Chapter 633: The Wolves of Revenge

At half past one in the morning, the alarm had barely rung its first chime when Xia Qing opened her eyes.

She dressed, quickly washed up, went downstairs to eat a simple but hearty breakfast—steamed eggs—then drove the micro-tiller out of the rack-building warehouse and, with her two companions, cut a path through the waist-high Calamity grass on the way to the small hut by the fields.

Beard Feng, Dajiang, and Xiao Jiang, who had been on shift from four in the afternoon until two in the morning, went to the inner room to catch up on sleep, leaving Xia Qing, Chen Cheng, and Er Yong to guard the second half of the night.

According to the weather forecast, a red-grade Calamity rain lasting a considerable time would hit a little after seven tomorrow morning, so they needed to conserve their energy in advance to deal with any sudden developments.

Right now, a yellow-grade Calamity rain was pattering down.

Xia Qing went first to the breeding greenhouse and saw the sick wolf already digging at the Calamity grass with its paws. Xia Qing praised it sincerely, "Good work, Lao Er. Rest when you're tired. I'll do a round and come back, and we'll pull them out together."

The sick wolf raised its rust-colored eyes and stood on the pitted ground, looking at Xia Qing happily.

Xia Qing smiled, her voice gentle, "Lao Er's eyes are getting brighter and brighter. That means your body's getting better. Once the Calamity rain passes, we'll go find Third Brother for a checkup. Maybe your stomach and intestines have already healed."

In another two days, Xia Qing and the sick wolf would finish the internal organ damage repair potion, and it would be time for a follow-up exam. If the sick wolf's stomach and intestines had recovered enough to handle raw meat, it could return to the wolf pack.

Xia Qing reluctantly rubbed its thick-furred neck before going to check on the livestock, poultry, and domestic insects in the breeding greenhouse. Protected by the Yishi stone, none of these animals had been affected by the Calamity rain; they were all resting.

Wearing night-vision goggles, Xia Qing was inspecting the chicken flock when she noticed a mother Luhua hen hadn't squeezed in with the others but was sitting in a nesting box.

Xia Qing's heart leapt. She reached in to feel, and the hen immediately let out angry clucks—"Cluck cluck, cluck cluck!"—pecking her hand with its beak. This set the whole flock off, chirping and clucking.

Though a chicken's beak was sharp, it couldn't peck through the protective glove Xia Qing was wearing. Feeling an egg under the hen's belly, Xia Qing excitedly called out in a low voice, "Lao Er, come quick! A hen's gone broody!"

The sick wolf, who had been burying its head in digging grass, immediately dashed to Xia Qing's side. It didn't understand what "broody" meant, but it could tell Xia Qing was happy, so it was happy too.

Xia Qing pointed at the basket of eggs on the shelf on the north wall. "Lao Er, go bring me that basket."

For hatching chicks, the fresher the eggs the better. The basket Xia Qing pointed to held eggs laid in the past two or three days.

The sick wolf carefully carried the basket over in its mouth. Xia Qing placed the eggs from the basket one by one under the broody hen. The hen immediately used her sharp beak to tuck the eggs beneath her, guarding them jealously, afraid Xia Qing would snatch them back. Watching this, Xia Qing felt reassured.

She placed nineteen eggs in total, and adding the one the hen was already sitting on, that made twenty. If all went well, these twenty eggs should hatch ten Green Lantern chicks.

This year she needed to hatch and raise at least fifty Green Lantern chickens to supply her idol's demand for chicken meat and eggs. This was one of the conditions she'd agreed with her idol before last year's Calamity snow in exchange for Calamity-suppressing medicine.

Even without the exchange condition, Xia Qing wanted to raise more chickens. More chickens meant not just more eggs and meat to eat, but also more Green Lantern chicken manure to collect. With quality fertilizer, the crops and vegetables in the fields would grow better.

After tucking in the eggs, Xia Qing moved to the planting greenhouse and found Sheep Boss quietly lying under a small night lamp, chewing her cud. She rubbed Sheep Boss's head and shared the good news about the broody hen, then began inspecting the Green Lantern vegetables in the shed.

Beard Feng and the others had just done a full cleanup, so there were no large Calamity weeds or Calamity-evolved vegetables in the vegetable beds. The yellow-light wheat and rapeseed had people guarding them, and the green-light wheat was protected by the Yishi stone—all very safe. Xia Qing greeted Er Yong, then, iron umbrella on her head, began patrolling the territory.

The second half of the night was the easiest time to feel tired and drowsy. Xia Qing kept the Lord's walkie-talkie on, listening to the rain drumming on the iron umbrella, and chatted with everyone on the channel, half-engaged.

"Sister Yan, how's it looking on your end? I just counted—we've only got 156 rapeseed plants left in the field." Zhu Li asked her neighbor Yuan Yan. When they weren't yet close, Zhu Li had called Yuan Yan "sister-in-law," but now that they were familiar, she'd switched to calling her "sister" directly.

"I didn't count, but it does look pretty sparse. I don't know how many will be left after the Calamity rain." Like Zhu Li, Yuan Yan had also sent Qi Fu to rest while she and her people watched the second half of the night, so Qi Fu could be well-rested for tomorrow morning's red-grade Calamity rain.

Zhu Li complained, "We've been busy all winter, and the seed money, labor, and fertilizer we put in might not even pay off. Growing rapeseed is too much of a loss."

"It really is a loss." Yuan Yan felt the same pain. "If I can't get green-light rapeseed seeds, this winter I'm planning to just plant overwintering wheat and vegetables—no rapeseed."

Xia Qing nodded along. At the current stage, the losses on overwintering yellow-light wheat were indeed a bit smaller than on yellow-light rapeseed. Her plan matched Yuan Yan's.

Wen Nengjie sighed, "It's only spring, and everyone's already starting to think about what to plant in winter. That's a good sign."

"Yeah, last year at this time, who would've dared think that far ahead?" Shi Zhong chimed in too.

In an era of natural disasters, you never knew if you'd see the next day—especially for ordinary people, who could only live one day at a time. No one had the time or energy to think about what they'd be doing six months or a year from now. Farming was hard work, and there was no guarantee of a harvest, but it let people see the hope of staying alive, so they were full of drive.

Standing in the buffer forest, Xia Qing looked up at Territory Nine in the distance, where beams of light kept sweeping past. If humans could fight each other less and cooperate more, their chances of survival would be greater.

In this respect, humans weren't even as good as the animals in the Evolution Forest.

"Sister Qing." A little after four in the morning, Er Yong's voice came through the earpiece walkie-talkie. "I just got word—the western wolf pack and some leopards are driving a herd of out-of-control large herbivores toward Forward."

Toward Forward—wasn't that toward the human territories and safe zones?

Damn! Animals might not fight wars among their own kind, but they held grudges—and they always got their revenge!

Xia Qing asked calmly, "How many?"

"Twenty-three wolves, four leopards, and close to a hundred herbivores so far. Because we still don't know the wolf pack's exact direction, no warning notice has been issued yet."

A hundred was already a sizable herd. Charging blindly, they'd cause more animals to run with them, and during a red-grade Calamity rain, this could form a medium- or large-scale beast tide that would slam directly into human territories and safe zones.

The western wolf pack had come for revenge, using the Calamity rain as cover.

Send people to stop them now? During a Calamity rain, human combat power dropped, and using heavy firepower could easily trigger a Calamity explosion. How could they stop them?

Xia Qing asked, "Have you received any pictures?"

If Handsome Giant Wolf had gone out with the western wolf pack, she had to leave the territory immediately to go stop them.