Chapter 1450: Territory Three's Hardworking Employee No. 002

When the Hui-Three delegation's plane took off from the safe-zone airport, Xia Qing put on her white lab coat and entered the artificial climate cultivation room.

Outside was a vast expanse of ice and snow, but on the other side of the wall the artificial climate cultivation room greeted her with a wave of warmth; Xia Qing took a deep breath and a look of contentment spread across her face.

The scent of humus in the soil, the fresh fragrance of plant stems and leaves, and the moisture in the air mingled together—the most familiar smell to anyone who works the land.

Listening carefully, she could also hear the automatic drip-irrigation system's tubes dripping water into the soil: drip, drip… that slow rhythm made Xia Qing feel her heart settle the moment she heard it.

Of the entire laboratory, the room she liked best was this one, bursting with life.

Xia Qing first checked the first glass compartment by the wall beside the door; the green-light chicken manure in the transparent glass jar had already turned a deep brown, almost ink-black, and was nearly finished fermenting.

Xia Qing then slid open the door of the light-blocking glass compartment below; inside, the mung bean sprouts stood tall with snow-white stems, their cotyledons a tender yellow just beginning to unfold—already sprouted and ready to eat. She reached up and tapped the control screen, lowering the humidity of this glass unit a little; by the afternoon she could take the bean sprouts out of the compartment, and she and Yang Jin would eat one plate, while Zhang Shi and Ye Yiyi would eat another.

After checking the bean sprouts, Xia Qing turned to inspect the four potato seedlings in the glass unit on the other side, which had already grown flower buds.

Of the potatoes Xia Qing planted this past spring, a total of 745 successfully flowered and bore fruit, but not a single one exploded into a breedable optimized seed—only 22 general optimized seeds with a harmful-element content between 5.6 and 6.5‰.

These 22 potato seedlings yielded a total of 230 potatoes of various sizes; Little Feimao bounced and spun around on this pile of potatoes many times before strictly selecting just one.

Territory Three's Employee No. 001 had never let her down—Xia Qing tested and confirmed that this potato seed had a harmful-element content of 5.3‰, the best quality of this batch.

After the potato passed its dormancy period, Xia Qing cut it into six pieces and planted them in the soil troughs in the cultivation room; sprouts emerged from the eyes of four of the pieces and successfully grew to the flowering stage.

If these four potato seedlings could explode into a single green-light breedable optimized-seed potato, that would be a pleasant surprise.

The potatoes bred by Hui-Three Research Institute, suited to the local soil and climate, had high yields but also a high rate of aggressive harmful-element evolution; and after two years of planting at various cultivation centers and territories, not a single green-light one had been bred.

After days upon days of observation, recording, adjustment, and waiting, the expected harvest may not come—so plant another batch, and then another. Farming is like that: it demands the most patience, and sniper lord Xia Qing is never short on patience.

If this batch fails to produce a green-light potato, next year she'll plant several kinds of yellow-light potatoes bred by other bases, using cross-pollination to see whether she can breed a better-quality potato variety.

After checking several more plants, Xia Qing came to the first glass compartment of Yi-element spinach.

After confirming that the light, temperature, and humidity readings of this glass compartment met the requirements, Xia Qing carefully slid open the glass door and caught a whiff of an extremely faint spinach-flower fragrance—Xia Qing confirmed this was the best-smelling floral scent on Blue Star!

Because this was the fragrance of the spinach that had earned her the most points, the confidence that let her pull the sniper rifle's trigger again and again!

At this moment, most of the flowers on the two spinach seedlings Xia Qing had placed such high hopes on had already opened. Of course, these little green clustered blossoms, in Xia Qing's eyes, also stood at the very top of Blue Star's flower-looks pyramid.

Having studied for over half a year beside Zhang Tao, Xia Qing had already mastered a great deal of breeding experience.

Most of the pale-yellow anthers on the stamens were already plump and dry; a light brush with a wool brush sent up wisps of pale-yellow powder like thin smoke. The feather-like stigmas of the pale-green pistils had fully unfurled, their color bright and faintly moist—ready to catch pollen.

After careful observation and testing, Xia Qing confirmed that today was the optimal time for pollination.

After growing so many batches of spinach, this was the first time Xia Qing had performed precise manual pollination on spinach.

