The brothers who had gone out of the city to count supplies came out. Everyone shook hands, knowing it would be hard to reunite in this lifetime, and parted ways.
When Zhao Xiaolu and Qin Huai’s respective boyfriends received the news and angrily chased after them, they only saw the backs of the group riding away on bicycles.
The two men cursed and returned to the city, only to be blocked at the entrance and denied entry.
Because “your wives already registered, collected your exit supplies, and crossed your names off An City Base’s roster.”
The two men: “…”
Damn it! They had been tricked!
Zhao Xiaolu and Qin Huai rode their bicycles, carrying dozens of jin of grain and luggage on the rear seats, and set off.
They felt no burden about tricking those men before leaving. After all, in the more than half a year they had spent at An City Base, the protection fee they had given their two boyfriends was twenty or thirty jin every month. Added together, they had taken at least one hundred and fifty jin of grain from them.
The women had been hungry and listless every day, while those men had the capital to eat, drink, visit prostitutes, and gamble. Now, taking twenty jin of grain from them was only a harmless way to vent.
Even if they had done nothing, once those men spent a few more days doing nothing in the base and finally reacted, they would also become part of the group abandoned by the base and driven out with nothing. By then, their situation would be exactly the same as now, perhaps even worse.
After all, once the base was properly occupied by powerful ability users, they would not be as merciful as the current leadership.
The two of them had worked in the workshop for more than half a year. They had obtained maps from the warehouse before and copied them by hand.
After deciding to leave An City, they refined the map they had been copying bit by bit over the past half year. Only now did they finally have a relatively clear and definite map.
They planned to return to C City, the city they had grown up in and knew best.
Because of zombie tides, many zombies had now left their original cities and headed toward the major bases. Relatively speaking, many city centres that had once been full of zombies were now instead empty.
Without the base’s protection, Zhao Xiaolu and Qin Huai were not ability users and did not know how to farm. If they did not seek cooperation or shelter, they could only sit and wait for their supplies to run out.
Based on what they had learned over the past half year, many large bases were built in relatively remote suburbs with power stations. But when small ability-user groups chose sites, they still preferred cities.
That was because most of these small ability-user groups obtained food from plant-type ability users within the team. Their requirements for plant-growing sites were not high. As long as they had a seed and a small flower bed, they could grow the crops needed by the team.
And when they chose to settle in cities, ability-user groups could more conveniently choose supplies and directly obtain leftover odds and ends that were inconvenient or not worth transporting after places had already been searched once, such as pots, bowls, ladles, basins, or metal rods and shovels that could be used in combat.
They established living areas in certain corners of the city and took turns keeping watch at night. Zhao Xiaolu and Qin Huai did not expect to join them directly. They only hoped that when some ability-user teams lacked people to repair various tools, they could step in and exchange their work for supplies.
For example, the bicycle, the most common mode of transport in the apocalypse, might suffer all kinds of wear and tear. If an ability-user team had no one who could repair or replace parts, they might need to constantly change bicycles and keep scrapping them, causing a lot of waste.
Bicycle problems could be handled by Qin Huai.
Some ability-user groups carried solar panels, storage batteries, matching power banks, and so on.
These relatively precise components could be repaired by Zhao Xiaolu.
The two each had skills and their own division of labour. If they formed a repair team and recommended themselves in the city, perhaps they could exchange services with these ability users for food.
Actually, it was not impossible to go to another city besides C City. But comparatively speaking, they had fled from C City, so this route and general direction were more familiar. Even if they got lost, looking at certain road signs might vaguely bring traces back from memory. They would not immediately lose all sense of direction and become lost on highways, national roads, or in the wilderness.
They did not have much food. They had to avoid zombies and return to the city as quickly as possible, while praying that the city’s zombies had already gone to the major bases because of zombie tides, rather than still remaining in the city.
…
June was the most uplifting month since the apocalypse began for everyone in D City Base.
Because they successively received the mutated crops distributed by the base.
