Chapter 274 | Chapter 275 | Chapter 276
Chapter 274: Metaphors
When Huai Yu woke up the next morning, she sat there in a daze for quite a long time.
If the chicks hadn’t come over to peck at the door to check on their owner, she might have spent a good while longer lost in thought.
But now, in the grand scheme of things, nothing was more important than shelling cowpea beans for the chicks!
Huai Yu happily headed into the vegetable patch and picked a large handful of old cowpeas. The withered outer skins of the aged cowpeas were spongy and devoid of moisture, with a structure as loose as raw cotton. But yesterday, the purple and white cowpea beans inside had instantly conquered everyone’s hearts upon the very first feeding.
Case in point, the chicks had already grown accustomed to scratching and rummaging across the vast wild field to eat while taking a stroll, yet they still came knocking on the door early this morning, attempting to secure another bowl of cowpea beans.
How could Huai Yu possibly say no to that?
The chicks might be able to lay eggs after they turned half a year old, and from April until now, at the end of August, nearly five months had passed. This was precisely the critical period for their growth and development!
“Hang on!”
She happily moved a stool to sit by the doorway, a pot of congee bubbling and gurgling on the stove, feeling full of anticipation for the future.
By the time Zhou Qian walked over with an empty stomach, he saw Huai Yu tossing a purple bean into the air. The chicks scrambled and lunged upward, and the plumpest hen among them successfully snatched and swallowed it whole at the perfect height.
He couldn’t help but stare for a moment. For some reason, a sentence slipped out of his mouth: “Would that golden oyster mushroom taste good stewed with a little hen like this?”
Huai Yu turned her face around, utterly dumbfounded.
Zhou Qian froze as well.
A moment later, he stared at his leg, then pulled out a plastic bag as if nothing had happened. “The spore powder collected by the Boston ivy. There’s too much of it; we wouldn’t even be able to use it all up in a massive brawl. I just kept a tiny pinch, and you can handle the rest.”
Only then did Huai Yu remember their actual business. She hurriedly scattered the remaining cowpea beans from her basin and said, “Brother Zhou Qian, drive the car over to the small hillside later to gather some dead tree branches. I’ll scatter all the spore powder onto them.”
“Are we planting them by the doorway?” Zhou Qian always felt a bit uneasy about it.
Huai Yu shook her head. “Mushrooms can’t be exposed to the sun, and the doorway is too open—it’s perfect to place them in Kuang Biao’s bamboo forest.”
Dampness, moisture, and shade… it ticked every box.
Zhou Qian had no objections now. He nimbly scooped himself a bowl of congee, pairing it with pickled eggplant caps. “Are we just eating this for breakfast?”
“No.” Huai Yu shook her head. “Brother Zhou Qian, you do heavy labor every day; eating just this won’t keep you full. But since we’re trying to nurse your body back to health, we should eat frequent, smaller meals. I’ll make more when you get hungry mid-morning.”
From her description, Zhou Qian couldn’t help but feel like a glutton.
But as a long-term hired hand, he truly performed a great deal of work for the master, so he paused and asked, “How many tree trunks do you need?”
Huai Yu thought about her two plastic bags of spore powder. Although they couldn’t even fill two bowls when put together, as spores went, it was clearly more than enough.
“The more the merrier.”
After speaking, she scooped herself a bowl of congee as well, but staring at the soft, thick white congee, she couldn’t resist falling into a daze again—with this kind of culinary skill, she didn’t know how popular she would be as a housekeeper! Yet she had insisted on being a maidservant for Wu Yue’s family!
Huff!
No wonder her memory was completely gone now. She must have known it would be humiliating to look back on! Being that foolish, she wouldn’t even be able to hold her head up!
But since she had initiated the breakup, it proved her pride was still intact. Huai Yu gleefully showed off to Zhou Qian again: “Brother Zhou Qian, my ability used to be incredibly fierce.”
“Placing a single bean in my palm, branches could sprout from it in an instant, super fast!”
“If I still had that kind of capability now, I could throw out a handful of beans during a fight—how could that not trip someone up?”
Zhou Qian was already thoroughly unfazed. “Dreaming again?”
Huai Yu nodded, summarizing precisely: “In the dream, I was a free housekeeper. That Wu Yue was living it up in the Garrison Army while I worked myself to death in the base cafeteria. After work, I still had to do housework and serve his germaphobic mother who picked at her food… It drove me mad!”
“The old woman even said it was all because my ability was too useless, pah! Her son was eating real meat and fish every day to supplement his training, and the Garrison Army provided all kinds of scientific exercises. I couldn’t even get enough sleep every day, so how was I supposed to train?”
