Farmland?
Once He Guying put it that way, Xin Xiaoru immediately calmed down.
She flew the vehicle to the perimeter of the fire scene, confirmed the range where the zombies were flailing about, estimated the speed at which the wildfire was spreading, and marked out a boundary for the mountain fire.
The RV slowly circled along this boundary. Meanwhile, He Guying brought down falling snow, freezing the marked line tree by tree and forming a not-very-thick ice wall.
His ability was limited. Roughly every fifty meters of frozen, tree-based ice wall, he would exhaust his powers and need to rest for a while before continuing. He treated it as his ability training for the day.
Only then did the two fleeing ability user girls belatedly realize that they had barged onto someone else’s territory, and had nearly burned down someone else’s land. They were instantly filled with unease.
They didn’t dare to just leave. After all the zombies had been burned to death, they detoured around the burning forest, ran beneath the RV, and asked if there was anything they could do.
Xin Xiaoru tossed down two axes. “Chop trees. Clear a half-meter-wide firebreak. Stack the felled logs farther away, don’t let them catch fire.”
The two nodded repeatedly and immediately set to work, trying to atone for their mistake.
After a busy afternoon, they finally finished both the ice wall and the firebreak.
Some thirty mu of forest was still burning. Just to be safe, He Guying reinforced the ice wall, making sure it wouldn’t melt before the fire reached it. Only then did he regroup with the two fleeing ability user girls and ask what had happened.
It turned out they were boarding middle school students from the neighboring Zaoyue City. Trapped in their dormitories and cut off from their families, they watched as the number of zombies at their school kept increasing while the stored food kept dwindling. Unable to hold out any longer, the two ventured out to look for food. Discovering that they were both ability user, they decided to escape together.
At first, things went fairly smoothly. Riding bicycles, they shook off the stiff-moving zombies, left the crowded school and city center behind, and headed toward an industrial zone they remembered as having fewer people.
But halfway there, they got lost. One moment it seemed like they were in the outskirts; the next, it felt like they had somehow ended up back in the city center of a neighboring district. Everything was chaotic, and they also got a firsthand look at just how bad the city’s disorder had become.
Zombies were everywhere. Burn marks from arson were everywhere. The strong bullying and robbing the weak had become increasingly blatant.
They could only keep running and hiding, dodging from place to place. Even so, they were eventually discovered by zombies, who chased them all the way here.
“I didn’t want to start a fire either,” the girl who had used fire said anxiously, clutching the grimy hem of her clothes and standing awkwardly in front of the RV. “But we really couldn’t run anymore. We could only try burning them.”
Xin Xiaoru thought of the wildfire in her previous life that had forced her to abandon an RV with no fuel left. Her gaze flickered.
Most likely, many of the mountain fires back then had been caused by ability users fighting, or doing other things.
The two girls kept apologizing. Xin Xiaoru didn’t have the heart to scold them further and only said, “Be careful in the future. In drought and extreme heat, once a fire starts, it can’t be controlled, and it can burn through several mountains in a row.”
The two nodded repeatedly.
Xin Xiaoru said, “Do you have anywhere to go? Or do you want to stay here and farm?”
“Farm… farm?”
Xin Xiaoru got out of the vehicle and led the two girls to the other side, entering the extra-dimensional hotel.
The hotel wasn’t large, but it had ten bunk beds, upper, middle, and lower, enough to sleep thirty people. On one of the beds sat an elderly woman, who immediately greeted them when she saw newcomers: “Boss.”
Xin Xiaoru nodded and said to the two girls, “She’s an experienced farmer and can guide you in farming. If you’re willing to farm together, you can stay here. The daily rent is five jin of food—150 jin per month.
If you don’t have money or food right now, you can owe it for the time being. Once you harvest some crops, you can pay back the owed rent and continue paying for your bed afterward.
We don’t provide meals, but we can lend you food. A ability user person can lend you five jin of vegetables per day, but when you return it, you must repay five jin of food. Got it?”
The girl with flight abilities widened her eyes and timidly asked, “Is there a difference between food and vegetables?”
“Yes.” According to the system prompt, “food” specifically refers to grains, beans, and tuber crops.
If someone eats only grains, beans, and tubers long-term, their nutrition will be unbalanced. But if they have none of those and only eat vegetables like bok choy, they will lack nutrition even more.
Modern people generally eat too much meat, oil, and salt, with excessive sugar intake. In the short term, eating only the boiled vegetables on the list won’t cause nutritional imbalance, in fact, it can regulate the body and improve health.
But over the long term, that’s absolutely not enough.
Xin Xiaoru said, “You can adjust the proportion of wheat, soybeans, and sweet potatoes to other vegetables yourself. Anyway, here I need five jin of food every day. Keep track of what you owe.”
Food crops generally take a long time to grow, around four months before harvest.
Vegetables like bok choy can be harvested in a month. For professional farmers, one crop from one acre yields around 4,000 jin. It seems fast, but the nutritional value is low. Anything you can’t eat yourself can’t be sold either and will rot in the field.
