But it wasn’t a big problem.
Not to mention the 48 packs of instant noodles that remained untouched, the small kumquat tree on the balcony had already borne fruit.
The other crops, fruits, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, planted last month were thriving.
The crops had mutated to some extent, all for the better. The seedlings grew quickly, the fruit trees grew tall, and the kumquat tree was laden with fruits, each one about the size of a small orange.
Fu Erdie estimated her food intake and rationed carefully, three or four a day could barely fill her stomach.
She picked over a dozen ripe kumquats, ate one, and stored the rest in the fridge, taking them out only when hunger struck.
She hoped the other vegetables and fruits she planted would mature soon. It would be ideal if the food grown in the small balcony planter could sustain her.
However, this wasn’t certain. She still didn’t fully understand the mutation principles behind the apartment, the greenery, and the crops. So far, she had only seen the positive side, the side effects or potential costs remained unknown.
She no longer wanted to be tormented by nightmares while waiting for death.
She wanted to survive. She wanted to find a way forward.
She tied her hair into a bun for convenience, put on her tattered clothes, washed clean after being torn in past fights, grabbed her hammer, secured her keys, and slipped out quietly.
She lived on the 16th floor. Above her were eight more floors, each with ten units. The stairwell was divided into a main staircase and a secondary one.
Fu Erdie first swept through her own floor.
She frequently entered Unit 16-2 and kept a spare key to it, just in case.
For the other units with broken doors, she went in to inspect them directly, moving anything usable to the entrance before hauling it back home.
For units with intact doors, Fu Erdie didn’t bother trying to break them down and simply skipped them.
In fact, many of these households had some stored food. However, after zombies had roamed inside, a lot of things had been knocked over and destroyed without reason. Nothing usable was left out in the open, so she had to search cabinet by cabinet.
She found plenty of intact items, rice, flour, oil, salt, sugar, and more.
Especially in the homes of elderly residents, there was often a considerable stockpile of rice.
Fu Erdie moved them all back home, one by one.
When the rice had weevils in it, the pothos stretched a small green tendril inside, stirred it around, and quickly wrapped up the insects like agate, then dangled it in front of Fu Erdie.
Fu Erdie couldn’t help but laugh. She gently stroked the pothos leaf.
“Thank you, little pothos.”
The “little pothos,” now taller than Fu Erdie herself, rubbed softly against her hand, clearly delighted.
Aside from edible items, Fu Erdie also brought over six flowerpots.
There should have been seven, but the seventh was a large floor-standing vase, too big and heavy for her to move.
She arranged five of the pots together, scattered various seeds, some she recognized, some she didn’t, into the soil, watered them, and let them grow freely.
As for the remaining small pot, she picked it up, crouched beside the “eco-friendly greenery,” and asked, “Would any of you be willing to come in here and help me out when I go outside?”
Before the others could react, the massive pothos nudged them aside.
Its large leaves brushed against Fu Erdie’s chest, and a single root deftly reached into the pot. Then, the entire apartment trembled, as if countless more roots were about to burst through the walls.
Fu Erdie: !
She quickly stopped it. “Good pothos, this home can’t do without you! You have to protect our home for me!”
The pothos paused, then drooped in resignation. The room fell silent once more.
Fu Erdie felt helpless but also found it amusing. She immediately comforted the plant.
Her real target was the spider plant beside the pothos, which looked pitifully squeezed aside.
Compared to the others, the spider plant was practically unchanged from before the apocalypse, a true underdog among the “eco-friendly greenery.”
Fu Erdie guessed that the pothos had been the main force behind cleaning the home and absorbing waste, but the other plants had similar abilities. They had simply fallen behind at the start and never had a chance to claim the things Fu Erdie considered trash, things they saw as nourishment, so they remained stunted here.
She had already searched most of the 16th floor. But there was one room she hadn’t dared enter. The stench was unbearable.
She was certain there was a corpse or zombie inside, rotting in the high heat, perhaps already reduced to a pool of decay.
She really didn’t dare go in to check the situation, so she wanted to see if any mutated plant would be willing to help her clean it up first.
Without the pothos’s dominant presence, the other plants began vying for attention.
The pothos gave each of them a slap, well, not a slap, but a leaf smack (?), breaking up the squabble among the weaker plants. Then it uprooted a potato seedling from the flower bed, roots and all, and placed it into Fu Erdie’s small pot.
Fu Erdie stared in disbelief.
Wait, so uprooting something could be this rough yet completely intact?
She noticed that the potato seedling the pothos had pulled up wasn’t the best-growing one, nor the smallest, but a rather unremarkable, medium-sized plant.
The moment the seedling was placed into the small pot, it visibly shook with joy, its intact roots immediately gripping the soil.
This was actually a mutated potato plant, one with a will of its own, just like the eco-friendly greenery!
Fu Erdie was stunned!
Still in disbelief, she took the potato plant to the door of the apartment reeking of decay and placed the pot down.
