Making Tang Yumo his personal maid was Chuck's own idea to begin with, so when this uninvited guest appeared in the residence, Chuck wasn't surprised, nor did he pay her any mind.
Until she pushed open the bedroom door and got sprayed in the face by the blonde mare who had just opened her "water valve."
The thick, sweet-smelling sticky liquid slowly slid down Tang Yumo's hair and the bridge of her nose, some even flowing into her mouth through the cracks of her lips. Yet she acted as if she completely didn't realize it, just standing blankly in place holding the wooden bucket.
Julia's high-arched waist finally lowered slowly. After she had gifted all the abundant energy essence in her belly to Tang Yumo at the door, her bulging snowy abdomen returned to its usual slightly swollen state. From between her red and swollen butterfly wings, hot streams still trickled out occasionally, finally returning to tranquility.
Chuck flipped out of bed, gently wiped the remaining drool from the corner of Julia's mouth, and briefly checked her condition before nodding reassuringly.
The craziness with Julia this morning was actually a completely unexpected and sudden situation. It was a natural act between two people whose bodies, souls, and emotions were extremely compatible. Even Chuck hadn't expected it would go to such an extent in the end...
That hot, sexy waist finally calmed down gradually amidst spasms and overflow. Chuck turned around, expressionlessly took the wooden bucket holding warm water from Tang Yumo's hands, and said indifferently: "Go fetch another bucket of hot water."
Hearing this, Tang Yumo, whose face was covered in thick, sticky fluid, finally snapped out of her daze. The moment she realized what had happened, her entire face instantly turned bright red. She could only forcefully suppress the discomfort in her heart, nod, and then quickly turn around and run out of the bedroom.
Chuck merely glanced at her and paid her no more mind.
He placed the wooden basin by the bed, wrung out the linen towel, and personally began wiping Julia's body.
It wasn't until over ten minutes later that the personal maid finally returned.
Although it was earlier than usual, the other women on the bed were also getting up one after another. Chuck covered Julia with a blanket, then sat by the bed, still naked, looking at the red-faced Tang Yumo, and spoke plainly.
"Spraying you in the face was purely a coincidence, don't mind it. But from now on, without my permission, don't enter the bedroom uninvited. There won't be a next time, got it?"
As his words fell, Tang Yumo's body trembled slightly from fear, and she nodded without hesitation.
"...Got it."
"Mmh."
Chuck acknowledged, then spread his hands, pointing to the area between his legs still covered in white foam and various traces.
"Now, do what you're supposed to do."
...
In all fairness, Tang Yumo had almost no talent when it came to taking care of people.
The Three Obediences and Four Virtues—for Chinese women, these should have been good qualities ingrained in their bones. But in today's world, women who grew up enjoying various privileges seem to have mostly abandoned them completely.
Tang Yumo was obviously one of them.
Even though she had been learning under Yitong's careful guidance for a full week, just simply wiping Chuck's body put her in a flustered mess... she even almost dumped the entire basin of hot water onto the bed they slept on.
It was only thanks to Chuck's quick reflexes that he reached out and caught it in time.
"Alright, I'll wipe myself."
In no mood to watch this woman perform a pantomime anymore, Chuck casually grabbed the clean linen towel from the basin, frowned, and motioned for her to get lost, not forgetting to add a sentence in passing.
"Don't forget what I said before. You were trained for a week, and this coming week is your trial period. You'd better take it seriously."
Halfway through speaking, Chuck couldn't hold it back and couldn't help but laugh out loud. He looked at her and spoke somewhat bewilderedly.
"It's been a week. As a woman, you can't even learn such a simple task properly. Just what kind of trash are you?"
There was no beating around the bush, no yielding or coddling. Chuck simply spoke the thoughts in his heart using the most straightforward words.
And that is the truth. As a woman, if she couldn't even do the most basic job of taking care of people, she didn't have a shred of qualification to enjoy a man's protection.
Hearing these words, Tang Yumo's head lowered even further. Her red face bore not only shame and fear, but also a bit of unwillingness and humiliation.
Growing up, she had always been the "other people's child" in everyone's mouth. After growing up and entering the system to become a teacher, she even considered herself an unquestionable "high-quality female" in her heart. When had she ever been evaluated by someone using words like "trash"?
