Chapter 621: Spring Sowing and the Art of Quality Seeds

To get a good harvest during the age of natural disasters, you need more than just hard-working farmers, fertile soil, clean water, pest-killing biocides, and greenhouses that shield crops from Devastation Rain. You also need high-quality seeds.

When the Base picked out and fenced off land for territory outside the Safe Zone, they factored in soil and water quality from the start.

Section One up north has decent soil and water. The river here is only mildly polluted. As long as it’s not during Devastation Rain or Devastation Snow, the Devastation Element content in the water stays between 14 to 17 parts per thousand, so you can use it to irrigate the fields directly. Still, if you want to keep your crop quality from slipping, it’s better to filter the water first.

But filtered irrigation water is just too expensive. So except for Territory Seven, all the other lords just use river water straight from the source. As a result, crops soak up more Devastation Element as they grow, their internal levels rise, and the quality drops.

What this really means is that the biggest obstacle for territory lords aiming to expand production is not having enough top-tier seeds.

If your territory can’t afford a greenhouse that blocks Devastation Element, lords are forced to pick out the 1% of their harvest that might be good enough as optimized seed and use that for the next round of planting.

And if not even that much shows up, you’re stuck spending a fortune in credits to buy seeds from the Territory Management Department or from other territory lords.

Luckily, high Evolution Element soil offers a partial solution. Crops grown in this soil absorb Devastation Element much more slowly, sometimes not at all. This gives territory lords a solid chance to cultivate quality seeds on their own land.

In short, high Evolution Element soil makes it cheap to preserve seed quality and can sometimes even help you develop better seeds.

In Xia Qing’s territory, the stretch of high Evolution Element soil runs in a long, winding band, tracing the path of the underground Pure Spring. It’s not perfectly straight, but it works.

The Pure Spring is at the top of the lower slope planting area. It snakes up more than two hundred meters to the high slope, and at the very top of that high slope is Old Goat’s Toon Tree. Another 250 meters north past the Toon Tree is the Northern Barrier.

Xia Qing turned this whole strip of land into 25 stepped terraces—12 on the high slope, 13 on the lower. While there are plenty of terraces, each is only about 50 square meters, so all together that’s only about 1.7 mu.

Other territories in the Alliance have their own patches of high Evolution Element soil too, but that’s a closely kept secret. Nobody ever pokes their nose into anyone else’s business, so Xia Qing has no idea how big others’ special patches are.

Still, she figures nobody else has as much as she does, since their territories don’t have a Pure Spring.

Xia Qing split her 1.7-mu terraces into two greenhouses—one on the high slope, one on the low—and put them under strict protection. She’s carefully tending the land and plans to use every inch to its fullest.

Her plan is to use these terraces to not just keep her crops healthy, but also to improve her seeds. This spring, she’ll be planting a little of every major crop her territory grows here.

Xia Qing already promised her Idol that within three years, she’d boost the Evolution Element content in her spinach to nine or higher. So this spring, the first thing she’s planting in her terraces is high Evolution Element spinach.

To stay under the radar, this year she’s only planting 150 High-Elevation Green Lantern Spinach seeds in the terraces. That number just happens to match the amount of seed the Base hands out to lords. But instead of Base-cultivated second-generation seed, she’s using the original first-gen seeds grown on her own terraces.

Spinach alone doesn’t even fill one terrace, so she’s putting the rest of the space to work with the Green Lantern Purple Sweet Potato—a Devastation Element-sensitive plant she got in a recent trade.

Devastation Element-sensitive plants need full isolation throughout their entire growth. Coincidentally, Xia Qing also wants to use Yi Stone to protect her spinach seedlings the whole way. So it makes sense to plant these two together in the same terrace.

She got lucky and now has nearly a hundred pieces of Yi Stone, but without a steady supply, she needs to make each one count. Now she’s hoping the Queen gets out of her postpartum rest soon and that Crippled Wolf shows up, since she’s ready to trade—she’s got a big fridge, a microscope, and cotton pads all set aside for him.

