Chapter 207: The Hard Truth About Harvests

When Xia Qing finished her patrol around the territory and returned home, the mouthwatering aroma of braised pig’s trotters greeted her at the door. She couldn’t wait to shed her protective suit and scrub her hands clean. Only after setting out the boiled offal for the sick wolf and Boss Sheep’s special feed did she bring the clay pot to her own table and lift the lid.

The broth inside was creamy white, but the taste was a bit mild. She poured in a dash of vinegar and finished it off with a sprinkle of Greenlight scallion, making it perfect.

Xia Qing stirred the soup a few times with her spoon and fished out a handful of soybeans. After a moment, she fell silent.

Even after not eating soybeans or drinking soy milk for ten years, basic common sense never leaves you. Once soybeans are cooked, even if they don’t burst open like mung beans, they should at least plump up a bit. So why did these soybeans look exactly the same as before they were cooked?

She picked one out and carefully popped it into her mouth, biting down with caution. And then…

She couldn’t bite through it!

After half a year of hard work, her precious soybeans had ended up like this—impossibly tough to eat.

Xia Qing polished off all the tender pig’s trotter and finished the soup until not a drop was left, then eyed the neat pile of untouched soybeans on the napkin, lost in thought.

Did these soybeans undergo a hardness evolution, or were they actually just some other species that looked like soybeans?

She’d seen soybeans while collecting materials with the Squad before. After a harvest, they’d toss them in an outdoor pot with some oil to make popcorn. Sure, it never looked pretty, but the taste wasn’t bad at all.

After ten years of calamity, Xia Qing refused to waste even a single grain. She washed the soybeans that had been cooked for over an hour, put them in a hot pan to dry roast, and figured she’d try popping them like corn.

But by the time the pan started smoking from the heat, the soybeans still hadn’t changed. Defeated, she scooped out the burning-hot beans and left them aside.

With beans this stubborn, there was no way to press out their juice for testing. Xia Qing decided to stop wrestling with the legumes and head back to work in the fields.

While she weeded the terraced plot on the highland, Hu Zifeng showed up carrying a basket, ready to collect today’s spinach juice and green-light vegetables. Xia Qing had told Yang Jin that Luo Pei could pick anything he wanted, but Luo Pei never asked for anything, which meant he just ate whatever Xia Qing picked that day.

She plucked two tomatoes, three cucumbers and a pumpkin, filling Hu Zifeng’s basket to the brim. “Wait here a bit, Captain Hu. I’ll head home and juice the spinach.”

Although Boss Sheep never spelled it out, it wasn’t hard for Hu Zifeng to guess what could be extracted from juicing spinach. Still, since Boss Sheep told everyone to keep quiet, he played dumb and just wanted to help however he could. “Go on, I’ll take over the weeding while you’re gone.”

After three days of hard work, there were only three peanut patches left to weed. Xia Qing reminded him, “Be careful not to touch the plants with the red threads tied around them.”

If the Greenlight peanuts detected contact from any animal, even humans, they’d attack with their leaf-vein needles. Hu Zifeng chuckled and nodded.

When Xia Qing came back, she not only brought the smallest vacuum bag full of spinach juice, but also a few of the iron-hard soybeans. “Captain Hu, please take these beans back to Luo Ge.”

She asked Captain Luo to let the Plot One planting group help test exactly what these iron beans really were.

That afternoon, Luo Pei called. “The beans you sent are, in fact, a type of evolved soybean. Their hardness skyrockets after mutation, so you need to soak them for thirty-six hours to soften the husk before processing. Because evolved soybeans like this are so hard, have poor taste and little nutritional value, even if you gather and bring them back to the Safe Zone, they end up as animal feed for livestock and poultry.”

So after half a year of tending, all her efforts had gone into providing Boss Sheep with fancy animal feed?

Xia Qing didn’t say anything, but Luo Pei could sense her frustration and laughed a few times. “When we cleared the Evolver Forest in Territory Three last year, did you see any evolved soybeans?”

“Nope.” Xia Qing replied without a moment’s hesitation.

The main squad—including Luo Pei—had handled clearing out threats at the front during cleanup missions. As an auxiliary evolver, Xia Qing was responsible for transporting resources and sealing up anything collected.

She’d found a spring here back then, so she’d paid close attention to this patch ever since. She was sure they hadn’t collected any soybeans or peanuts from around here.

“We cleared Territory Three in late November, so if those beans had been growing nearby last fall, we would’ve seen the bare stems even if there weren’t any pods left.” Luo Pei guessed, “So odds are, these evolved soybeans were moved here by some small animals.”

Xia Qing agreed. “Rodents and ants both store food in winter, but ants don’t travel far. It must have been rodents.”

Thinking about how her hard-won soybeans might just be leftovers from mice, hamsters or squirrels dragging them in from somewhere else—only to abandon them when they couldn’t bite through the shells—Xia Qing was seriously tempted to pick a fight over it.

But random brawling isn’t her style.

After hanging up, she checked the evolved squirrel’s location and saw the little guy had returned, its marker stuck unmoving in one spot in Plot Forty-Nine, Area Three. It was probably resting.

Xia Qing hiked up to the highland, spotted the squirrel’s tree from a distance, and on the way home grabbed a handful of toon leaves. Carrying her sheep plow, she called out to Boss Sheep, “Hey, Boss, ready to till some land?”

Boss Sheep clearly had nothing better to do; as soon as she called, it came running. Xia Qing strapped the harness on, and together—one pulling, one steering—they started turning the soil by the village entrance.

All her frustration from before got poured into working the land. After flipping over four acres, she still wasn’t satisfied, so she grabbed her machete and chopped down more than forty saplings, each over three meters tall.

These faux paulownia trees had started showing up after the disaster, and no one really knew what species they came from. While their leaves didn’t have much Life Drain Element, other toxins made them inedible.

In spring, the trees bloomed with fragrant little flowers, which drew bees and butterflies for pollination. In summer, they produced berries that looked just like mulberries, enticing birds to feed and scatter seeds far and wide with their droppings.

Within a week of their seeds falling, wild paulownias would sprout and shoot up fast—reaching three to four meters high in barely two months—crowding out all other plants. But since they grow so quickly, their wood is soft and useless for furniture, good for nothing but firewood.

Last winter, the clean-up team chopped every wild paulownia in Territory Three and even burned their roots. But whatever roots stayed underground and seeds dropped by birds still managed to sprout up everywhere, forcing Xia Qing to clear them out regularly.

If she didn’t, her neat farmland would soon turn into a thicket of wild paulownia.

Still, they weren’t entirely worthless. In poor soil, Xia Qing had deliberately kept an acre overrun with these seedlings. Once they shot up to three or four meters, she’d chop them all down and keep their straight trunks as makeshift poles.

These poles worked as well as bamboo for building arbors for cucumbers and beans, could hold up greenhouse frames, and now would be perfect to fence in a new chicken pen.

Clearing wild paulownias and turning the soil—today’s big projects were to build a new chicken enclosure and move the backyard flock into their new home.

She staked down posts to mark the chicken pen’s perimeter, then waited for the chickens and goslings to settle into their cage at dusk so she could move over the old wire mesh and nests. Soon, the new coop would be up and running.

Xia Qing clapped the dirt off her gloves, startling a few little birds that were picking for insects in the freshly turned soil.

After finishing the chicken coop, she headed to the greenhouse on the highland and crouched beside the peanut terraced plot she’d tended for nearly six months, worried all over again.