The tangled roots, branches, and leaves wrapped around the steel skeleton of Building Seven while pushing hard from the bottom, lifting the entire building upward.
Fu Erdie and the others hurriedly jumped onto the huge steel plate controlled by Sang Wenhao. Then they brought out the hired workers from the fourteenth floor and settled them on a safe open space far away from Building Seven. Only then did they fly back into the air and look at Building Seven from farther away.
When they looked, they realised that Building Seven was supported by root systems.
These roots were not touching the ground with their tips. Instead, they had coiled into tangled masses, like fingers clenched into fists and punching against the ground to exert force.
Because the entire building was in a transparent, jelly-like state, the bulges and depressions of the plants inside were extremely obvious. The current Building Seven no longer looked like a building. It was more like an enormous ultimate plant mutation.
After a brief period of chaos, they began adjusting the overall height and structure.
As part of the house, the steel bars displayed astonishing flexibility, making subtle adjustments according to the plants’ intentions.
Many rooms had things inside them, so the house protected those areas carefully and did not squeeze them. The other spaces were basically allowed to twist freely.
After repeatedly twisting, the steel bars turned into a brown gel-like substance, then seemed to melt into water and merge with the whole of Building Seven.
Immediately afterwards, the colour of the entire Building Seven began to deepen.
Before the colour completely turned dark brown, Fu Erdie saw that the framework supporting the building had changed from steel bars into plants. The plants had simulated the previous straight, vertical-and-horizontal structure of reinforced concrete, completely holding the house up.
As a visual psychic ability user, Han Zhi saw more clearly than anyone else and promptly shared the see-through vision inside. Everyone then saw the wall plaster inside each room falling off because of this movement. The white walls, or walls and wallpaper of various other colours, all fell to the ground and were rapidly corroded and absorbed by the plants like rubbish.
Just like that, the walls changed from conventional walls into something like the treehouses in themed scenic areas or special village resorts.
However, the inside of this treehouse did not have obvious wooden stakes or tree stumps. It was simply an extremely unique space where all kinds of plants tangled together, full of roots, vines, and green leaves.
The furniture in empty rooms was not damaged, and the occupied rooms and storage rooms were also preserved well. Some small shifts in position were harmless and did not damage any parts or equipment.
After the interior basically settled into shape, Han Zhi turned off the see-through vision. Everyone returned to the external view and saw that Building Seven no longer had any trace of its previous appearance. It had become a high-rise completely built from plants. Anyone who did not know better would think it was a building covered in strangely shaped ivy leaves and roots.
Of course, even stranger was the enormous succulent that looked like a lotus throne. It clearly had not taken on the work of building the architectural framework. Instead, it had become the base stabilising this huge high-rise structure. Half of its fleshy leaves faced upward, supporting the plant building, while the other half faced downward, joining the roots of the other plants to form the building’s “feet.” It looked beautiful, gorgeous, and powerful.
White light moved across the wall. Finally, facing everyone, it displayed a line of pinyin:
[huan] [ying] [hui] [jia]
Welcome home.
Everyone stared, stunned. Their eyes widened slightly, and their emotions were indescribably stirred.
After a long while, Fu Erdie took the lead and walked in through the main entrance.
“Let’s go. Let’s take a look at our new home together.”
Since the bottom floor of the house was now about one and a half metres higher than before, the plants specially made a vine staircase for Fu Erdie to go up.
The moment she stepped onto the vines, she noticed that the texture beneath her feet was different. It was hard, like old tree roots that had grown for many years. There was hardness, but not the smooth, cold hardness of stone or artificial floor tiles. It had resilience.
Fu Erdie crouched down, touched the special floor, and smiled. “Who am I touching right now?”
A leaf emerged from the floor. Surprisingly, it was not the pothos, but the millet.
Fu Erdie stroked it. “Do you feel uncomfortable when we step on you?”
The millet leaf shook its “head.”
Fu Erdie still had many questions in her heart, but with so many people behind her, it was inconvenient to ask. So she temporarily suppressed them, stood up again, and walked inward.
Now the entire plant building had electricity, and the lift could be used. However, Fu Erdie deliberately did not take the lift. Instead, she started from the first floor and inspected each floor one by one, going upward floor by floor.
The structure of every floor had undergone enormous changes. The corridor was still a corridor, but the rows of wooden or alloy doors had all turned into green doors woven from vines, branches, and leaves, decorated with all kinds of tiny flowers.
