Chapter 80: Preparing Dried Fish for the Cat Companion

Chapter 80: Chapter 80: Preparing Dried Fish for the Cat Companion

Hu Zifeng let loose, "Of course they sprouted! That’s why I have every right to curse you out. If you all in the Second Territory hadn’t been raising hundreds of Evolutionary Rats, my potato sprouts wouldn’t have been gnawed to bits!"

Detecting a Yellow Light Snake, Xiaqing pressed the button on her walkie-talkie, her mood excellent. "Eighty-six Evolutionary Rats entered the Third Territory from the Second Territory. They chewed through a solar panel and its wiring. In order to clear them out, I spent seven hundred points to hire help and used one hundred and fifty Bullets. I expect the Second Territory to compensate me for my losses."

Hu Zifeng immediately chimed in, "You have to pay for the damages in my territory, too! If you don’t, I’ll report you to the administrative hall in the Safe Zone!"

Tang Huai ignored Hu Zifeng and angrily demanded of Xiaqing, "Eighty-six rats? How could you possibly have used one hundred and fifty Bullets?"

Xiaqing pressed the button. "I’m a bad shot."

Having lost two people in his territory to the Evolutionary Rats and been lashed three times himself, Tang Huai swore under his breath. He shut off the walkie-talkie and, grimacing in pain, tried to climb out of bed.

Tang Heng, who had just entered with a glass of water, rushed over to support him. "Brother, do you need to use the bathroom?"

"No." Tang Huai pushed his brother’s arm away and got up, gritting his teeth. "I’m going to go dig up those rats!"

Tang Heng tried to placate him in a low voice, "Brother, Captain Xu is still here."

Tang Huai cursed, "What the hell do I care if he’s here or not! If he hadn’t come to my territory and released those rats, would I be this injured?"

"Brother, this territory belongs to Tang Lu."

Tang Huai...

Inside Territory No. 4, Zhao Ze emerged from his house on a crutch, arranging for his people to harvest vegetables and trade them for medicine.

In No. 6 Territory, Kuang Qingwei lay around eating elm leaf cakes, listening as his young, beautiful wife scoffed at Xiaqing, calling her a complete idiot.

In Territory No.5, Qi Fu, his arm held in a splint and a sling, remarked thoughtfully, "Back on the construction team, Xiaqing was a real piece of work. No matter how exhausting the job or how bad the injury, she’d just take it without a single complaint. Now that she’s out of the Safe Zone and working for herself, she’s even more hardcore."

Qi Fu’s wife, Yuan Yan, guessed, "Do you think her Endurance has evolved to be twice as strong?"

"No," Qi Fu said with certainty. "Back on the construction team, she’d be drenched in sweat, her arms and legs shaking."

Yuan Yan was taken aback. "For a woman to push herself that far... it’s really something. You have to admire her."

After the great biological evolution on Blue Star, any single woman who didn’t rely on a man and managed to live with dignity into the tenth year of the Natural Disasters was worthy of admiration.

"Who’s had it easy, surviving this long?" Qi Fu took a final drag from his Evolution Smoke and stood up. "Come on, let’s head to the fields. We’ll prop up any of the toppled seedlings that we can save."

Xiaqing switched off her walkie-talkie. She chopped up the Red Light Snake and tossed the pieces into the water to feed her fish. She bagged the two edible snakes to take with her, then headed out, pulling up Injurious Grass as she went to check on the Qiang Evolved cotton she had transplanted to the field outside the greenhouse.

The cotton plants had all grown to over two meters tall, and the sight of flower buds nestled among the dense leaves and branches was enough to make anyone envious.

Xiaqing prodded them with a stick. After confirming the cotton plants hadn’t evolved any offensive abilities, she decided to let them be and observe them for a while longer.

The *Planting Guide* said that after a cotton plant underwent Qiang Evolution, there was still a ten percent chance it could flower and produce cotton. Xiaqing was keeping these plants, gambling on that ten percent possibility.

Back home, Xiaqing placed the newly captured edible snakes into the wooden crate she used for raising them, then tossed in the insects she had caught as food. The crate already contained a dozen or so edible snakes of various sizes.

