Chapter 753: Return to the Territory: Lessons, Trust, and the Test of Harvest

On the third day of special training, Yan Long drove Xia Qing’s battered old car back into Section Three. Completely wiped out, Xia Qing had Old Goat carry her home. She collapsed on the couch in the living room and fell asleep right there—clothes still on, skipping dinner.

The next morning, when Xia Qing opened her eyes, she spotted a half-eaten cucumber placed by her side. No need to guess—Old Goat obviously left it there since she hadn’t gotten up for breakfast.

By now, Xia Qing and Old Goat were true partners who trusted each other implicitly. Old Goat could wander through the house and not disturb her at all. Sometimes, the steady clack of Old Goat’s hooves was comforting, helping her sleep more soundly. That’s why she hadn’t woken up even when Old Goat went out, picked a cucumber, and gnawed half of it before leaving the rest for her.

Why just half? Every time Xia Qing took a break from farm work, she’d split a cucumber straight from the field—one half for herself, the other for Old Goat. Leaving her half a cucumber was nothing out of the ordinary.

Xia Qing took the cucumber to the kitchen, washed it off, and crunched away before heading upstairs to peel off her protective suit and shower.

Over these three days, she’d learned how to take down a crocodile unarmed, survive in rapids, and endure bruise after bruise, sore muscle after sore muscle. Each mark on her body was proof of growth.

It was a shame, though—not a single python of the right size lurking in the evolved forest nearby, so she never got to see Yan Long face off with one. It had been years since Xia Qing saw that battle firsthand.

Yan Long’s bodyguard job in Territory Seven would end this year, making this her last round of special training with Xia Qing and Tan Qi. By year’s end she’d return to Hui One Base for her next mission.

Yan Long hadn’t said much about it, but Xia Qing was sure the next battlefield would be near water. There’d been a flash of anticipation in Yan Long’s eyes every time she mentioned the new job.

On the lake, in the rapids—Yan Long’s eyes always shone with a rare brilliance. She loved the water and loved fighting within it. Any mission she looked forward to had to be near water.

Shaking the water from her cropped hair, Xia Qing stretched her aching arms and grabbed a towel to dry off.

Yan Long belonged to the water, which meant this place would never be her true home. But Xia Qing loved it here. This was her land, her anchor—the place she’d fight tooth and nail to protect.

Once she’d changed, Xia Qing rinsed some rice, poured in pure spring water, and set it to gently simmer for porridge.

It wasn’t that she loved rice porridge that much, but her stash of Green Lantern food still had the most rice left.

Last winter, Xia Qing swapped with Yang Jin for four hundred jin of bS-6 Green Lantern rice with a Devastation Element content of 4.3 per mille. Since then, she’d focused on eating Green Lantern crops to strengthen her body, lower her Devastation Element level, and boost her Evolution Element content. With rice as her biggest stockpile, it naturally became her main staple.

As an Advanced Evolutionary, she ate much more than ordinary people—over five months, she’d already polished off more than three hundred ten jin of rice, with just over eighty jin left.

Once that was gone, her Green Lantern wheat, mung beans, corn, soybeans, and sweet potatoes would mature one after the other, giving her plenty of options for staple foods.

A good harvest needs more than hard work—it depends on the weather. To reap these crops smoothly, she needed a stretch without freak hail, hurricanes, or locust swarms, and in half a month, she needed the second Devastation Rain to be gentle, not fierce.

People can’t stop natural disasters, but they can get ready for them. So for the next half month, Xia Qing’s top priority was managing the fields, reinforcing greenhouses and shelters, and bracing everything to keep losses down when disaster struck.

After feeding the chickens, she stepped out of the Abandoned Village and spotted Old Goat trotting by with a little basket in his mouth, hunting for bugs. She greeted him warmly: “Morning, Boss! Thanks for the cucumber you picked for me last night!”

Seeing his sidekick back in high spirits, Old Goat dropped the small basket—now filled with dead bugs—on the ground and headed off to graze.

“Leave it to me, Boss. Take a break,” Xia Qing said breezily, grabbing the basket and resuming her bug hunt while checking on her territory.

Grasshoppers, crickets, cabbage worms, caterpillars, centipedes, snakes… Xia Qing caught everything she saw.

When she reached the reservoir, she tipped a handful of bugs into the iron cage for the big fish that had been moved from the fish tank to the reservoir—Green Lantern and Yellow Lantern giants, ten in all. Most of the bugs she fed to the fry, opening the netted cover over the pond and dumping the rest in.

The fish fry grew fast after hatching—some already two centimeters long. As soon as the bugs hit the water, the fry swarmed in and tore into them, stirring wave after wave of ripples across the surface.

Trouble was, there were always egrets, night herons, spot-billed ducks, water snakes, and grass snakes sneaking into her fish pond to snack on her precious fry whenever Xia Qing let her guard down. So she had no choice but to cover the whole pond with a fishing net to keep the birds out.

She’d traded for that net in Territory Ten. They’d dug their own fish ponds over there and ran into the same problem. At an Alliance meeting, Madam Shi mentioned Shizhong made nets, so Xia Qing asked for an extra one.

With the net in place, the birds couldn’t get in and her fry would be much safer.

To protect the fry during Devastation Rain, Xia Qing decided to go with a two-pronged approach.

First, she’d copy Territory Five—raise the pond dikes to stop rainwater runoff during the storm. Second, on the day before Devastation Rain, herd all the fry into a small nursery pond with a fishing net, then cover it with rainproof fabric. That way, any Devastation Rain landing or flowing in wouldn’t taint the pond or drop the fry’s quality.

The risk was if the wind picked up during the storm, it could blow off the rain cover and let the rain in anyway.

So Xia Qing had a backup plan: when gathering fish with the net, she’d pull out some fry and keep them in the fish tank for the whole storm. Once the Devastation Element content in air and water dropped back to normal, she’d return the fry to the pond to keep growing.

Her allies liked the idea and decided to use both methods, too, spreading out the risk. They also planned to move the fish tanks into the Hidden Valley, screening them from the Devastation Element entirely during the storm.

Xia Qing went along with them, moving some fry to the Hidden Valley, which meant she didn’t need to use a Yi Stone to shield those fry in the fish tank anymore.

After feeding the fish, Xia Qing carried on with her basket, patrolling the hillside. Passing by the terraced fields planted with Green Lantern rice, she stopped and—separated by the insect net—sighed as she gazed at five bS-6 Green Lantern rice seedlings.

She’d grown these five plants from unhulled seeds she picked out of the four hundred jin of Green Lantern rice. Since bS-6 Green Lantern rice from White San Base had a great taste, Xia Qing had high hopes for these five stalks.

Unfortunately, the seedlings seemed unable to adapt to the local soil and water. They were lagging behind the J-2 rice from Section Seven, and their Devastation Element content had climbed by 0.3 points to 4.6 per mille.

At this rate, even if these five bS-6 plants managed to bloom, seed, and mature, their quality would drop from Green Lantern to Yellow Lantern.

And this was the result from planting them in High Evolution Element Soil—regular dirt would fare even worse.

Nothing saps a farmer’s motivation more than that.