Yunchuan was carried back to the cave by the young woman. The cave floor was covered with dry grass and all kinds of animal skins.

As soon as the group returned to the cave, Henry Carter heard the rustling sound of bedbugs crawling down from the rock wall, like the sound of rain.

This sound was not unfamiliar to Henry Carter; deep in the Kunlun Mountains, in a hotel, he had fought against these things before.

The young woman casually tossed Henry Carter onto a sheepskin, then lay down on a stone bed herself, and in an instant, was snoring thunderously.

A tall, burly savage stood guard at the entrance of the cave, also tending to the fire.

The fire was not just for warmth; its main purpose was protection.

At first, by the flickering firelight, Henry Carter could see bedbugs lining up and coming down from the rock wall. Later, he saw centipedes, spiders, and other creatures crawling out from the cracks in the stones, which greatly alarmed Henry Carter.

It was obvious that their target was the savages in this cave.

The young woman who had just nursed him slept soundly,

but Henry Carter was wide awake!

He didn’t feel sleepy at all. He had intended to carefully think over what he had experienced that day, but instead, he spent the whole night battling bedbugs, centipedes, spiders, and the like.

The young woman was very popular; many men came to her throughout the night. However, she seemed to sleep through it all, letting those men move on her as they pleased.

This was something Henry Carter couldn’t understand.

But from this, it was clear that the women in this tribe belonged to everyone—in other words, everything in this tribe belonged to everyone.

This was still a tribe in the era of communal ownership.

Henry Carter studied geology, and his field of study didn’t really include the modern era. The appearance of humans was far too recent in terms of geological time.

However, since mining has a historical legacy, and legacy is a uniquely human habit, Henry Carter was also somewhat familiar with the evolution of ancient humans.

If women were communal property, then children must be as well. After squashing a bedbug, Henry Carter finally understood why he could pass himself off as the young woman’s child.

Perhaps the child he had kicked away was also very likely not her own.

Sure enough, when the sun rose, the woman who woke up looked very confused. Only after Henry Carter cried out “ya ya” twice did the young woman look at Henry Carter in surprise and delight.

She picked up Henry Carter, kissed him, then left the cave, straddled a rock, and began to nurse him.

The morning sun looked as if it had just been scooped out of water, appearing moist and rosy. As the sun climbed to the mountaintop, the color gradually faded, finally turning white.

Perhaps because the woman had eaten well the night before, her milk was plentiful today, and Henry Carter ate his fill.

After feeding Henry Carter, the young woman casually tossed him onto the ground, picked up a large basket, and left the camp.

The men had set out even earlier. After the women left the camp, the area in front of the cave was soon crawling with children.

As for the older children, they followed the women.

Six elderly men and women stayed behind to watch over the little ones.

Among them, the one-eyed old crone was still searching among the children for the white-skinned child from last night, the one bright enough for her half-blind eyes to see.

Henry Carter watched as she passed right in front of him. At this moment, he was even dirtier than the other filthy children, especially after rolling in the ashes and getting covered in dew, which left a layer of ash crust on his body.

It wasn’t that Henry Carter didn’t like cleanliness, but this layer of ash could reduce the chances of being attacked by fleas, centipedes, and other poisonous insects.

The filthy Henry Carter at this moment was definitely not the same as the white child in the old crone’s memory.

The old crone kept searching among the children. After checking each one, she finally slumped her frail body against the rock wall in exhaustion.

She had forever, forever lost a child who was different from the rest.

The old crone leaned motionless against the rock wall, her one eye wide open. When Henry Carter saw ashes fall into her gray-white eye and she still didn’t move, he knew that the old crone was dead.

The remaining elders didn’t discover the old crone’s death until noon. They carried her body to the edge of the cliff, threw it over, and then went back to basking in the sun against the rock wall.

There was no sadness, no reluctance, and certainly no so-called funeral.

The death of a person was like the withering of a flower, the dying of a blade of grass, or the disappearance of a cloud—utterly natural.

Chapter Four: Have I Really Become a Savage

Seeing this, Henry Carter was finally at ease. In this society where everyone seemed to live and die together and share all means of production, the addition or loss of a person meant nothing to them.

“So, am I a savage now?”

Henry Carter asked himself this question over and over in his mind.

A nameless sorrow surged up in an instant, and tears streamed down his face like a flood bursting through a dam, leaving two white tracks on his dark cheeks.

A child was accidentally bitten to death by a poisonous snake. When the elders realized the child was dead, they threw his body off the cliff as well.

The snake had crawled out from inside the cave...