15: Chapter 15 You reap what you sow

On the day the eighty-square-meter plot of land was finally dug up piece by piece, Jiang Lin sat at the edge of the field for a long time, until the red soil beneath his backside grew warm from sitting, before he finally convinced himself that he had truly rooted himself in this dead, desolate Wasteland.

For modern farmers equipped with mechanized equipment, this damn-small patch of land probably wouldn't even count as a drop in the bucket.

But in the Wasteland, every single inch of these eighty square meters was forcibly carved out by Jiang Lin from the hardened, dark red Gobi desert with his entrenching tool, which had risen and fallen tens of thousands of times.

According to the plan he had repeatedly calculated and scribbled over countless times on scratch paper, this hard-earned arable land was strictly divided into three functional zones.

Fifty square meters of the core area were entirely reserved for potatoes; they were his calorie bank and the cornerstone of all his survival logic.

Twenty-five square meters were given to the Soybean, which was the medicine for the land and also his only source of protein.

The remaining five square meters were split up by him into dozens of tiny anchor points, evenly distributed along the drainage ditches at the very outer edge of the entire cultivated land.

This was the Pumpkin's territory.

Pumpkins, as a plant, were naturally masters of guerrilla warfare.

Jiang Lin hadn't prepared a large plot of farmland for them; that half-catty of Pumpkin seeds had been densely planted like a fence right along the edge of the eighty-square-meter safe zone.

His calculations were very precise.

The root systems would stay within the safe zone to absorb nutrients, while those tireless vines could be allowed to spread out onto the uncultivated, highly acidic Wasteland.

Around the fortieth day, the potatoes in the field had grown lush, dark green branches and leaves, and the Soybean seedlings had also shot up by a large margin, swaying in the breeze.

But the most eye-catching of all was the circle of Pumpkins planted along the outer periphery of the drainage ditches.

Initially, a small fraction of those Pumpkin seeds had been weeded out by the cold and barrenness, but the ones that survived displayed a jaw-dropping aggressiveness.

The huge green leaves looked like small umbrellas held open, and the thick vines crossed over the drainage ditches, charging directly into the unimproved Wasteland zone.

Even though contact with the highly acidic primitive red soil caused the edges of some leaves to show scorched marks, the vines at the very front still tirelessly extended forward, looking as though they were ready to dye this entire barren Wasteland completely green.

This was an extremely wild and primitive vitality.

Looking at these overstepping vines, however, Jiang Lin furrowed his brow.

Biology class had taught a concept called apical dominance.

A plant's terminal bud would preferentially consume nutrients and inhibit the growth of lateral buds.

For a vine plant like the Pumpkin, if the main vine was allowed to crawl forward indefinitely, it would drain all the base fertilizer in the soil just to grow in size, and the ultimate result would be growing only leaves without blooming, and even if it did bloom, it wouldn't bear good melons.

"You're growing quite happily, but you're here to be vegetables, not to do landscaping."

Jiang Lin muttered, fished the folding knife out of his pocket, and flipped open the blade.

In agriculture, dealing with this kind of excessive vegetative growth had one most effective crude method—pinching the tips and pruning the lateral branches.

He walked to the edge of the plot, squatted down, and searched among the intertwined vines with his gaze.

Finding the tips of the main vines that were growing the most vigorously and were full of moisture, as well as the excess lateral vines emerging from the leaf axils, his hand rose and his knife fell.

With a light click, a tender, ten-odd-centimeter-long Pumpkin shoot fell into his hand.

A few drops of transparent juice oozed from the cut, carrying a strong, raw scent unique to fresh plants.

Smelling this scent, Jiang Lin's Adam's apple involuntarily bobbed up and down.

He hadn't eaten anything fresh for far too long.

Forty days, a full forty days.

His daily food intake consisted of dry-chewing compressed biscuits that were as hard as bricks, heavy on salt and oil, followed by gulping down filtered, slightly astringent rainwater.

This extremely monotonous diet not only numbed his taste buds but also caused his body to launch a serious protest.

Even with glycerin enemas brought along, his intestinal peristalsis had slowed to the absolute limit.

Fever blisters had broken out around the corners of his mouth, and the ulcer on the side of his tongue made him gasp in pain even just drinking cold water.

And now, what he was clutching in his hand were green vegetables rich in fiber and vitamins.

Among the common folk, Pumpkin tender shoots, young leaves, and tender petioles were naturally a very refreshing home-cooked dish.

Acting like a miser, Jiang Lin circled the entire perimeter of the eighty-square-meter plot and cut off a good half-bucket's worth of Pumpkin vines.

In the evening, a bonfire was lit in front of the camp.

The dry wood scavenged from the riverbed crackled and popped in the fire.

Jiang Lin sat by the campfire, holding a Pumpkin vine in his hand, and began meticulously preparing the ingredients.

The surface of the Pumpkin vine had a layer of fine white fuzz and small thorns; eating it directly would prick the throat.

