support both Jack Cooper and himself. He didn’t believe that the little bit of wilderness survival knowledge he’d picked up as a child would be enough to take good care of Jack Cooper.

The human body is fragile: skin too thin, bones too brittle, nails not sharp enough, legs not strong enough. In the wild, aside from a nimble mind, humans are almost useless.

Wherever there are wild pandas, there must be great danger. Henry Clark didn’t dare linger. While it was still early, he needed to find a safe place for Jack Cooper.

A bamboo spear, its tip sharpened after being scorched, was his only piece of safety equipment. With a sense of tragic resolve, Henry Clark set out. Roads are made by people—if you don’t walk, how will you know if there’s a path?

The mountains and rivers were breathtakingly beautiful. On both sides of the stream, the grass was lush and green. Perhaps startled by the sound of Henry Clark's bamboo spear striking the grass, colorful golden pheasants would occasionally burst from the undergrowth, flapping low as they flew off into the distance.