Her temporary plan was this: first, have He Xuan and the other two say they were looking for a child.
This child was from the family of a distant relative of her grandmother’s in Xiangde Village. She was also the only child who had visited C City and taken a photo with Fu Erdie. When Fu Erdie had gone to Xiangde Village to look for her grandmother, that farmer uncle had said that this child was the only one left in her family and had also gone to the D City base.
He Xuan and the others could compare her with the child’s photo and confirm whether she was the person they were looking for.
If the base let them take the child home smoothly, that meant the base still more or less kept its word and did not detain people and refuse to let them leave.
If the base played tricks and wanted to keep the child as a “hostage,” then Fu Erdie would secretly take her grandmother and the other two away first, then find a chance to come back and rescue that child.
That would frighten the child, but there should be no danger to her life. After all, a hostage’s basic food and health still had to be guaranteed. Maybe she would even eat better than before.
Of course, Fu Erdie hoped even more that she could smoothly take everyone away without any extra complications.
“But in that case, the grain needed to pick up four people will be 2,920 jin.” Fu Erdie tapped the number.
It seemed she would have to work even harder tomorrow and the day after.
When Fu Erdie returned home, all the plant babies were very happy. But this happiness lasted until the next morning before it began to change flavour.
First, Fu Erdie assigned her parents a “task”: teach the plants pinyin.
The couple: ?
Under everyone else’s gaze, Fu Erdie described the plant babies as intelligent individuals she had created. “After their intelligent mutation, they gained the ability to think independently. We can educate them like children and do some basic teaching work. While enlightening them, we can also give them the ability to communicate with us.”
The couple: “…”
Fu Erdie grabbed the plant babies that were scattering in all directions, took out the pinyin teaching videos and pinyin chart she had recorded earlier, and said coldly and ruthlessly, “You must learn. If you don’t learn, I’ll drag you over for training.”
The plants instantly perked up!
Training was good! Wasn’t training just sticking close to the gardener? They were willing!
The babies rushed to gather around Fu Erdie.
Fu Erdie revealed a Big Bad Wolf smile. “So you like training this much? No need to rush. One at a time.”
The potato seedling, which had been squeezed dry the day before yesterday and was still lying there like a salted fish: “…”
Young! These plants were still too young!
What could it do?
Of course, watch the show~
And then, the dark two days of the intelligently mutated plants, especially the crops, began.
Forced pushing and pulling, squeezing them dry, hollowing out their entire bodies, then restoring them, then squeezing them dry again…
It was like normally taking relaxed strolls and walks, only to suddenly be dragged into military training. Then, when completely exhausted, someone poured a whole crate of special energy drinks into you, restoring your stamina to ninety percent, before draining you completely again, then restoring you to eighty percent, draining you again, restoring you to seventy percent…
Repeated over and over, tormenting them continuously, until the babies had only two percent stamina left and Fu Erdie herself was also exhausted, unable to provide any more recovery effects. Only then did she let them go and turned to hug Sang Wenhao to recover her ability efficiently.
Once Fu Erdie’s energy had recovered, she began dragging the other babies over for training.
After the potato seedling, the tomato, cucumber, rice, millet, cabbage, peach tree, cherry tree, orange tree… one after another, they were hollowed out again and again. After two days, three thousand jin of grain was finally prepared.
Fu Erdie was very happy. After reaching her goal, she once again asked the babies whether they wanted to recover their energy.
Pure recovery, the kind with no production.
But the babies did not trust her at all! They kept feeling that they would be squeezed again, so they all hid and played dead.
Fu Erdie had no choice but to continue looking for Sang Wenhao to recover her energy.
Previously, Sang Wenhao lived in 16-2, while Fu Erdie lived in 16-1. Now, because Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao could automatically circulate their abilities when they slept together, the two of them had, for this reason, ended up living together by accident.
The house connected the two apartments into one. Fu Erdie moved the bed out of the bedroom and placed it in the living room of 16-1, turning the not particularly large living room into a spacious and comfortable bedroom. As for the original bedroom, along with the balcony and the other bedroom, they were naturally used to grow mutated but non-intelligent crops.
Mozi was not very used to the newly arrived people. At night, when sleeping, it insisted on squeezing between the two of them and separating them.
Fu Erdie found it amusing.
But automatic ability circulation required physical contact. With the dog blocking the middle, she could not guarantee that she would touch Sang Wenhao while sleeping.
Helpless, she could only explain the reasoning to the dog bit by bit and very patiently.
