Chapter 648: High-Quality Rice Seed

Seeing that Wang Laoshi, who had only one hand, found it inconvenient to plant seedlings, Tan Qi immediately carried half a basket of seedlings down into the water, went to her side, and said, "Wang Laoshi, I'll hand you the seedlings. When you get tired, we'll switch — you hold the seedlings for me and I'll do the planting."

"Alright." Zhao's mother smiled and took the seedlings from Tan Qi's hands, explaining transplanting techniques as she worked alongside her.

Before long, Shi Du and his mother also arrived at Territory Three. Watching the two of them walk in, Tang Huai became quite certain that Xia Qing had secretly started a group chat without including him. He sulkily stabbed several fat white grubs to death.

Qi Fu and his wife didn't come, because they were busy helping plant seedlings at Territory Five. The members of the Territory Alliance helped one another, and in less than half a day the rice seedlings in every territory had all been planted.

They were the first batch on this stretch of territory to get rice in the ground. Not only earlier than ordinary territories that handed their rice seeds to the Territory Management Department for seedling cultivation, but also earlier than Territories One and Twelve, who raised their own seedlings.

Although they couldn't afford to build a standardized greenhouse, their alliance possessed a hidden valley and could rent Yishi stones, giving them exceptional seedling-raising conditions. Their alliance also had a technical expert; after learning seedling-raising techniques from Territory Seven, their seedlings grew healthy and strong.

On top of all that, they had high-quality rice seeds!

The lords of Territories Four and Ten gazed at the more normally colored leaves of the rice seedlings inside Territory Three, smiles on their faces and hearts full of hope. Because once this batch of rice Xia Qing planted was harvested, they could exchange seeds with her and grow this more stable, high-quality rice on their own territories.

Once the rice was harvested, they could sell more points and eat healthier food.

Territory Fifteen's lord, Tan Qi, didn't know what everyone was smiling about, but she was happy too — every time she came to find Xia Qing, she was happy. Because seeing Xia Qing filled her with drive.

Just like her dad said: as long as she's willing to work hard and put her heart into it, she can become as excellent a lord as Sister Xia Qing.

The water surface that had been bare just moments ago was now lined with rows of lush green rice seedlings, and Xia Qing's heart felt incomparably at ease.

After seeing off the allies who had come to help, she picked up the only three baskets of green-light rice seedlings she had and headed for the terraced fields.

The seedlings the allies had just helped plant were raised from the 40 jin of J-2 yellow-light rice seed exchanged with Third Brother and the 2.5 jin of LD-8 yellow-light rice seed compensated by the Blaze Squad — altogether covering two and a half mu.

The seedlings raised from the two-plus jin of green-light rice she had harvested last year were to be planted in the terraced fields, used to cultivate even higher-quality rice seed.

Even if she couldn't cultivate something even better, she could rely on the high-Yishi-element soil and unpolluted spring water to ensure the quality of these green-light rice plants wouldn't decline.

The Qiang-element content of this batch of J-2 green-light rice seedlings was the same as when the rice seed was harvested late last autumn: still 4.7‰.

What did this prove? It proved that the seedling quality from the hidden valley was excellent, and that the idol's research team had bred this J-2 rice with very high stability!

Not bad.

The 100 stalks of green-light rice Xia Qing exchanged with the idol last June, and the variety of the 40 jin of yellow-light rice she exchanged with the idol last winter, were both J-2.

Simply put, the J-2 yellow-light rice seed with a Qiang-element content of a little over six parts per thousand, harvested by Territory Seven in late autumn, was grown from the J-2 green-light rice seed cultivated in spring.

For the region Xia Qing was in, the biggest difference between growing crops during the years of disaster and before them was the Qiang element present in the air, soil, and water.

Growing crops absorb Qiang element. If a crop has poor resistance to Qiang element, the Qiang-element content within the plant keeps rising. This means that with every successive planting, the crop's quality drops a notch.

For example, the green-light rice with a Qiang-element content of 4.7‰ that Territory Seven harvested in summer — replant those seedlings, and by autumn harvest it's already yellow-light rice with a Qiang-element content of a little over six parts per thousand.

As for the batch of yellow-light rice with a Qiang-element content of a little over six parts per thousand that Xia Qing had just planted out in the open in her fields, what the Qiang-element content would be by late-summer harvest remained to be verified.

The idol had said this batch of yellow-light rice had a stability of three generations when grown in the open. That meant by the third harvest, the vast majority of the rice would have a Qiang-element content of 13–15‰. Working from that figure, the bulk of the yellow-light rice Xia Qing harvested at the end of this summer should come in around 9‰.

Three generations of stability was already a pretty impressive seed.

What did low-stability rice look like?

For example, the 400 stalks of yellow-light rice H-14 with a Qiang-element content of 10‰ that Xia Qing received from the Territory Management Department early last July — by autumn she had harvested only 260 stalks of yellow-light rice with a Qiang-element content below 13–15‰.

Rice seed with such a high Qiang-element content could only be eaten; it couldn't be saved as seed. Because plant it again, and the next harvest would almost entirely be yellow-light rice.

The other 140 of the 400 rice stalks had either undergone Qiang-mutation in Qiang rain or seen their Qiang-element content rise, becoming red-light rice unfit for direct consumption, which could only be sold off cheaply to Zhong Tao. Zhong Tao would send this red-light grain to the Safe Zone food processing plant, where they would remove the excess Qiang element and process the grain into food fit for human consumption. The vast majority of the nutrients in food processed this way had already been destroyed.

In other words, the H-14 rice seedlings Xia Qing had exchanged from the Territory Management Department had only one generation of stability for her.

It wasn't just her — other lords were in the same boat.

So the lack of high-quality seed was the biggest factor holding lords back from expanding their crop-planting area. If Hua was to get its people off grass-based rations, it had to break through this bottleneck.

Lords who made their living from farming naturally joined the ranks tackling this problem, because they had an urgent need for high-quality seed.

After finishing planting the J-2 green-light rice seedlings with a Qiang-element content of 4.7‰, Xia Qing carefully took the last five green-light rice seedlings tied with red thread out of the basket and planted them in the terraced field.

The variety of these five rice seedlings was BS-6, with a Qiang-element content of 4.3‰.

"BS" stood for Bai San. These were rice seeds, still in their husks and mixed in with the rice grains, that she had found among the 400 jin of green-light rice exchanged from Bai San Base through Yang Jin.

When rice seed is hulled into rice grains, the embryo of the rice is destroyed and can no longer develop into a plant.

The fact that Xia Qing had found these ten unhulled rice seeds was thanks not only to the lax screening and inspection by the workers at Bai San Base's rice planting center, but also to Bai San's hulling machines being of poor quality and failing to hull the rice clean.

The rice-hulling machines they were using now were very likely still manufactured before the years of disaster.

After planting the last few rice seedlings she was pinning her hopes on, Xia Qing went home, took a shower, washed the mud off her protective suit, changed into clean clothes, took three jin of green-light pork ribs out of the fridge, and headed to Territory Seven to visit the idol and discuss important matters.