Most were potatoes and sweet potatoes, while a smaller portion were various fruits and vegetables.
No matter what they received, people carefully cared for them under the base’s guidance. Finally, after raising them for more than ten days, they obtained various crops produced by the plants.
For the first time, the people of D City learned that crops could be produced so quickly!
It was also the first time they learned… crops could actually produce every day!
The base said these were mutated crops grown by Butterfly Principal’s ability, and each could produce about one jin of food on average per day.
But the power of the people was strong. After discovering the wonder of the mutated crops, they worshipped them like Buddhas every day. They even improved the pots holding the crops, making holes at the bottoms of the plastic pots to leave space for the roots to extend out. Then they used a simple frame to suspend the pot over a larger bucket. This bucket would hold all kinds of waste and rubbish that the plants could process and absorb.
The most common were the natural excretions produced daily by every person. Then came the various rubbish generated by the base, such as residual slag from the thermal power station after burning rubbish, unusable powder screened out by the gravel plant, plant branches and leaves destroyed around ability users from the base’s current leadership faction during daily ability practice, and so on.
People would search in every direction for anything that could feed the mutated crops and place these things in the bucket beneath the pots, waiting for the crops to clean the waste completely.
Ever since they learned that crops could also absorb plastic, all kinds of broken, unusable discarded plastic also became long-term nourishment for the mutated crops to slowly digest.
Once the rubbish inside the base had been more or less searched through, people would form groups to go outside the city to find rubbish.
Recently, there had been no zombie tide warning, and the scattered zombies nearby were cleaned up at any time by things called intelligent mutated plants. So it was relatively safe for people to go out.
Under all these factors, the mutated crops that came to D City Base received very good care. Their average daily output of one jin increased to around twelve jin per day.
By the end of June, the four batches of mutated crops transported from Butterfly Garden had already reached everyone’s hands. Everyone joyfully raised their crops, and they had more energy when working every day.
The base no longer needed to spend a lot of time farming. The ten thousand people originally used for farming were all reassigned to other jobs, such as transporting stone, coal, and rubbish, as well as textile production, raw-material processing, making clothes and quilts, crafting bamboo-tube bowls, and so on. This greatly reduced the workload of the other twenty thousand people.
Thirty thousand people digested the original workload of twenty thousand. Tasks that previously might not be finished even by working from dawn to dark could now basically be completed within a standard eight-hour workday.
A reduction in workload meant a reduction in food demand. Every day, they ate the agricultural products produced by the mutated crop in their own hands, then drank a bowl of rice porridge issued by the base in the morning and evening. They were full for the whole day, eating cleanly and satisfyingly, and their physical condition visibly improved.
The base’s few healing ability users also ate a lot of fresh and healthy vegetables and fruits. Since they no longer needed to keep their abilities ready at all times to deal with outside ability users who might be injured at any moment, they could spare energy every day to treat a limited number of people with more serious injuries and illnesses.
Aside from some people whose age-related illnesses truly could not be cured, most serious illnesses were greatly relieved. Even diseases caused by water-source contamination were well controlled.
The base had already connected pipelines from nearby rivers to the residential area inside the base. They could use river water to irrigate mutated crops and could also bathe more conveniently with river water.
With healing ability users present, everyone was not so worried about bathing. If serious lesions appeared on their bodies due to being washed with river water, healing ability users could treat them in time as a fallback.
Just like that, in the short span of one month, D City Base had already taken on a completely thriving appearance.
As for Butterfly Garden, also known as Senyu Residential Complex, it too had undergone considerable changes after one month.
Because the ability power station on the roof of Building Six had officially generated and supplied electricity!
The moment engineer Zhuang Licheng, who possessed an electric ability, struck the ability input port of the power station with full force and injected a voltage of ten million volts, the enormous storage battery filled with electricity. Then it was input into Building Six, Building Seven… and all ten residential buildings of the entire complex. At night, Senyu Residential Complex was thoroughly, completely illuminated!
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