Broadly speaking, attacks could be divided into brute force, binding, sensory disruption, food temptation, and internal explosion.
Brute force referred to direct attacks such as strength-based strikes and piercing. Sensory disruption was like the gardenia releasing a scent that numbed the nerves. Besides paralysis, Fu Erdie also wanted to see whether any plants could directly release other types of poisonous mist.
Food temptation targeted some ability users who had not eaten enough vegetables and fruit since the apocalypse began. The idea was to launch fruit with intensified plant pheromones, making their craving for food occupy their brains, like lust clouding the mind. They would become fixated on the vegetables and fruit, then eat the fruit filled with corrosive liquid.
Internal explosion referred to an attack method like the dandelion’s, where it could easily slip into an enemy’s body while they were unprepared. For now, because of its wind attribute, the dandelion was the easiest to send into an enemy’s body. Temporarily, no other seeds had this natural advantage of being able to get mutated seeds directly inside the enemy.
Fu Erdie pulled out each plant one by one and tested them individually.
Currently, aside from the pothos being a third-rank mutated plant, most of the other plants were first or second rank.
There were 86 mutated plants already planted, excluding the dandelions, covering 26 species. In addition, there were 112 mutated seeds that had not yet been planted.
They had all been scavenged from several buildings and gradually cultivated inside the house’s domain. Those with relatively large or tempting fruits, such as peaches, corn, dragon fruit, cauliflower, and cabbage, could develop in the direction of pheromone temptation.
Plants like Sichuan pepper trees and chilli peppers, which naturally had scent-based attacks, could directly follow the sensory attack route.
Onions, ginger, taro, and yam were also sensory-type plants, but their edible parts were underground, so it was not convenient for them to release scent directly. Their flavours and toxins could be hidden inside their fruits and released by launching them or setting them up in advance beneath an enemy’s feet, paralysing the enemy. Or, once stepped on and crushed, they could release mucus and corrosive liquid, sticking the enemy’s feet to the ground and corroding them.
For brute force, Fu Erdie found a small bamboo plant that was still very weak and had almost been eaten when it was still a bamboo shoot. Its piercing spikes, even in its current initial stage, were already comparable to the second-rank millet’s. Once it grew a little more, matured, and levelled up, it would become even stronger.
For binding, Fu Erdie felt that bitter melon and eggplant were both excellent. Their fruits could also be used for plant temptation, making them quite multifunctional.
Fu Erdie gained a more specific understanding of many plants. But the one that surprised her the most was the zucchini, which had always had little presence and which she had barely eaten a few times.
When she was little and first saw zucchini, Fu Erdie thought it was a large cucumber. Later, after discovering that zucchini also had darker, larger, more mature varieties, she thought it was an immature pumpkin.
Then Grandma told her it was zucchini.
So in Fu Erdie’s mind, zucchini was a strange, neither-here-nor-there thing that did not taste very good.
After the apocalypse, every time Fu Erdie found seeds, she would place them inside the house for a while. Later, after the intelligently mutated species appeared, the pothos would pick them out and find time to plant them.
Fu Erdie did not recognise these seeds. Sometimes, after randomly planting them, she left them alone. Later, she often could not tell which was which. Up until today, she had thought zucchini was a plant that grew on vines.
But now, faced with the zucchini’s indignant gesturing, Fu Erdie fell silent.
It turned out this was actually a short plant that grew close to the ground!
Its leaves were large, and the stems of the leaves were thick, somewhat like lotus stems. After mutating, they became especially elastic. They could extend very far on their own and could also be stretched very long like rubber bands.
This trait… didn’t it directly solve the problem of plant fruits not being throwable or not launching far enough in battle?
But that was not even the biggest surprise. The biggest surprise was that, under its deliberate control, its fruit became as hard as a club!
How did Fu Erdie discover this? By being hit.
The zucchini was very angry that Fu Erdie had always treated it as some other unknown plant and had never connected its roots, stems, leaves, and fruit with the name zucchini. Extremely angry, it used its gourd-like fruit to hit her.
But because the zucchini itself had appeared relatively late, and its body was short and squat, it was usually clumsy and could not snatch food. Its chance to go out travelling and foraging with Fu Erdie had also been stolen by the potato. Right now, it was still a weak little thing, relying entirely on photosynthesis and water it quietly begged from the house to grow.
If Fu Erdie had not been checking every single plant’s traits one by one, it would almost have been buried and overlooked!
Fu Erdie, a fourth-rank ability user, felt no pressure being hit by a first-rank zucchini. It did not hurt at all, but she could feel the hardness of the zucchini. It could absolutely join the brute-force camp!
Not only was it a brute-force type, it could also be a temptation-type plant, and it could serve as a slingshot for launching plants. Because of cucurbitacin, it could also control its flowers and fruits to release bitterness and produce toxic gas…
Fu Erdie announced that this was the buried all-round ace!
She solemnly apologised to the zucchini and announced that she would often take it with her when going out in the future. After all, it was still too weak now. Its roots and stems could only barely maintain one thin strand on each floor, and they were often accidentally injured and snapped when the tomatoes and cucumbers fought…
In short, because it was too weak, it could at any time abandon the “hair-like strands” buried inside the building that it had no energy to fully grow.
