Chapter 874: The Most Valuable Employee of the Mouse World

Before Xia Qing discovered Little Fei Mao’s ability, she had to wait for seeds to sprout and then test each plant one by one with an instrument to select seeds suitable for cultivation and optimization.

If a selected plant had already passed its transplanting period, it couldn’t be moved to the richer soil of the terraces. Xia Qing would have to mark it off and care for it separately with fertilizer and water, which made breeding work much more complicated.

But now, with Little Fei Mao’s help, the process of seed selection has become much easier.

To figure out if this talent for picking quality seeds—food—was unique to Little Fei Mao or shared by the whole freeloading squirrel family, Xia Qing took samples from all fourteen of the grain depots belonging to Little Fei Mao, the parents, and their two kits, and analyzed the quality of their stashes.

In doing so, she found that the three squirrels had mixed up grains grown by Xia Qing with Yellow Lantern and Red Lantern grass seeds and fruits they’d scavenged elsewhere. So, for now, Xia Qing concluded that the ability to choose top-quality food was unique to Little Fei Mao.

Once satisfied, Xia Qing confiscated most of the freeloading family’s stored food to feed the chickens.

Even though the freeloaders bounced around, squeaking their protests, Xia Qing showed no mercy—since they’d stashed damp grains in a tree hollow, which would soon go moldy.

Wasting food was absolutely intolerable, especially when Xia Qing had worked so hard to grow it. She was already being kind by leaving them a stash of dry, storable grains.

But the freeloaders didn’t see it that way. After Xia Qing took their stores, the mother squirrel immediately moved out with her two kits and whatever food she had left, heading back to their old tree hollow in Section Three of Hill Forty-Nine.

The Eurasian Lynx hadn’t shown up in ages, and the little Honey Badger and the Red Fox that roamed Section Three posed less of a threat to squirrels than the humans did in Section Three.

Little Fei Mao didn’t move out with his family. He stayed right where he was, living in the pocket of Xia Qing’s protective suit.

So Xia Qing decided to hire Little Fei Mao as the very first official employee of Section Three.

Job description: Seed selection.

Salary: Piece-rate pay. Every batch of seeds he selects earns him five credits, which go towards paying off his debt. So far, Little Fei Mao has paid back 25 credits and still owes Xia Qing a few more.

Benefits: Food (Green Lantern food), drinks (pure spring water), and lodging (Xia Qing’s coat pocket). Plus, if he performs well, he even gets special bonuses—like high-evolution spinach seeds.

Looking at the whole mouse world on Blue Star, Xia Qing could say with confidence that she was offering Little Fei Mao the highest salary around.

In other words, just three months old, Little Fei Mao had already clawed his way to the peak of the Blue Star working mouse pyramid, all by his own skills!

Freeloader, the red squirrel, was known for being neat and tidy and she’d passed that on to her kits.

Whenever Xia Qing was outside, if Little Fei Mao needed to relieve himself, he’d climb out of his pocket and find a safe spot. If Xia Qing was indoors, he used the dirt basin Xia Qing had prepared for him with dry straw mixed in.

Every time Xia Qing saw Little Fei Mao crawl out of his pocket on the coat rack for a bathroom break, she felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

Having a working mouse around was way more cost-effective than owning a spoiled cat. After all, Hu Zifeng had raised Little Five for a year and the only thing that cat had learned was to eat.

Besides the eight kilos of Hui Three’s SY-2 Green Lantern corn, Xia Qing also had two kilos of Red Eleven’s Y-3 she got from Tan Junjie last winter and 2.5 kilos of Green Lantern corn seeds harvested last autumn from the six optimized Green Lantern corn stalks.

Little Fei Mao was extremely picky. Out of roughly 12.5 kilos of Green Lantern seeds, he picked out only 180 top-quality ones. Even the optimized seeds that had appeared in Xia Qing’s territory last year didn’t meet his sky-high standards—not a single one made it to his stash.

Xia Qing sowed the seeds Little Fei Mao had selected, plus 400 more that she’d chosen herself, in the terraces. The rest she planted in the sheds where wheat had been harvested, in Sheds 8 and 9.

The Green Lantern corn seeds were enough for just one and a half sheds. For the rest of the half-shed, Xia Qing planted Yellow Lantern corn.

