“We picked her up. I was just about to talk about that.” He Xuan sounded both amused and helpless. “The child said she doesn’t know us, and she doesn’t know you either, so she doesn’t want to leave… I even tried tempting her with grain, but it didn’t work.”
Fu Erdie: “…”
Right. The child was twelve now. When she had come to C City to visit, she had only been seven or eight. She had been so young back then; how could she remember a relative’s older sister who had taken her to the park for one weekend and casually taken a photo with her?
If it were Fu Erdie herself, she would not remember either!
It was because the child’s grandparents often video-called Grandma and sent videos of their little granddaughter that Fu Erdie had occasionally glimpsed her and remembered her. But to the child, Fu Erdie truly had no presence.
Still, it was good that she was cautious. Although there was not much point in someone abducting her, keeping the attitude that “good things don’t fall from the sky” usually helped people live longer.
Fu Erdie looked at her cousin, who was washing his feet, and felt her heart clog.
A seventeen-year-old young man was not even as sensible as a twelve-year-old child!
“Then has the child gone back to her previous residence? What did the base say?”
He Xuan replied, “No. We used two jin of kohlrabi to exchange for the child to stay for two days in the storage room beside the reception office. Although it’s a storage room, I heard it’s much cleaner than the ordinary people’s accommodation.”
Fu Erdie nodded. “That’s true.”
He Xuan continued, “Then I gave her a bottle of drinkable water, along with potatoes and fruit that can be eaten raw, so she can recover a little over these two days and rest. I contacted you as soon as I returned to the room. For now, it seems the base has no intention of detaining people, and they want to use this as an opportunity to establish a long-term trading relationship with us.”
“Trading crystal cores? They probably don’t have many left.” Fu Erdie rubbed her chin.
“Yes, they don’t have many crystal cores left. The remaining crystal cores are needed to command their existing ability users. What they want to trade for more is steel bars, cement, and technical personnel who can repair buildings and construct city walls.”
This was actually the first time He Xuan learned that walls built only by earth-type ability users or metal-type ability users would not last very long.
No matter how strong the ability users themselves were, and no matter how thick the earth walls or metal walls they made were, if there was no piling, no properly built foundation piles, and no scientifically designed support, the wall would still collapse after being pushed by enough zombies.
“Some ability-user bases don’t care about walls because there are people on duty every day. If they see zombies coming and can’t beat them, they run back and notify everyone. The wall’s function isn’t so much to block zombies as it is to mark territory and help with warning. For example, if one day no one sees zombies coming, but a section of the wall has collapsed, that means zombies have broken in there.”
But truly useful walls, the kind that could be used long-term, still had to be built by people who understood the work.
How to design the piling positions, what piling depth was needed for different soil and rock layers, how the surrounding earth should be compacted and levelled after piling, and with what weight…
All these things required professionals.
If Fu Erdie’s residential complex wanted to expand outward and build a more external wall, Professor Zhao should be able to guide them. After all, throughout her long academic and research career, it was common for different disciplines to overlap and for professors and engineers from different fields to work together on projects. Professor Zhao would have some understanding of construction.
She could be called a generalist, even an all-rounder, but she was not, after all, a specialist who had researched one vertical field in depth.
For example, when building a system, an architect was extremely important. They had to steer the overall structure and direction. But under one framework, there were many branches, and each branch needed someone sufficiently specialised and focused to handle it. Only then could every detail be filled in, instead of leaving the whole system full of holes.
What the D City base was now telling He Xuan and the others was that they actually had many such technical personnel. Although they were not ability users, and their education might only be undergraduate, junior college, or even no formal education at all — perhaps just migrant workers who had learned a trade and gone out to work — after ten or twenty years of work, they had become professionals who understood certain areas especially well and had refined certain skills. Before the apocalypse, they had been ordinary. Now, they were urgently needed and especially useful.
The base had protected thirty thousand ordinary people. Among them, five or six hundred had various skills. If Fu Erdie’s residential complex needed them, the base could escort these people over and help Fu Erdie complete infrastructure work.
