Chapter 372: A Wall for Peace of Mind

Old Goat refused to come back, so Xia Qing didn’t push it. She greeted Guan Tong and Chen Zheng, checked on the construction team’s progress, then picked some vegetables and headed home.

When she got home, Xia Qing noticed Er Gou lying in the yard, watching over the corn to keep birds away, looking a little listless. She set down her things and asked, “Er, are you feeling sick?”

At this point, Xia Qing was practically half a vet. After checking Er Gou’s temperature and stool and finding everything normal, she made dinner. The meat porridge she brought out for Er Gou was gone in no time, so his appetite was fine.

So it wasn’t health, but something emotional. After eating and washing up, Xia Qing didn’t rush off to the fields or check up on the construction. She stayed right beside Er Gou.

Er Gou rested his head on Xia Qing’s lap, visibly unhappy.

As she stroked his fur, Xia Qing spoke softly, “You’ve spent days guarding the corn at home, feeling worn out? You’ve done great, Er. This afternoon, I’ll keep an eye on the corn. You go play with Old Goat. He’s up on the high slope, watching the construction team.”

But Er Gou just kept his head on Xia Qing’s lap, refusing to budge.

“Not that?” Xia Qing tried again. “Are you missing the Queen or your little sister, Lame Wolf? Do you want to move back to the Wolf Den and live with the others?”

Er Gou looked up at Xia Qing, but still didn’t seem any happier.

Xia Qing couldn’t figure out why a wolf would be in such a bad mood. She gave up guessing and let Er Gou out to play with Old Goat. Meanwhile, she tidied up the corn cobs from threshing, shelled the dried mung beans, and chased away the birds.

The mung beans were already dried, and after shelling, the total was 208 jin. For this second crop, Xia Qing had planted one mu of Yellow Lantern mung beans and a terrace of Green Lantern mung beans. Before the disaster, such a yield would have been disappointing.

But with the ongoing disasters and all the Devastation Element and Devastation Rain, she was already satisfied to get this much.

Her experience with this second round of planting made it clear—breeding high-quality seed stock and keeping the Devastation Element content in the seeds from rising was really, really tough.

That spring, she’d brought six jin of Yellow Lantern mung bean seeds out from the Safe Zone, but in the end only harvested just over 4,000 mung bean plants, of which 27 were Green Lanterns.

For the next crop, Xia Qing kept planting mung beans and tried to follow Li Si’s “Green Bean Growing Manual” for cultivation and fertilizing as closely as possible.

Still, her territory’s conditions fell far short of Li Si’s standards, so the sprouting rate and overall yield barely improved.

Take the Green Lantern mung beans she planted on that one terrace—only 66% of the seeds sprouted, 20% of those were lost in Devastation Rain, and 60% of the surviving plants had Devastation Element content above 0.5%, which made them shift from Green Lantern to Yellow Lantern plants.

So even though Xia Qing sowed half a jin of Green Lantern beans and eventually harvested 75 jin of mung beans, only 30 jin were Green Lanterns.

Blue Star has already changed. The atmosphere isn’t what it used to be. Li Si’s cultivation guide mentioned ‘near-zero Devastation Element’ growing environments, but between the cost and the tech required, there’s no way to build that on a large scale within a territory.

To plant more crops and boost food production, Xia Qing believed she needed to breed seeds resilient enough to withstand the Devastation Element.

She genuinely wished the experts—people like Li Si—would focus their energy on seed research instead of scheming, for the sake of all humanity.

Around four in the afternoon, Xia Qing got a message from Er Yong letting her know the construction crew was nearly finished enclosing the iron mesh wall. The project needed the lord’s inspection before it could be signed off.

As Lord of the territory, Xia Qing packed up the shelled mung beans, bundled the half-dried corn, and took everything indoors so the birds couldn’t steal it. Only then did she head to meet Lu Yuhui, the construction lead.

