Chapter 779: Bamboo Revolution: A Harvest of Iron and Green

The rotary tiller had already driven off but the off-roader was still parked inside Territory Nine.

As soon as Tang Huai followed Xia Qing out of the old shack, he reached for the passenger door. Xia Qing suggested, “You should sit in the back.”

“Alright.” Tang Huai didn’t argue and slipped into the back seat. He stared at the unusual passenger seat up front and quickly caught on. “So… that’s set up for Old Goat?”

Xia Qing gave a brief nod, buckled her seatbelt and started the car.

Tang Huai’s eyes grew wider and wider. “Wait, so the passenger seat in the rotary tiller is Old Goat’s too? That sheep’s got some serious territory issues. Pretty sharp nose, huh? Why didn’t you warn me about this sooner?”

Xia Qing explained, “There are only two seats in the rotary tiller.”

If you don’t sit in the passenger seat, where else could you go? Either crouch with the baskets and oil drums behind the driver’s seat, or perch on the toolbox mounted to the right of the driver.

“Yeah, true. Good thing you had Chen Zheng and Chen Cheng drive the rotary tiller home. They sat in the passenger seat too, right? Otherwise, Old Goat might have held a grudge against me.”

Xia Qing stayed quiet, but she knew Chen Cheng would definitely crouch in the back. No one in Hu Zifeng’s squad dared mess with the stubborn and strong Old Goat. They never touched Old Goat’s things and avoided the Toon Tree altogether.

But even Tang Huai sitting in the rotary tiller’s passenger seat wasn’t a big deal. Xia Qing had a few spare seats for Old Goat in her warehouse anyway. She’d just swap in a fresh one when she had the time.

The off-roader stopped under the bus sign at the north end of Territory Two. After Tang Huai headed back to his territory, Xia Qing spun the steering wheel and turned into Section Three.

The moment Old Goat heard her beloved ride return, she bolted out of the house. Xia Qing was in a hurry, but still stopped and opened the door for her. “Boss, our bamboo has evolved a second time. I need to go check it out.”

“Baa.” Wearing her protective mask, Old Goat settled happily into her special seat and let out a satisfied bleat.

When Xia Qing pulled up to the edge of the Western Buffer Forest, Guan Tong was already waiting nearby. “Sister Qing, just an hour ago we chopped the bamboo here, but now there are over twenty more shoots poking up again. The fastest one is already over a meter tall. These things grow like crazy!”

Blue Star always manages to outdo itself—no such thing as the craziest, only crazier.

With Old Goat and Guan Tong, Xia Qing went to check on the wild bamboo growth.

Fifteen meters from the stand, Xia Qing already sensed the evolved bamboo’s aggressive magnetic field. No doubt about it—they’d gone through a second evolution.

Now with the Hardness Evolution, the bamboo’s leaves had turned red and the roots grew even faster. Xia Qing stared at the muddy ground underfoot. Less than twenty centimeters beneath her, a root was hiding. The magnetic disturbance she picked up was coming from right here.

“Baaa—” Old Goat let out a nervous cry.

“I know, it’s dangerous up ahead. We’ll keep our distance.” Xia Qing tightened Old Goat’s protective mask, took out a steel pellet and fired it at a nearly two-meter-tall red-leaved bamboo.

“Thunk.”

The fresh bamboo wasn’t quite hard enough yet. The steel pellet lodged halfway into the stalk. Suddenly, the underground roots attacked. Not only did they shove a huge stone slab lying by the bamboo (weighing dozens of pounds) into the air, but razor-sharp bamboo needles shot out of the ground less than a meter in front of Xia Qing.

“Holy crap!” Guan Tong exclaimed. “The roots have stretched out even more, and those root fibers are a lot stronger!”

Xia Qing’s voice stayed calm, but her eyes shone with excitement. “The bamboo is even tougher now. Chopping it down is going to be even harder than before.”

“Doesn’t matter if it’s tough, as long as it’s useful!” Guan Tong was just as thrilled. “There are more than forty hours left until the Devastation Rain ends. At this rate, we can harvest at least five more crops of bamboo.”

