The clansmen went to the riverside again to continue catching fish and drying them into fish jerky. However, this time only a portion of the people went; the others stayed in the cave to keep drying the fish they had already brought back.

The slope below the cave was covered with bamboo. There was an abundance of bamboo here, spreading out over at least three to five thousand mu.

In Henry Carter’s eyes, this was not only an important source of food, but also the base he needed to create a new civilization.

At this moment, the benefits of mastering a form of civilization became apparent—even if it was only a bamboo civilization.

Henry Carter was confident that he could use bamboo to start a brand-new civilization.

His mother thought they should use bamboo poles to dry the fish, but unfortunately, cutting bamboo was a big problem.

Bamboo thicker than an adult’s wrist was basically beyond the range of manual cutting. Those crude stone axes, when used on bamboo, would just bounce off, sometimes even injuring the user’s head, but doing no damage to the bamboo itself.

Of course, this was no obstacle for Henry Carter.

He taught the clansmen to light a small fire at the base of the bamboo. After being scorched by fire, the bamboo would quickly soften and fall. After bending it back and forth a few times, the bamboo would break.

Henry Carter didn’t want the easily obtained dead bamboo; he only wanted fresh green bamboo.

The clansmen collected the dead bamboo to use as racks for drying fish, while Henry Carter needed the green bamboo to build himself a real house.

He insisted that he was not a savage. Since he was not a cave-dwelling savage, he should have a proper house, even if it was built from bamboo.

In the evening, his exhausted mother returned, bringing some bad news: the tribe had run out of salt. She planned to take the girls of the tribe to trade for some salt.

Henry Carter glanced at the tribe’s ugly girls and felt this was very inappropriate. His mother couldn’t treat these girls like chickens raised in a rural household, to be traded away whenever they ran out of oil, salt, soy sauce, or vinegar.

What’s more, these girls really were just little girls. Judging by the two egg-sized bumps on their chests, they were definitely not adults yet. The thought of marrying them off to men from another tribe at this age made Henry Carter shudder. He decided to keep these sisters of his for another two years.

For a former elite geological team member, finding a salt mine was not a difficult task.

There was one right on the mountain where they lived, because he had seen many shells embedded in the rocks.

Where there are shells, it means this place was once a vast ocean. Since it was once an ocean, it’s only natural that there would be salt mines.

The seawater was gone, but the salt and various minerals from the seawater would not have disappeared.

As for how to find these salt mines, that was even simpler. Just take the little wild ox for a walk, and it would find the salt mine.

Things turned out to be even easier than Henry Carter had imagined, because after the little wild ox was full, it started licking the rocks on the mountainside.

Henry Carter licked the rock as well—it was bitter, astringent, and salty. This was a sodium sulfate salt mine. The strong salty taste indicated that the sodium chloride content was pretty good.

The gray color only meant that there were too many impurities in the salt, so it needed to be dissolved in water and filtered before it could be basically edible.

The origin of the salt was a secret the previous chieftain would rather die than reveal. Or perhaps the murderer who threw the chieftain off the cliff never thought to ask. Even his mother only thought about how to become chieftain, never considering how the tribe would survive without salt.

Fortunately, there was Henry Carter.

He knocked down a pile of gray salt ore and gave it to his mother. After tasting this salt, which was about thirty percent impurities, she was satisfied and went back to being chieftain.

She was now the most important person in the tribe—the one who led everyone to catch endless fish, and the one who could continue to provide salt.

Henry Carter was very busy.

After solving the tribe’s food and salt problems, he devoted himself to leading the tribe’s evolution, striving to progress from cave dwellers to nest builders.

Don’t underestimate this step of moving from living in caves to living in houses. Its significance was enormous. In the long process of human evolution, just taking this step took hundreds of thousands of years.

And the appearance of houses also meant the simultaneous emergence of families with fixed partners.

In this respect, the future that Henry Carter had experienced was not much different from the present.

No longer could a large group of people live together, nor could women be given a little food in exchange for anything desired. If things continued this way, the story of one person getting sick and wiping out the whole tribe would soon play out here.

In a tribe of about two hundred people, most were always out gathering food, so there were very few who could help Henry Carter build houses.

However, when the first bamboo house built under Henry Carter’s direction appeared, people were amazed for a long time. His mother even tried to claim this beautiful bamboo house for herself, but Henry Carter unceremoniously drove her out.

The reason was simple: his mother had no interest in bathing at all. Lying next to her, Henry Carter could always smell a deadly odor—a mix of salted fish, rotting meat, and all sorts of indescribable strange smells.

And her favorite way to sleep was to hug her chubby son like an octopus, never letting go throughout the night.

In the days when he needed his mother’s protection, Henry Carter could endure any stench to survive.

Now, there was no need to suffer like that anymore.