Du Lai turned around to face Fu Miaoxue, and then asked her:

“Young mistress, have you ever heard a saying?”

Fu Miaoxue: “???”

Du Lai: “Even a mosquito’s leg is still meat.”

Fu Miaoxue: “…”

Du Lai shoved the bamboo tube into her hands, turned around, and kept walking.

He stopped trying to catch crabs and instead put more effort into digging in the sand. The beach was abundant — a few scoops was enough to unearth clams, which was far easier than chasing crabs.

After all, his hand was still swollen, and his fever hadn’t fully broken. Going after those nimble little crabs was genuinely taxing.

Fu Miaoxue hugged his growing collection and followed behind, asking: “What’s this thing? How do you eat it? You have to shell it, right? But the shell is so hard… how do you get it off? Do you know how? Du Lai? Du Lai, say something——”

Du Lai was truly at a loss for words with her.

Sometimes she seemed quite capable — like when setting up the tent, or climbing the big rock. Maybe not professional, but with a certain competent air about her.

And yet at other times, she displayed a startling lack of basic knowledge.

“You don’t even know what this is?” Du Lai asked, his patience finally snapping. “You’ve never seen one?”

Fu Miaoxue looked at him blankly. “What’s strange about that? My family doesn’t live by the sea. It’s perfectly normal to have never seen something like this~”

“These are clams!” Du Lai explained wearily. “You know flower clams? Scallops, oysters — you’ve definitely eaten those, right? They’re basically the same type of thing!”

“How can that be?” Fu Miaoxue stared at him in astonishment. “They’re completely different. I’ve had scallops. A scallop is a small, cylindrical thing — white and soft and tender, not hard at all.”

Du Lai: “…”

He didn’t know what to say.

When did scallops become cylindrical? What special mutant variety were wealthy people eating these days?

On her end, Fu Miaoxue had already made the connection herself. She said with sudden understanding: “Oh, I get it! You mean this clam thing is similar to a scallop once you remove the shell, right?”

“Looks like your family’s chef, whenever he served scallops, never showed you the shell.” Du Lai said.

Fu Miaoxue blinked, finding what he said rather strange. “Why would my family’s chef show me a shell while cooking? That kind of thing should go straight in the trash. If he wanted me to look at garbage, he’d have to want to lose his job.”

“Fine…” Du Lai didn’t want to keep arguing this point with her. He said helplessly: “Anyway, these are edible. Remove the shell, cook them, and you can eat them.”

“Oh.” Fu Miaoxue absorbed this new knowledge easily, her mood quite good. “Since they’re edible, let’s dig up a lot more~”

That said, the only one who actually dug was still Du Lai alone.

It wasn’t that Fu Miaoxue refused to work — it was that she was far too easily distracted by everything around her, finding each new thing endlessly fascinating.

Du Lai dug with both hands and unearthed another large one.

At first he thought it was a big clam, but once he pulled it fully out of the sand, he found it was a small octopus hiding inside a shell.

Not bad.

Food supply +1.

Du Lai was about to stuff it into the bamboo tube when he caught a glimpse of Fu Miaoxue frolicking freely along the beach. His heart stirred. He cleared his throat and asked: “Hey, has your family’s chef ever made you octopus?”

Fu Miaoxue heard this and stopped. “No. My grandfather doesn’t let me eat random things.”

“Then you’re in for a treat today.” Du Lai smiled and held up the octopus in his hand. “I just caught one. Rinse it clean and it’s ready to eat.”

Fu Miaoxue rushed over, full of curiosity. “It really is an octopus — smaller than on TV, like a baby octopus.”

She looked up at Du Lai. “You can eat this just by rinsing it?”

“Of course!” Du Lai said, corners of his mouth curling up, face perfectly serious. “You can fry it, pan-fry it, boil it — or of course, you can eat it… raw~”