Chapter 785: Earning Corn Seeds

"Beep beep, beep beep."

At half past three in the morning, the alarm clock inside the two-story building of Territory Three went off right on time. A hand reached over, grabbed the phone accurately, and shrank back into the blankets.

About half a minute later, Xia Qing poked her head out from under the covers with a mess of short hair, and stretched.

She had slept wonderfully, and was full of energy again — ready to chop bamboo with a vengeance!

After quickly getting dressed and washing up, Xia Qing went downstairs with light steps to greet her companion. "Boss, good morning."

"Meh." Boss Sheep replied, not in a very good mood.

"Boss, bear with it a little longer. The scouring rain will end tomorrow morning. What would you like for breakfast today? How about cucumber and corn mixed with Number Three rations? Full of color, aroma, and flavor!"

"Mehhh~~~"

"Alright, let's go chop the bamboo first, then head to the greenhouse to pick a few cucumbers, and I'll mix them up for you."

"Meh!" Boss Sheep also sprang up full of energy.

Xia Qing drank a cup of warm, unpolluted spring water, first helped her companion put on protective gear, then put on her own. One person and one sheep drove the micro-tiller, mowing the grass along the road as they headed toward the West Buffer Forest.

Boss Sheep lifted her nose and sniffed, letting out an unhappy bleat, irritated by a smell in the vehicle that she found annoying.

Something off about the smell? Xia Qing pretended not to understand and explained in all seriousness, "This vehicle is convenient for mowing grass. Once we get to the reception room, we'll switch vehicles."

Hearing the micro-tiller, Guan Tong and Chen Zheng, Chen Cheng in the reception room also set out, heading toward the raised edge of the bamboo field in the West Buffer Forest.

Guan Tong blinked at the red-clothed bamboo. "Is it my imagination? Why do I feel like the color of this bamboo is getting darker and darker?"

Chen Cheng yawned. "Your eyesight has evolved — you can still tell colors in the middle of the night? Cut one down later and send it down to compare, then we'll know."

Chen Zheng knew what Guan Tong was worried about.

Frequently chopping down scouring-evolved aggressive plants during the scouring rain is very dangerous. Because after the branches are cut, the large amounts of nutrients and scouring rain elements absorbed by the root system have nowhere to go, and the plant is very likely to evolve again, raising the danger level of the aggressive plant.

But this potential threat didn't amount to much in Territory Three. "The soil layer here is very thin, and bamboo is a shallow-rooted plant — the roots spread horizontally and don't dig deep. If something seems off, we just pull the bamboo roots out and suppress them with Yishi stone."

"Right, I forgot about that!"

Only then did Guan Tong remember that Xia Qing had very generously used Yishi stone to shield five greenhouses from scouring elements. Given her cautious style, she must still have spare Yishi stone on hand.

With this precious mineral that specifically counters scouring elements around, no matter how much the bamboo roots struggle inside Territory Three, they couldn't stir up any tricks.

Where did Xia Qing's Yishi stone come from? The members of the Beard Feng Squad all had some idea in their hearts: Hui-3 Base's trump card seed X-2 was very likely evolved from Territory Three!

Thinking of this, they couldn't help feeling a chill of retrospective fear. Over the past year, such precious high-Yishi-element vegetables had been growing brazenly in places that any of them, and the greedy Boss Sheep, could touch at any moment!

"Boss, Sister Qing, you're here!" Chen Cheng greeted the two lords of Territory Three with overflowing enthusiasm.

Boss Sheep naturally wouldn't pay him any attention. Xia Qing asked, "You all got some sleep too, right?"

Chen Cheng replied, "We slept, just woke up. Everything's normal in the territory, Sister Qing can rest easy."

Xia Qing acknowledged, looked up through her night-vision goggles at the red-leaf bamboo, and said, "It feels like the brightness of this bamboo is different from the last batch — it might be harder. Let me test first whether its attack methods have evolved."

Xia Qing flicked out a steel pellet, accurately snapping off a finger-thick branch of the red-leaf bamboo. The instant that bamboo was hit, its fibrous roots burst out, exceeding fifteen centimeters in length.

Guan Tong breathed a sigh of relief. "Just the fibrous roots got longer, that's a relief."

Indeed, that was a relief.

Xia Qing instructed, "Everyone walk on the stone slabs going there and back, don't get your feet pricked. Boss, don't prick your hooves."

"Meh."

Boss Sheep responded and followed behind Xia Qing, clip-clopping along the stone slabs toward the bamboo grove.

Next came a vigorous bout of chopping.

Forty minutes later, the four people and one sheep had finished harvesting the third batch of 43 hardness-evolved bamboo.

Six and a half hours later, Xia Qing had harvested another batch — the fourth — of 50 hardness-evolved bamboo.

That afternoon at five, while harvesting the fifth batch of 58 hardness-evolved bamboo, Xia Qing discovered the bamboo had evolved again. The bamboo's magnetic field had grown stronger, the main roots buried in the soil trembled along with the fibrous roots, and the entire bamboo field was shaking.

If it kept evolving at this rate, by the time they harvested the sixth batch, the various main roots of the bamboo would very likely leap out of the soil and lash about like whips.

Bamboo whip roots tens of meters long, covered in rings of fibrous roots, dancing around — their attack power would definitely instantly kill dancing potato vines.

Out of caution, Xia Qing decided to stop chopping. She had already harvested 222 hardness-evolved bamboo, enough to replace the framework of her greenhouse entirely. There was no need to take this risk.

The sixth batch of bamboo could wait until the scouring rain stopped and the scouring element content in the atmosphere returned to normal levels, then be chopped slowly.

There were still sixteen hours until the scouring rain ended. Since she didn't plan to chop another batch, there was no need to fertilize the bamboo field again. Given how crazily this bamboo grew, it would definitely reach 18 meters tall before the scouring rain stopped.

With no more bamboo to chop, and the situations in Territories Three and Nine also under control, Xia Qing began frequently taking on the dangerous clearing missions posted by Tan Junjie that required support from territory evolvers.

Not only danger incidents within Territories 2 through 10 — even when Territories 20 through 26 in the far south reported danger incidents needing manpower, Xia Qing would go to support.

Need a sniper? I'm here!

Need a strength evolver? I'm here!

Xia Qing was being this enthusiastic to earn green-light corn seeds, to plant in the greenhouse vacated after harvesting the winter wheat.

Hearing how enthusiastic Xia Qing was, Shi Du, Yu Shou, Zhang Hongda and others also started going out enthusiastically to earn seeds.

The inspection team was numb: where did they get so much stamina? Weren't they tired?

The lords who held nutritional sources in their hands replied: Tired? What's that?

At eleven in the morning on the third day, the second scouring rain of Year Eleven of the Calamity finally stopped.

The sun edged the dense clouds with bright borders, and the scouring element content in the air began to slowly decrease.

When no more scouring-evolved crops burrowed out of the greenhouses, and no more aggressive plants appeared in the territories, the exhausted farmers collapsed on the spot and slept soundly.

The inspection team began tallying losses and reporting them to the Territory Management Department.

In the second scouring rain disaster of Year Eleven of the Calamity, which lasted fifty-three hours, the peripheral territories of Hui-3 saw the most complex and severe danger situations in Northern Zone One.

During this scouring rain, Northern Zone One activated the scouring-snake emergency disaster-elimination procedure and cleared 458 aggressive plants.

But!

The casualty count in Northern Zone One's territories was only 58.

These two sets of numbers together, even if they couldn't shock the entire Hua Nation, would definitely shake all ten bases of Hui City!