14: Chapter 14 Open Fire

The Soybean seedlings were already as high as an ankle.

Jiang Lin squatted at the edge of the field, lifted a corner of the plastic film, and the wind immediately rushed in, blowing the Soybean stems so curved that they almost clung to the soil surface.

His heart tightened, and he reached out to steady them, but stopped halfway.

The moment the wind stopped, those thin stalks bounced back up, curved but unbroken, as if gently supported by an invisible hand.

He stared at them for a long time until he confirmed that they wouldn't fall over, before covering the plastic film back up and pressing down the stones tightly.

The potatoes that he cared about the most had their dark green buds fully unfolded, growing more than a circle thicker than when they first emerged from the soil.

The leaves were stained with dark red dust; he reached out and pinched a leaf, and the tactile sensation startled him for a moment.

It was hard, and the surface looked as if it were covered with a layer of rough leathery skin, exuding a fierce vigor of savage growth throughout its body.

This was probably a protective layer they had evolved themselves to adapt to the arid, high-radiation environment of the Wasteland.

As for the three clusters of Pumpkins planted by the edge drainage ditch, their growth was the most aggressive.

Between the two thick and huge cotyledons, true leaves with tiny downy hairs had already emerged, propped up like several verdant little umbrellas.

Although they hadn't started to crawl and vine yet, that posture of greedily absorbing nutrients could be felt right through the soil crust.

Compared to the cautious Soybeans and potatoes, this thing was simply a ruffian on the Wasteland.

"They grow a bit slowly, and this Pumpkin looks like a big eater."

Jiang Lin muttered to himself.

After the Soybean cotyledons unfolded, the speed at which the true leaves emerged was obviously rather slow.

The height of the potato seedlings was at least a third shorter than the plants of the same period he had seen in agricultural technology videos.

He squatted at the edge of the field and began to calculate in his mind.

This time, he had brought over 80 catties of compressed biscuits.

Eighty catties of compressed biscuits were about 40,000 grams, with each 100 grams containing about 2,000 kilojoules of calories.

If he ingested 400 grams per day, it could last 100 days.

But this was only calculated based on the minimum standard for sustaining survival.

Once he did physical labor and cultivated more land, it would be impossible to eat only 400 grams a day.

In fact, it was impossible for him not to carry out land reclamation.

A 20-square-meter plot of land, even with a maximum harvest, would not be enough to support him in eating his fill every day.

The yield per mu of potatoes on Earth was about two to three thousand catties; converted into square meters, one square meter could produce four or five catties.

This was an ideal state.

Base fertilizer was applied, nutrient solution was sprayed, the soil pH value was adjusted just right, sunlight was sufficient, and water sources were abundant.

But his planting environment was the Wasteland.

The soil here was acidic and compacted, possibly containing heavy metals and radionuclides; sunlight was weakened by more than half due to suspended particles; rainwater needed to be filtered, neutralized, and sedimented before it could be used for watering; and the organic matter content in the soil was approximately equal to zero.

Under these conditions, how much fruit could these mere ten square meters of potatoes bear?

Could the yield be half?

What about a third?

A gust of wind blew past, and Jiang Lin shivered.

How many calories did an adult need at a minimum per year?

Converted into malnourished potatoes on the Wasteland, about how many catties would be needed?

As a source of protein, how much area needed to be planted with Soybeans?

The numbers popped out one by one, and the more he calculated, the colder he felt.

To maintain long-term survival, he needed to cultivate at least eighty to one hundred square meters of farmland.

And he currently had only twenty square meters.

There was less than two catties of quicklime left, plant ash was almost used up, and compound fertilizer had only the bottom of a bag left.

He had to compost on his own.

He must find more things that could be burned into plant ash, he must find more water sources, and he must turn twenty square meters into forty, and forty into eighty.

...

A thousand tangled thoughts clogged his brain, and just thinking about it was suffocating.

If it were the former Jiang Lin, seeing such a heavy workload, his first reaction might have been to back out.

Now, looking at those dense numbers on his notebook, he didn't feel much fear in his heart; instead, a sense of excitement surged up.

Shun was raised from the fields, and Fu Yue was lifted from the building walls; therefore, when Heaven is about to place a great responsibility on a person, it must first frustrate their spirit, labor their muscles and bones, starve their body, deprive them of their possessions, and confound their undertakings, so as to stimulate their mind, harden their nature, and build up their incompetence.