The dog’s ears twitched. It rubbed against Fu Erdie’s hand, then reluctantly got off the bed and returned to the dog bed beside them.
….
By late December in C City, the temperature had finally reached ten degrees, about the same as C City’s winters before the apocalypse.
Fu Erdie wore a thin cotton coat and set off again with Sang Wenhao, He Xuan, Ye Jia, and Zhuang Licheng, bringing three thousand jin of grain with them.
This time, they first drove to a dealership that specialised in selling buses. In the chaotic parking lot that had clearly been looted, they found an electric minibus. After stuffing the grain into the luggage compartment and the empty seats, they swayed onto the road.
As before, Fu Erdie killed zombies while travelling and scattered mutated dandelion seeds along the way. When they returned, she would collect the grown dandelions back.
Fu Erdie had considered simply leaving these dandelions outside to grow naturally and become seeds of the dandelion baby growing outside. But perhaps because of the dandelion’s linkage trait, the larger the dandelion’s coverage became and the wider its spread, the more severely the ability of each individual dandelion declined.
It was like a lump of gel. When gathered together, it was very sticky. But if spread out thinly in order to cover a larger area, its stickiness would greatly decrease.
For example, before being spread out, one dandelion could store ten mutated seeds a day. But when Fu Erdie brought the dandelion out of C City without cutting off its link to the dandelions in the residential complex, the number of mutated seeds produced each day became fewer and fewer, until eventually there was no new production at all, and its flying ability also weakened a lot.
So Fu Erdie could only make the dandelion in the box van cut off its connection with the dandelions in the residential complex.
After returning to the complex, this connection would recover. But for the time being, the dandelions outside could only become independent wild players with no connection to Fu Erdie. If they were injured, they could not be treated by Fu Erdie healing the dandelion seeds inside the complex.
Fu Erdie let these mutated seeds choose for themselves whether to stay outside or follow her. Nine out of ten chose to run after Fu Erdie. The remaining one ran away from home, cut off its connection with the group, and slowly grew by corroding zombies and rubbish. It no longer paid attention to Fu Erdie. Fu Erdie respected their choice.
When children grew up, they always had to choose the path they wanted to take.
So on the way back from H City, some dandelions had run away from home and gone wild outside, while most stayed where they were and waited.
When Fu Erdie’s returning scent came on the wind, they would uproot themselves and ride the wind back to her side.
It was the same now that they were going to D City. The seeds would first corrode zombies on the ground, quietly grow, wait for Fu Erdie’s return journey, and then make their choice.
The group’s journey was very smooth.
Except for one congested section where they were blocked for a day by many zombies and vehicles, the rest of the journey went smoothly.
The D City base currently occupied twenty square kilometres. Inside the base was a granary. Before the apocalypse, it had stored one hundred thousand tons of grain, which should theoretically have been enough to feed thirty thousand people for nine years.
But different grains in the granary had strict requirements for various storage indicators, especially temperature and humidity, which directly determined whether the grain would sprout, heat up, ferment, or grow mould.
Generally speaking, the temperature in a granary needed to be kept below twenty-five degrees, a standard room-temperature state. Some grains and seeds needed to be controlled below twenty degrees or even fifteen degrees and stored in low-temperature warehouses.
However, in the six months since the apocalypse began, a full four months had been at forty to fifty degrees. On top of that, there were sudden heavy rainstorms from time to time, and the air humidity was extremely high. The granary had completely become a hotbed for mould.
The base tried to maintain relatively stable thermal power generation, constantly searching for resources and energy, using manpower to maintain fuel transport for the power plant, and supplementing it with their limited solar power generation. Their hope was to stabilise the granary’s electricity supply and make the grain last longer.
But after the core equipment of the power generation system was not maintained in time and suffered repeated failures and outages, the grain still fell into an uncontrollable internal fermentation, heating, and moulding process.
Even worse, after the thermal power plant burned through its coal, it was modified to burn rubbish instead.
However, burning rubbish produced a lot of exhaust gas and wastewater. During burning, some rubbish also damaged the internal equipment of the furnace. Although many ordinary people were arranged to sort through the rubbish and hook out large, sharp, angular pieces, many sharp components were still inevitably missed within the rubbish piles.
Especially after a survivor stepped on a kitchen knife hidden in the rubbish and died from tetanus, more survivors felt a sense of shared vulnerability. While cursing and protesting uselessly, their rubbish-sorting became even more perfunctory.
Subconsciously, they felt that they were working for the base, this enormous collective. They did not feel that they were protecting their own granary.
