I awkwardly withdrew my hand, suddenly remembering that there was a crescent-shaped knife in Boss’s cutlery box—a small knife used for scaling fish in the wild. I quickly turned around, took out the little knife, and handed it to the kneeling Child, saying, “I bent your bronze knife just now, so I’ll give you this one… Sigh, I’ll compensate Boss for it later… Hmph, come to think of it, I’ve already wrecked one of his cars, and I still don’t know how to pay for that! Oh well, when you have too many lice, you stop feeling itchy.”

Receiving the fish-scaling knife, Little Wilder was overjoyed, kneeling on the ground and kowtowing repeatedly. Big Wilder, holding a wooden tray, couldn’t kowtow but was also moved to tears. As for me, I didn’t know if they understood what I’d just said; I just watched the two Wilder kowtowing again and again, and sighed inwardly: “Not sharing a language can be deadly.”

The meat in my mouth was bland and tasteless, and seemed to lack salt. I tasted it a bit, but lost all interest in eating—even though my stomach was hungry: “Here, you two take the food first, I have no appetite.”

After a pause, I said carefully, “Here… um, where is the nearest city from here… Did I really travel through time? Can you get me out of the mountains as soon as possible? I need to contact the outside world…”

After my repeated efforts, the Wilder seemed to understand. After dinner, the two Wilder packed up their belongings and led me out of the mountains. Little Monkey carried my large bundle on its back, waving my baseball bat in its hand, while the older one carried several rolls of animal hide, leading the way toward the nearest city.

We walked for about three more days, and along the way I continued learning their language. During this time, my skin gradually returned to normal, but then, to my surprise, it seemed as if time had reversed and I had returned to my youth—my height actually shrank, and my appearance became much younger.

This filled me with fear—what on earth had happened to me? Had time really turned back?

If time had reversed, was the outside world still there? Were my parents and brothers still okay?

……

Years later, I still can’t remember what it was like to leave the mountains; it’s as if it was all a dream. The dream was so shocking that I subconsciously wanted to forget it, unwilling to recall it.

Maybe, perhaps, it seems, possibly, probably… it took us three days to reach the nearest hunter’s village. When I first saw the settlement, I suspected the Wilder had led me the wrong way—maybe they weren’t taking me out of the mountains, but deeper into the valleys, because the level of civilization in that village was hardly higher than that of the mountain Wilder: crude mud houses, rickety wooden fences, rough tools…

Looking back, I realize I was so shocked at the time that I didn’t even know how I got back to the mountains. I vaguely remember that I couldn’t say a word, just stared blankly. The Wilder kept asking for my opinion, and seeing my odd expression, led me back into the mountains.

When I finally came to my senses, the first thing I thought of was that car. Maybe I wanted to use work to forget my anxiety, or maybe I was just looking for something to hold onto. I returned to the place where I’d first arrived in this world, dismantling the car day and night, working until late every night, then carrying the parts back to the cave and collapsing into sleep.

During this frenzy of labor, I discovered two things. First, for some reason, all the car parts had become incredibly rust-resistant, as if every part had been “nano”-treated. Second, my strength had increased a lot; I could easily unscrew and remove parts that used to be hard to take apart.

In the end, I still couldn’t be sure, but it seemed something really had happened to me—my height had shrunk by several centimeters, and looking in the mirror, I looked much younger. Now, if I said I was eighteen or nineteen, no one would doubt it.

In addition, after more than ten days of repeated study, I more or less understood their simple language. However, they still couldn’t understand my questions, which were: “What is this place?” “What year is it now?” “Who are you people?”

Could there really be such a world?

The two Wilder beside me actually “had no idea where they were.”

I had already realized that the world I was in now had a productivity level extremely close to that of primitive society. It should belong to the Bronze Age, with a crude language and culture, and many places still retained traces of primitive society. The language spoken by the mountain Wilder was so impoverished it was almost hopeless; maybe they knew the answers to my questions, but it was very hard for them to express themselves clearly.

Oh, in the Bronze Age, there was a famous saying: “The sounds of chickens and dogs can be heard from one village to another, but people grow old and die without ever visiting each other.” In such a society, knowing the name of your own country already made you a very learned person; most people never left their home area by more than five kilometers in their entire lives. In such an era, you couldn’t expect an ordinary person to clearly describe their surroundings.