After opening a door, the walls inside had become plant-themed rooms just like what they had seen through the see-through vision.
However, all kinds of furnishings inside the rooms remained in their original places. The walls separating different apartments and individual rooms had disappeared.
Fu Erdie’s thoughts moved. “If I want a single room, can you divide one out for me?”
The white light on the wall flashed. Then a wall made of branches, roots, stems, and leaves extended out, temporarily creating a partition and dividing out a room of moderate size. In the next second, this primitive-looking wall turned white.
Cao Yuanbai had been trying not to speak because he was afraid of seeming too inexperienced. But now, he could not help exclaiming, “It can even change form!”
A [√] appeared on the wall.
Fu Erdie was also very curious.
But she still remembered her persona — she possessed a home ability. In other words, at least to outsiders, this building should be controllable by her.
The wall just now could be explained as something created by the mutated plants. But the current change in the wall belonged to the scope of the “home” ability.
Fu Erdie pretended to stretch out her hand. “Let me try and see if I can change it into other forms.”
The house clearly understood Fu Erdie’s meaning. At this moment, it also very much wanted to show off and began changing the room’s colours in all kinds of ways: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple — all of them changed once. Even when Fu Erdie said “darker” or “lighter,” the house could appropriately adjust the colour depth and brightness.
Fu Erdie suddenly had an idea. “Make a pattern.”
The house paused for a moment, then produced a large yellow zucchini flower.
Of course, this was not a pattern. It had literally grown out.
Fu Erdie was charmed and went forward to touch the zucchini flower.
“It seems I can only change colours, not wall patterns or decorations.”
“No, no, no!” Cao Yuanbai cried. “This is already amazing!!! Does that mean I can change colours every day?”
Fu Erdie nodded. “If I’m in a good mood.”
Cao Yuanbai laughed foolishly.
In the end, the room returned to the same original treehouse style as the outside.
Fu Erdie led the dozens of people through the floors one by one, strolling around as if touring a garden.
The others did not feel impatient either. They all followed with great novelty.
When they reached the fourteenth floor, Fu Erdie symbolically asked for the hired workers’ opinions and opened their doors to check.
The thirty-plus hired workers occupied more than half of the fourteenth floor.
However, because the room layouts had been different before — some large, some small, some double rooms, some with inner balconies — the distribution had been uneven. Although the hired workers had come from the communal sleeping platforms of the D City base and felt that, forget separate rooms, even two or three people sleeping in a living room would be fine, overall, the layout had still contained many unreasonable and unfair aspects.
Since there had been spare rooms, Cao Bingqing had arranged for them to live in separate bedrooms or inner balconies.
But this meant many living room spaces had been wasted.
Now that the house had undergone a huge mutation and the walls could be jointly controlled by the house and plants, the room distribution could become much freer.
They could design the position of each single room or standard room according to certain standards. They could move windows according to the need for light and combine the work divisions of different hired workers so people from the same trade could live together.
The people belonging to the technical department, whether the five technical personnel or the ten welders, sometimes worked in Professor Zhao’s large living room on the sixteenth floor that functioned like a workshop, and sometimes brought work back to the living rooms on the fourteenth floor.
But the living rooms did not have enough light. Especially when the house followed Fu Erdie outside to roam, Building Seven’s stored electricity was limited, and only the sixteenth floor could use electricity. It was very difficult for them to work or weld on the fourteenth floor.
Considering these things, Fu Erdie decided to arrange a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows on both the west and east sides of the fourteenth floor. This way, the technical department’s hired personnel could work better when the house was not in the complex.
In addition, they could specially make a dining room or lounge for the hired personnel on the fourteenth floor. Whenever there was a need for public communication, they could come to this specific room.
After transforming the floor structure, everyone would have their own independent space, and the previously wasted living room spaces could be gathered together to become more useful shared areas in suitable places.
Actually, it was not only the fourteenth floor. The sixteenth and seventeenth floors also had similar structural distributions that could be improved.
For example, Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao’s connected 16-1 and 16-2 had technically been opened up, but the rooms were scattered around, making it strange to live in and not spacious or bright enough. Several rooms currently stored shared materials, but because moving things in and out through doorframes was inconvenient, they had not changed the location. Whenever people needed them, they temporarily came to Sang Wenhao’s side to move things.