After the machinery and equipment were damaged by this rubbish, they could not receive effective maintenance. Whether it was tools or replacement parts, there was far from enough, and the technical personnel were overwhelmed. Every repair process was stretched thin.
Just like this, the power plant’s failure rate grew higher and higher, and the granary’s losses grew larger and larger. Out of one hundred thousand tons of grain, in the blink of an eye, not even ten thousand tons remained.
The sprouted grain seeds had no choice but to be planted under unsuitable environmental and climatic conditions. As for the remaining seven or eight thousand tons of grain, after feeding thirty thousand people for half a year, it was almost exhausted. At most, they could continue eating for free for another two months before it would be gone.
However, the grain planted outside had a particularly poor harvest. One mu of land only yielded one or two hundred jin, barely enough to feed one person, let alone ability users whose appetites were two or three times larger.
This was the true reason the base was so urgently seeking grain.
Even though the two or three thousand jin of grain Fu Erdie brought to look for people was insignificant compared with a grain shortage of tens of thousands of jin, the base’s people would still take whatever they could get.
So when Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao got off midway, and He Xuan, Ye Jia, and Zhuang Licheng brought the grain to the D City base, the people at the city gate who had received the notice were very happy. After confirming that the three of them were all ability users and had not been infected or mutated, they hurriedly reported upward and sent both the people and the vehicle to the loading point for supplies.
The person sent by the base to liaise with them was a mid-level leader named Xu Qi. He was a middle-aged man in his forties or fifties, wearing a relatively formal fleece-lined jacket. As soon as he came up, he grasped He Xuan’s hand.
“You’re here to look for relatives? How thoughtful, how thoughtful.”
He handed over a backed-up handwritten list. “This list is written according to survivors brought in from different surrounding cities. If you see anyone familiar and want to take them away, you can take them. Take as many as you can.”
He carried a solar-powered calculator with him. He tapped the clear button and entered a string of numbers for them. “If you take away fewer than ten people, the resettlement fee will be seven hundred jin of grain per person. If you take between ten and one hundred people, the resettlement fee is four hundred jin per person. If you take more than one hundred people, then you can just take them directly. No resettlement fee.”
As he spoke, he looked at He Xuan with great anticipation. “Among so many people, it shouldn’t be hard to casually find one hundred acquaintances, right?”
The three of them: “…”
Why did this feel less like picking people up and more like picking up hot potatoes? The other side seemed impatient to throw more people out.
Thinking about it, it made sense. A person doing labour needed to eat two jin of grain a day. Otherwise, they would not be full and would not be able to finish so much work.
And one hundred people would eat two hundred jin of grain a day. In half a month, that would be three thousand jin. The grain they had transported over as a thank-you gift was not as good as solving the food and clothing problem of more than a hundred people.
However, He Xuan and the others were not from D City or C City, so they did not have that many relatives. In the end, they only looked for the child from Xiangde Village, saying that her older sister was looking for her.
“Only one person?” Xu Qi was very disappointed. “No other relatives?”
He Xuan: “…We’re mainly looking for her. As for the others, I’ll look through the list again.”
Xu Qi said, “Good, good, good! Look carefully, look properly! Who doesn’t have relatives and friends? You can definitely find one hundred people! Also, you’re not from the H City base, are you? H City has already been completely flooded and scattered. We don’t care whether you’re from a new base or an old base. As long as we can trade, it’s fine. We still have a lot of crystal cores here that can be used to buy grain and seeds. If you can be responsible for that side of the trade, then let’s go inside and talk.”
He Xuan remembered Fu Erdie’s instruction to gather more information and agreed.
At this time, Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao were walking toward the D City base with the modified box van, which looked like an ordinary cargo container.
The windows of the box van had already been folded inside it, making it look like plain miscellaneous goods.
The two of them had deliberately got off the vehicle ten kilometres in advance so they could walk, get covered in dust along the way, and make themselves look more travel-worn and like refugees.
Because they were not sure whether entering D City required an entrance fee or something similar, Fu Erdie thought about it and still placed one hundred jin of grain inside the box van, along with quite a few cold-weather cotton coats and quilts.
Since the potato seedling had already been squeezed dry, the potatoes Fu Erdie brought out this time were ordinary mutated potatoes without intelligence. There were six plants in total. Inside the box van, they could steadily produce one two-jin potato each day, which could be used for emergencies.
The two of them moved very quickly. After walking five kilometres in twenty minutes, they discovered that even though they were still five kilometres away, there were already many refugees camped around the outskirts of the city.
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