To maintain her health and encourage her body’s evolution, Xiaqing had always, both then and now, ensured she ate the best diet she possibly could. Now that she had snake and bamboo rat meat, she naturally made sure to eat a balanced diet.

’Telling Zhong Tao I didn’t eat snake meat? That was just to avoid the polite back-and-forth over a single snake.’

After breakfast, Xiaqing started clearing the Injurious Grass from her yard.

Injurious Grass had extensive root systems. Pulling one up would dislodge a large clump of earth. If you just shook the dirt off, any broken root fragments left behind would grow into a new plant as soon as they were touched by the Harmful Rain. Therefore, you didn’t just have to burn the grass itself; you had to burn the soil clinging to its roots, too.

Though her body still ached, Xiaqing quickly pulled up all the Injurious Grass in the yard and spread it on a bamboo rack to dry. Then, she opened the garage, drove out her micro-tiller, and hitched a cylindrical stone roller to the back.

The next step was to level the yard, which was now full of pits and holes from where she’d uprooted the grass.

With Sheep Leader in the passenger seat and Xiaqing driving, the woman-and-sheep duo used the micro-tiller to pull the heavy stone roller, weighing several hundred pounds. After flattening and compacting the yard, Xiaqing drove the micro-tiller back into the garage.

Once the yard was level, Xiaqing went up to the living room on the second floor of her small building. She sat in a bamboo chair, steeped a cup of hot tea, and drank it all. Then, humming a little tune, she sat by the floor-to-ceiling window and began picking out spinach seeds one by one.

The spinach seeds were about the size of mung beans, but they weren’t round. They were flattened on two sides with a pointed tip, and their casings were incredibly hard. This hardness was what allowed the spinach plants to fire their seeds like bullets with such devastating explosive power. If she hadn’t been wearing a high-quality Protective Suit, she would have been shot full of holes.

How could a feeble little spinach plant possess such immense explosive power? Because this was Blue Star after the great biological evolution, a world where anything bizarre was possible.

The Green Light Spinach had managed to survive tenaciously into the tenth year of the Natural Disasters, likely thanks to its incredible explosive power and the hardness of its seed casings.

Picking spinach seeds out of the dry soil, which was mixed with small clods and pebbles, was meticulous work. But for the incredibly patient Xiaqing, it was a form of relaxation.

After more than two hours, she had finished picking all the spinach seeds from the soil, harvesting a total of 2,830.

There were a total of fifty-two Green Light Spinach plants on the terraces. Fourteen of them were male plants that only produced pollen, while the other thirty-eight were female plants that flowered and bore seeds. Xiaqing had counted before: each female plant yielded between eighty and one hundred and twenty seeds. That meant she should have harvested somewhere between 3,000 and 4,500 spinach seeds in total. The other thousand-some seeds must have been shattered against hard surfaces during the "great seed explosion," or perhaps they were still buried in the soil somewhere.

’If I go look, I can probably find some more.’

Xiaqing soaked the spinach seeds in Pollution-free Spring Water for over an hour. Then she took them out and laid them in the sun to dry again, eliminating any lingering effects from the Harmful Rain.

After sweeping the floor, Xiaqing stared blankly at the clean spinach seeds spread across her balcony. It took a full two minutes before she remembered the two big fish she had killed during the Harmful Rain.

She took out the sealed bags. After testing them, she found both fish were Red Light. Xiaqing simply washed the fish, sliced them into fillets, and put them in the dryer to save for her second companion: the little kitten.

「At noon」

When the patrol team passed by, Xiaqing handed over two specimens speared on the end of a stick: a still-vibrant, sticky Qiang Evolved pumpkin vine and a Qiang Evolved potato vine that released toxic gas when it flowered. She asked them to give the vines to Zhang San, and in return, she received one hundred large sealed bags from him.

Xiaqing reported to Tan Junjie, "Captain Tan, this batch of potato seeds... not only are the leaves reddish and the growth slow, but the probability of an aggressive Qiang Evolution is also high. Could you please report this to the main base?"

Tan Junjie nodded. "We’ve already filed a report. Are you sure your injuries are okay?"

"I’ve used some medicine, so I can manage," Xiaqing replied, then asked, "Captain Tan, how many casualties were there from the potatoes’ aggressive Qiang Evolution?"