Now, 16-1 and 16-2 officially merged into one. The storage room was moved, and a door was opened in the direction of the corridor. If anyone needed anything, they could directly come over, open the door, and take the materials, tools, or living items they needed. Sang Wenhao no longer had to help.
Other rooms, such as Granny Zhang Dongxuan’s and Cao Bingqing and Fu Chenghong’s, had more or less the same problems. The core technical group — Professor Zhao, Zhuang Licheng, and the sports student Pan Feizhou, who had already begun working but still needed continuous study — also needed more reasonable room planning.
Fu Chenghong was relatively good at drawing spatial layouts, so he immediately took on the work of redistributing the space. He planned to gather everyone’s opinions, information, and requirements today and provide a plan tomorrow.
The hired workers toured from the ground floor to the fourteenth floor and did not continue upward. The internal members of Butterfly Garden, however, walked floor by floor all the way to the top floor before finally returning to their rooms, still unsatisfied.
Aside from the technical department, which required a clean and simple white environment and changed their walls to white, everyone else happily kept the original grass-and-wood room style. With great novelty, they poked here and touched there, then reorganised their rooms.
How the others adapted to the new environment did not need to be mentioned. After Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao returned to their room, however, they took out the pinyin chart and immediately asked the house, “You’ve merged with the plants. Can you still come out in the future?”
A [√] appeared on the wall.
Fu Erdie immediately breathed a sigh of relief.
The house and plants were now all gathered around Fu Erdie, “talking all at once” as they took out nearby pinyin charts and explained their situations.
It turned out that now that Building Seven had officially become the house’s main body, the house could completely control the overall framework structure.
If it were only itself, there would have been no need to shake off the cement and concrete on its body.
But the plants’ main bodies were inside the building, their tangled roots locked tightly with the house, so they could only be fixed in Building Seven. However, they also wanted to follow the gardener around everywhere, like the potato and zucchini.
Since they could not move, they could only make the house move.
So while Fu Erdie and the others were still marvelled by the house controlling an entire building, the plants and the house had already communicated: first throw away the cement, then let the plants completely replace it.
Fu Erdie asked, “After throwing away the cement, can the plants still not come out? Also, the cement was part of your main body. Now that you’ve thrown it away, do you feel uncomfortable anywhere?”
The plants shook their heads and slowly pointed at the pinyin to explain.
“Our main bodies are in Building Seven, and after Building Seven became a mutated house, our main bodies fused with the house’s main body.”
The house added that after reaching fourth rank, what it kept and added to its main body could be decided by itself to a certain extent.
This time, it chose to keep only the steel bars as its main body. At the same time, it connected with the roots, branches, and leaves that had been rooted longest and could not leave the building, framing the entire building and joining this part of the plants’ main bodies to its own main body. It officially used the plants’ existence to replace the original cement.
As for the steel bars that had decomposed and spread everywhere, they served as the main body of this fourth-rank ability entity, increasing the strength and support of the entire building. At present, Building Seven’s strength was completely sufficient to be used like a normal building, and its defence was even higher. Ordinary ability users could not damage it.
Of course, if a third-rank ability user came, or dozens of second-rank ability users attacked with smoke and fire, it still would not be able to withstand it.
To prove that its main body was reliable, the house’s white light drilled from Building Seven into the box van. The entire building immediately lost power, but it still stood steadily.
And to prove that even after fixing part of their bodies into the house’s framework, the plants could still use their other parts and abilities however they wanted without issue, they began dancing wildly like demons.
The fastest and furthest-reaching spider plant even stretched its leaves hundreds of metres from the sixteenth floor to the ground outside the complex, accurately grabbed a staggering zombie rat, pulled it back to the sixteenth floor, and tossed it up and down.
No matter how it messed around, the floors and walls of Building Seven remained as steady as an old dog, showing extremely strong control.
Fu Erdie looked at the zombie rat, which had already been shaken dizzy, and nodded with difficulty, believing in the reliability of this plant house.
However, the reason all the plants were so united — even the tomatoes and cucumbers stopped fighting and became the main force of the house’s framework — was because they wanted to move locations and wander around with Fu Erdie.
They did not want to stay in the complex anymore like resentful plants guarding an empty house.
So Fu Erdie soothed them and told them that after the technical department finished work every day, they could start practising walking.
Right now, this building was seventy or eighty metres tall, with only one-and-a-half-metre “legs.” Even a corgi would want to laugh at that. If they could not flexibly change their body shape and walking style, it would be difficult for them to even leave the complex.
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