After Fu Erdie listened to He Xuan, her first reaction was that her residential complex did not need these people. With Zhao Shansi, Zhuang Licheng, and the sports student Pan Feizhou, they could already build an electrical system for the complex. She did not ask for much — as long as the entire complex, or even just the few buildings around Building Seven, had electricity, that would be enough.
As for walls — what did she need walls for? She was eager to go back and actively lure a large batch of zombies over to give the plant babies an extra meal.
The issue of warning was not too serious either. After all, the dandelions in the complex were connected in patches. They had already had experience giving alarms before. As long as they were there, Fu Erdie and the others could discover powerful enemies approaching at any time.
But to say she completely did not need more technical personnel would not be entirely true.
For example, the first floor of Building Seven had previously had many walls damaged by the university town ability-user team. Now, those areas had only been patched and protected internally with steel reinforcement. Once the house’s domain expanded to the whole building, those damaged walls would recover by themselves.
But the house’s upgrade was obviously not that fast. It had to eat many crystal cores and practise push and pull with Fu Erdie for a long time before it could level up little by little. If this process took a long time and the domain still did not extend to the first floor, then if the first floor really had problems, they could only rely on the succulent to support it by force…
Fu Erdie did not think the succulent was already strong enough to support one wall, let alone an entire building.
In addition, several other buildings had also been burned in many places during the previous exchange of fire, and they needed people to repair them.
Actually, even Professor Zhao and Zhuang Licheng’s technical work needed many assistants.
Fu Erdie hoped that in the future, even if the house followed her wandering everywhere, her family back at the residential complex would still have electricity to use. Then this generator and electrical system would require many lists, many different things to prepare, many different modules to build, weld, and assemble.
It was not possible for every single task, even things like welding that anyone could do, to be handled by Professor Zhao and Zhuang Licheng. So they still needed subordinates.
But the D City base clearly did not want to let those professional technical personnel go. Fu Erdie also could not bring herself to snatch them away.
“Let’s test it first,” Fu Erdie decided. “Tell them we don’t need to build walls, but we do need skilled workers who can repair high-rise buildings. You can tell them about the damage to Building Seven and the nearby buildings in our complex, so they have an idea of how much steel and cement we need. Also tell them we need electricians and welders. If there are technical personnel in power research, or students in related majors, they can come too.”
Fu Erdie could not be sure how many people and related materials might be needed, so she said, “As for the latter, just mention it roughly for now. This time, the main purpose is still picking people up. Later, after we go back and discuss it with Professor Zhao, we’ll make a list of people and materials we need, then come to them again.”
He Xuan listened to Fu Erdie and noted everything down one by one.
“What about that child?”
“Take the walkie-talkie over. I’ll speak to her.”
The walkie-talkie had to be pressed to talk, and the other side briefly disconnected. They had probably gone out.
Fu Erdie took this chance to walk toward her grandmother.
At this moment, her aunt was washing in the toilet with the bathtub. Fu Erdie lied and said that her box van only had two buckets of water. Washing Grandma had already turned more than half a bucket black, and Auntie would also need more than half a bucket to wash, so her cousin would only have that little bit of water left to wipe himself down.
It was not that Fu Erdie was deliberately bullying her cousin. Her box van really did only have two buckets. She could not conjure up more buckets, and she did not want to say that she had plenty of stored water and expose her ability.
Seeing this, her aunt wanted to give the chance to wash her whole body to her son, but Fu Erdie stopped her.
“He’s not a child. His body is much stronger than yours. The earlier you finish cleaning yourself, the earlier you suffer less from the skin disease.”
Seeing that Fu Erdie was not very happy, her aunt also felt helpless about her child’s lack of sense. She could only glare at Cao Yuanbai again, then go to the toilet to wash.
Cao Yuanbai accepted it quite well and even said, “Don’t pour away the water Grandma and Mum used after washing. Just leave it there. By tomorrow morning, the dirty stuff will have settled. I’ll scoop out the water on top and use it to rinse myself.”
Fu Erdie looked at the black water, so dark she could no longer see what colour the bucket was inside. She held back and still did not reveal her ability.
Grandma was sitting in a chair, lost in thought. Fu Erdie walked over and said, “The people from our base who came openly are three others. They brought the photo of me and that child, Zhang Guya, and said they came to look for her. Tomorrow, at the base gate, while unloading the goods and picking people up, once we confirm that the base really isn’t playing tricks, we’ll leave together and leave behind the three thousand jin of grain as the resettlement fee for all four of you.”
