Greetings, Numero. The chicks have accepted your offering and come back with opinion.
First, for the purpose of this return, chapters 1 and 7 have been read as samples. While you do know how to weave words, your ideas do not make sense when linked. There's also a problem with your choice of words, some of them being more an approximation of the sound of what they should be instead of the exact word used (Buck naked, whereas it is Butt Naked), but this bird rushes itself, let's go slowly, shall we?
Chapter 1:
Idea incongruence: "Cleo coughed up a mouthful of water as he woke up to the taste of salt and blood. Occasionally, his nose twitched due to the fishy smell lingering in the air. As to his body, the lower half was soaked while the other half was dry from the heat of the sun." He just woke up, but "occasionally" his nose twitched? How long did you imagine this passage taking? In this bird mind, it should have been brief, yet, this adverb is making it seem so much longer than it has to be! Also, the way you write "As to his body", as if it was obvious, is instead, the first time his bodily parts are mentioned. In fact, this is the first paragraph of your chapter!
Idea Incongruence: "Forcing his aching body, he sat using his noodly hands". Noodly hands? Did you perhaps mean unstable hands? Noodly has instead given the idea of long, thin limbs. Sure, they are also soft, and untrustworthy to use as a support. Perhaps as legs and feet it might have worked…
Idea Incongruence: "Dragging his weakened body, he snailed to a blue baggage nearest to him, intending to make it his first step toward his goal." This human has done a very complex movement: snailing. The human body does not usually do "snailing". Are you sure of that?
Repetitive Idea: "Thinking of his needs, his stomach growled in protest due to his hunger." Stomachs growl out of hunger, so you're being needlessly repetitive here.
Repetitive word/idea: "Now that he’d decided where to build his shelter, he must now gather materials to build it". There are two now, needlessly.
Idea Inversion: "To find it, he needed to go inside… Looking at the lush forest, he was a bit overwhelmed." There's a paragraph in between here, so when you finish reading "inside" you are actually left wondering inside where.
Idea Incongruence: "Every stomp he made produced a crunching sound beneath him as the sand flattened from his black leather shoes." Those must have been quite the steps if he was STOMPING the sand.
Idea Incongruence: "Shaking his head, he ignored the vision he saw. It might be an aftereffect of the accident, as his head appeared to have received heavy trauma." Heavy trauma? Are you writing medical fiction? Because if it had been "hit his head hard" this bird would have sympathized with Cleo, but with a heavy trauma, it is instead worried he might need medical attention and this story might end as "And then Cleo woke up in the Hospital Bed. It had all been just a dream" for real.
Conclusion:
No chapter 7 remarks. It would have been a rehash of chapter 1, and quite frankly, this bird had to turn up its disbelief filter by quite a few notches while reading. It was doing real time edit of your chapter while reading since some parts were in dire need of rephrasing to make better sense: cut up the usage of repeated ideas, better usage of words instead of metaphors, don't be inverting the order you present your ideas.
Understand that while you might have a story to tell, and your form of presentation is not the worst this chick has seen, it is still lacking. You would benefit quite a bit from simplifying your language, writing more objectively and clearly, without wandering around,
This bird wishes you good luck on your endeavours, Farming Writer.
