Chapter 131: Secrets of Storing Food on Blue Star

After the great microbial evolution on Blue Star, storing food became much harder. People came up with all sorts of ways to extend how long food would last.

Xia Qing used the same common, low-cost method as everyone else—first drying the food, then vacuum packing it to pull out all the air.

This method only protected against ‘aerobic bacteria’ and those especially active in places with the Xiang element. It couldn’t stop ‘anaerobic bacteria’ from making toxins.

Even wheat and corn, known for being easy to store, only kept for three months at most using this method if they hadn’t been shelled yet.

Three months later, the food might look fine on the surface, but by then, toxins from evolved anaerobic bacteria would have already spoiled it.

These evolved anaerobic bacteria produce several toxins, including one of the deadliest new biotoxins on Blue Star—the evolved botulinum toxin.

This evolved botulinum can’t even be killed after hours of boiling. Unless someone’s literally starving, no one would risk gambling their life against these mutated germs.

Besides these simple food storage tricks, there were other pricier and more effective options—the most common being food storage warehouses.

Both the farming and livestock centers in the Safe Zone had their own warehouses for storing food. These let food last much longer: major grains could now keep for more than a year, and even easy-to-rot crops like onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, eggplant, and Chinese cabbage would hold up over three months in storage.

Given how devastating the microbial evolution was, getting food to last that long was pretty incredible.

Xia Qing wasn’t a technician and couldn’t help build storage warehouses, so she still didn’t really understand how they worked. All she knew was there were two key conditions: filter out all the Xiang element from the air, and strictly control temperature and humidity.

The destructive power of Blue Star’s microbes rose right along with the amount of Xiang element in the atmosphere. Once it reached a certain level, the microbes’ destructiveness could shoot up exponentially.

Temperature and humidity were manageable. Filtering out the Xiang element was incredibly hard, making warehouses expensive to build and extremely costly to run.

Before she got the Yi Stone, Xia Qing never even considered stockpiling food for the long-term in her own territory. She didn’t know how to build a warehouse, didn’t want to hire someone, and it just wasn’t worth the cost to store the handful of crops she’d grown or gathered.

There was something else even more important: at the Produce Trade Fair, Xia Qing overheard Tang Zhengrong telling Huang Jie, the Land Management Department head from the Hui City Main Base, that all Hui San’s territories had a total cultivated area of 1,358.6 mu.

But how did they get such an oddly specific number?

Xia Qing had lived in Territory Three for half a year, and the Land Management Department had never once sent anyone to check or measure the fields—she hadn’t even heard of them measuring any other territories.

If nobody set foot there but they still had such detailed data, there was only one explanation: the Land Management Department got it from satellite images.

During the first years after the cataclysm, cosmic gamma ray bursts wiped out every low and mid-orbit satellite on Blue Star. Only a few high orbit satellites from Hua Nation survived. After the disaster, every country scrambled to restore communications—Xia Qing had heard several radio broadcasts about Hua Nation’s new successful satellite launches.

If the Base could use satellites to measure farming acreage, then they could certainly watch everything happening inside each territory. That was why Xia Qing, alone in her land, always acted cautious and tried to hide what she was up to—even just fetching spring water.

Right now, she was just one of two hundred completely unremarkable lords at Hui San Base. But if she suddenly put up several solar panels or built a food storage warehouse, the leadership was guaranteed to notice.

All Xia Qing wanted was to lay low and live well. She had no interest in drawing anyone’s attention with flashy moves.

Now, with the Yi Stone in hand, her biggest food storage headache was solved. All she needed was to dig a dry, cool cave in the mountain, make it mothproof, insectproof, and germproof, and she’d have a place to keep food.

Food stored this way would last even longer than vacuum sealed bags.

And with all these mountains on her land, digging out a cave would be a piece of cake.

Humming happily and munching on ground-cherry berries, Xia Qing unrolled detailed maps of Territory Three and Area Three of Mountain 49 and started picking sites.

She’d gotten these two maps by trading vegetables with Zhong Tao. The Territory Three map was drawn by herself, while the Area Three map of Mountain 49 came from Luo Pei. She’d marked every crop she’d grown and every native edible plant she found in her territory and Area Three with pencil on those maps.

In a way, these two maps were her very own treasure maps.

Xia Qing added the locations of the three ground-cherry patches, then stared at all the tiny dots, circles, and squares appearing across the maps, feeling a deep sense of accomplishment.

