Starting from Robinson Crusoe

...

Knowing Bi Kai was exhausted, Chen Zhou had tried several times during the explanation to persuade him to go rest, but Bi Kai was stubborn to the extreme and forced himself to hold on until he finished speaking before finally falling asleep.

Adding more firewood to the bonfire, he stood dazed at the doorway of the shack, looking at Bi Kai’s thin body curled up under the animal hide, frowning, as if making some kind of decision.

That night, the Three-headed Saw-toothed Tiger slept poorly, constantly woken by Chen Zhou and Bi Kai.

At dawn they were still hungry, staring at the fawn’s corpse by the bonfire, wanting to eat, but without the Leader’s permission they didn’t dare, and could only circle the fire anxiously, glancing around, never straying far from the deer’s body.

Their pacing footsteps were like Chen Zhou’s unsettled thoughts.

He was making a difficult decision—

Whether or not to let Bi Kai use the Strong Regeneration Injection he carried.

Taking the silver-glinting syringe out from the inner pocket of his clothes, Chen Zhou turned his head, sat back down by the fire, and studied it carefully.

Strictly speaking, he had already saved Bi Kai’s life once; accepting any reward now would be hardly excessive.

And he hadn’t used that to demand repayment—in fact he had even taken the initiative to say that, if he had the chance, he would avenge Bi Kai and Gao Yao. Rationally speaking, there was nothing improper in what he’d done.

But in any matter you can’t only look at yourself; you have to look at the other person too.

Regardless of whether Bi Kai truly harbored a death wish, when Chen Zhou searched his own heart, he felt that if the dying man were himself, he might not be able to let go of the temptation to live a little longer, staking his own life so that someone else could benefit.

More importantly, he felt that if it were him in Bi Kai’s place, he probably wouldn’t be able to act with such loyalty and courage, to go this far for a friend.

Animals are all self-serving, and humans even more so.

But precisely because most living beings in this world are self-serving, those who sacrifice themselves for others are all the more precious.

...

The sun had risen; the silver syringe bathed in sunlight, turning slowly between Chen Zhou’s fingers.

To anyone who understood what the syringe was for, the liquid slowly flowing in the tube would be filled with temptation.

"Strong Regeneration Injection."

It meant that aside from aging, anyone who possessed it could obtain a second life.

It was infinite room for error, and also represented the hope of turning the tables even at the brink of despair.

Even though Chen Zhou didn’t believe he would ever face a near-death moment, the world is unpredictable; who could say he would never run into that one-in-ten-thousand chance?

To appreciate someone, to admire someone, and then take out your own "second life" to save him—this kind of boldness is something not everyone possesses.

Moreover, they were not living under a normal social order at the moment.

The cruel challenge rules constrained every person on this land. Helping someone was tantamount to aiding the enemy, even if that person had no malicious intent.

What’s more, even if you took a step back and said that helping Bi Kai now allowed him to live until the challenge ended, at that time only two people could leave; he would still die.

Unless he actively gave up the challenge, chose to leave the challenge zone, and stayed forever on this ancient wasteland—that would be a torment in its own right.

Thinking it through, there were simply too many reasons not to support taking out the precious Strong Regeneration Injection for Bi Kai’s use.

But to do something often doesn’t require many "not worthwhile" factors; as long as there is one "worthwhile," that is enough.

The syringe in his hand finally stopped rotating, the flat needle pointing upward, and Chen Zhou also stood up.

...

Lowering his head, he walked into the shack. Leaning beside the already soundly sleeping Bi Kai, Chen Zhou heard the faint sound of his breathing.

Without making a fuss, and without waking Bi Kai on purpose, he carefully extended a hand to grasp Bi Kai’s ruined arm.

At this moment, Chen Zhou was extremely tense.

He wasn’t worried about Bi Kai being startled awake, nor distressed over this syringe, nor afraid of making a mistake in the process and wasting it.

He was afraid that a prompt would suddenly appear in front of him, explicitly forbidding him to continue.

The extra clauses in the challenge rules had mentioned—

"To ensure this challenge remains sufficiently entertaining, please do not give up on yourselves and end the challenge prematurely, and under no circumstances privately cooperate in a way that robs the challenge of its competitive nature."