Exercising his patience, he pinched the outermost thin layer of skin from the broken end of the vine and gently peeled it downward.

Accompanied by a subtle tearing sound, the rough skin was completely stripped away, revealing the tender, jade-green stem meat inside.

This work was quite tedious, and those small thorns pricked his fingers with a slight itch, but Jiang Lin peeled with intense concentration.

The peeled tender stems and intact young leaves were tossed by him into an iron bucket filled with clean water to be washed.

The iron bucket was set over the fire, and the water quickly boiled.

Jiang Lin first smashed a little less than half a piece of compressed biscuit with a stone, poured the biscuit crumbs into the water, and stirred them evenly.

The originally clear water turned into a paste-like base soup with a bit of grease.

Next, he pinched a tiny bit of salt left at the bottom of the ziplock bag and sprinkled it into the soup.

Finally, he dumped all those emerald-green Pumpkin vines and leaves into it.

The boiling water churned.

The green leaves quickly softened in the boiling water, and their color became even deeper.

A scent mixed with the aroma of grain oils and a rich, fresh plant fragrance spread out in front of the tent along with the white steam.

Jiang Lin couldn't wait for the soup to cool down completely; he directly scooped up a spoonful with a wooden-whittled spoon, blew on it twice, and put it into his mouth.

The moment the soup entered his mouth, his whole body froze.

There was none of that dry astringency of compressed biscuits that tugged at the throat.

The tender stems of the Pumpkin vine made a slight crisp sound between his teeth, and after chewing a few times, they transformed into smooth, tender, and juicy fibers.

The leaves were soft and dense, carrying a trace of very subtle yet extremely real sweetness that slid all the way down his esophagus into his stomach.

This warm current carrying vitality instantly smoothed away the roughness that had accumulated for a long time on his stomach wall, like a sponge.

Jiang Lin's eye sockets inexplicably felt a bit sore.

In the Real World, if his mother served such a bowl of clear water-boiled vegetable leaves with barely a few specks of oil, he would probably perfunctorily shovel down a couple of bites.

But in this scarred, dead, and desolate Wasteland World, this mouthful of warm green vegetable soup was simply a delicacy of jade plates and rare treasures.

He drank half a bucket of soup completely clean in one breath, not even sparing the last piece of rotten leaf clinging to the side of the bucket.

This meal of Pumpkin vine soup became a turning point in Jiang Lin's survival in the Wasteland.

The next morning, when he went to the pit fifty meters away to use the toilet, his bowel movement was unprecedentedly smooth.

The large amount of plant fiber acted like a gentle brush, clearing out the stagnation in his intestines.

Two days later, the fever blisters at the corners of his mouth began to scab over, and the ulcer on his tongue healed significantly.

Relying on the green Great Wall built by that half-catty of seeds, Jiang Lin not only saved a large amount of compressed biscuits but also forced his physiological state to endure the most difficult period between harvests.

As time passed, the temperature on the Wasteland seemed to get a bit warmer.

Around the sixtieth day, flower buds began to emerge on the Pumpkin vines.

Not many days later, those flower buds bloomed one after another.

Resembling golden trumpets, the Pumpkin flowers appeared incomparably glaring yet full of vitality among the dark red soil and green vines.

When Jiang Lin first saw these flowers, he was so excited that he rubbed his hands in place for a long time.

Blooming meant bearing fruit.

If there were melons to eat, that calorie deficit would be completely filled.

However, this joy only lasted for a week before turning into a massive panic.

He discovered that those brilliantly blooming yellow flowers, after blooming for a day or two, began to wither and dry up, and finally, together with the fingernail-sized little green Pumpkin button beneath the receptacle, dropped into the soil with a snap.

More than a dozen flowers dropped consecutively.

Jiang Lin squatted beside the Pumpkin vines, holding a fallen withered flower in his hand, and stared blankly at the sky.

The grayish sky was quiet enough to make people panic.

There were no bird calls, no rustling sound of wind passing through woods, and even less buzzing of insects.

"Holy shit."

Jiang Lin slapped his thigh fiercely, cursing himself silently for being an idiot.

Pumpkins were a typical cross-pollinated crop.

On Earth, a field of blooming Pumpkins could attract hundreds and thousands of bees and butterflies to dart back and forth among the flowers, bringing the pollen of male flowers to the stigmas of female flowers.

But this was the Wasteland.

There wasn't even a single fly here, so where would bees come from?

Without insect pollination, those female flowers with little Pumpkin buttons wouldn't wait for pollen, and naturally would wither and fall off due to failure of fertilization.

"No bees, then I'll just have to do it myself."

The thing he feared least was finding a way.

Jiang Lin immediately returned to the tent, dug out a spare ballpoint pen refill, and tore off a small ball of medical absorbent cotton from the first-aid kit.

Tying the absorbent cotton tightly to one end of the pen refill, he made a makeshift pollination brush.

Early the next morning, just as the sky was beginning to brighten, Jiang Lin went down to the field.

