Chapter 207: Evolved Iron Soybeans

Xia Qing finished patrolling her territory and returned home, where she immediately smelled braised pig's trotters. She couldn't wait to take off her protective suit and wash her hands. First she set out the sick wolf's boiled offal and Boss Sheep's concentrate on the table for them, then carried the clay pot to her own table and lifted the lid.

The broth was milky white and a bit bland in flavor, so she poured in some vinegar and garnished it with a single sprig of green-light scallion—perfect.

Xia Qing stirred a few times with her spoon, fished out the soybeans from the broth, and fell silent.

Even though she hadn't eaten soybeans or soy milk in ten years, she still had basic common sense. Even if cooked soybeans don't burst open like mung beans, they should at least swell up a bit—how could these soybeans look exactly the same as when she put them in?

Xia Qing picked one up with her chopsticks, put it in her mouth, and took a careful bite. Then she discovered…

She couldn't bite through it!

These were soybeans she had spent half a year harvesting, and she couldn't bite through them.

Xia Qing ate up every last bit of the chewy pig's trotters and broth, then stared at the soybeans laid out on a paper towel—every single one accounted for—and fell into thought.

Had these soybeans undergone a hardness evolution, or were they some other species that merely looked like soybeans?

When she had previously gone out on collection missions with the combat team, she had run into soybeans before. After harvesting, they had used a field-cooking pot with oil to make popcorn soybeans. The look wasn't great, but the taste was actually pretty good.

Ten years into the Calamity, Xia Qing refused to waste a single grain of food. She washed the soybeans that had been boiled for over an hour, then put them back into a hot pan and slowly heated them, planning to make popcorn soybeans.

In the end, the pan had gotten so hot it started smoking, and the soybeans still hadn't changed. Xia Qing could only scoop out the scorching-hot soybeans and set them aside.

Hard as they were, squeezing out juice for testing was impossible. Xia Qing stopped wrestling with the beans and went to deal with the fields first.

While she was weeding the terraced fields on Gao Po, Hu Zifeng arrived with a basket to pick up today's spinach juice and green-light vegetables. Although Xia Qing had told Yang Jin that Luo Pei could pick whatever he wanted to eat, Luo Pei hadn't made any requests, so it had become a matter of whatever Xia Qing picked, he ate.

Xia Qing picked two tomatoes, three cucumbers, and one pumpkin, then stuffed the basket Hu Zifeng had brought full. "Captain Hu, wait here a moment. I'll go home and juice the spinach."

Although the boss hadn't said so outright, Hu Zifeng of course knew what could be extracted from juiced spinach. But the boss had issued a gag order, so even if he guessed, he wouldn't ask—he just wanted to help cover it up as much as possible. "Go ahead, I'll hoe some weeds for a while."

After three busy days, only the weeds in three peanut fields remained unhoed. Xia Qing reminded him, "Be careful not to touch the ones tied with red string."

Green-light peanuts would sense the touch of any animal, including humans, and attack with their leaf-vein needles. Hu Zifeng cheerfully agreed.

When Xia Qing came back, she brought not only the smallest sealed bag filled with spinach juice, but also a few iron soybeans. "Sorry to trouble Captain Hu, but please take these beans back and hand them to Brother Luo."

Xia Qing asked Captain Luo to have the people in Territory One's planting group test what exactly this iron bean was.

That afternoon, Luo Pei called. "The beans you sent over are indeed a type of evolved soybean. After evolving, this kind of soybean becomes extremely hard. You need to soak them for thirty-six hours first to soften the skin before processing. Because this type of evolved soybean is hard, tastes bad, and contains few nutrients, even when collected and sent back to the Safe Zone, it's processed into feed for poultry and livestock."

So all that half a year of her hard work had been just to give Boss Sheep an extra mouthful of feed?

Though he couldn't hear Xia Qing's response, Luo Pei could sense her frustration and laughed a few times. "When we cleared the evolved forest in Territory Three last year, did you see any evolved soybeans?"

"No," Xia Qing answered with absolute certainty.