Grandma came back to herself, somewhat surprised. “Ordinary people don’t need to pay a resettlement fee to leave!”
Fu Erdie lowered her eyes but still said, “Let’s leave it. We have enough grain anyway, but the base doesn’t.”
Grandma looked at her lovingly and stroked Fu Erdie’s smooth hair. “Good child. You’ve worked hard.”
Fu Erdie shook her head and showed her the walkie-talkie in her hand. “In a moment, we’ll speak to Zhang Guya. Help me prove that we really are relatives.”
“Okay.”
After a burst of static, He Xuan’s voice sounded. “Boss, we’re at the child’s room.”
Fu Erdie’s brow twitched at the word “boss,” and she quickly looked at her cousin.
Her cousin was focused on scrubbing his feet and had not noticed what was happening over here.
Fu Erdie breathed a sigh of relief, pressed the talk button, and said to the child on the other side, “Guya, it’s me. I’m the older sister in the photo with you. It’s like this…”
Because Zhang Guya seemed cautious enough and calm enough, Fu Erdie told her the rescue plan, and did not hide the fact that she had wanted to use her to test the base’s attitude.
Any deception, before it was exposed or before the person involved figured it out, would become a beautifully polished part of the story. But once the person realised the truth, even something that had benefited them would become a faintly aching thorn.
In that case, it was better to tell her from the start, rather than let her feel grateful for a long time while knowing nothing, only to grow up, understand it later, and suffer backlash from it.
Grandma spoke up to testify that it really was her.
Her cousin, who was still scrubbing his feet beside them, also shouted loudly, “And me, and me! Cao Yuanbai!”
Fu Erdie truly could not hold back anymore. She rushed over and slapped Cao Yuanbai on the back. “Can you lower your voice!”
Cao Yuanbai shrank his neck and quickly made a zipping motion over his mouth.
Fu Erdie took a deep breath, shifted her attention, and listened to the breathing mixed with static from the walkie-talkie. Then she heard the little girl’s young, choked voice.
“Thank you, sister. Thank you, Grandma. Thank you, brother, sister, auntie…”
The heavy stone in Fu Erdie’s heart finally fell. A hundred feelings mixed together. Because charging the walkie-talkie in the base was inconvenient, Fu Erdie agreed to turn it off first and meet at the unloading point at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Then she ended the call.
The little girl’s broken yet sensible voice still drifted beside Fu Erdie’s ear.
Every time it drifted past, Fu Erdie wanted to hammer this cousin of hers once.
In the past, people said poor children matured early. Now did it take being an orphan to mature early?
Zhang Guya was a left-behind child who had lived in the countryside with her grandparents. After the apocalypse, her grandparents passed away one after another, leaving her completely alone. She had stumbled through hardship after hardship and followed the larger group to survive until today.
She was not an ability user, had no special skill, did not know life skills like driving, and was weak, slow at work. Every day, she had to work sixteen hours straight just to complete one day’s workload, then eat a little cold leftover food.
She did not want to grow up so quickly either. But she had no choice.
In contrast, this useless cousin of hers could not even drive. Since he was not yet eighteen, that was understandable. Fu Erdie herself had not learned to drive either.
But aside from not knowing how to drive and lacking common sense, he also did not know how to care about others.
However, this was also related to her aunt’s personality.
The apocalypse was this harsh, yet from the way her aunt wanted to let her son wash first, it was obvious that for the past half year, whenever there was something slightly good to eat, she gave it to her child; whenever there was a little clean water to drink, she gave it to her child; whenever there was a clean cloth to wipe off dirt, she still gave it to her child.
She endured every hardship herself, and whenever her son was occasionally considerate or sensible, she would be moved to tears. “My child has finally grown up.”
Forget the apocalypse. Even before the apocalypse, her aunt had been like this, often touched by the not-so-big, not-so-small things her son did, such as giving her a Mother’s Day gift.
But the premise of that gift was that her aunt had transferred him one thousand yuan as spending money because he wanted to buy shoes.