Back dozens of days ago, his brief intersection with Bi Kai and Gao Yao had already brushed that red line of private cooperation. It was only because the contact was short and they didn’t meet again afterward that it hadn’t constituted cooperation.

Now he had reunited with Bi Kai, and while they were not in the same group he was still taking out a syringe from his supplies to inject Bi Kai. This undoubtedly cemented an act of cooperation.

Chen Zhou knew well what the Space-Time Administration Bureau was capable of: the movements of every challenger were monitored by that group of beings who could almost be called "gods."

What Chen Zhou feared most was being subjected to an irresistible force that would prevent him from doing this.

Yet what puzzled him was that even after he pulled Bi Kai’s soft arm out from the animal-hide coat and pressed the needle against his skin, no prompt appeared, nor did he hear any unusual sound.

In the end, when Chen Zhou quietly injected the entire syringe, still nothing happened, as if the Space-Time Administration Bureau had turned a blind eye to his actions.

...

The silver sheen gone, the syringe looked as if it had been corroded. Chen Zhou casually tossed it into the pile of broken branches that made up the shack.

Walking out of the shack, Chen Zhou did not stay to wait.

Whether the injection would restore Bi Kai’s Martial Arts was hard to say, but his life would certainly be safe for the time being.

Worried that once Bi Kai woke up he would come asking what had happened, or insist on working himself to death for Chen Zhou, or cling to him wanting to gift him the herd of deer, Chen Zhou felt it would be better to leave quietly first.

...

He softly called the Three-headed Saw-toothed Tiger to follow. Before leaving, Chen Zhou added plenty of firewood to the bonfire, so Bi Kai wouldn’t freeze to death in his sleep.

Then, without looking back, he led the little fellows out of the woods and headed up the mountain.

What mattered most right now was filling the Saw-toothed Tigers’ bellies—and, of course, getting himself some breakfast too.

...

Early morning was exactly when many wild beasts left their dens to move about; hunting at this time was most likely to yield results.

On his way up the ridge, Chen Zhou scanned around for prey as he walked, while thinking about a question—a question that had been troubling him for a long time—

Was he actually one of the 100 participants in the challenge, or the 101st person, outside the plan?

Did the challenge rules truly apply to him or not?

When the challenge ended, would he be able to return to his own world?

From the very first day of the challenge, there had been suspicious points.

As one of the "challengers," Chen Zhou had bizarrely not received any of the survival tools mentioned in the rules.

And he seemed to have arrived much earlier than the other challengers—at the very least, Paul only appeared after he had already started making fire by friction.

At the time, Chen Zhou had simply assumed that, as someone who’d joined the challenge midway, he had been subjected to some sort of punishment by the Space-Time Administration Bureau, or that because his physical fitness was far superior to the other challengers, he was bearing a kind of balancing handicap.

But as the days passed one by one, he gradually realized that things seemed quite different from his original understanding.

The first thing that shook his assumptions was the Black-robed Man.

The Black-robed Man’s physical condition and combat skills were clearly far above those of the other challengers; in theory this too was a kind of imbalance.

Yet what was even more unbalanced was that the Black-robed Man possessed equipment that could almost be called cheating. That anti-stab armor alone was enough to fend off most physical attacks, and he even had at least two Weak Regeneration Pills.

From the very first day of the challenge, there had been suspicious points.

As one of the "challengers," Chen Zhou had bizarrely not received any of the survival tools mentioned in the rules.

And he seemed to have arrived much earlier than the other challengers—at the very least, Paul only appeared after he had already started making fire by friction.

At the time, Chen Zhou had simply assumed that, as someone who’d joined the challenge midway, he had been subjected to some sort of punishment by the Space-Time Administration Bureau, or that because his physical fitness was far superior to the other challengers, he was bearing a kind of balancing handicap.

But as the days passed one by one, he gradually realized that things seemed quite different from his original understanding.

The first thing that shook his assumptions was the Black-robed Man.

The Black-robed Man’s physical condition and combat skills were clearly far above those of the other challengers; in theory this too was a kind of imbalance.

Yet what was even more unbalanced was that the Black-robed Man possessed equipment that could almost be called cheating. That anti-stab armor alone was enough to fend off most physical attacks, and he even had at least two Weak Regeneration Pills.