Chapter 235 - 202: Preparing to Pick Vegetables

Chapter 235: Chapter 202: Preparing to Pick Vegetables

Huai Yu stood in the vegetable field with a basket in hand, shouting to Zhou Qian, who was still huffing and puffing as he dug the soil, "How many people are coming tonight?"

Zhou Qian stomped his foot, reminding the Virginia creeper to behave itself again, before calculating, "Twelve!"

Thinking of his immense appetite, Huai Yu turned and silently walked back to the utility shed to swap for two large baskets.

Potatoes—she dug up two clusters first, unearthing fourteen large potatoes, each the size of two fists.

Sweet potatoes—she turned the vines first. She trimmed off the overly dense and old ones, picked out the tender pieces, and tied them into five bundles using some green grass. She left the rest at the edge of the field; Big and Second would bring the chicks to eat them later.

Soybeans—they weren’t ripe yet, so there was no rush to use her Superpower to accelerate their growth. After all, everyone knew that current soybeans tasted terrible, so there was no need to draw attention.

Peppers—red and green, filling half a basket.

Cucumbers—also half a basket. She additionally picked five bright yellow, mature cucumbers as thick as a calf. Whether stir-fried with peppers or stewed with meat, they were delicious.

Eggplants—she needed a dozen or so. The eggplants she grew were the chubby, round purple variety; not large, but with excellent flesh. Huai Yu figured she would accelerate the growth of another batch in a few days to make pickled eggplants, which should last until winter.

Tomatoes! The ones on the vines weren’t fully red yet, but rather a mix of red, green, and yellow. However, it didn’t affect their taste at all; Huai Yu treated them completely like fruits anyway.

Otherwise, there wasn’t much else to hope for. Right now, in the entire field, only the row of small peach trees not far from the pond counted as fruit trees. Even with Huai Yu putting her heart into accelerating them, they had only grown branches about a meter high. Waiting for them to bear fruit would take an eternity. However, since Zhou Qian had become her neighbor, she thought it should be fine if she was a bit bolder and used her Superpower more often. She decided she would accelerate them again tomorrow.

After picking twenty or thirty tomatoes, her two baskets were already filled to the brim. Huai Yu stared at them for a long time before eventually turning back to fetch another basket. If they were all big eaters like Zhou Qian, two baskets might not actually be enough.

Then she dug up a dozen iron stick yams. She wondered if they were bringing any meat. Stewing these in meat broth until they were soft and crumbled at the touch would make the soup incredibly delicious once they melted into it.

She also pulled up a pile of peanuts. The damp soil clung to the tender, milky-yellow pods. Skillfully grabbing the peanut leaves and stems, Huai Yu forcefully knocked the mud off at the edge of the field. Then, sitting on the ridge, she picked and pulled, harvesting another small half-basket of peanuts.

"A bumpy house, a red canopy, and a little white fatty living inside..."

As she patted away the mud, she suddenly saw a vole at the edge of the field, looking over with shifty eyes.

"Little Tian!" Huai Yu exclaimed in pleasant surprise. "I haven’t seen you in so long!"

Thinking about how she used to leave early and return late, and that Little Tian wouldn’t come visiting at night, it was normal not to see it. However, she had been home every day recently... "Oh, are you too scared to show up because you saw a stranger?"

The last time she ran into Lin Xuefeng at night, he had used water to make a hamster wheel for the vole, trapping it inside and making it run until it was dizzy and disoriented, taking a long time before finally dispelling the Water Curtain. Whether Little Tian was happy or liked it, Huai Yu didn’t know. Regardless, she had later dug out a pink plastic running wheel from her pile of junk and placed it at the entrance of its old burrow. There was nothing she could do. Little Tian was shy and still refused to show her its new home.

Huai Yu generously grabbed a handful of tender peanuts from the basket and offered them. "Do you want me to dry them in the sun for you?

"Oh, right. Zhou Qian isn’t a bad person. I told him I have a vole friend, so he won’t hit you.

"But don’t go stealing things from his house! Otherwise, if he’s too quick and kills you by accident, I’ll have no choice but to forgive him!"

Little Tian stood up on its hind legs, its already round eyes widening even further. It let out a flurry of "SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK," seemingly cursing quite profusely. But Huai Yu couldn’t understand it! So she grabbed another handful of peanuts and handed them over. "Do you want me to shell them for you? If these aren’t dried properly, don’t put them in your nest."

Little Tian was truly furious, but there were simply too many peanuts in front of it! Moreover, they were so fresh and their Mutant Value was so low—a hundred times better than the ones it used to hoard in its nest! Of course, it didn’t know that all these peanuts in front of it were grown by accelerating the two handfuls from its own nest.

But regardless, the worldly Little Tian was thus appeased. Staring at the two large handfuls of peanuts before it, the vole was instantly dumbfounded.

After a while, it grabbed one in its mouth and scurried away. Not long after, it returned with three more voles following behind: one large and two small.

Huai Yu blinked. "You sorted out your love life that quickly?

"But only having two babies in a litter... isn’t that quite useless for your family?"

What devastatingly cruel and savage words to a vole!

Little Tian squeaked angrily once more. Sometimes it acted very smart and could understand human speech, but most of the time it played dumb. Huai Yu didn’t know if it had actually mutated, or what kind of mutation it had. But looking again at the two little voles peering over with obvious curiosity, she thought it must have mutated in its reproductive abilities. After all, what kind of hardworking vole only birthed two babies in a litter?

Little Tian’s family began busily transporting the peanuts, while Huai Yu clapped the mud off her hands and went back to the field to pick a large handful of green vegetables. Finally, she piled a layer of cowpeas on top of the baskets. With three overflowing baskets of vegetables stacked up, it should be enough to feed a dozen big eaters, right?

By the time she finished tidying up the uprooted sweet potato vines, it was already 4:00 p.m. With the arrival of summer, the days had grown longer, and the sun was still blindingly bright. When Zhou Qian came over and took a look, he couldn’t help but be stunned.

"This much food?"

"Yeah!" Huai Yu said helplessly. "You alone can eat a whole large basin full."

Zhou Qian didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. "That’s because I have a biological prosthetic limb installed, which requires a massive amount of energy replenishment. Ordinary people don’t..."

He shut his mouth.

Due to their high-intensity training and the lack of nutrition in current foods, everyone’s appetite was actually quite astonishing. By preparing so many vegetables, Huai Yu had accidentally hit the mark; it should be just enough to fill everyone’s stomachs. He thus said no more. The large baskets that Huai Yu needed both hands, a flushed face, and much huffing and stumbling to carry, he picked up effortlessly, one in each hand.

"I’ll ride my bike and take these back first."

He had a bracket tied to his backseat. Hanging a basket on each side, he rode his bike smoothly and naturally toward his own home. Long legs were truly amazing! Huai Yu was full of envy.

Returning to the house to tidy up, she thought about the dried pheasant meat she had saved. After agonizing over it for a long time, she decided to bring half a basin of it anyway. She only had three basins in total, and had already eaten half a basin recently. Now she could only spare another half a basin—no more! But giving it away still made her heart ache! If she hadn’t considered that there would be other opportunities at the highway toll station in the future, she really couldn’t have been this generous.

When Zhou Qian rode his bike back to pick her up and saw the meat packed in the stainless steel basin, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

"I told you they would bring meat..."