The people in the residential complex, silent for so long under ice and snow, also began moving around. Some opened doors, some waved.
The plants that had been unable to resist dozing off through winter also woke one after another. Almost instantly, they burst with new energy, stretching vines, roots, stems, and leaves toward Fu Erdie for hugs.
The feeling of returning to a familiar kindergarten made the last trace of tension on Fu Erdie’s face completely melt away.
After several months apart, the potato sprout had grown much larger again. When it ran over, its momentum was enormous, like a small mountain. When it pounced, it was already too big for Fu Erdie to hold.
There were many new cubs among the plants, obviously planted one after another under the guidance of the base’s people.
Once planted, intelligent mutated plants grew up and produced new plant seeds. As a result, the mutated plants in the complex had almost increased geometrically.
The old employees who had stayed behind in Butterfly Garden, like Potato, had visibly graduated from the senior class of kindergarten and had begun managing the newly born little ones like Pothos Boss had once done.
This time, Potato had experience. After squeezing past a crowd of little ones to cuddle Fu Erdie, it quickly took out a thick stack of leaves for her to see.
On the leaves were rows of pinyin written in sap, recording Potato Sprout’s rather proud educational achievements.
Sang Wenhao and her parents were handling the unloading of supplies, so Fu Erdie picked up this special leaf notebook and began reading.
It turned out that Potato had told the newly born cubs not to rush into taking root first. Instead, they had to overcome their instincts and, under the humans’ feeding inside the complex, absorb nutrients from the food humans brought them.
Some cubs were still too young and did not understand Potato Sprout’s intention. They insisted on taking root.
As a result, one month later, the rooted plant cubs and the unrooted plant cubs became comparison groups.
While the other cubs were running all over Butterfly Garden, and even outside Butterfly Garden, the rooted cubs stared longingly, their eyes turning red with anger—if they had eyes, that was.
Later, the next batch of cubs directly saw the earlier comparison group’s situation and chose on their own to change their instinctive lifestyle. They spent all day moving around and playing everywhere, having the time of their lives.
Of course, every cub had a different personality. Most kindergarten children were lively and active, but some still preferred quietly standing somewhere and growing up in peace.
Potato did not force them. It simply became more experienced, allowing the cubs to choose freely.
Some cubs, once they had the ability to move, chose to go out and forage in the wild.
Some mature second-, third-, even fourth- and fifth-rank cubs consciously left Senyu Residential Complex’s range and headed farther away, leaving the core area for newly born cubs.
Fu Erdie was a little confused.
If that was the case, why had she not seen plants outside when she came back?
This question was answered after Fu Erdie put down the supplies and returned to the warm, constant-temperature twenty-fourth floor of Building Six.
Standing on the top floor, she looked down over the frost-covered world outside the complex. Among the layers upon layers of steel forest, she saw vast patches of plants hidden behind abandoned buildings, waving at her through the glass.
Behind her, her aunt Cao Rui smiled and said, “The area within two kilometres around the complex has already been occupied by the plants. It all belongs to Butterfly Garden’s territory. There are far more plants than what you can see on the surface.”
Fu Erdie activated her x-ray vision and observed the situation outside.
Inside those abandoned buildings that looked no different from the rest of the city, everything was packed full of greenery. Many plants bloomed inside. Sensing Fu Erdie’s gaze, they all took the initiative to wave.
Her eyes softened unconsciously.
“It seems they’ve been doing very well during this time.”
Cao Rui nodded.
The house’s comfortable domain was now the entire residential complex, but the only area specially maintained at a body-comfortable constant temperature was the twenty-fourth floor of Building Six.
Before Fu Erdie returned, Cao Bingqing and Fu Chenghong had already arranged Fu Erdie’s room. It had everything she needed. Even the layout and decoration were modelled after her original room, 16-1 in Building Seven.
The other rooms on the twenty-fourth floor belonged to Cao Bingqing and Fu Chenghong, Professor Zhao, and other core members who used to live on the sixteenth floor of Building Seven. After greeting everyone, Fu Erdie gathered with them in the common room to hear in detail how the base had changed over the past half year.
The telegraph could only transmit limited information. Fu Erdie had vaguely known that Senyu Residential Complex, along with the nearby ability users, had put in a lot of effort to pull zombies from the northwest in order to move in, or even simply live closer to Butterfly Garden.
In Fu Erdie’s mind, most of them were low-rank ability users. Without her and Sang Wenhao opening the way, pulling zombies would probably be dangerous and progress would be slow.
To her surprise, the ability users had been very fast.
The fastest batch to go out could almost pull back one batch every three or four days.
Although the number of zombie heads was not large, only around a hundred zombies at a time, this was already the best and fastest result low-rank ability users could achieve.
Yes, they could not gather tens or hundreds of thousands of zombies in one go like Fu Erdie, then pull them back. But they could pull zombies in small batches. As long as their bodies kept moving, their results could continuously accumulate.
