Chapter 74 - 73: Meat!

Chapter 74: Chapter 73: Meat!

If Huai Yu knew about Wu Yue’s current predicament, she probably would have planted her hands on her hips and burst out laughing.

But in reality, she was currently busy farming!

The weather in early April was a bit unusual. For the past few days, the sun had been shining brightly, making the daytime incredibly warm. Because of this, she didn’t have the time to patiently wait for a few crops of soybeans to grow and purify the soil.

There was no helping it; farmers ultimately relied on the weather for their livelihood. As for her superpower, purifying a few seeds was fine, but purifying such a large plot of land...

She would probably end up paralyzed with exhaustion for the next half a month.

"Forget it! I’ll just plant them like this!" she thought. "At worst, I’ll just slowly purify them while they grow."

Otherwise, by the time she forced a few crops of soybeans to mature, the weather would be too hot, and the other seeds wouldn’t grow well. This was especially true for the summer staple—cowpeas. Once they flowered in the heat, having an endless supply of them to eat would just be a pipe dream.

These thoughts came to her naturally, as if the ability to farm was etched into her very DNA. Huai Yu stared at her hands in bewilderment.

"Very well, add another point to the ’sturdy peasant woman’ label," she mused.

The frail little chicks were penned near the doorway, chirping as they basked in the sun. Huai Yu hadn’t spared any effort in using her superpower to nourish them.

Meanwhile, in the first plot of reclaimed land, the soybeans had quietly sprouted.

The buds were tiny and inconspicuous. Huai Yu squatted down and observed them for a good while, feeling happier the longer she looked. She quickly lifted the straw mats to let the warm sunlight bathe the soil. By preserving the soil moisture this way, the temperature difference within the dirt wouldn’t be too drastic, which was much more favorable for the seedlings’ rapid growth.

As for the potatoes she had bought, they were still wrapped in bags to sprout. What she really needed to hurry up and plant today were the sweet potato vines she had purchased yesterday.

"That cursed Wu Yue!" she thought. If it hadn’t been for him, she could have planted the sweet potato vines as soon as she returned yesterday afternoon! Propagating them from cuttings wasn’t difficult at all.

But because her house was destroyed, she had been heartbroken, overwhelmed by tasks, and had silently wept until dawn—no, until the latter half of the night, before she finally snapped out of it! By the time she sorted out her basket again, the sweet potato vines had almost completely wilted! As a result, she had to expend even more mental energy using her superpower to revive them.

Fortunately, although the soil in the field hadn’t been completely broken up yet, the plant ash she had mixed in earlier was just right. By casually pulling up a couple of ridges, she could easily finish planting this small bundle of sweet potato cuttings.

Then there were the cucumber seeds, chili pepper seeds, and cowpeas... These were items she had spent a massive fortune on. After all, in this day and age, anything related to food was in desperately short supply, and seeds were counted out one by one.

What was even more absurd was that when Huai Yu went to buy the seeds, the vendor used a white tray with rows of small indentations to count them. They just grabbed a handful of seeds, spread them over the tray, and the exact quantity became perfectly clear.

"What is this..."

The vendor smiled. "Oh, this is a bead-counting tray. Sigh, my family used to be in the jade business. Those piles of beads were sold individually. If you bought fifty and someone else bought two hundred, we had to use this to count them."

It really made one sigh with emotion! Back then, they sold jade; now, they sold vegetable seeds. Setting aside the difference in profit, it felt like a massive downgrade in career class.

In short, Huai Yu stared at the fifty cowpea seeds, twenty-two chili pepper seeds, and twenty cucumber seeds in her hand, treating them like precious treasures. She didn’t want to lose a single one.

She soaked the cucumber and chili pepper seeds in water to germinate. As for the cowpeas, she dropped two or three seeds into each hole; planting fifty seeds only took a matter of minutes.

Next came the peanuts contributed by Little Tian.

It was just two large handfuls of sun-dried peanuts. Sitting at the edge of the field, Huai Yu CRACKED open the peanut shells, swaying her head back and forth as she chanted a traditional riddle:

"A pockmarked house, a red tent, and a white fatty sleeping inside...

"White fatty, oh, white fatty!"

Hehe!

Little Tian’s eye for quality was indeed quite good. The shelled peanuts were plump with red skins. Even though they were dry, they still had quite a bit of weight to them. By the feel of it—they were all excellent seeds.

She collected the peanut shells separately. Later on, she could bake them into charcoal, which would be very useful for filtering water. When the time came, she would allow Little Tian to bring his own cup and have a sip!

The last item, and the most abundant, were the yam bulbils.

These tiny things were as easy to plant as potatoes; their main selling point was that they could survive as long as there was soil. The only requirement was that they needed plenty of space, otherwise, when they grew into yams, they would be packed too tightly together.

Huai Yu felt she was already being very careful and patient with her farming. However, there were only so many seeds. Even with her slow pace, by noon, she once again found herself with no work to do.

She stuffed a handful of dry grass into the stove, pondering over eating a dried scallion and lard pancake for lunch. She would crush some dried chilies, pour a little hot oil over them, then blanch some bean sprouts, toss them with salt, and wrap it all directly into a pancake...

It would be another perfect meal!

However... she looked at her unfamiliar new house again. Suddenly, she felt a little lost.

Since waking up, Huai Yu’s daily goal had been to make her life better—to have a proper place to live, and to have a steady supply of food and clothing. April’s Chinese toon, May’s locust flowers... She had made plans for everything in the mountains. Her future was right at her feet.

But now, overnight, she had a brand-new home. Even after planting such a large plot of land, she still had over a thousand points left on her wristband. She still had all the pickled vegetables, salted vegetables, dried vegetables, and various wild greens she had stored earlier, nor was she lacking in rice, flour, grain, and oil...

Watching the dancing flames from her stool, she truly had no idea what to do next.

But soon, taking a massive bite out of her wrap, Huai Yu suddenly found a new goal.

Meat!

She needed meat!

The bean sprouts were delicious, the pancake wasn’t bad, and the pork cracklings were incredibly fragrant! But she only had those two catties of pork fat in total, and the price of meat she had asked about last time was over a hundred points. Although a thousand points seemed like a lot, she could probably only buy ten catties of meat with it. And that would be the heavily polluted kind.

Huai Yu rallied her spirits, gobbling down the rest of her pancake in a few bites. She then stood up to pack her gear, deciding to go check out the mountains again.

Previously, she had only wandered around the periphery along the plank paths, never daring to go deeper. Naturally, she had only seen a scattering of small birds; there were absolutely no other edible living creatures.

For one thing, time was tight; walking too far would waste a lot of time on the round trip. Secondly, she was worried about encountering mutant animals or plants she couldn’t handle.

But thinking about how even a fierce giant blackfish could become docile after her purification... Then...

It was the season of tall grass and flying birds. She really wasn’t picky—a wild hare or a pheasant would do just fine.

After some thought, she rolled up the maroon sleeping bag and stuffed it into her wicker basket, brought along a stack of paper, and slung on her satchel. Taking her kitchen knife and multi-purpose shovel as her short and long standby weapons, she skillfully wheeled out her bicycle.

Time to head out!

She popped the bicycle’s kickstand back down and turned around, looking dejected as she carefully locked the house door. After walking two steps away, she came back to tug at the lock again.

"Honestly!" she thought. When she lived in the treehouse, she never worried about things getting stolen when she went out!

"Make sure you guard the house well," Huai Yu said earnestly, leaning close to the Rose Corridor. "You really need to guard it well this time, or else I’ll go catch a mutant goat. They eat any kind of plant. They’ll eat your leaves too."