As for the other wheat-harvested sheds—Shed 5 and Shed 12—Xia Qing decided to plant Green Lantern mung beans.

The reason she was planting so many mung beans was simple: the only Green Lantern food seeds she had left were mung beans. If she didn’t plant them, she’d have to plant Yellow Lantern corn, or let the fields stay empty.

Although mung beans needed more fertilizer than corn, their quality was higher. They were also less likely to undergo Devastation Evolution in the Devastation Rain. Even if they did, the short mung bean plants were much easier to clear than the tall corn stalks.

By the time the second round of mung beans was harvested in October, the price of Green Lantern mung beans would probably drop even lower. Still, no matter how much it fell, Green Lantern grains would always be worth more than Yellow Lantern ones.

So, it wasn’t just Xia Qing. Almost all the other lords chose mung beans as their second crop unless they could get hold of some other Green Lantern crops.

The twelfth shed in Section Three, which had been flipped by the storm, was not repaired with Hardness-Evolved Red-leaved Bamboo.

That’s because, after the second Devastation Rain, the Hardness-Evolved bamboo stakes in Section Three hadn’t fully dried out yet.

If she stuck those bamboo posts in the ground now, by the time the third Devastation Rain hit, the posts would soak up too much Devastation Element, take root, start growing, and then break through the rain cover—ruining all the crops inside and leaving them exposed to the rain and its mutating effects.

So, the 294 Hardness-Evolved bamboo poles Xia Qing collected after the second Devastation Rain were all stacked neatly in the Western Buffer Forest, drying on the earthen kang under a shelter made of rain cover.

The rain cover kept both sunlight and rain off the bamboo, while the kang sped up the drying. Xia Qing had actually learned this clever drying method from Huo Lei.

And it wasn’t just her; all the other lords were drying their Devastation-Evolved bamboo the same way.

With this method, the bamboo could be dried out in just a month. By next month, Xia Qing planned to replace all the arched greenhouse supports in her territory with Hardness-Evolved bamboo, making everything more disaster-proof and durable.

During the short-lived return rain half a month ago, the new Devastation-Evolved bamboo in Section Three only grew to a bit over six meters tall—nowhere near big enough to harvest. So, these bamboo stalks would have to wait for the third Devastation Rain before they could be cut down.

For this round of four acres’ worth of corn and mung beans, Xia Qing didn’t ask Qi Fu and his wife or Hu Zifeng’s team for help—she did all the planting herself, using the new planter.

The Alliance Research Institute, just half a month old, had used Jiang Ying’s design ideas and sketches, then joined forces with Huo Lei, to create a single-person, easy-to-use planter.

This one-person planter was far more efficient than the old version, which Qi Fu and Shizhong had modified but still needed three people to operate. It fit perfectly in the low-roofed greenhouses.

The planter had two handles, a two-meter-long, fifteen-centimeter wide wooden board, and several bamboo tubes with conical funnel tips, which could be spaced out as needed for the crop rows.

For example, when planting corn with rows fifty centimeters apart, you’d install four bamboo tubes on the board spaced fifty centimeters apart and fill each tube with corn seeds. The operator would walk backwards, holding the handles, and whenever it was time to plant, they’d shove the pointed end of the tube into the soil, setting the depth themselves.

As each conical tip pressed into the soil, one or two seeds would naturally drop down from the bamboo tube through the funnel, landing right in the row.

Of course, the size of the seed opening was adjustable, depending on what you were planting. This was the cleverest part of the design, and why each planter cost fifty credits and was in such high demand among the lords.

Few lords could build such a precise and sensitive mechanism for controlling seed flow.

After adjusting the bamboo tubes and filling them with seeds, Xia Qing just walked backward down the shed, pressing the lightweight planter into the ground row by row. In no time, she’d finished planting half an acre.

After planting all four acres, Xia Qing’s back wasn’t sore and her arms didn’t ache. Like everyone else, she couldn’t help marveling at how smart it was to set up the Alliance Research Institute.

Specialization is key. Bring together people with the same goal, let everyone do what they’re best at, and you wind up with results far better than you’d get alone. That’s really what the Alliance is all about.