“Some ability users have already accumulated half a year’s worth of residence days for themselves.”
Before, they would not actually stay in the complex for half a year. Instead, when they sensed their bodies mutating due to polluted water or other contamination outside, or when they were injured, they would come stay in the complex and ask the house for treatment, consuming their accumulated days.
However, before the temperature dropped, the ability users were almost nonstop. They repeatedly went out to pull zombies, returned, recorded their results, rested, and went out again at a very high frequency.
To repay the ability users, Cao Bingqing had made some adjustments to the system. For example, based on the number of zombies pulled back and the number of days spent outside, she would give a comprehensive evaluation and grant them a period of free rest inside the complex.
But after the temperature dropped in June, the strong winds and snowstorms outside were no longer suitable for going out to pull zombies and complete missions. Cao Bingqing and Fu Chenghong set aside one building to temporarily house the ability users.
Most of the ability users were grateful and did not want to appear useless or take advantage of Butterfly Garden. They voluntarily helped the two hundred ordinary people in the complex, who usually looked after the plant cubs, take care of various matters around Senyu Residential Complex.
And honestly, with this kind of weather, it was difficult for ordinary people to move around outside. One careless moment could lead to a cold, fever, and death. Whether it was inspecting and repairing power equipment and the complex’s electrical circuits, or looking after plant cubs and mutated crops, it was more suitable and safer for ability users to do it.
After hearing her mother explain the complex’s situation, Fu Erdie thought again of the ability users in Qing City Base, as well as the ability users and ordinary people in D City Base who had once been severely hostile toward each other.
Sure enough, when basic living needs were barely met, most people would not choose to become evil.
Being kind to others was the simple result of so many years of direct and subtle education. Most people now in Butterfly Garden were like this.
Of course, if someone did evil, Fu Erdie would absolutely not tolerate it.
Fu Erdie calmly glanced at her cousin Cao Yuanbai. He had performed fairly well. She hoped he would continue. Otherwise, if he took the lead in making mistakes, she would not mind using him as an example to warn the others.
For some reason, Cao Yuanbai suddenly felt a chill on the back of his neck. Sure enough, even on a constant-temperature floor, he could not wear too little!
Butterfly Garden’s plants had grown vigorously under all kinds of feeding, and their scale was now enormous. The scale of mutated crops was also huge.
Fu Erdie contacted D City Base and asked them to indirectly contact the other six major bases to sound out the situation. If there was demand, they could try trading.
Looking at the plants freely living in the tall buildings outside, Fu Erdie thought that only by bringing all bases under control and understanding each base’s situation would they no longer be constantly passive.
A plan for a plant army covering the entire country began to sprout in the snowy world frozen for thousands of miles.
From July to September of the third year of the apocalypse, all bases and all activity came to a halt.
Across vast regions, the temperature continued falling, reaching minus forty degrees by late September.
This temperature was already the coldest winter temperature in the northeast of Hua Country. Even though D City Base’s ordinary people had received many warm supplies that Fu Erdie had brought back from afar, two thousand people still died one after another.
Most of these people were elderly people and children. For a time, everyone was deeply sorrowful.
Relatives buried the elderly and children who had passed away, then scattered dandelion seeds over the small graves.
They knew these mutated dandelions would absorb their loved ones’ remains, but the decay of corpses was irreversible. In the end, people would turn to dust. Asking the dandelions for a seed and scattering it there gave them the illusion that their departed loved ones continued to exist in another form.
Thus, in D City’s graveyard, every time a new mound appeared, one more dandelion would grow on its tip.
When planted, the dandelion seed would take a day to grow, then produce many flying fluffs. After leaving the main body, these fluffs would consciously leave the graveyard and take root elsewhere. As a result, the number of dandelions in the graveyard always corresponded to the number of people who had died.
After discovering this, families who had lost loved ones could no longer hold back and wept.
Unintentionally, D City Base’s people formed this tacit understanding: when a loved one passed away, or when they wanted to mourn someone, they planted a dandelion.
In October, something major happened in D City Base: New Province Base chose to come and join them.
New Province Base was located in the northwest and was one of the eight major bases.
When Fu Erdie had been fighting zombie kings and pulling zombies in the northwest, she had passed by New Province Base and casually taken away a wave of zombies that had been besieging them.
To Fu Erdie, this had been an extremely normal win-win situation. She had taken the zombie king’s crystal core and the cores of so many ability zombies, while New Province Base had resolved its zombie crisis.
But to New Province Base, Fu Erdie’s arrival had been no different from help sent in the snow.
Now, when the cold had arrived, it was New Province Base’s turn to send help in the snow.
They sent real coal, along with many mineral resources that could serve as fuel! They even sent extremely precious oil!