“In a fit of rage, I broke up with him!”
Zhou Qian knit his brows. “Did the breakup succeed?”
“Of course it did!” Huai Yu grew even more incensed. “That ghostly Wu Yue, do you know why he agreed to break up? Because he felt I was old, lacked capability, and my face wasn’t as pretty as before… He thought there was no way I could find anyone better than him after the breakup, and that I would regret it sooner or later!”
“He wanted to strike a high-and-mighty pose and wait for me to crawl back!”
“Pah, pah, pah! A good horse doesn’t turn back to eat old grass. He’s like a piece of chewed-up mantou crust that someone else spit out—am I supposed to pick it up and chew it again?”
Zhou Qian paused with his congee bowl.
After a moment, he lightly tapped the rim of his bowl with his chopsticks. “Let’s keep our normal conversations clean. Don’t use blind metaphors like that.”
“Also, next time you dream, don’t keep fixating on romance. Hurry up and dream about what exactly you did after the breakup. And why were you left sleeping soundly inside that Daoist temple on Sanqing Mountain?”
Huai Yu felt wronged too. “This dream isn’t under my control either…”
As she spoke, she fished out a mirror, cradling her face to examine it left and right. “Look at how beautiful my eyes are! To think I actually listened to his sweet talk and got double eyelid surgery just to look better on a livestream camera… Sigh! Truly foolish!”
Zhou Qian paused, feeling a bit of heartache for her. “Don’t say that. The past her was you as well.”
“Didn’t you say so yourself before? You desired a home too much. Your compromises stemmed from love and affection, as well as respect and tolerance for family. This is inherently a very good trait; you simply met the wrong person.”
“It’s fine.” Zhou Qian’s words of comfort carried quite a bit of weight. “Aren’t you returning to the way you used to look now? When I first met you, you looked only sixteen or seventeen, pitifully thin, like you hadn’t grown into your features yet.”
“Looking at you now, you already have the appearance of an eighteen or nineteen-year-old young woman.”
“By the Lunar New Year, who knows, you might look like you’re in your twenties.”
“See, everything is returning to your most beautiful self. Let the things of the past remain in the past—except for blood feuds.”
Zhou Qian tilted his head to look at the scars on his arm. After sleeping in the tree cocoon for ten hours, the faint pink tender flesh had already taken on a slightly deeper shade, very nearly matching his original skin tone.
It was, after all, the healing effect of a mere ten hours.
But if the tree cocoon was this powerful, what kind of fatal injury had Huai Yu sustained back then to be forced into a deep slumber for several years? To the extent that she now seemed to have completely faded from people’s memories, with no trace of her existence left to be found?
Every time he thought about this, his heart felt heavy.
He glanced at Huai Yu, who was puffing out her cheeks in stubborn defiance, and then thought of Wu Yue, who might be connected to her injury…
Zhou Qian looked down at his leg again—while he had the time, he might as well practice a bit more with the spore powder!
It was a pity this move was far too lethal; he couldn’t exactly look for his old comrades to spar with it.
Chapter 275: Sunflower Seed Harvest
After the meal, Zhou Qian drove out to the hillside they had climbed before to gather tree trunks—if he couldn’t gather enough, he would probably have to go to the Jinyuan Community to ask around and see if anyone knew how to make mushroom grow bags.
Meanwhile, Huai Yu carried her basket and slipped into the vegetable patch—having left it untended for three or four days, another batch of vegetables had already matured! If this were the past, she would have been picking vegetables in a frantic rush early in the morning, and then huffing and puffing to transport them to the trading market.
But now that they had a car, they could go whenever they wanted, and the rhythm of life instantly became leisurely.
Along the way, she also wanted to bring two ginseng roots to Boss Tang and Uncle Date—of course, they were the ordinary ginseng roots that she had force-grown.
As for whether Uncle Date would realize that these ginseng roots were the very ones he had sold to her… there was a world of difference between the two states, so he probably wouldn’t be able to tell.
Even if he did, it didn’t matter! Uncle Date already knew that she lived by the Rose Corridor, and using wood-series abilities to force-grow ginseng wasn’t some kind of rare ability anyway.
One had to know that in plantations everywhere, 70% of the wood-series ability users were concentrated there; it was barely worth mentioning.
She thought about her plan, and then thought about how the savings of both her and Zhou Qian combined still couldn’t make up 4,000 points, so she decided she still had to work hard at selling vegetables! Everything else was an unexpected pleasant surprise, but only selling vegetables was a stable, iron-rice-bowl job.
……
The entire summer passed by in this unhurried manner, and by the time the autumn leaves withered and turned yellow, and the frost and white dew arrived, Huai Yu’s home had undergone a vast transformation once again.
