Chapter 874: Standing at the Top of the Blue Star Working-Squirrel Pyramid: Little Feimao

Before discovering that Little Fei had this ability, Xia Qing had to wait for seeds to sprout before screening cultivable optimized strains, then check each plant's quality one by one with instruments.

If the selected plants had already passed the transplanting window, they couldn't be moved to the better-conditioned terraces, so each one had to be fenced off individually and given separate fertilizer and water, increasing the breeding workload.

Now with Little Feimao, the seed-selection work was greatly simplified.

To confirm whether this ability to pick out premium seeds and food belonged to Little Feimao alone or to the whole freeloader family, Xia Qing dug out all fourteen granaries of the freeloader and its two pups, and sampled the quality of the squirrels' stored food.

She found that these three squirrels had piled the grain they'd stolen from Xia Qing together with yellow-light and red-light grass seeds and fruits gathered from elsewhere. So for now, the ability to pick out premium food could be considered unique to Little Feimao.

Once the confirmation was done, Xia Qing confiscated most of the freeloader family's stored grain and used it to feed the chickens.

Though the freeloader hopped about cursing and swearing, Xia Qing showed no mercy. Because they'd hidden undried grain in tree hollows, it would soon mold and grow fur.

Wasting grain was absolutely intolerable—especially grain that Xia Qing had worked so hard to grow. That she didn't confiscate all of it and left them some dry, storable grain was already very merciful of her.

But the freeloader didn't see it that way. After Xia Qing robbed its stored food, it immediately packed up its two pups and remaining supplies, moved out of Territory Three, and returned to its tree hollow in Area 3 of Mountain 49.

The red lynx hadn't come by in a long time, and the little honey badgers and the daily-appearing red foxes in Area 3 posed far less threat to them than the humans in Territory Three.

Little Feimao didn't move with its family; it still lived in the pocket of Xia Qing's protective suit.

So Xia Qing hired Little Feimao, making it the first official employee of Territory Three.

Job description: seed selection.

Pay: piece-rate wage system—5 points per batch of seeds selected, used to repay its debt. To date, Little Feimao has repaid 25 points and still owes Xia Qing points.

Benefits: food (green-light food) and drink (unpolluted spring water) and housing (Xia Qing's clothing pocket) included. For good work performance, special bonuses—high-eryuan-element spinach seeds—will be distributed from time to time.

Looking across the entire Blue Star rodent world, Xia Qing could thump her chest and guarantee that the pay she gave Little Feimao was absolutely the highest.

In other words, Little Feimao, barely three months old, had already stood at the top of the Blue Star working-squirrel pyramid through outstanding work ability!

The freeloader was a very hygiene-conscious red squirrel, and the pups it raised were also very hygiene-conscious.

When Xia Qing was active outdoors, if Little Feimao needed to relieve itself, it would come out of its nest and find a safe spot; when Xia Qing was active indoors, it would use the soil basin mixed with dry grass that Xia Qing had prepared for it.

Every time she saw Little Feimao climb out of the pocket hanging on the clothes rack to go to the bathroom, Xia Qing felt a sense of satisfaction:

Raising a working squirrel was far more cost-effective than raising a cat overlord. Hu Zi Feng had kept his Little Fifth for a year, and all it did was eat.

Besides the 8 jin of Hui San's SY-2 green-light corn, Xia Qing also had the 2 jin of Red Eleven's Y-3 that Tan Junjie had traded her last winter, plus the 2.5 jin of green-light corn seeds harvested from the six green-light cultivable optimized strains that had popped out of the yellow-light corn she'd planted last autumn.

Little Feimao was very picky. Out of 12.5 jin—roughly—green-light seeds, it selected only 180 premium seeds. As for the cultivable optimized strains that had popped out in Xia Qing's territory last year, not a single one was good enough for the ultra-picky Little Feimao to carry back to its nest.

Xia Qing planted the seeds Little Feimao had selected, along with 400 seeds she'd picked herself, in the terraces; the other seeds went into Sheds 8 and 9, which had just been harvested of wheat.

The green-light corn seeds only filled one and a half sheds; in the remaining half-shed, Xia Qing planted yellow-light corn.

In the other two sheds that had been harvested of wheat—Sheds 5 and 12—Xia Qing decided to plant green-light mung beans.