At present, with C City and D City as the boundary, a huge stretch of land to the northwest was safe. Therefore, the people coming from New Province Base did not encounter fatal threats from ability zombies along the way.
However, the harsh weather, mountains, and dangerous terrain were indeed problems. Still, New Province Base overcame them and brought two thousand ability users and two thousand ordinary people in a grand convoy to deliver resources to D City and Butterfly Garden, while also joining them.
When Fu Erdie heard that they had abundant oil, she was immediately moved.
After all, with oil, they could drive vehicles freely and replace their previous human-powered cycling. There were countless benefits and no drawbacks. Butterfly Garden’s ability users could drive out to pull zombies once the weather improved.
So Fu Erdie accepted their joining and clearly stated that they could open up a new area to settle ordinary people.
This would be the area outside the residential complex, and also Butterfly Garden’s first official step toward expansion.
The buildings around Senyu Residential Complex were maintained by the plant cubs. When the plants found a cracked window, they would clean it up in time, pull off branches, leaves, and roots they were about to shed, and weave new windows for the buildings.
If a wall cracked, the plants would use their bodies to patch it.
Although they were not as strong as Building Seven’s veteran plants, they could imitate well enough to make the buildings look acceptable.
Now that they had decided to receive some of the people from New Province Base, cousin Cao Yuanbai finally had something to do again instead of sitting around at home.
He would be responsible for repairing these damaged buildings.
After New Province Base’s people arrived, half stayed in D City Base while half came to Butterfly Garden, and they settled down quickly.
D City Base did not let Butterfly Garden take on all the ordinary people. Instead, they split them evenly: one thousand ordinary people and one thousand ability users on each side. For the current D City and Butterfly Garden, this was not stressful. After all, everyone’s mutated crops had already grown and multiplied.
Butterfly Garden obtained a lot of oil. At the same time, they received an unexpected surprise: over three million zombies that had followed the convoy all the way, deliberately lured by more than twenty ability users.
This was an enormous number, but it made Fu Erdie’s eyes light up. It also excited the plant cubs who understood.
Extra meal! A huge extra meal!
What could make the cubs happier than this?
So, on the third day after New Province’s travel-worn convoy arrived at Butterfly Garden, the ability users pulling the zombies arrived later. The enormous zombie horde, which actually could not stand very steadily in the snowstorm but still stubbornly approached the gathering place of people, also arrived.
Thirty kilometres from Senyu Residential Complex, Fu Erdie designated a mountain as the zombies’ burial ground and brought the mobile plant cubs there to feast.
In just two days, the enormous zombie horde was slaughtered clean by the plant cubs. All that remained was for them to slowly absorb it.
Fu Erdie told the plants not to rush and to eat peacefully on this mountain. As for herself, she would use this time to count the plant cubs’ combat power and optimise their lessons. Once the cubs grew to a certain level, she would send them out to serve as eyes at different roads and regions.
In October, the snowstorm was still strong, and the temperature had already reached minus fifty degrees, with no further room to fall.
Fu Erdie, in the raging wind, brought 3,562 intelligent mutated plants and countless dandelion mutated seeds to Jian City and An City, two large cities with bases. Along the way, she sowed seeds, letting the plants blend with local plants and buildings so people could not distinguish them.
The dandelion fluffs mixed with the endless flying snow. For a time, no one knew where they had taken root.
When expanding the plant territory, Fu Erdie encountered dandelions that had been foraging outside. These plants clearly had more chances to eat wild food, and their growth speed was also faster. Among only the ones Fu Erdie encountered, along with those that specially floated over from far away to greet her, there were already fifteen fourth-rank dandelions.
These dandelions looked at the newly arrived younger siblings. A gust of wind rolled up, carrying them to a sheltered corner of an alley, where they landed and took root. Each little cub began its own cultivation.
In mid-October, Fu Erdie returned to Building Seven by the river in Jian City and met up with it.
During this period, Building Seven had also produced many fruits and seeds. However, without the house’s enhancement, the probability of producing intelligent mutated seeds was relatively low.
Fu Erdie collected those seeds amid Pothos’s eager clustering. After asking the cubs of Building Seven for their opinion, she brought Building Seven to stay in Jian City.
At the same time, D City Base’s technical team and Butterfly Garden’s Professor Zhao’s group were in full swing preparing a new type of ability-powered generator. They aimed to optimise the generator unit based on Butterfly Garden’s existing model so it could be used on more floors, and also on Building Seven.
Building Seven remained an important advance post at the boundary between the middle and lower reaches of Li River. Fu Erdie left the house in Senyu Residential Complex to protect her family, while she herself stayed with Building Seven, waiting for news from D City and those ability users. Yes. While Fu Erdie had D City Base negotiate trade matters with the other major bases, she also used crystal cores as payment to hire familiar and relatively trusted ability users to secretly infiltrate the six major bases despite the wind and snow.
Leave a Reply