Chapter 302 - 200: Phenomenal Natural Disaster (Part 2)

Chapter 302: Chapter 200: Phenomenal Natural Disaster (Part 2)

CRACK!!

A deafening thunderclap exploded.

Unlike the rolling thunder from before, this clap was singularly terrifying, its volume ratcheting up by several notches.

His eardrums throbbed from the immense sound. Lin Chen frowned. He had just taken a step when a black shadow in his peripheral vision suddenly lunged at him.

"Mamma mia!!!"

Erica screamed and jumped on him, clinging like an octopus as she curled into a trembling ball.

"?"

Lin Chen’s hands, raised instinctively, hovered in mid-air. For a moment, he had no idea where to put them.

"Aren’t you supposed to be a wilderness guide? You can handle animal guts but you’re afraid of thunder? Where’s all that professional competence now?"

"Y-Y-You... Everyone has a weakness! What’s wrong with being afraid of thunder? It’s perfectly normal!"

Erica jumped off him but kept her hands on his shoulders, staring warily at the sky outside.

"I’ve never heard thunder that terrifying before. The normal kind isn’t scary. I didn’t even flinch during the last downpour. This is an exception!"

"That’s true," Lin Chen agreed with a nod. "That last one was pretty terrifying, like something exploded. I get the feeling this bamboo hut, as it is, can’t withstand a storm of this magnitude."

"There’s nothing we can do about it. We don’t have rope to secure it or big rocks to weigh down the roof. Even if we cut down heavy logs, we couldn’t get them up there. And if we did, they’d just roll off because of the roof’s slope. We’ll just have to leave it up to fate."

"I’m going up to take a look."

After shaking off Erica’s hands, Lin Chen placed a foot on the steps, only to spot several faint, dark streaks at the top edges of the pit.

His expression changed instantly.

’Could it be?!’

He hurried up the steps. Once at the top, he confirmed his fears: a shallow layer of rainwater had collected on the floor. Worse, the water was still rising, now trickling over the edge of the pit.

"Hey! Erica, get up here, quick!"

"Is water getting in?"

Erica noticed his urgent tone and saw the water trickling down too.

As he yelled, she was already scrambling up the steps to the main floor.

Once she was at the top, she saw that the entire floor was already covered in water.

The ground where the bamboo hut stood was relatively flat, but that was only in comparison to its surroundings. The entire mountainside was on a downward slope.

With enough water pooling, it was bound to flow downhill.

"What should we do? If we leave it, the cellar will flood, right?"

"Don’t panic." Lin Chen held up a hand to calm her, then stared at the water on the floor for a moment.

He studied the walls for a long time and finally found the source. Some of the water was seeping through gaps between the logs higher up the wall, then trickling down.

However, the main problem was with the wall’s fundamental structure.

The base of the bamboo wall, which he had assumed was watertight, actually had an unexpected flaw due to its mortise-and-tenon construction.

It was true that the lowest logs were pressed firmly into the soil. But if one looked at the horizontal logs at either end, more than half their mass was buried underground, leaving only a knuckle’s height exposed.

The front, back, and side walls used an interlocking structure where the logs were stacked in a staggered pattern. This inevitably resulted in some sections being higher than others.

The water was seeping in through the gaps on the lower-lying side.

He went outside to check, and sure enough, the flooding was even more extreme out there.

Especially near the point of entry, the water was already a finger-joint deep and pouring steadily through the gaps in the logs.

Trying to modify the bamboo wall in these conditions was clearly not an option.

Lin Chen circled the hut twice and quickly made up his mind.

’Dig a drainage trench!’

He grabbed a piece of bamboo that had been split in half to use as a makeshift shovel and started digging a trench parallel to the hut’s uphill wall.

He piled the excavated dirt alongside the trench, creating a berm to further channel the runoff to either side.

He had used this trick before while building a shelter in Alaska. The trench itself was only twenty centimeters deep, but piling the excavated earth alongside it instantly doubled the height of the barrier.

The forty-centimeter barrier was enough to handle the current flow for now. Almost as soon as the trench was complete, the water on the north side of the hut began to recede at a visible rate.

The trench didn’t need to be very long, just enough to divert the rainwater flowing down the slope to either side of the bamboo hut.

With the surface runoff diverted, the water level inside the hut dropped sharply, gradually revealing the soaked earth below.

Erica had already retreated to the cellar steps, which were now the only dry place inside the hut. Even the ground at the bottom of the pit was nearly a third flooded.

She was afraid that if she stayed down there, it would flood completely. ’If the water makes the only staircase fall apart, I’ll be trapped,’ she worried.

As someone surviving in a coastal environment for the first time, Erica was completely at a loss in the face of such a violent storm. She had no idea what she was supposed to do.

She stood rooted to the spot, staring blankly out the door at the downpour, her mind a complete blank.

Lin Chen came back inside, wiping the rain from his face and wringing out his collar and cuffs.

"This damn weather... No wonder that Robert fellow said the Panama challenge was the hardest one in history. A heavy downpour every three days on average, and now we’re getting a storm I’ve only ever seen in documentaries. Without tools, it’s honestly hard to survive for very long."

Even he, a grown man, couldn’t help but feel a knot of fear when faced with a disaster of this scale. It was only natural that Erica, a rich girl with no coastal survival experience, would be at her wit’s end.

The hut fell silent, leaving only the sound of the howling wind and lashing rain outside.

Just as he was trying to think of something to say to break the awkward silence, Erica suddenly pointed outside, her eyes filled with terror.

"Quick, look! What is that?!"

"What?"

Lin Chen had never seen such a look on her face. He whipped his head around.

When he got a clear look at the distant horizon, he couldn’t help but gasp.

His gaze traveled past the river valley forest. Out on the sea, beneath the gloomy sky, a slender tornado was gradually taking shape.

The oppressive black clouds were being pulled into a vortex. Even from this far away, they could see massive sheets of water spraying off the tornado’s surface.

"A waterspout?!"

They both swallowed hard.

’What the hell kind of weather is this for a survival challenge?’

Forget a no-tools challenge; even in a normal competition with gear, anyone who saw this would run as far away as they could.

The power of a tornado is simply not something humans can withstand. It can hurl a car weighing several tons into the sky with ease.

In its path, humans were just tiny insects, no different from scraps of paper scattered by the wind.

"Lin, what are we going to do?"

Erica’s voice trembled, laced with the hint of a sob.

"Are we going to die here?"

"Calm down. Take a deep breath."

Lin Chen patted her shoulder. "It’s going to be okay. From what I know, waterspouts form over the sea. In the vast majority of cases, they can’t make landfall because the surface structure and pressure are different on land."

"Really?"

After all, Erica had fifteen years of wilderness survival experience. Her ability to remain calm in a crisis far surpassed that of an ordinary person.

After Lin Chen’s simple explanation, she quickly calmed down and stared with fascination at the waterspout connecting the sky and the sea.

"Is this kind of thing rare? I think I’ve only ever seen them online. I’ve never heard any of my friends or clients talk about seeing one."