The first harvest gave them twenty-eight poles. This time, thirty-five. And since the bamboo whips were spreading, there could be forty or more stalks next. Five harvests could mean at least two hundred poles!

In catastrophic years like this, you had to build greenhouses to protect your crops from Devastation Rain and mutated pests.

Building one greenhouse needed 117 arched supports plus one main and four auxiliary beams to hold it up. All of those needed bamboo—its flexibility, hardness and light weight were perfect. The columns inside, down the middle and sides, could be made of beech or maple.

Then you had to buy things like insect nets, rain covers, film-pressing wire and spring clamps. Sure, you could use steel for the frame, but those greenhouses cost a fortune—way more than most territory lords could afford.

So after farming, territory lords were busy gathering good wood for greenhouses. If you couldn’t find quality materials, your greenhouse would only last a year or two.

This was the lords’ second year here. Most territories were already searching for timber to replace support poles and columns that broke last year.

Guan Tong wasn’t a lord but he’d heard the talk nonstop. Now, whenever he spotted a young tree with a thick trunk or hefty limbs on a mission, his first thought was, “That would make a perfect column.”

That’s why the accelerated growth of the evolved bamboo had him so excited. “Sister Qing, how many of these bamboo poles does it take to build one greenhouse?”

Xia Qing rattled off the numbers. “If we let them grow to about eighteen meters and the stalks reach twenty centimeters thick, each one can be split into at least fifteen bamboo slats, each four centimeters wide. One slat can make a single arched support. So for a whole frame—main and auxiliary beams included—we only need eleven stalks. With fifteen greenhouses, that’s 165 poles, and any extras can be used as columns.”

That only made Guan Tong even more fired up. “Let’s go back and sharpen the knives, Sister Qing!”

Xia Qing was even more eager than he was. “You go ahead. I’ll fertilize the bamboo.”

Red-leaved bamboo might be evolved now, but it’s still a plant. To make it grow fast, you had to feed it Devastation Element, water and plenty of nutrients.

Xia Qing drove home, grabbed eight sacks of manure and nine of green manure from her warehouse in the rack building, hauled them to the Buffer Forest and then teamed up with Old Goat to lug them up the hillside and fertilize the Green Lantern Bamboo.

She’d cleared 4.5 acres of space for the red-leaved bamboo in the Western Buffer Forest. Seventeen bags of fertilizer would probably only get them through one round of new growth.

No problem—once she’d cut this batch, she’d just fertilize again!

Since Tang Zhengrong’s downfall and the arrest of Jiang Yansheng (who had stolen Sun Zhe’s business) and his uncle Jiang Quan from the Territory Management Department, Sun Zhe from Territory Forty-Eight had gotten back into the earthworm castings trade. Xia Qing’s warehouse held dozens of bags of it, plus the manure she fermented from wild boar droppings—plenty for the red-leaved bamboo.

Of course, Xia Qing couldn’t bear to use Green Lantern Fertilizer on the bamboo. After she finished her stash of earthworm castings and wild boar manure, she could trade with other lords for what they had in stock. With the compost starter from Territory Eight on the market, fertilizer prices had dropped anyway.

So when Xia Qing fertilized the red-leaved bamboo, she didn’t feel even slightly guilty. Fertilizer wasn’t in short supply. What she really needed was high-quality building materials.

Spreading seventeen bags of fertilizer across 4.5 acres of hillside in the rain was nothing for a Level 6 Strength-Based Evolution like Xia Qing. Ten minutes, tops.

When she finished, she and Old Goat stood in the rain at the edge of the bamboo field, excitement shining in their eyes as they watched the red-leaved bamboo shoot up fast, as if every stalk was a steel-reinforced framework for a sturdy new greenhouse.

With bamboo this tough, even if the next Devastation Rain brought winds two levels stronger, her greenhouses would hold fast!

Hu Zifeng listened to the sharpening of knives and, through the camera, watched Xia Qing and Old Goat standing side by side with umbrellas at the hillside bamboo field. The sight made his blood run hot with anticipation.