She put on a mask, raised the light intensity of this glass compartment, lowered the humidity, and gently swept the wool brush back and forth across the male flower spikes until the bristles were coated in yellow pollen; then, with the pollen-laden brush, she lightly and repeatedly dabbed the feather-like stigmas of the female flowers, making sure every little "prickly ball" on the pistil made contact with pollen.

The quality of pollination would directly and profoundly affect the final quality of the spinach seeds. So this task could not be handed to temporary worker No. 002, Daigua—it had to be done by Xia Qing herself.

While she was fully focused on pollinating the spinach, she heard a "beep beep beep" from outside; the laboratory door opened, familiar footsteps drew closer, and the artificial climate cultivation room's door was pulled open.

"Yi."

Xia Qing gently closed the glass-compartment door of these two precious spinach plants and asked the cute little monkey, who was wearing a baby-style warm protective suit and a mask, "Daigua, here to test the soil?"

"Yi!" This was one of its daily work tasks.

"Good job, Daigua—come in and take samples for testing. I'm pollinating our spinach, so for the next three days Daigua doesn't need to handle the spinach compartments." The next three days were all the golden pollination period.

"Yi!"

Little Daigua rolled its little wheeled stool over, stopped beside the potato compartment, hopped on, and used its little black paw to slide open the glass door; with practiced precision it inserted the testing probe to check the soil, then pulled out the pen from its pocket, flipped open the little notebook hanging on the glass compartment, and recorded today's soil data.

Seeing Daigua was doing a fine job, Xia Qing opened the glass door and continued pollinating the spinach. After finishing, she took a tag with a string, wrote the pollination date and the male parent's number on it, and hung it on the female spinach plant:

11-12-14, Male Parent A.

Then, Xia Qing opened the second glass compartment planted with spinach. The 28 spinach seedlings inside—15 male and 13 female—had also entered the flowering stage and could be pollinated.

Before this year's temperature drop, Xia Qing had transplanted 33 spinach plants with Yi-element content of 7.5–8.1‰ from the terraced fields into flowerpots and moved them into this laboratory. Later, to evade Zhang Han's search, Xia Qing moved the spinach pots into the rack building; once she confirmed it was safe, she moved them back.

Even though she had been extremely careful, she still managed to kill 3 plants, which broke Xia Qing's heart.

After brushing all 28 of them and hanging on the tags, Xia Qing opened the last glass unit planted with spinach.

Inside were 18 spinach plants—10 male and 8 female—with Yi-element content of 6.5–6.8‰; it was from this glass compartment that Zhang Han had "stolen" two spinach leaves.

Although the spinach in this compartment wasn't considered precious by Xia Qing, these were the best-quality spinach bred without the use of pollution-free spring water, giant-bee excrement, or Yi-stone fragments.

Under the same conditions, the X-2 currently being bred in the Hui-Three Safe Zone cultivation center's standardized greenhouse topped out at a Yi-element content of just 6.7‰.

So these 18 X-2 plants were the spinach that could be openly shown to people within Territory Three, and also the protective umbrella Xia Qing had planted for the X-3 in the other two compartments.

After confirming these 18 spinach plants had not yet entered their optimal pollination period, Xia Qing turned on the ventilation system of this glass unit and let the spinach keep growing.

Then, she opened the glass-compartment door beside it, picked a cucumber, and left the cultivation room. She turned on the faucet in the laboratory's disinfection area to rinse the cucumber, took a bite, and went to check on Daigua's progress.

Seeing Xia Qing walk over with a cucumber dangling from her mouth, little Daigua in its mask on the stool in front of the soil-testing instrument immediately pointed its little black paw at the "Laboratory Safety Management Regulations" posted on the wall. "Yi, a-ai kaka…"

"Got it, I won't go in." Xia Qing broke off a section of cucumber, tucked it into a wrapper, and hung it on the door handle. "This is for Daigua—eat it after you're done. I'm heading to Mountain Fifty, I'll be back this afternoon. If you and Ergua get hungry, eat the cabbage in the kitchen."

"Yi!!"

Daigua answered brightly, hopped down, opened the door, tucked the cucumber into its protective-suit pocket, and went back to testing the soil.

Seeing that move, even Zhang San and the Broken-Waist Wolf would shake their heads.