Inside the house, nothing much had changed, except that the large hole in the corner where Kuang Biao had once poked out a bamboo shoot was now occupied by a massive layer of golden oyster mushrooms.
Huai Yu was very displeased about this, and she had even expressed that she could lug back a bag of cement to cover it up, but the golden oyster mushroom promised that it would share more of its wild-type spore powder with them in the future…
In short, for the sake of Zhou Qian’s combat power, and also fearing that the golden oyster mushroom’s main body wouldn’t have an easy time surviving the winter down the mountain, Huai Yu ultimately gave in and accepted it.
The only one who got hurt was Kuang Biao—
“Why can it do that but I can’t? When my bamboo shoots grow up, they stand straight between heaven and earth, and they are clearly much more supportive than it is!”
Huai Yu got angry the moment she heard this: “Stand straight between heaven and earth? Yeah! The floor is already broken, and if you break the roof next, I won’t even need to water you when it rains, right!”
“Besides, you are a bamboo that knows how to find a girlfriend, and I am a girl. How can you watch me sleep? Shameless! You perverted, shameless brat!”
Humph!
Kuang Biao felt even more wronged: “We aren’t even the same species… You are a human… Well, actually, I feel like you don’t really seem like a human either, but you are indeed a human. How could I be interested in a human?”
Fine! Huai Yu grew even angrier because of this! That very day, she steamed a whole pot of bamboo tube rice.
And outside—
The green vegetables had long since been replaced batch by batch with vegetables suitable for autumn, and the chilies were gradually thinning out, but the crimson facing-heaven chilies and red pointed chilies became exceptionally eye-catching.
The cowpea vines that were once like giant pythons were now gradually withering away, leaving only a scattering of tender cowpeas popping up on the vines every two or three days, barely enough to make a bowl of food.
Before long, these would have to be pulled out, so she could quickly transplant the vegetable seedlings bred by Qiu Bo.
On the other side, the soybeans and mung beans had long since matured. When Zhou Qian harvested them and spread them out flat outside to dry in the sun, the occasional popping and crackling sound of the bean pods bursting open was exceptionally pleasant to the ear…
After the weather turned cool, the bamboo forest tunnel was filled with a whole row of sauce crocks, pickle jars, and various dried vegetables… Huai Yu had even made up her mind that after experiencing one more drop in temperature, she would make some cured meat, cured ribs, sausages, and the like.
When the time came, they would hang in rows up above, cool, dry, and well-ventilated, with a relatively stable temperature, and with both Kuang Biao and the Rose Corridor guarding them together—wow! There was simply no safer place in the world than this.
At this moment, she took a walk around the outside, then tilted her head up to look at the roof. Seeing Zhou Qian carefully stepping on the ridge of the roof, holding a sunflower seed disc as massive as a millstone with both hands, she couldn’t help but hold her breath—
The sunflower seeds had finally matured and dried out!
The only bad thing was that she shouldn’t have planted the sunflowers behind the house just to save trouble and keep them hidden back then. Although there was a bit of a distance from the house and it didn’t affect the lighting, who told Kuang Biao to make it so angry?
In short, Xiao Kui stayed single and beautiful, flatly refusing to fall in love.
Not only did it refuse to fall in love, but it was also highly disdainful—in fact, when the sunflower seeds matured, Huai Yu wanted to ask if she could just chop it down directly—because Xiao Kui hadn’t accumulated enough energy this year, so it wouldn’t be able to survive the winter.
Huai Yu could have force-grown it a bit more, but it refused.
If it couldn’t survive the winter, then so be it; plants like them that produced many seeds were just like that! As long as a single seed took root and sprouted the following year, that would be another version of itself, making no difference at all.
It hadn’t mutated very severely either, so it was already very satisfied just to grow robustly.
Therefore, if Huai Yu wanted to eat sunflower seeds, sure, just save a few seeds to keep planting them next year.
Chopping it down and drying it was fine too; the day the seeds matured was the exact moment it entered dormancy, and the plant itself no longer possessed vitality.
However, as Kuang Biao’s neighbor, it had spent so much effort just to grow taller than the bamboo. Even if it was chopped down to dry the flower disc, it absolutely could not be placed in a position lower than him!
This was Xiao Kui’s dignity!
Faced with this, what could Huai Yu do?
She had no choice but to wave her hand: “Alright then, I won’t chop down the flower disc. Don’t let it supply nutrients after you enter dormancy; just let it dry naturally like this.”
It was a stroke of luck that the autumn days were dry and without rain, otherwise, even if Xiao Kui was unwilling, she would have had to chop down the flower disc quickly.