Fu Erdie found a wooden basin, filled it with soil, and placed the zucchini’s main body, which had already pulled itself out by the roots, inside. “From now on, you’ll be like the potato, a plant that can often travel outside with us!”
Although the zucchini was still throwing a little tantrum, it was already happy inside. While arrogantly pretending not to care, it secretly pulled at the potato’s leaves in provocation.
The potato, which had always thought its position was incredibly secure, was dumbfounded.
How could this be!
This shouldn’t be happening!
How could there be a baby more suitable to take outside than the adorable potato?!
The potato panicked. It hurriedly produced a ten-jin potato and placed it in Fu Erdie’s hand. Then, with a smack, it knocked away the “light and flimsy” two-jin zucchini in her other hand.
Gardener, calm down! Look at my size, then look at it. How could it possibly compare to me?!
But Fu Erdie misunderstood, thinking it meant that zucchini was not edible.
After all, before the apocalypse, Fu Erdie had not liked eating zucchini. After the apocalypse, zucchini fruits had either been eaten by other plants, or if they were cooked into dishes, Fu Erdie had not touched them and Sang Wenhao or the little old lady had eaten them.
It was normal for the potato to mistakenly think Fu Erdie did not eat zucchini.
Fu Erdie was indeed a little hesitant, but she still let the zucchini soften its stone-hard shell, broke off a piece, and put it into her mouth.
Eh?
Fu Erdie was surprised and felt that the change in texture after mutation was excellent. “It’s lightly sweet, not irritating, but very refreshing. Delicious.”
Potato: !
If the zucchini had an expression, it would already be showing a wicked smile.
How could its flesh possibly not taste good~
The potato, which had originally felt no sense of crisis and therefore had no desire to train or produce, now had its heart beating violently.
No! It had to defend its position! It had to travel with the gardener! It was the most special baby!
After being squeezed dry earlier and lying flat for so many days, the potato took the initiative for the first time, asking Fu Erdie to continue squeezing it dry.
Fu Erdie: “…”
Fu Erdie ignored the babies’ little schemes and began guiding each one in cultivation.
The so-called guidance was a somewhat mysterious push-and-pull of ability.
Each plant’s energy space was different. The main tone was a green, quiet, open wilderness-farm style. But for something like the tomato, its energy space was red everywhere, as if even the sun in the sky wanted to be tomato-red.
The cucumber was no less intense. Its vines were everywhere, and from time to time, there would be a particularly conspicuous flash of red. Fu Erdie did not want to look too closely at what it had done to the tomato in its own imagination…
The energy spaces of the other plants more or less contained the shadows of the house and other plants.
But there was no shadow of Fu Erdie. She did not know whether it was because, after she entered, she overlapped with that shadow. Otherwise, seeing another version of herself in a space…
How terrifying!
For Fu Erdie to guide the plants to mutate in the direction of their strengths, she needed to push and pull while making each energy exchange lean as much as possible toward a specific focus.
For long-fruited vine plants like yardlong beans, naturally they should develop in the direction of binding. So when Fu Erdie guided it, she only needed to focus directly on its main body.
For things like dragon fruit and cabbage, which relied on pheromones for plant temptation, Fu Erdie needed to concentrate her ability on the fruit.
For scent-type plants like gardenia, her ability input had to focus on the flowers and the entire space, allowing the gardenia to have some ability to control the distribution range of its scent, so that it would not affect friend and foe indiscriminately during battle.
After a whole day, Fu Erdie exhausted all her ability on the 86 plants and produced a full two thousand jin of crops. It counted as both training and production at the same time.
By the time she finished pushing and pulling with the plants whose main bodies were in Building One on the outermost edge of the residential complex, she was already so tired she did not want to move. She directly used the walkie-talkie to ask Sang Wenhao to pick her up and, while he was at it, bring back the piles of vegetables and fruit downstairs.
Sang Wenhao naturally agreed.
The other ability-user teammates who heard the walkie-talkie also followed him onto the roofless iron box with half-height railings and flew toward Fu Erdie.
Along the way, they saw tomatoes, cucumbers, and all kinds of vegetables placed downstairs at every building, red and green, making for a very beautiful sight.
The box van descended. Sang Wenhao carried Fu Erdie on his back and stopped her from using her ability on him, secretly exchanging a glance with her.
Fu Erdie understood what he meant. He was already third-rank, and flying this distance did not require Fu Erdie’s ability enhancement at all.
Fu Erdie also had no strength left, so she returned to the sixteenth floor of Building Seven like this, hastily ate a luxurious bowl of rice mixed with Lao Gan Ma chilli sauce, returned to 16-1, and fell asleep immediately. She also asked her parents to pass on a message: if there was anything, they could talk about it during breakfast tomorrow morning.
She also needed to adjust her work rhythm. At the very least, she had to leave time every morning and evening for everyone to chat, eat together, and exchange information.
The ability-user team loaded the plants from downstairs of each building along the way. Then Sang Wenhao carried them by air to the newly designated storage room on the seventeenth floor. Fu Chenghong and Cao Bingqing registered and recorded them, and everyone worked together to store them properly. Only then was the day’s work complete, and they returned to the sixteenth floor to eat.
Professor Zhao and Zhuang Licheng had already sorted out the list of supplies and manpower needed that day. But because Fu Erdie was not there, they asked Sang Wenhao to take it over for them, so Fu Erdie could see it and make a decision after waking up.
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