Because in a world hit by disaster, nothing gave more security than food and weapons.

All that mountain and farmland—over fifteen thousand mu—was hers on paper. She could dig her cave wherever she pleased, as long as it didn’t go deeper than thirty meters into the mountain.

Go deeper than thirty meters and you’d risk damaging the inner mountain structure, threatening her most precious lifeline: uncontaminated spring water.

She hesitated between digging in Area Three or the Buffer Forest, but finally decided on a cave in West Buffer Forest.

Even though Area Three was hers and at a higher elevation—making it easier to keep the temperature steady—she just wasn’t comfortable storing food somewhere she couldn’t regularly see or hear.

Once she picked a spot, actually digging out the cave was no big deal for Xia Qing—she had both the tools and the strength.

But there was no rush. She focused on the real technical step for preserving food: making a protective shell for the Yi Stone.

After carefully studying the info Luo Pei sent over, Xia Qing, with three months’ blacksmithing under her belt, figured it wouldn’t be too hard.

She needed to melt down the surface layer of the Yi Stone, plus crushed rock from around it. Then, mix that with specific proportions of iron, carbon, silicon, manganese, nickel and aluminum, finally casting it all into a shell of the right thickness.

She took out her toolbox and inventoried the supplies she’d built up over the years. She had iron, carbon, silicon, and aluminum on hand, but needed to buy manganese and nickel.

Xia Qing pulled out her phone and messaged Zhong Tao.

He replied almost instantly: “No problem! But what do you need all this for?”

Xia Qing answered, “My machete broke. It’s way too expensive to get it fixed at the Safe Zone, so I’m planning to recast it myself. I worked at the blacksmith’s shop in the Safe Zone, so I know a little something about forging.”

Zhong Tao, who’d just walked into the military cafeteria, stared at his screen a few seconds before replying, “Is there anything you CAN’T do?”

Xia Qing just chuckled and slipped her phone back in her pocket.

“What are you standing around for? Reporting to your girlfriend or something?” one of his buddies joked, coming over with a food tray and seeing Zhong Tao in a daze.

Zhong Tao went to grab food and came back, still thinking. “Hey, do you think a woman who’s good at farming, building houses, AND blacksmithing—oh, and has Strength Evolution, too—would still need a man?” he asked his squadmates.

Zheng Kui knew right away who he was talking about, but said nothing. Another guy next to him snickered, “It’s not whether she needs a man—it’s whether any man would dare to marry a woman like that! Would you?”

Zhong Tao shook his head like a rattle-drum, didn’t even want to imagine it, and buried himself in his food.

Back in Territory Three, Xia Qing switched out the drinking water for her two VIP guests, listened to the radio, grabbed the chickens from their coop and put them in the workshop, then started making dinner for herself and Boss Sheep.

Lunch had been heavy, so Xia Qing settled on something lighter for dinner: mung bean and rice porridge, white flour pancakes, cold-dressed veggies, chili bird’s blood, and a few pieces of roasted egret. Perfect.

Boss Sheep got a meal of tender toon leaves and compressed rations mixed with pasture grass. The green-glow alfalfa and perilla, now in bloom, reeked so much that even passing by made both Xia Qing and Boss Sheep want to take a detour.

When all the food was ready, Xia Qing called out from inside, “Boss, dinner’s ready!”

Boss Sheep, lounging in the shed and chewing the cud, took just seconds to finish his ‘foot-wash’, rub on the grass, open the door, dash into the house and take his seat at the table. Then he squinted at Xia Qing.

Where’s my food?

Xia Qing, putting on a look of dramatic sadness, brought out his food bowl. “Boss, ever since your friend showed up, you don’t stick with me anymore. I feel so left out now.”

Left out? Whatever that is, can you eat it? Boss Sheep’s eyes only followed the bowl.

Xia Qing was speechless trying to talk sense to a sheep. She set his bowl down and gave his horns a good rub. “Heartless little guy!”

It was night, so Xia Qing sealed the security door and pulled the blackout curtains tight before flipping on the lights. She washed her hands in the kitchen, brought her own dinner to the table, and with a happy shout, declared, “Let’s eat!”

In the sheep shed, the Brain-Evolved Wolf watched in the direction of the closed security door with amber eyes for a while, then slowly closed them at last.