In any case, right now, Zhou Qian stood on the ridge of the roof and used a massive amount of effort just to hook the flower disc down, and he still had to tread tremulously and carefully so that the dried sunflower seeds wouldn’t all fall off, making it truly a major project.
However, now that they were brought down, the two of them stared at the millstone-sized flower discs one by one, and both felt a wave of pleasant surprise.
Originally, they had worried that if the sunflower seeds grew exceptionally large, cracking them open would probably lose its soul. But it turned out that apart from Xiao Kui’s main flower disc, all the others were of a normal sunflower seed size.
Twenty or thirty flower discs as large as millstones were arranged neatly at the doorway. The two of them found a sheet of plastic film to spread on the ground, inverted the flower discs, and while tapping them gently with a wooden stick, they couldn’t help but fantasize:
“Brother Zhou Qian, cracking sunflower seeds after eating the New Year’s Eve dinner will definitely be exceptionally fragrant!”
Zhou Qian originally had no feelings toward sunflower seeds or snacks, but after six years of the cataclysm, even white steamed buns had become a feast, let alone sunflower seeds which he hadn’t touched in years.
He thought for a moment, and only then did he say profoundly: “We’ll roast a batch of original flavor, and then roast a batch of salted flavor. Do you know how to make that dark plum flavor?”
Just as he was speaking, they heard two honks of a car horn from the side of the road.
Zhou Qian raised his eyebrows: “Someone’s here.”
Huai Yu blanked for a second, then beamed with joy: “Could it be that Boss Tang brought Gao Ming over? I only cleaned his house yesterday, and it’s even more rudimentary than your house, Brother Zhou Qian!”
Chapter 276: Gao Ming’s Arrival
With a new neighbor arriving, the sunflower seeds in their hands suddenly didn’t seem all that important. Huai Yu and Zhou Qian quickly rode their bicycles over, intending to return the key at the same time.
Inside Boss Tang’s car, Gao Ming, who was as thin as a bamboo pole, sat expressionless. His hair had been forced into a buzz cut during his labor reform, which now left his sharp cheekbones and protruding cheek muscles completely uncovered. His thick brows and dark, heavy eyes gave him an inherently formidable aura that warned others not to mess with him.
However, as his gaze swept across the desolate, uninhabited wild field, his expression relaxed slightly. “My car…”
“What car?” Boss Tang grew vigilant. “Don’t go thinking that just because you live in the middle of nowhere, you can drive around whenever you want! Not a chance! You don’t have a car anymore! I sold it!”
“The points from selling it were spent on building your house, buying your equipment, and preparing food and drink for you—especially since power lines can’t reach this far out. Do you have any idea how expensive your generator was? 8,000 points! A whole 8,000! And I had to pull strings just to buy diesel…”
The more Boss Tang spoke, the more resentful he became. He felt less like a brother and more like a father—but this son hadn’t saved him an ounce of worry!
“Anyway! Even though nobody will discover you out here, you still need to take it easy.”
Boss Tang had already explained the basic situation to him, but for some reason, he still kept nagging like an anxious old father. Eventually, he checked one last thing to confirm:
“Ketaro is still being raised at your neighbor’s house. The little girl really likes it. Since you’re terrible at taking care of things anyway, just let her keep raising it!”
If nothing else, with Ketaro’s habit of rolling balls out of plants every day, would it have this much energy if Huai Yu weren’t searching all over the place for strange and novel species to give it?
It wasn’t that Boss Tang was biased toward Huai Yu; it was just that Gao Ming currently couldn’t even take care of himself. Before everything else had even been fully prepared in his rudimentary house, he had already set up three alarm clocks.
For his three meals a day, the alarms would ring right on time.
Thinking of this, Boss Tang let out another heavy sigh.
By this time, the car had smoothly arrived at Area 3 of the Rose Mansion.
Just like Area 2, the house in Area 3 was built perilously close to the roadside. However, unlike Zhou Qian’s house where the front door faced outward, this door faced the side, considering Gao Ming often engaged in less-than-compliant activities. Outside the yard stood a tall perimeter wall…
If someone were to pass by, they would basically see nothing at all, prioritizing total privacy and safety.
It was safer being closer to the Rose Corridor, and safer from being easily spotted by anyone.
Boss Tang had inquired about the design of Zhou Qian’s house before building this one. He had also mobilized his financial power to hire Liang Zhu from the Construction Department along with several ability users. Because it was truly difficult to convince ordinary laborers to come out here, the entire house was constructed solely by ability users.
The good news: the house was built incredibly fast and sturdy.