The moment the pot touched the ground, the potato plant slowly and laboriously extended its roots toward the room.
Fu Erdie didn’t want to look.
She knew that seeing the scene inside would give her nightmares, make her nauseous.
But she was genuinely curious about how the potato plant would handle it.
So she leaned toward the door and peered inside.
A second later, she immediately stepped back into the hallway and started dry heaving.
The corpse inside was no longer recognizable as human. Organs were scattered chaotically across the floor, clearly torn apart by zombies.
A clump of hair, still attached to a piece of scalp and a single eyeball, stared blankly toward the door, as if looking at her, or at every passerby in this world.
She dry heaved for a long time.
This was the apocalypse. She needed to get used to it.
With that thought, Fu Erdie turned back and looked into the room again.
But soon, she rushed out once more.
A stress response left her trembling uncontrollably, vomiting violently.
The small kumquat she had eaten in the morning came back up along with her stomach acid, leaving a burning sensation in her throat.
Tears and snot covered her face. She tore off a piece of her tattered sleeve to wipe them away, tossing it over the vomit to cover it up.
She stood up and tried to approach the room a third time.
But suddenly, she felt something tugging at the back of her clothes. Turning around, she saw a familiar sight, the pothos.
A small leaf had stretched as far as it could reach and was now gently pulling at her shirt.
As if to say, “It’s okay if you can’t face it. We’re always here.”
Fu Erdie felt like she had already cried more in the past two months than in her entire twenty-something years of life.
But just now, and now, she couldn’t help the tears from streaming down again.
“Thank you,” she said, gently stroking the pothos leaf. “It’s so good to have you.”
The pothos understood. It brushed against her once more, then slowly began to wilt. From its leaves to the vines that had stretched so far, it withered and dropped away, reduced to a long, thin line due to a lack of nutrients.
Watching this, Fu Erdie came to a realization.
The eco-friendly greenery, or rather, the pothos, could understand her words. It could assess the condition of every plant on the balcony and accurately grasp her intentions.
It was incredibly intelligent, but its roots were in the home, rooted inside the apartment.
Perhaps it could spread outward, but for now, it didn’t have enough energy. Reaching out with such a thin, small vine was already its limit.
The potato plant was the same.
It was even weaker than the pothos, its roots spreading at a very slow pace.
They were all trying their best to survive, and to help her.
She, too, needed to overcome her fear and take them where they couldn’t go on their own.
Fu Erdie tore off the other sleeve and tied it over her eyes.
Gently holding the potted plant, carefully supporting the delicate roots of the potato seedling, she leaned against the wall and made her way inside.
The stench of decay filled the air, the buzzing of insects surrounded her, every sensation grated on her nerves.
Unknown bugs bit at her skin, the itching and pain more intense than usual.
Still, she fumbled forward, stepping over whatever sticky things lay in her path. Following the memory of what she had seen earlier, she made her way to where the remains were and set the potato plant down.
The moment she placed it, her hand brushed against something sticky, soft, yet wrapped around bone.
Her arm froze, but she still set the potato plant down steadily, then stood up, turned around, and, scraping against the wall, took a few steps away. She pulled the cloth from her eyes and fled back to Unit 16-1.
She stripped off all her clothes, threw them on the floor, and rushed into the bathroom to shower.
“Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.”
She tried to brainwash herself, switching between hot and cold water, washing away the lingering sensation on her skin.
Dead humans. Humans with abilities. Both seemed to frighten her more than the zombies themselves.
She wanted to stay in the shower for a long time.
But the water, electricity, and gas in her home were all provided through the unique energy conversion of the pothos and the apartment itself, and she didn’t want to waste them.
After ten minutes, she stepped out, carried her dog to the balcony, and let herself be surrounded by the fresh scent and greenery of the pothos. Only then did she slowly begin to recover.
Then came the thrill of overcoming her fear and accomplishing something big.
She decided to make herself a pack of instant noodles to celebrate.
But she felt like she had forgotten something…
What was it again?
Oh well, it probably wasn’t important!
To be honest, after two months of eating plain rice with pickled vegetables, Fu Erdie had had enough. A simple pack of instant noodles obviously wouldn’t satisfy her craving for something more flavorful. She tore open a pack of ready-to-eat chicken breast and dipped it in the noodle soup.
Emmm… the taste was a bit strange.
Still, she ate the chicken breast properly, unwilling to waste the noodle soup, sipping it down slowly.
Soft music played from her phone, the room illuminated only by a dim nightlight, calm and serene.
She slept happily that night. The next morning, she went to water the crops on the balcony as usual.
Then, she suddenly realized what she had forgotten.
The potato plant!!!
She had thrown away the clothes she wore yesterday as trash.
But during the more than ten days she had spent fighting zombies, she had ruined seven sets of clothes. Those were the ones she continued to wear for work and heavy labor, she called them her “beggar outfits.”
Putting on one of her tattered beggar outfits, Fu Erdie rushed to the room where she had left the potato plant.