She didn’t make it far before her phone began beeping with an alert. Curious, she turned back and couldn’t help laughing.

Red Squirrel had darted out from some little nook and was busy scavenging in the spot where Xia Qing had just finished working. After harvesting several hundred jin of grain, it was inevitable that a few stray beans or kernels had ended up out of sight.

Now she finally understood how that little stash of corn kernels wound up in Red Squirrel’s nest.

Xia Qing didn’t mind Red Squirrel taking leftovers. When she reached the high slope, she saw Er Gou and Old Goat stretched out under the Toon Tree, peering through the gaps in the grass wall and shrubs at the Inspection Team working in the Northern Barrier.

The well-behaved Er Gou she was used to now looked more like Lame Wolf’s fierce mom—wild and bristling with aggression. Even when Xia Qing stood next to him, his hostility toward the construction crew barely faded.

Was his foul mood because of the construction? The team’s never come into view of the house’s security camera, so they really shouldn’t have crossed paths with Er Gou.

Xia Qing ruffled Er Gou’s head and went off to meet with Lu Yuhui.

It took twelve days, twenty workers, three excavators, and two mixers, with the helicopter flying three trips to bring in all the wire mesh. But finally, it was done.

A nine-kilometer-long, 4.3-meter-high iron mesh wall now wrapped around Xia Qing’s entire territory—including the farmland, reservoir, Western Buffer Forest, and Northern Buffer Forest.

After inspecting the newly installed mesh wall to make sure it all passed muster, Xia Qing gifted Lu Yuhui two big cabbages in thanks. “You’ve all worked hard these past days.”

Getting edible food during disaster years was always a joy. Lu Yuhui accepted the cabbages with a big smile, stashing them in the work truck. “I’ll be working in Territory Eight for a while next. If you spot any problems with the wall, just reach out, Sister Qing.”

Xia Qing nodded, watching the construction crew drive their work truck slowly along the Northern Barrier toward Territory Eight.

Section Three’s Northern Barrier runs along the hillside. It’s fifty meters wide, but hardly flat. To make it easier for trucks to travel up and down, the crew had leveled the whole thing with excavators. Now it actually looked like a real road.

With the wall in place, Xia Qing felt thrilled. She strolled west along the flat road on the barrier, reached her main gate, pulled out her key, unlocked the huge iron lock on the wire mesh door, swung the gate wide, and stepped right into her own territory grinning from ear to ear.

Sure, her wire mesh wall wasn’t as tall or sturdy as the ones in the Safe Zone. But to her, it was enough. Standing inside her newly walled territory, Xia Qing felt more secure than ever.

With the wall and cameras up, she could finally sleep easy at night. When it came time to train over in Hill Forty-Nine’s Section Three, she wouldn’t have to ask for Hu Zifeng’s squad to help guard the territory anymore.

After locking the gate, Xia Qing returned to the terraced fields on the high slope, carefully checking on the spinach rich in the Yi Element.

The spinach in the greenhouse had ripened days ago, and she’d already sent the harvested roots, stems, and leaves to Section Seven in exchange for a batch of premium nutrient shake. But the spinach on the high slope terraces still wasn’t ready.

She’d planted this terrace based on Zhang San’s “Spinach Growing Manual”—using a Yi Stone to drive off the Devastation Element and watering only with pure spring water. No doubt, it was higher quality than what grew in the greenhouse.

Does slower ripening mean even better quality? Xia Qing was eager to find out.

Leaving the terrace, Xia Qing climbed up and discovered both Er Gou and Old Goat at the northern edge of the territory, right up against the new wall. Old Goat grazed calmly, while Er Gou crept closer to the mesh, baring his sharp fangs.

The moment Xia Qing saw Er Gou’s reaction to the wall, she got it—his grumpiness today and that hostility toward the construction team had an obvious cause.

Unlike Old Goat—the herbivorous evolved animal—Er Gou, raised as a carnivorous predator in the Evolved Forest, hated being fenced in by iron wire.