The elderly woman roughly explained some of the winding methods of farming and trading crops: “If you seriously want to eat well and survive, you need to grow food crops. But growing vegetables also has benefits, you can feed chickens, ducks, and pigs. They eat the vegetables, grow into nutritious meat, and give you energy. That’s the right way.”
The two girls: “…We didn’t expect that with our lazy limbs and no knowledge of grains, we would actually have to farm, and even raise chickens and ducks!”
Although they had never done it before, they didn’t hesitate and agreed immediately.
The main reason… this hotel is just too cool!!!
At the end of September, in Yicheng, or rather, all of Huaguo, it was still unbearably hot! Without electricity, people of all ages, especially those in poor health, were literally dying from the heat.
The two girls were ability user, so their bodies were much stronger, but it was still unbearably hot, exhausting, filthy, and smelly, and they hadn’t had a decent day in over a month. Having an extra-dimensional hotel to stay in was far better than needing a bicycle!
Besides, the hotel wasn’t bad at all, just like a slightly bigger, more crowded student dormitory. What was there not to like?
Not only did they accept it, they were also worried that Xin Xiaoru might scold them for not having money to pay rent and force her to lend them food. They quickly said, “We’re not going anywhere! We’ll stay here and farm! Boss, please let us stay!”
Xin Xiaoru nodded briskly, her previous irritability gone.
“Do your best, I believe in you.”
Just then, the girls’ stomachs growled. They cautiously asked, “Can we eat something now? We know it’s borrowed, and we’ll pay you back with our harvest.”
Xin Xiaoru smiled kindly and pointed to the lush green bok choy she had already grown: “It’s over there, pick it yourselves. From now on, the vegetables you eat come from the crops I’ve planted. Once you pick and eat them, if your own crops aren’t ready yet, you’ll have to go hungry.”
The bok choy, being the first planted vegetable, was already mature and ready to eat. Of the later-planted vegetables, the carrots still needed two to three months to mature, but the peas could be harvested in just half a month, so they were already ready. The remaining cauliflower and crown daisy had growth cycles of about a month and a half, so in another twenty days, they’d be ready too. Leaving this plot for the girls meant they wouldn’t starve.
Xin Xiaoru added, “From now on, all the planting, watering, and fertilizing on this acre will be done by you under the old lady’s guidance. If you don’t grow the crops properly, you still won’t have anything to eat.”
The girls nodded repeatedly, seeing no problem with this. Zhao Changyue watched this and thought to himself, Well, holy smokes…
The tenants farm their own land, harvest their own crops, eat for themselves, and still owe the landlord five jin of food a day! This business model is genius!
Seeing what he was thinking, Xin Xiaoru quietly rolled her eyes.
In any case, the plan was settled.
Now there were two honest, hardworking kids in the field, and since they were ability user, Xin Xiaoru felt much more at ease.
She separated the dense hotel and placed it on a brick-and-earth wall of the terraced fields. The old lady and the two girls, whom she had permitted, could pass through the wall to enter the extra-dimensional hotel.
Xin Xiaoru showed them around the space: “The hotel doesn’t have tables or chairs. You can use the wood we cut from the isolation barriers during the day to make your own furniture. If you don’t know how, I’ll give you a woodworking book. Look through it, make a list of the tools you need, and I’ll help you find them.”
“Okay, okay! Don’t worry!”
That night, Xin Xiaoru, He Guoying, and Zhao Changyue didn’t sleep in the RV. They stayed in the dense hotel to check for any issues.
After a night there, the only problem was that the space between the top, middle, and bottom bunks was a bit low, taller people couldn’t sit fully upright. Everything else was fine.
The next day, the three felt confident enough to go out and search for stranded survivors.
Zaoyue City was a neighboring small city, larger in area than Yicheng but much smaller in economy and population. It was a typical agricultural city, producing a lot of dates that sold well in other regions.
Zaoyue City had almost entirely fallen. A month earlier, the local government had begun consolidating urban resources, merging publicly-owned supermarkets and granaries onto a single farm, hoping to distribute them efficiently after the disaster.
The idea was good in theory, but the reality was cruel. Significant resistance appeared in the process: superiors and subordinates each had their own agendas, and citizens, as consumers, couldn’t buy necessities and caused unrest.
Even when some resources were gathered and zombies were kept away from the storage areas, two solar magnetic storms struck, collapsing the logistics system from within. The local government lost all control of the city. Not only could they not coordinate police and military forces, but they couldn’t even gather willing ability users. Everyone acted independently, forming their own small groups across the city and countryside.
When Xin Xiaoru arrived, she saw many small bases surrounded by walls. Most of the people inside these bases were ability user.
Outside the bases roamed countless zombies, staggering and overwhelming.
The surviving ordinary people were either being chased or on the verge of being chased.
When the RV flew by, those who had a chance could drop an ice spike to shatter a zombie’s skull, giving survivors enough distance to escape. Those who didn’t make it, or when zombies had gathered too densely, had no chance, only able to watch helplessly as people were torn apart.