70: Chapter 70 Solar-Powered Water Dispenser

It was not yet dawn.

On the eastern horizon, there was a ghastly cyan pallor.

The sea breeze carried a bone-chilling coolness.

Chen Jian pushed his glasses, which were covered in fingerprints, up the bridge of his nose and issued his first iron decree after seizing power on the Deserted Island.

"Ma Liang, take two nimble-handed people to the beach wreckage area, and strip back all the transparent plastic sheets, large plastic bags, and packaged plastic wrap you can find for me."

"The rest who can still stand steady, follow me to the nearby garbage dumps to rummage through waste iron boxes, empty pop cans, and plastic bottles. As long as the bottoms don't leak and they can hold water, it's fine."

To survive, the efficiency was frighteningly high.

In less than twenty minutes, everyone panted as they returned to the designated smooth beach.

Holding various tattered plastic skins torn from the cruise ship wreckage and all sorts of bottles and cans in their arms.

Ma Liang threw a piece of plastic sheet still stained with unknown brown blemishes onto the ground, his face full of doubt.

"Engineer Chen, what on earth are you tossing about for a long time picking up this lousy plastic? Squeeze it hard, can this thing still wring fresh water out for you?"

Chen Jian completely ignored his unnutritious mocking and walked straight to the center of the beach.

"Dig a pit." Chen Jian pointed at the slightly damp sandy ground beneath his feet and ordered Ma Liang and the other two.

Ma Liang was full of resentment, feeling that Chen Jian was wielding a feather as a decree.

But under the torment of extreme thirst, he still obediently knelt on the ground and desperately dug the sand with both hands.

Soon, a standard inverted conical sand pit the size of a washbasin and about half a meter deep was dug out.

Chen Jian stepped forward, had someone rub several plastic bottles against a stone to split them in two, and then placed them right in the center of the bottom of the circular pit.

Immediately after, he picked up a plastic bucket with a broken half-rim next to him, walked to the edge of the beach, and directly scooped a large half-bucket of turbid seawater.

Then he walked to the edge of the sand pit and poured that half-bucket of seawater directly into the pit. The seawater spread out at the bottom of the pit, and the water level was controlled exceptionally well, just enough not to submerge the few plastic bottles in the very center.

"Holy shit! What are you doing making a pit of poisonous saltwater here?! Do you think we aren't dying fast enough?"

An employee's family member jumped up and cursed loudly.

Just as this group of people was on the verge of going wild, behind the crowd, the IT otaku who hadn't spoken the whole time suddenly slapped his own thigh.

"Snap!" The crisp sound startled the people around.

"Holy shit! Holy shit! I remember!"

The IT guy's eyes were red as he pointed at the sand pit in front of Chen Jian.

Ma Liang grabbed him by the collar: "What kind of epileptic fit are you having?! What did you remember?"

"The solar distilled water device!"

He was so excited that he was incoherent: "I've watched Bear's 'Man vs. Wild'! This is a physical device that uses high temperatures to evaporate seawater, and then condenses it to extract pure fresh water!"

Ma Liang was so angry that he slapped Zhang Wei on the back of the head: "Since you fucking knew this method, where were you yesterday and the day before yesterday when everyone was thirsty?! Why didn't you say anything!"

Zhang Wei wailed with a bitter face:

"Brother Liang, can you be reasonable?! Yesterday I was so thirsty that my brain stem shrank, my stomach was bubbling with sour water, and all I could think about in my head was how to go up and chop up that kid Lin Fan to snatch his nongfu spring!"

"Everyone is just an office corporate slave, I gave those few high school physics questions back to the teacher long ago! If I hadn't watched Engineer Chen dig a pit and pour water, you couldn't beat it into me and I still wouldn't have remembered this matter!"

Listening to Zhang Wei's complaints, Chen Jian sneered at the corner of his mouth.

Sure enough, when people face desperate situations and extreme hunger, let alone intelligence, even basic logical thinking ability would be excreted as cleanly as urine.

Only an absolutely calm person like his wife could maintain reason forever, thereby standing at the top of the food chain.

Chen Jian ignored the noisy crowd.

He picked up the piece of transparent plastic sheet with the largest area found just now, and tightly and evenly paved and covered it above the half-meter-deep circular pit.

He squatted down, and with extremely nimble hands and feet, used the surrounding wet sand and heavy stones to tightly press down the edges of the plastic sheet.

After confirming that the entire interior of the sand pit was completely sealed and not a single bit of air could leak in.

Chen Jian straightened up and picked an exceptionally smooth pebble the size of a thumb from the ground.

He placed it right in the dead center of the taut transparent plastic sheet.

The plastic sheet that was originally pulled flat and neat immediately sagged deeply downward under the pressure of the pebble's gravity, forming a dead-corner-free inverted conical curved surface.

And the lowest condensation dripping point of this conical curved surface, without any deviation, precisely aimed above the plastic bottle at the bottom of the pit.

Having finished this last step, Chen Jian let out a long breath of turbid air and patted the rough sand and soil on his hands.

"Zhang Wei has already stated the principle: physical condensation."

Chen Jian led people to make dozens of such devices before clapping his hands, "Alright, now, the only thing we need to do is one thing."

"Wait for the sun to come out."

As long as the sun shines on it, the seawater at the bottom of the pit absorbs heat and evaporates into water vapor, encountering the plastic sheet with a lower temperature above to condense into water droplets.

The water droplets slide along the slope toward the middle low valley, and finally drip into the plastic bottle.

The distilled fresh water that can be directly consumed was thus created out of thin air.

Under the dual endorsement of the IT guy's science popularization and Chen Jian's practical operation, the more than twenty workplace elites on the beach whose eyes were turning green from hunger were completely convinced.

They only hated themselves for not reading more survival knowledge and spending all their energy on making money and sucking up to Su Qingxue.

Ma Liang and a few other big fellows sat directly on their buttocks around the sand pit.

They guarded that tattered plastic sheet like they were worshipping the God of Wealth, not even daring to blink their eyes.

...

The same early morning.

The people on the beach below were straining their eyes red for a few drops of unfiltered distilled water.

Right above them in the Karst Cave, the wood in the campfire had long burned out, leaving only a few dark red charcoal fires emitting a cozy residual warmth that made people sleepy.

Lin Fan comfortably leaned inside the partition, his eyes closed in contentment.

If an outsider looked over, they would definitely think that this "living king of hell" whose hands had been stained with blood was catching up on sleep.

But the actual situation was that Lin Fan's entire attention was highly concentrated on the glowing transparent system panel in front of him that only he could see.

[Detected that the intertidal reef area in the southeast direction is currently in a rare major ebb tide period.]

[Optimal time window for ebb tide: 06:15 - 08:30.]

[There are a large number of lingering blue crab communities under the reefs in this water area that have not receded with the tide, and most of their hiding spots are distributed in fractured rock crevices and deep water pools at the bottom.]

[Estimated absolute capturable stock: 40 - 60 (adults). It is recommended to carry a large-capacity container to go and clear them out.]

Looking at these oil-dripping golden characters all over the screen, Lin Fan opened his eyes.

Blue crabs!

In ordinary fresh food supermarkets in civilized society, these were high-end goods starting at over a hundred yuan per catty!

On this Deserted Island where everyone could beat each other's brains out for half a piece of mud-stained compressed biscuit, what did dozens of plump large blue crabs mean?