The bad news: it cost a whopping 20,000 points.
To keep Gao Ming from facing prison time again, Boss Tang had spared no effort.
At this moment, he stopped the car. Looking at the two vegetable patches at the entrance that the workers had leveled out as a favor, he couldn’t help but sigh: Forget it, I’ll plant a few more fruit trees later. The fruit itself doesn’t matter; what matters is that it will make the place look more concealed.
He couldn’t rely on Gao Ming to grow vegetables at all.
Pushing open the gate to the yard, the layout was largely the same as Zhou Qian’s house: a kitchen that no one expected to be of much use, a storage shed for stockpiling coal and diesel, a toilet in the corner that required manual water replenishment, and the well in the yard was equipped with a hand pump.
Because with Gao Ming’s meager strength, if he were expected to lift water with a windlass like Zhou Qian did, he wouldn’t be able to pull it up.
The living room was completely empty, small and delicate, with the sole remaining table and chair standing as the final defiance of human habitation. Even the bedroom was furnished with only a wardrobe and a bed.
The only difference was that connected to the side of the living room was a massive workshop. Its area was larger than the living room, bedroom, and the kitchen on the other side combined, packed with the tools Gao Ming wanted to use and the machinery he had kept from before…
In short, it was already filled to the brim.
Boss Tang pushed open the door, took a look inside, and found everything completely spotless. He couldn’t help but feel a bit embarrassed. “Look at what a wonderful neighbor I found for you; she cleaned up the house so beautifully! Now that you’re here, you can just lie down and rest.”
He originally wanted to advise him a bit more on how to get along with neighbors, but he never expected Gao Ming to merely let out an “mm.” “Then is paying 1,000 points enough?”
Boss Tang completely broke down. “If you put a clear price tag on social obligations, it ruins the whole meaning of it!”
Huai Yu and Zhou Qian had just entered the yard when they overheard their conversation, and Huai Yu couldn’t help but blank.
In the next instant, she beamed with joy. “Neighbor! You’re so generous!”
That was so embarrassing! She had only done some basic cleaning!
However, the neighbor had already raised his thin wrist. Next to his highly prominent bone was a quiet, low-profile black communicator. “If you prepare three meals a day and deliver them to me, and tidy up the place every day, the monthly salary will be 3,000 points.”
3,000 points?!
She hadn’t been to the trading market in a long time; had prices skyrocketed to this extent?! Even if the meals were highly valuable, she still clearly remembered seeing people squatting by the roadside waiting for manual labor jobs, earning only ten or twenty points a day!
Huai Yu’s eyes widened in circles.
Boss Tang’s eyes also widened in circles, his tense face now entirely filled with murderous intent. “Gao Ming! What nonsense are you talking?”
The other party hesitated for a fraction of a second, then turned his head to look at him. “Is this salary not enough?”
Seeing that Boss Tang was on the verge of a total meltdown, Huai Yu hurriedly held out her hand. “Enough, enough, enough! It’s a deal!”
Although one person talking about neighborly relations while the other placed a clear price tag was a bit mismatched, he was simply offering way too much! Besides, she was going to cook and eat with Zhou Qian anyway; making an extra portion wouldn’t take any effort at all.
As for the cleaning…
To be honest, Huai Yu looked around this empty place and wondered what there was to clean every day.
After a moment’s thought, she said warily, “I won’t clean the toilet for you though! If you absolutely must hire someone for that, my Brother Zhou Qian can do it, but—”
“I know.” Gao Ming still maintained his world-weary face. “It costs extra. Let’s do this then: you handle the cooking and cleaning for 2,500, and he handles tidying the toilet for 1,000.”
Zhou Qian: “…”
Well, the toilet’s water tank was connected to the water tower at the very top; it just needed to be pumped full every few days when it ran out. In reality, it was still a squat toilet that everyone was used to using.
As long as he didn’t smear feces on the wall, how dirty could a toilet get?
If scrubbing a toilet could earn 1,000 points a month, he could have made a fortune doing that back in the Defense Army.
It was pretty good.
The two of them looked at this Gao Ming, whom Boss Tang had described as full of danger, and realized that his way of thinking was completely direct. Even if he put a clear price tag on things, he didn’t have that arrogant attitude of buying a service; instead, he seemed to be stating an inconsequential matter.
If not for this, Huai Yu wouldn’t have been so direct… She had originally wanted to look after Ketaro’s former owner! She never expected to strike it rich the moment he arrived; it felt rather embarrassing.
Gao Ming had already adjusted the transfer amount on his communicator. “Alright, 1,000 for cleaning and a monthly salary of 2,500. Let’s pay it now.”