But the fact remained, she messed up. Just as she had worried most, she had completely and utterly messed up.
"I will learn properly... I'm sorry... Master."
As Tang Yumo spoke, she bent at the waist and bowed, just like a Japanese woman.
Since she was a maid, she naturally had to address Chuck as Master. This was different from his roleplay with Yitong; it was a true master-servant relationship.
"Alright, get out."
Chuck had no interest in her noise anymore, waving his hand casually to shoo her away. Then he simply wiped himself down, put his clothes back on, and walked out of the residence.
As to whether Tang Yumo would ultimately pass the trial, Chuck didn't actually care much.
Tang Yumo once took things too hard and jumped into the sea, but now her hope for survival was rekindled. Chuck was in no mood to investigate what kind of psychological shift happened before and after. To him, the reason for keeping this woman was actually very simple.
It was merely a sliver of pity remaining in his heart.
...
It was a new day again.
The daily morning workout concluded. After eating breakfast, Chuck didn't stop; he grabbed his tools and a wicker basket, taking Valentina and Kaede all the way towards the red stone hills.
The current focus of work was undoubtedly the task of building a pipeline to divert fresh water.
During the recent period, Chuck and the Gu family mother and daughter had discussed several times, finally deciding on the plan for laying the pipeline.
They would cast iron pipes—one meter long, with an inner diameter of about six centimeters and a thickness of just over one centimeter—using a pure iron casting method. The pipes would be connected end-to-end through spigot-and-socket joints, coated with a layer of mortar on the inside for simple rust prevention, and finally connected head-to-tail. They would be buried underground to divert water from the volcano summit down.
This was the simplest and most direct method for diverting fresh water under comprehensive consideration.
But even so, just a rough estimate of the materials and labor required made Chuck's scalp tingle.
After all, although making one pipe wasn't difficult, the location of the volcano water source was just too far from the stone slope platform. Even though they could ignore the terrain and go in a straight line as much as possible when laying the water pipe, even in a straight line, Chuck roughly estimated that the total length of the pipeline would be at least 700 meters or more.
Following his initial concept, Chuck cast a few iron pipes first. He found that if they followed the ideal pipe thickness, just a single one-meter-long iron pipe would require nearly twenty kilograms of pure iron...
A distance of 700 meters would require at least nearly 800 iron pipes, which is a full sixteen tons of pure iron!
Converted into the red iron ore Chuck needed to mine, that was nearly forty tons of weight!
To mine forty tons of iron ore, if Chuck wanted a long-term solution to the water problem and didn't want the pipeline laid with such great effort to face problems due to rust and leaks in just a year or two, naturally he couldn't cut corners on materials.
However, although it sounds scary, actually, based on Chuck's experience, this quantity wasn't considered too much. After all, iron ore is inherently heavier than ordinary stone, so the corresponding volume is smaller. Just the red iron ore veins exposed on the surface of the red stone hills that Chuck had explored so far already had reserves far exceeding hundreds of tons.
So mining ore wasn't really a problem.
The key lay in the subsequent smelting, assembly, and pipeline laying.
Eight hundred iron pipes. And that's not counting the effort required to dig trenches, fill them with soil, and lay the pipeline. A completely massive super project.
But as it happened, this was the problem Chuck needed to solve most right now.
Even this time, Chuck's workbench cheat couldn't provide him with much help. He had tried to use the DIY blueprint function to craft it, but for a large-scale blueprint exceeding 700 meters, which also had to adapt to the terrain, trying to draw it out in advance wasn't even as convenient as improvising while digging the trench...
Therefore, things turned out to be simpler in the end.
During the past period, Chuck took Valentina and Kaede to mine ore every morning. In the afternoon, he grabbed the weighted shovel and pickaxe, went alone to the water source at the volcano, and carefully selected the positions for digging the pipeline grooves. He would return in the evening, taking advantage of the coolness before sunset to fire up the furnace, smelt, and cast the iron pipes.
Morning workout, daytime labor, nighttime fucking. The days passed in an orderly fashion. After a week, Chuck's workouts yielded a 0.13 base attribute improvement, he successfully finished selecting the 810-meter total pipeline route, and simultaneously smelted the required 150 iron pipes.