He spent over nine hundred on shoes for himself, then used the remaining few dozen yuan to buy his mother a bag.
Fu Erdie had looked at her aunt’s emotional message in the family group chat and honestly felt her scalp go numb.
She thought and thought, but still could not calm down.
Although the residential complex had been built by her, with her as the leader, that only meant she needed to take on more responsibility and restrain her own relatives and friends properly.
Externally, they represented the residential complex “base.” Internally, her relatives and friends could eat and drink well without doing anything, but their attitude would represent Fu Erdie’s attitude.
If her cousin went to the complex and still casually promised things to other people, then if she disagreed, she would have to be the villain.
And if the complex had secret strategies or plans that could not be told to outsiders, and her cousin leaked them, that would also be a huge problem.
Besides, with his personality of getting carried away the moment he had a slight advantage and having a strange sense of superiority, he would also easily offend a whole group of people on Fu Erdie’s behalf.
She could not let him go back just like this.
Fu Erdie made up her mind and knocked on the bathroom door. “Auntie, I think this base is pretty good. Why don’t I take you and Grandma back first, and Cousin can stay here for a while longer?”
Cao Yuanbai suddenly turned his head. “Why?! Didn’t you come to pick us up?”
Fu Erdie wanted to sneer, but she held it back. “Actually, compared with this place, our base isn’t that much better. At most, there’s a little less work to do every day. If you go there, it won’t be that different from being here.”
“But I want to be with Grandma and Mum!” Cao Yuanbai looked shocked, clearly unable to understand.
Fu Erdie smiled. “I have a more important task for you. You heard it too. Our base will cooperate with the D City base, so there should be some exchanges later. But I’m a little worried. What if D City cuts corners on the materials they send over? Since you’re already doing hard labour at the cement factory, help me keep an eye on the quality of the cement. While you’re at it, take part more in the cement wall-repair work and learn some skills. You’ve had nine years of compulsory education plus two years of high school. Surely after one or two months, you won’t still know nothing about even plastering a wall.”
“After some time, once you understand these things a little and can come back to my base to help with odd jobs in all the wall-repair steps, I’ll take you back then.”
Cao Yuanbai: “…”
He was just someone whose mouth was faster than his brain, not someone with no brain at all. No matter how he listened, something felt wrong!
He was an ordinary person, yes. But his mum, Grandma, and even Cousin Fu Erdie were ordinary people too. Why did he have to stay and learn other processes at the cement factory, while they did not?
She clearly wanted to leave him behind!
Fu Erdie saw the accusation in his eyes and said coldly, “Here, if you cause trouble, your mother and grandmother will clean up after you unconditionally. At my place, relationships between ability users are very complicated. Grandma and I are direct relatives. Auntie is a collateral relative, but she is also my mum’s younger sister and took care of me a lot when I was little. If something happens, I will protect them and cover for them as much as possible. But what about you? Aside from occasionally doing stupid things that anger me and the family, what else have you done? If you make a mistake, I have to pay for it. Even my boyfriend might have to pay for it.”
“Even if we grew up together and have a good relationship, what about my boyfriend? Touch your conscience and ask yourself: you don’t know how to do anything, yet if you cause trouble for my boyfriend in my base, why should he cover for you?”
“Let’s put it this way. In the base, I’m just a clerk handling miscellaneous things. Most of it depends on my boyfriend. Him helping me take care of a few relatives is already the limit. When you don’t have any real ability, are you really comfortable asking my boyfriend to take care of you?”
Cao Yuanbai opened his mouth, wanting to say, How do I need taking care of?
But after thinking about it, his face flushed red and he held it in.
Now, at the D City base’s cement factory, he had always been responsible for purely physical work like crushing stones. If someone asked him what kind of stones were used, how they should be screened in the next step, what particle size was needed, or how they should be calcined, he knew nothing at all.
And from what his cousin said, if her base needed cement, they could just buy it directly from the D City base. They did not need him to continue crushing raw materials at all.
“Doesn’t your place have any idiot manual labour…” Cao Yuanbai scratched his messy chicken-nest hair, now panicking inside.