The third crop Xia Qing plans to prioritize in the terraces is peanuts.

Last year, Xia Qing harvested 35 Green Lantern peanuts and 170 Yellow Lantern peanuts from her terraces. Thanks to Red Squirrel, she got another 195 Green Lantern and 315 Yellow Lantern peanuts in the Hidden Valley. Aside from a few she traded to her Idol, she barely ate any all winter. Nearly every mature peanut became seed stock. Now, she has 9,200 Green Lantern peanut seeds and plenty of Yellow Lantern ones ready to go.

Of course, just because you have a bunch of seeds doesn’t mean all of them will sprout—the germination rate matters.

Last spring, the peanuts sprouted naturally, so Xia Qing had no idea about their germination rate. To get precise numbers, she did a test with Pure Spring Water during the winter: Green Lantern peanuts had about a 50% sprout rate, Yellow Lantern peanuts just 35%.

That’s the lowest rate among all her seeds. Even the dangerous Yellow Lantern potatoes—after Devastation Evolution, they wobble and dance—manage to reach a 40% sprout rate. By comparison, Yellow Lantern sunflower seeds have a bright 80% germination rate!

Low germination or not, you still treat them like gold. To hedge her bets, Xia Qing plans to plant two terraces with Green Lantern peanuts and one with Yellow Lantern peanuts. The rest go in the acre she owns in the Hidden Valley.

The fourth crop she’s focusing on in the terraces is Green Lantern soybeans.

Last year, the soybeans in Xia Qing’s territory mutated into utter oddballs—so tough you couldn’t chew them. Now she’s got 350 Green Lantern soybeans she traded with Li Si for Green Lantern eggs. She also has three jin—thanks to Zhang San, who demanded them from Territory Nine after their evolved Water Rat got caught snooping in Section Three. She’ll plant two terraces of soybeans, with the rest headed for the fields downhill.

The fifth crop for the terraces is Yellow Lantern sunflowers. The point isn’t so much the harvest as betting that, with high Evolution Element soil, Pure Spring Water, and a little luck, she’ll get that 1% chance for an optimized seed and improve her sunflower seed quality.

The sixth is Yellow Lantern potatoes—same reason as the sunflowers.

Then come the staple grains and cotton: wheat, rice, corn, and, of course, cotton. She’ll plant each in the terraces, both to keep their seed quality steady and maybe give it a boost.

Next up are Old Goat’s favorites—Green Lantern perilla and Green Lantern alfalfa, one terrace each. And although Green Lantern pumpkin grows like weeds, it’s tasty and yields like crazy, so she’ll dedicate a terrace for it, too.

That leaves four terraces for improving the seed quality of garlic, ginger, green onion, water celery, cucumber, string beans, tomato, and more. Xia Qing also plans to grow some chrysanthemum flowers she found in Valley Two, plus the mint she got from Xin Yu. These four terraces are just for her, Old Goat, and Er Gou. Only sometimes will she share with her Idol Zhang San or her marksmanship teacher Luo Pei.

Zhang San will trade with her from time to time, for sure. Luo Pei’s nearly recovered, but he’ll be out in the field more now, hardly staying in the territory. So even if Xia Qing wanted to treat her teacher to fresh veggies, she probably wouldn’t get many chances.

Long story short, all the crops Xia Qing now grows will have a place in the terraces. This way, she can eat well and, more importantly, keep her seed lines healthy and improving.

That means once planting season comes after Devastation Rain, Xia Qing’s going to be swamped. So she’s working hard to prep everything ahead of time. The second the weather clears up after Devastation Rain, she’ll be ready to soak seeds and get planting fast.

While Xia Qing’s busy with farmwork, Yang Jin and Luo Pei escort Tang Rui, Tang Zheng, and three others back to the Hui Three Safe Zone by helicopter.