Starting today, it's the day to officially begin laying the pipeline!
The morning air was cool and fresh. Chuck walked all the way to the volcano, arriving at the hot spring platform exuding the familiar sulfur smell.
It wasn't until he killed the giant bird and truly occupied the volcanic zone excluding the summit that Chuck discovered that the water source of the sulfur hot spring he found earlier was just one of the many water sources flowing down from the summit.
And there were many more water sources like this around the mountain peak.
As the source of the island's water, since it was a lake naturally accumulated after the former crater extinguished, the water flowing or seeping from the edge of the summit obviously flowed down scattered along the peak walls. It was just that from different directions, they eventually converged gradually at the foot of the mountain.
Among them, those on the north and west sides converged into streams, giving birth to a river valley and a lake respectively. The south-facing side had the least water, eventually becoming a hot spring, evaporating and disappearing in the residual heat.
There were three water sources for the hot spring in total. Chuck's pipeline project this time intended to intercept the largest one and divert it to the stone slope platform.
Doing this would undoubtedly shrink the scale of the hot spring, but due to the existence of the other two water sources, it wouldn't completely disappear either. In the future, when needed, he could still bring the women to the summit to enjoy it—a plan having the best of both worlds.
As for the method of intercepting the water source, Chuck chose a very simple and crude way.
—Directly use a pickaxe to dig a groove at the bottom of the water source, then place a stone trough made of quartz sandstone. By chiseling a hole on the side at the bottom of the stone trough, a pipe can be inserted.
Chuck spent some time completing the installation of the upstream water collection device. Then he took out his shovel and began digging the pipeline groove along his pre-selected route.
In the volcanic zone, especially this hot spring platform closest to the summit, most of the exposed terrain was dominated by that pitch-black rock. This was similar to the granite Chuck encountered inside the stone walls when he excavated the artificial cave before; both were hard as hell.
Trying to dig a pipeline groove out of this kind of rock mass was an almost impossible task.
But fortunately, even in this kind of terrain, not all the ground was exposed rock mass like this. There were still some areas covered by surface weathered soil or black stone gravel. Although the depth was shallow, it was enough to cover the pipeline.
Chuck had chosen his route based on this premise earlier.
Going all the way down from the hot spring platform, whenever he encountered rock mass obstruction, he bypassed it as much as possible. Although this would extend the overall length of the pipeline, ensuring the pipeline's coverage was highly beneficial for subsequent rust prevention and durability.
And as he dug further down the mountain, the soil depth became deeper, and the depth of the groove gradually deepened from the original twenty centimeters to thirty centimeters.
Chuck was busy all the way until noon, and had just dug the groove to above the red stone hills.
He continued to be busy from noon to evening, and finally reached below the red stone hills.
It wasn't until he dragged his exhausted body back home and took a shower served by Tang Yumo that Chuck finally returned to the room, came to the dining table, and truly sat down to catch his breath.
Looking at it now, just the task of digging the pipeline groove would require a full two days.
Fortunately, Chuck's current time was relatively ample. And just as he expected, whether it was the iron pickaxe, iron axe, or iron shovel, after the weight of the tools was multiplied, he finally found the feeling of "laboring" again.
It also indeed played a role in exercising his body to a certain extent.
...
Night fell.
Tonight, Chuck was the first to return to the bedroom.
He stripped completely naked without hesitation, lay on the large bed with his high-spirited giant dragon erect, waiting for tonight's first opponent while gazing at the ceiling and the countdown in the corner of his vision by the dim firelight.
89:10:18:54
Less than ninety days left.
What remained to be faced were three lord-class fierce beasts.
But for Chuck, this time wasn't about evenly distributing time to conquer them one by one. Instead, he would follow his own rhythm, strengthening himself bit by bit, until he was strong enough that Chuck had absolute certainty in defeating all the enemies blocking his path.
Two months.
This was the boundary Chuck had drawn for himself in his heart.
Use two months to settle the water issue, the last of all survival needs, and then become as strong as possible...
Then use one month to clear the whole thing in one breath!