In studying, he was an ordinary person with low comprehension, helpless in front of final-answer questions.

But on the question of survival, all logic was linear.

Turn over one square meter of land, and there was one more square meter of hope; save a bucket of water, and there was one more day of life.

There were no roundabout geometric relationships here, only solid sweat and mud.

"Then let's do it."

Turn over two square meters every day, come rain or shine.

After turning the soil, he would go to the puddle dozens of meters away to collect acidic accumulated water.

The rest of the time was all spent on studying.

It was still about battling it out stubbornly.

Encountering a problem he didn't know, he no longer forced himself to think blindly, but copied the problem down, tearing apart and mashing up every knowledge point and every theorem involved like dissecting a sparrow.

In this process, he gradually discovered a wonderful chemical reaction.

That mechanically repetitive, high-intensity physical labor during the day seemed to invisibly empty the anxiety and distractions in his brain.

When he sat under the desk lamp in the evening, looking at those dry mathematical symbols, his state of mind was surprisingly peaceful.

It made him feel like an artisan polishing parts, neither hurried nor impatient, deducing formulas over and over again.

Days passed alternately in such sweating labor and boring deductions.

There was no calendar on the Wasteland, and Jiang Lin could only record time by making a stroke on the broken wall every day.

The weather was getting warmer and warmer, feeling like spring had arrived; the growth rate of potatoes and Soybeans had sped up a bit, and Jiang Lin had already removed the PE film.

On this day, tired of studying, prompted by a desire for activity after extreme stillness, he picked up the entrenching tool, hung two iron buckets with nylon rope, and walked south down the gentle slope.

When he reached the bottom of the slope, he stopped.

Ahead was a section of a dry riverbed.

The riverbed was very wide, probably thirty or forty meters; the bottom was filled with pebbles that had been washed by water for a long time, and the gaps between the pebbles were filled with fine sand.

On both sides of the riverbed were earth walls eroded into vertical sections, where clear stratigraphic boundary lines could be seen—red, gray, and black, like a book cut horizontally.

He walked east along the riverbed.

After walking for about ten minutes, he noticed a protruding rock layer at the bottom of the right earth wall, like a shallow rock eave, casting a small patch of shadow on the ground below.

He walked over to take a look.

On the surface of the pebbles under the rock eave, there was something.

Grayish-green, thin, clinging to the rock, like a layer of extremely thin downy carpet.

Starting from the bottom of the rock eave, it extended intermittently for about half a meter; the widest place was as wide as two palms side by side, and the narrowest place was only one finger wide.

The leaves of this thing were even smaller than sesame seeds, densely packed together, with their surfaces covered by a layer of extremely fine gray down.

It looked very much like Moss.

This creature showed extremely strong vitality under the extreme environment of the Wasteland.

Without soil, it grew directly on the rocks.

Without rainwater, it entered a state of suspended animation, waiting for the rain that it didn't know when would come again.

Without sunlight, it shrank in the shady side of the rock, maintaining the bare minimum operation of life with an extremely low metabolic rate.

It had hung on half-dead for who knew how many years.

Jiang Lin used his hand to pick up a small pinch, looked at it in the palm of his hand, and put it into his mouth.

An extremely heavy bitterness instantly exploded on his taste buds, followed by a dry, stale earthy smell.

He didn't spit it out; he held that small piece of Moss in his mouth and chewed slowly.

He chewed until the bitterness and earthy smell mixed together indistinguishably, chewed until the surface of his tongue was almost paralyzed by the astringency, and then swallowed it down.

This was not food.

Definitely not.

But it contained dietary fiber and might also contain trace elements.

He had learned in biology class that Mosses were the pioneers of nature; they could secrete acidic substances to corrode rocks and extract minerals from the stones.

Those minerals were stored in the cells of the Moss.

Better than nothing, he supposed.

At this thought, Jiang Lin took out his folding knife and, along the edge of the Moss, as close to the rock surface as possible, removed the Moss together with a very thin layer of sediment attached to the bottom.

He only took about two-thirds.

The remaining one-third was left intact on the rock.

Leaving it to continue growing.

And leaving a hope.

With the harvest of Moss, his spirits soared, and he continued to rummage through the pile of rocks at the edge of the riverbed.

