Under the combined action of atmospheric Qiang elements and Yi elements, a phenomenon has occurred during the overall evolution of Blue Star’s organisms that remains unexplained to this day:
The lower the organism, the higher its degree of evolution.
While humans generally evolved twofold, with only about two-thousandths evolving multiple times, many simple invertebrates evolved eightfold, and their rate of multiple evolution was significantly higher than that of humans.
Therefore, the evolved organisms of Blue Star were several times more dangerous to humans than they had been before the natural disasters.
Yet, while Blue Star’s evolved organisms brought life-threatening dangers, they also brought opportunities for survival: organisms with trace harmful radioactive elements and a Qiang element content of no more than five per mille.
Researchers named them “safe food.”
Currently, research has confirmed three points: first, the lower the content of these two elements, the more beneficial they are to the human body; second, the higher the proportion of safe food in one’s diet, the stronger a human’s ability to resist environmental pollution; third, multiple-evolved safe organisms are significantly more effective at boosting human resistance than ordinary safe food.
Because safe food could not meet the consumption needs of the entire nation, Hua Guo designated edible organisms with trace or no harmful radioactive elements and a Qiang element content between 5 and 15 per mille as “optional food.”
When tested with a standard Qiang element detector, both safe food and optional food showed a green light.
If Xia Qing took this evolved catfish she had slapped to death to the safe zone, she could exchange it for three months’ worth of rations.
However, Xia Qing, who was thoroughly sick of the coarse composite compressed rations, only wanted to eat meat right now.
She cleaned the catfish in no time, chopped it into several pieces, threw them into the pot, added some spring water, and started boiling it.
Seasonings? Only salt and chili powder.
Side dishes? None.
Actually, she did have six jin of evolved potato seeds.
But Xia Qing could not bring herself to eat them. *The Complete Book of Planting* clearly stated that these potato seeds had a harmful element content of only 7.5 per mille, and their germination rate was very low, between 30% and 35%.
With the six jin of potatoes she had, how many seedlings would sprout and how many jin of potatoes she could harvest remained entirely unknown, so she was reluctant to eat them.
Soon, a tempting aroma of meat wafted from the pot. Xia Qing took a sniff, certain that the catfish she was stewing smelled even better and had less of a muddy taste than the stewed fish sold in the safe zone canteens.
This catfish was very likely safe food.
Although her appetite had doubled after her evolution, Xia Qing could not finish a ten-plus jin catfish in one meal.
Since there was no way to preserve fresh food in her territory, Xia Qing slowly roasted the remaining fish into dried fish and sealed it in a bag.
Only by doing this could she prevent the fish from being corroded and spoiled by the Qiang elements and evolutionary bacteria in the air.
She would have more and more food in the future, so she had to find a way to get solar panels and a refrigerator as soon as possible. But before that, she had to find some glass to patch her windows to block out evolved insects, snakes, and rats.
Xia Qing picked up her large canvas bag and tools, deciding to use the afternoon to patrol the abandoned village.
Within Territory No. 3, there were three villages distributed in a triangular pattern, situated slightly higher than the fields and separated by large stretches of farmland. Before the natural disasters, each village had dozens of households, but now, only dozens of ruined houses remained.
Xia Qing lived in the abandoned village at the top of the triangle. To the southeast and southwest of her village lay the other two abandoned villages.
The houses in these abandoned villages had long been swallowed by wild plants. As Xia Qing pushed aside the wild grass, she saw quite a few human and animal bones that had been gnawed clean.
Xia Qing had seen such scenes countless times over the past ten years and had long since grown numb to them.
After searching the three villages, Xia Qing found tempered laminated glass of the right size for her windows. She wiped them clean, fitted them into her window frames, and secured them tightly with glass glue and specialized sealing strips.
By the tenth year of the natural disasters, the glue and sealing strips manufactured before the disasters had long passed their expiration dates and spoiled. The ones she was using now had been brought out from the safe zone and were manufactured after the disasters.
The natural disasters had destroyed Blue Star’s original industrial manufacturing system, making most of the supplies that could once be easily bought with a tap of a phone into scarce goods that were nearly impossible to find.
Xia Qing had only managed to get her hands on this glass glue and sealing strips by leveraging her status as a construction team squad leader.
After her father died, Xia Qing, who was helpless and beautiful, had only a few choices if she wanted to live comfortably and decently in the safe zone: she either had to possess overwhelming strength, find a group of powerful teammates she could trust with her life, or sell her body.
Xia Qing did not have overwhelming strength, nor did she have teammates she could trust. She certainly did not want to sell her body, so she chose to cut her hair short, smudge her face with dirt, and blend into the construction team to do hard labor.
Earning points was a secondary goal; Xia Qing’s primary aim was to hide herself, learn construction techniques, and accumulate materials and tools that were unavailable on the market to prepare for her solo life after leaving the safe zone.
Of course, there were men in the construction team who tried to make a move on Xia Qing, but after experiencing her formidable strength, they all abandoned their crooked thoughts.
As for those who refused to give up—if she could kill them, she did; if she couldn’t, she avoided them and used underhanded tricks to keep them too busy to notice her filthy self.
After installing the bright glass, Xia Qing let out a long sigh of relief. Her home was finally sealed tight.
Taking advantage of the remaining daylight, Xia Qing took a shovel to the neighboring yard. She dug a pit and buried the skeletons of two humans and a dog, which had been covered by wild grass.
The two humans and the dog had been killed by the evolved plant, mistletoe. Judging from their postures, the dog had been trying to find a way to save its owner until its final breath.
The seeds of evolved mistletoe could parasitize not only tree trunks but also animal and human bodies. If the host did not notice and clear them out in time, they would quickly be sucked dry of blood and flesh.
Xia Qing still remembered the first time she saw clusters of bright red mistletoe berries growing from a person killed by the plant. Back then, she thought it was the most terrifying scene of the natural disasters.
But over the following years, one narrow escape after another taught her that there was no “most terrifying,” only “more terrifying.” Fortunately, humans now had protective suits and other self-defense methods. As long as they did not rashly enter uncleared evolution forests, they would not suffer large-scale attacks from evolved organisms.
After burying the family of three, Xia Qing cleared the wild grass and cleaned up the house in the yard.
The owners of this house had been building it when the acid rain and biological evolution hit. The reinforced concrete two-story structure was just completed, so they had no time to finish the secondary structure, doors, or windows. The purchased building materials were all piled up in the rooms on the second floor.
Fortunately, the roof was made of resin tiles, and the homeowner had done everything possible to protect the house. Otherwise, under the relentless lashing of highly acidic rain for half a year, let alone the concrete, even the steel rebars would have been dissolved.
Xia Qing was only one person, and her current two-story small building was more than enough to live in. She decided to clean up this Shelf Building and convert it into a warehouse to store large, less important supplies like farm tools, building materials, scrap furniture, and wood.
After tidying up and taking another walk around, Xia Qing felt a profound sense of accomplishment, but she also felt she should find an evolved animal to guard her home as soon as possible, preferably a smart one.
An evolved dog or a big goose would do—preferably a big goose, since it was herbivorous. Xia Qing didn’t even have enough meat for herself, so she couldn’t afford to feed a dog.
But this was just a fleeting thought. Animals that could still be tamed by humans after evolving were extremely rare. Xia Qing did not think she would be lucky enough to just sit back and have one land in her territory.
At this stage, getting the fields planted was still the most important task.
Banxia Novel, so much joy.