Chapter 418: The Meaning of Slowing Down
The further they walked, the more scattered rocks appeared along the shore. Many of the small tide pools were no longer still.
Under normal circumstances, in any other place, Lady Calico would never let a single fish or shrimp escape her grasp—even the tiniest ones, no bigger than a pinky finger, would be caught. Even if the Daoist wouldn’t eat them, she would meticulously clean and dry them into little fish jerky for storage. After all, she was small, and fish of that size were just right for her.
But today, in this place, Lady Calico was different.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care for them. Lady Calico was very frugal.
She simply decided to let the tide pools temporarily keep them for her. Once she was done collecting all the big fish and big shrimp, she would return for the smaller ones and turn them into fish jerky.
As she went, she fully applied the skills she had secretly learned from the local villagers—along with her own natural abilities. It was almost as if she was deliberately demonstrating her newfound expertise to the Daoist.
She constantly bent down, searching through the cracks between rocks for hidden fish, shrimp, and crabs. Sometimes, she lifted stone slabs to look beneath them. No matter how well-hidden, nimble, or ferocious the creatures were, none could escape her cat’s claws.
And when she caught something? Not everything went into her pouch. If she deemed it suitable, she simply gave it a rinse in fresh water—then popped it straight into her mouth.
By the time noon approached, she was already standing behind an elderly woman wearing a straw hat, watching her pry shellfish and oysters off the rock walls.
At the same time, she pulled out her own Water-Splitting Blade, lowering her head to study it carefully.
“Enough,” Song You quickly called out to her. “Your harvest is already more than plentiful. If you keep going at this rate, you’ll have caught so much in just one day that the next few days will be incredibly boring.”