“No.” Seeing that he still knew how to panic and was not completely hopeless, Fu Erdie quietly breathed a sigh of relief. “There’s only daily cleaning, sweeping the complex, and standing guard. That doesn’t count as physical labour. Anyone can do it. The ordinary people in our base are either original residents like me, who are inconvenient to drive out, or very close relatives and friends.”
Cao Yuanbai felt that he also counted as a very close relative and friend of his cousin’s, but when he met her inexplicably cold eyes, he could not say anything.
“Xiaodie.”
Her aunt, who was still washing herself in the bathroom, became anxious when she heard this.
What she was worried about was not that her son could not leave with them, but that she might cause trouble for her niece. “How about I don’t go back either? Just let Mum go back with you. Mum is old and doesn’t eat much. You know her personality too. She’s easy to get along with. Just let Mum go. I won’t go.”
Fu Erdie’s attitude toward her aunt was completely different from her attitude toward her cousin. She said gently, “Auntie, you can drive, and your driving skills are good. After going to the base, there will be many jobs where you can drive. It’ll just be a little hard, because you’ll have to dodge zombies around the city. But no matter what, there will definitely be work to do, and it’ll be much easier than here. Come back with me. Cousin is already grown up. He needs training.”
“If a small animal is always protected by its mother, the ending usually won’t be good.”
Those words were heavy. Her aunt and cousin both fell silent.
After a long while, it was Grandma who spoke.
She knew Xiaodie had an ability, and she had also heard the woman on the walkie-talkie speak to Fu Erdie with respect. She knew life in the residential complex was definitely not as difficult as her granddaughter claimed.
Her granddaughter had probably been angered by Yuanbai’s immaturity in all kinds of small details since their reunion and wanted to temper him a little.
Actually, that was fine too.
The D City base was not a man-eating base. Although it was very hard, they could still eat their fill every day. Leaving Yuanbai alone here would not cause any major trouble.
Besides, although Yuanbai had previously been unreliable, he still obediently helped his mum and grandmother finish the work they could not complete every day. Although he was always self-righteous and put himself first in most things, and although from childhood to now, aside from often being scolded by Fu Erdie, no one else had really managed to discipline him, his nature was not bad. He was much better than his father, who loved taking advantage of others.
It was just that his habit of bragging, being unable to keep things to himself, and looking down on others was exactly the same as his father’s.
Right now, his character was not fixed yet. With some tempering, perhaps he could still be brought back.
If he could not be corrected, and his mouth remained permanently without a gate… then even if he were taken back to C City and went to Xiaodie’s residential complex, he would only be someone pushed to the margins and guarded against.
If there were many people like him in the complex, it might not matter. Everyone could joke around and muddle through together. The worry was that the complex was a place where everyone had been carefully selected, and aside from him, no one else was the type to chatter endlessly without thinking. If he went there, he would only be isolated.
Maybe after being isolated, he would still feel wronged and not understand why everyone looked down on him.
“Let Yuanbai stay here. Learning a bit more is good too,” Grandma said. “If after a few months he still hasn’t learned anything, then we’ll talk about it then.”
Cao Yuanbai hunched his back dejectedly. He did not even want to keep scrubbing his feet anymore and simply rested them on the edge of the basin to air-dry.
With Grandma’s support, Fu Erdie felt relieved. At least she was not the only one playing the villain.
“I’ll give you thirty jin of potatoes,” Fu Erdie said. “I’ll leave the remaining half bucket of water for you too. You can hide them and eat and drink them slowly. When I have time next month, I’ll come see you.”
Cao Yuanbai knew the family was determined to make him learn something, so he could only agree.
That night, Grandma and Auntie slept on the big bed in the bedroom, Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao slept in the box van, and Cao Yuanbai slept on the floor.
He looked at the scattered moonlight spilling in through the window and suddenly felt very world-weary.
Was he going to be alone?
Actually, if he were alone, he would not have to do the unfinished work for Grandma and Mum. That was not too bad.
But although it should clearly be much easier, he still felt empty inside and lacked a sense of security.
He looked toward the bedroom, then turned over and looked at the box van. In the end, he said nothing.
Forget it. Work was work, no matter where he did it. Once he learned all about cement, he would also be a professional. Then, he would secretly become stronger and shock everyone!
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