The entrenching tool was inserted into the gaps of the gravel, pried open, and a deeper layer of gravel was revealed underneath.

When prying at the third place, the tip of the shovel hit something.

He squatted down and brushed away the surface gravel with his hands.

A grayish-white thing was exposed underneath, about as thick as a wrist, half buried between the sandy soil and gravel.

He dug a circle around it with the entrenching tool, digging about thirty centimeters deep, and finally pried it out completely.

A section of a tree trunk.

It was about as long as his arm, a circle thicker than a wrist, grayish-white on the surface, and covered with fine cracks.

It was ridiculously light in his hand, feeling like it would shatter with a little force.

Pinching it with a nail left a small dent, and one could feel that the interior was a honeycomb-like loose structure.

Jiang Lin gently placed it on the ground and continued to dig downwards.

In the same layer of gravel, he dug out three or four similar pieces of wood.

Their sizes varied; the large ones were nearly half a meter long, and the small ones were only as long as a finger.

They were all thoroughly dry and as light as foam.

He picked up these dead wood remains section by section and put them into an empty iron bucket.

When the iron bucket was full, he stuck the rest into the gaps of the nylon rope between the iron bucket and the entrenching tool, tightening them with the rope.

This was firewood.

And also the source of plant ash.

Plant ash could not only adjust acidity, but also supplement potassium.

Potatoes were potassium-eating crops; only with sufficient potassium fertilizer could the tubers expand.

Before the sky completely darkened, Jiang Lin carried two buckets of Moss and a large bundle of dead wood back to the camp.

First, he divided the Moss into two portions.

The larger portion, about the size of a palm, was spread flat on the surface of a rock in the corner of the camp. That rock surface had a shallow groove that could accumulate a little water.

After the Moss was successfully transplanted, the rest was chopped up and put into an iron bucket.

Then he started a fire.

He squatted at the door of the tent, used the entrenching tool to dig a shallow pit on the ground, surrounded it with a circle of stones, and set up dead branches.

He brought the lighter close to the thinnest dead branches and pressed the switch with his thumb.

Click.

The blue flame of the windproof lighter spewed out from the nozzle, licking the edge of the dead branches. The dead branches first turned black, and then a wisp of extremely thin blue smoke rose.

The smoke was very faint and almost invisible in the night wind of the Wasteland.

He cupped the flame with his palms to block the wind.

The edges of the dead branches began to turn red, and the red light spread toward the center along the fiber lines of the wood chips. Then, with a poof, the dead branches burned.

Jiang Lin placed an iron bucket between two stones and poured half a bucket of treated rainwater into it.

When the water boiled, a peculiar grassy and woody scent emerged from the mouth of the bucket, mixing with the metal smell of the iron bucket itself, permeating the entrance of the tent.

Jiang Lin used his folding knife padded with a cloth to take the iron bucket off the fire and placed it on the ground to cool for a while.

Then he picked up the iron bucket, brought it to his lips, blew away the Moss residue on the water surface, and took a sip.

No nausea, no abdominal pain, no abnormal reactions of any kind.

Only the tip of his tongue shrank back from being scalded.

He blew on it and took another sip.

The hot liquid slid down his esophagus, warmth spreading outward from his stomach, extending all the way along his blood vessels to the tips of his fingers and toes.

Having stayed on the Wasteland for over a month, this was the first time he had drunk something hot.

Then he broke off a small piece of compressed biscuit, crushed it, and sprinkled it into the Moss soup.

The biscuit crumbs floated on the water surface, slowly sinking after absorbing moisture, turning into small clumps of paste.

He picked up the spoon he had carved from wood during the cooking period, stirred it, scooped up a spoonful, blew it cool, and put it into his mouth.

The salty and greasy taste of the compressed biscuits, mixed with the bitterness and earthy smell of the Moss, boiled into a bowl of mush whose taste was hard to describe.

He still scraped it clean spoon by spoon and finished drinking it.

Burping contentedly, he crawled into the tent and took out the notebook dedicated to keeping a diary.

By the firelight, he began to write his diary in English.

December 4th, Year 1.

It's extremely cold outside, but I have fire now.

Survival is hard, just like math problems.

But Mencius said, "Born in grief, die in peace."

I will try my best to grow potatoes and my mind here.

I really miss the tomato and egg stir-fry made by my mom.