Chapter 216 - 183: Looks a Bit Familiar

Chapter 216: Chapter 183: Looks a Bit Familiar

Anxious, Huai Yu grabbed the Fat Ginseng and set it on the ground. "Go find a place to grow on your own."

She then stopped the tense Zhou Qian. "It’s impossible for there to be mutated plants in my vegetable garden! I even went in yesterday to pick—"

Oh.

She slowly released her grip. There actually was one plant that was slightly mutated. It was just...

She smiled sweetly. "Brother Zhou Qian, I know you’re anxious, but just hear me out.

"There is indeed one plant in my garden that looks a bit different, but it’s a good vegetable. It can’t speak, it can’t run, and it definitely won’t attack anyone.

"It just looks a little rugged. How about I take you to see it?"

Zhou Qian was highly skeptical.

A moment later...

"You call this ’a little rugged’?"

Parting the tall, sturdy weeds to look at the center of the vegetable plot, he saw a cowpea vine about sixty centimeters in diameter coiling behind the dense bean and cucumber trellises. It snaked all the way around like a giant python, enclosing the entire patch. Visually, it was at least forty meters long. Even though its stem was incredibly thick, the leaves and the pale purple flowers blooming on it were identical in size and color to an ordinary cowpea plant. It was as if the mutation had only amplified its yield, making a single plant capable of feeding someone for a year.

Zhou Qian took a deep breath and looked at Huai Yu again. "So, the cowpeas you’ve been feeding me lately were picked from this thing?"

Huai Yu nodded, looking thoroughly earnest. "Those cowpeas pass the detector. I’ve even sold them before! They’re perfectly normal."

He thought that this kind of "normal" was exactly what was most abnormal. He had just been discharged from the hospital, and the biological materials in his leg had integrated quite well. Logically, he should have been full of energy. Yet, at this moment, he felt utterly powerless. He let out a long sigh and instinctively tried to grab onto something to support his crumbling sanity, but the texture under his hand felt wrong.

Turning his head, he saw a pepper plant standing beside him that reached his chest. Its stem was a solid two or three centimeters thick. Fleshy, glossy green peppers hung from its branches, looking robust and thriving. But could a normal pepper plant grow to look like this in May? And then there was the eggplant up ahead, which had also grown into a similarly sized miniature tree.

He glanced at Huai Yu beside him. She didn’t seem to think it was the least bit abnormal that every single vegetable patch contained an exceptionally overgrown "tree"!

Instead, she proudly showed them off to Zhou Qian. "See? It’s just this cowpea vine that tried a little too hard. The rest are completely fine.

"Didn’t you guys say back then that my Wood Ability’s mutation direction might be promoting growth? This is what it looks like after being promoted. Is this not how others with a Wood Ability farm?"

She looked as if this was simply the natural order of things. Her last shred of guilt had vanished the moment Zhou Qian gave up on questioning the giant python-like cowpea vine. Now, leading him on a patrol through the vegetable patches, she spoke with an inexplicable sense of pride.

"I also planted yams, sweet potatoes, peanuts, soybeans... Brother Zhou Qian, if you ever need vegetable seedlings, you can dig some up from me."

Zhou Qian pinched the bridge of his nose and raised a hand in a "stop" gesture. "Thank you for the kind offer, but no thanks. I think I’ll go buy seedlings at the market."

Unlike Huai Yu’s house and vegetable garden, which bordered the Rose Corridor, his own place would undoubtedly host friends in the future once it was built. He definitely didn’t want a scenario where guests came over and he had to set up a ladder to climb a two-meter-tall pepper tree just to harvest vegetables for dinner.

He took another look at Huai Yu. Even though she swore up and down that her vegetables were completely normal and wouldn’t grow to be one or two meters tall, Zhou Qian no longer planned on believing her.

When he saw her casually dig up a potato plant, unearthing fifteen or sixteen yellow-skinned potatoes the size of cantaloupes, his entire body swayed slightly.

"Never mind," he muttered. Having just recovered from a major injury, his mind couldn’t quite handle this level of shock yet. He figured he should head back and rest.

He turned to leave, but Huai Yu called out to him again. "Um, Brother Zhou Qian, if you aren’t busy, could you... do me a favor?"

Her large vats hadn’t been moved to their designated spots yet.

Zhou Qian nodded helplessly. "Alright, I’ll move them for you."

Compared to the Guard Army, their Defense Army did not possess Superpowers, but their physical fitness was still far beyond that of ordinary people. Moving a few earthen vats was nothing to him.

However, Zhou Qian swore that their strength was strictly physical; it definitely didn’t extend to their mental fortitude. And now, following a stuttering ginseng that looked like a radish, a cowpea vine coiled like a giant python, and vegetables that grew into small trees... was this bizarre, fifty-centimeter-tall beetle with an iridescent black shell really not a hallucination?

He looked toward the prime suspect—the Rose Corridor—his sanity hanging by a thread. He even watched as the beetle wobbled along, clutching a red ball, and ambled unhurriedly toward the shed by Huai Yu’s door.

Had the world undergone yet another mutation after the apocalypse?

Zhou Qian remained silent. In his dazed state, he felt as though he had seen a quail-egg-sized ball like that before. But in his memory, it had been a mix of multicolored hues, not nearly as vibrant as the bright red sphere currently being cradled in the beetle’s front claws.

Huai Yu let out a surprised gasp. "Ke Taichiro, you’re back so early today?"

Usually, Ke Taichiro would pick a spot and stay there to gather balls, only hauling them back in the evening. It was still morning.

As soon as she asked, Ke Taichiro flapped her wings and bobbed her two antennae. She couldn’t speak, but Huai Yu understood her meaning perfectly. She looked up at the gloomy sky and felt the increasingly chilly gale.

"That makes sense. It’s going to rain today."

Only then did she turn to Zhou Qian. "Sorry about that, Brother Zhou Qian. I didn’t expect Ke Taichiro to come back so early. Did that scare you?"

He had been standing there in a daze for quite a while.

After a long pause, Zhou Qian finally took a deep breath and asked, "You raised this, too?"

Huai Yu nodded. Even if it was just temporary, raising was raising.

"What’s wrong? Ke Taichiro has a very good temper. Don’t be nervous, Brother Zhou Qian."

Zhou Qian stared at Huai Yu, not knowing for a moment if she was playing dumb to dodge the issue. After all, the main point of everything appearing before them wasn’t whether the plants and animals had mutated, nor was it whether a beetle could roll balls. The point was Huai Yu herself!

She was the one who needed to protect herself the most!

She had a Wood Ability, which everyone knew was very weak. Its mutation direction was Plant Affinity, which obviously had a great deal to do with her ability to live peacefully in the Rose Corridor. She was just a young girl with absolutely no background, living here all alone, yet she didn’t even try to hide these secrets from him...

Zhou Qian let out a heavy sigh.

At the same time, he found himself wondering, "That red ball looks a bit familiar... Where did that mutated beetle get it?"