The reason for planting so many mung beans was that the only green-light food seed Xia Qing had on hand that could be sown was mung beans. If she didn't plant mung beans, she'd have to plant yellow-light corn, or the fields would sit empty.

Though planting mung beans required more fertilizer than planting corn, mung beans were higher quality, had a lower probability of eryu-evoluting during the eryu-rain period than yellow-light corn, and even if they did eryu-evolute, the short mung bean plants were easier to clear out than the tall corn plants.

When the second crop of mung beans was harvested in October, the price of green-light mung beans would certainly be lower than now. But no matter how much it dropped, green-light food was still priced higher than yellow-light food.

So, not just Xia Qing, but most lords' second crops—besides whatever other green-light crops they could find—all chose to plant mung beans.

The Shed 12 in Territory Three that had been flipped over by the gale wasn't repaired with hardness-evolved red-leaf bamboo.

Because the hardness-evolved bamboo poles harvested during the second eryu-rain in Territory Three hadn't yet fully dehydrated and dried.

If she stuck those hardness-evolved bamboo poles into the soil now, by the third eryu-rain, after being nourished by the excess eryu-elements, they'd surely take root and grow rapidly, punching through the rain cloth and drenching all the crops inside with eryu-rain, causing massive eryu-evolution.

The 294 hardness-evolved bamboo poles Xia Qing had harvested during the second eryu-rain were now neatly stacked on the earthen kang inside the shade shed built of rain cloth beneath the western buffer forest.

The rain cloth could block sunlight and rain, and the earthen kang could speed up the dehydration of the bamboo poles. This dehydration method was something Xia Qing had learned from Lord Huo Lei.

Not just Xia Qing—hardness-evolved bamboo poles in other territories were also being dehydrated the same way.

Using this method, the bamboo could be dried out in a month. Next month, Xia Qing could replace all the arched supports of the greenhouses in her territory with hardness-evolved bamboo, boosting the sheds' disaster resistance and service life.

The eryu-evolved bamboo that had grown from the replanted bamboo roots during the return-rain half a month earlier had only grown to just over six meters tall; neither height nor thickness met felling standards. So this batch of bamboo couldn't be cut until the third eryu-rain.

For these four mu of corn and mung beans, Xia Qing hadn't asked Qi Fu and his wife or Hu Zi Feng's squad for help—she'd sown them all herself with the new seeder.

The Alliance Research Institute, established just over half a month ago, with Jiang Ying providing the design concept and blueprints, and Jiang Ying and Lord Huo Lei collaborating on production, had manufactured a simple, single-person seeder.

This single-person seeder was more efficient than the old seeder improved by Qi Fu and Shi Chong, which required three people to operate, and was very suitable for sowing inside the height-limited greenhouses.

The seeder consisted of two handles, a two-meter-long, fifteen-centimeter-wide wooden board, and several small bamboo tubes mounted on the board and connected to funnel-shaped pointed tips; the position of the bamboo tubes could be adjusted according to row width.

For example, when sowing corn with a row width of 50 centimeters, four bamboo tubes spaced 50 centimeters apart could be mounted on the board, with corn seeds poured into each tube. Then the sower, holding the seeder's handles, would walk backward through the field. When a seed needed to be dropped, the conical tube beneath the bamboo tube was pushed into the soil—the depth of insertion controlled by the sower.

When the pointed tip of the conical tube was pushed into the soil, one or two seeds in the bamboo tube would, under inertia, travel from the bamboo tube into the conical funnel and drop into the soil.

Of course, the opening of the channel through which seeds flowed from the bamboo tube into the conical tube could be adjusted according to seed size. This was the most ingenious part of the seeder's design, and the reason it could sell for 50 points each and still have lords scrambling to buy it.

Because the lords couldn't make such a delicate, sensitive mechanism for controlling seed drop.

After adjusting the bamboo tubes' positions and loading the seeds to be sown into them, Xia Qing gripped the seeder's handles and walked backward from one end of the shed to the other, pressing down and lifting up the less-than-ten-jin seeder, and half a mu was sown.

After sowing four mu, Xia Qing's arms didn't ache and her back wasn't sore, and she sighed along with everyone else: establishing the Alliance Research Institute was truly a brilliant move.

Every trade has its specialty. Gathering a group of people with a common goal, letting each person do what they're best at, and producing an effect greater than the sum of its parts—that's the true meaning of an alliance.