During the clearing mission, Luo Pei and the other main force members cleared dangerous creatures up front, while Xia Qing, as an auxiliary evolved squad member, was in charge of transport. Once the team members harvested and collected supplies were sealed, they would be handed off to the strength-type squad members.

Because they'd discovered a spring there, Xia Qing paid close attention to this area of Territory Three. She confirmed they hadn't collected any soybeans there, nor any peanuts.

"We cleared Territory Three in late November. If soybeans had been growing nearby last year, even if we couldn't see the beans themselves, we should have been able to see the leafless soybean stalks." Luo Pei speculated with a smile. "So this kind of evolved soybean was probably carried there by small animals."

Xia Qing agreed with Luo Pei's speculation. "Rodents and ants both have the habit of storing food for winter. Ants have a small range of activity, so it was probably rodents."

Thinking that the soybeans she had painstakingly tended for half a year might have been carried back from somewhere else by small animals like rats, hamsters, or squirrels and hidden in their burrows, then discarded when they got hungry and found they couldn't gnaw through them, Xia Qing was so frustrated she wanted to pick a fight.

Picking a fight for no reason was something Xia Qing would never do.

After hanging up the phone, she checked the red squirrel's location and found the little fellow had returned. The small red dot was fixed in one spot in Area Three of Mountain Forty-Nine, not moving—she was probably resting.

Xia Qing went to Gao Po, confirmed from a distance which pine tree the red squirrel was on, then casually grabbed a handful of Chinese toon leaves on her way back. At home she shouldered the sheep-drawn plow and called out to Boss Sheep, "Boss, let's go plow the field?"

Boss Sheep was probably also so idle its wool was growing. The moment Xia Qing called, it charged right over. Xia Qing hitched up the plow, and with one person and one sheep—one pulling and one guiding—they began turning the soil at the village entrance.

All the frustration in Xia Qing's heart turned into strength. After plowing over four mu, she still hadn't worked it off, so Xia Qing grabbed a machete and chopped down more than forty false paulownia trees over three meters tall.

The false paulownia was a deciduous tree that had evolved from some unknown species after the Calamity. Although its leaves didn't contain high levels of the Qiang element, they did contain several elements harmful to the human body and couldn't be eaten.

In spring, this tree would be covered in fragrant little flowers that attracted bees and butterflies to pollinate it; in summer, it bore bright red soft fruits similar to mulberries that attracted birds to peck at them, spreading the seeds in all directions through bird droppings.

Wild paulownia seeds would sprout less than a week after hitting the ground and grow rapidly, shooting up to three or four meters in just two months, quickly encroaching on the growing space of other plants. Because it grew so fast, the wood of the wild paulownia was very poor and couldn't be used for furniture—only burned as firewood.

When they cleared Territory Three last winter, the task force chopped down all the wild paulownias and dug up the roots to burn them. But the roots left in the soil and new seeds brought by birds still kept sprouting wave after wave of wild paulownia saplings, requiring Xia Qing to clear them regularly.

If she didn't clear them, the flat cultivated land in her territory would quickly turn into a wild paulownia forest.

However, the wild paulownia wasn't entirely useless. Xia Qing had deliberately left over a mu of wild paulownia saplings in a spot with poor soil. When these saplings grew to three or four meters tall, Xia Qing would chop them all down, keeping the straight main trunks for use as poles.

These poles could replace bamboo poles, used to build climbing frames for cucumbers and long beans, as small support sticks inside greenhouses, and now also to fence the chicken run.

Xia Qing had chopped the wild paulownias and plowed the land today specifically to build a new chicken run, so she could move the flock of chickens from the backyard to this spot.

After burying the wooden stakes to mark out the chicken run area, she would wait until the chickens and goslings went into the coop in the evening, then move the netting and nests from the old chicken run over here and install them—the new chicken run would be ready to use.

Xia Qing brushed the dirt off her gloves, startling a few small birds that had been searching for bugs on the freshly turned soil.

After finishing with the chicken run, Xia Qing went to the planting shed on Gao Po and squatted beside the peanut terraces she had carefully tended for nearly half a year, worrying.