He carefully identified the Pumpkin flowers.

Pumpkins were monoecious plants; male flowers had only a long flower stalk containing stamens fully loaded with yellow pollen.

Beneath the receptacle of a female flower, it naturally carried a small sphere.

Holding that pen refill tied with cotton, he first gently rubbed it against the stamen of a blooming male flower, letting the pristine white absorbent cotton become covered with golden-yellow pollen, and then carefully applied the pollen onto the sticky stigma of the female flower.

After finishing one flower, he looked for the next.

This became a steadfast morning routine every single dawn.

On this barren Wasteland where only one living person remained, he took the place of nature's insects, maintaining the laws of plant propagation.

A few days later, the first piece of good news arrived.

That female flower he had focused on had its petals wither, but the small green sphere beneath the receptacle did not drop; instead, it expanded by a circle at a speed visible to the naked eye, securely setting its fruit.

"It worked!"

And those male flowers that had completed their task of providing pollen were not wasted either.

The number of male Pumpkin flowers far exceeded that of female flowers.

In agriculture, an excess of male flowers would only consume the plant's nutrients in vain.

Once pollination was over, Jiang Lin unceremoniously plucked off all those male flowers that were blooming in full splendor.

Pumpkin flowers didn't have the coarse fibers of vines; their texture was smoother and more tender, carrying a special fresh fragrance.

Whether used to boil compressed biscuit paste or roasted slightly over the fire directly, they were first-class delicacies.

These by-products of nature greatly enriched his diet and forcibly helped him delay the consumption progress of those eighty catties of compressed biscuits by nearly a month.

At the same time, the twenty-five square meters of Soybean also entered a critical period.

Compared to the aggressive vitality of the Pumpkin, the Soybean appeared quiet and even somewhat delicate. Its pinnate compound leaves trembled slightly in the wind, and the fuzz on the leaves was covered in red dust, making it look rather disheveled.

But when Jiang Lin patrolled the farmland every day, he spent the longest time squatting in front of the Soybean ridges.

He didn't pinch off the tender tips of the Soybean, even though Soybean seedlings were actually edible.

He couldn't bear to do it.

"The Pumpkin is used to fill the stomach and supplement vitamins, but the Soybean is like medicine for the land."

Jiang Lin squatted on the ground and gently used his hand to push aside the red soil at the roots of a Soybean plant.

This was a high-stakes gamble he was making on the Wasteland.

The middle school biology textbook explained it clearly: legumes have rhizobia, which can fix nitrogen in the air and convert it into nitrogen fertilizer that plants can absorb.

This dark red compacted soil had an organic matter content close to zero and was extremely deficient in nitrogen.

The five catties of compound fertilizer that Jiang Lin had brought in had long since run out, and he had no extra chemical fertilizer to support his subsequent land reclamation plan.

If the Soybean could form root nodules in this land, it meant he would own a miniature underground chemical fertilizer plant.

He carefully dug deeper, and his fingertips touched the taproot of that Soybean plant.

When that section of root stained with soil was exposed to the surface, Jiang Lin's originally tight lips suddenly curved upwards.

On those slender roots, a few white protrusions the size of rice grains were attached.

Root nodules.

Although they were small in size and not very numerous, under the extreme environment of the Wasteland with high acidity and heavy metals, these rhizobia had actually survived and begun to establish a symbiotic relationship with the Soybean.

This showed that after lime neutralization, rainwater purification, and plant ash conditioning, the biochemical environment of this land had dropped from death mode to a barely surviving mode.

"It worked!"

Jiang Lin carefully covered the red soil back over and patted it firm.

These twenty-five square meters of Soybean would be his chemical fertilizer plant for future crop rotation and land expansion.

To make up for the severe protein deficit, on the sixtieth day, he picked out a few of the plumpest pods and plucked them off.

That was what was called edamame in the Real World.

After boiling them in an iron bucket and peeling off the fuzzy shells, three round beans popped into his mouth.

The moment his teeth bit open the beans, a soft texture melted on the tip of his tongue. Coupled with the solid and rich aroma of plant protein, it almost gave him the illusion that he was eating meat.

This was energy.

It was the most urgently needed amino acids for building brain synapses and repairing muscle fibers.

Jiang Lin ate very slowly, swallowing only after it turned completely mushy.

He could feel that warm power sliding down his esophagus, as if a parched land was welcoming a spring rain.

Although this meal consisted of only a mere few beans, the psychological comfort it brought him was immense.

"Potatoes save lives, Pumpkins help in emergencies, and Soybeans strengthen the body."

Jiang Lin heavily wrote down this sentence in his diary.

The one-hundredth day.

This was not only a round number, but also the milestone for the maturity of the Wasteland potatoes.

The potato plants in the field had stopped growing, their originally dark green leaves had turned yellow over a large area, and some stems had even begun to wither and fall over.

Jiang Lin took a deep breath, picked up the engineering shovel, and walked to the potato ridges.

With this shovel down, what was being decided was not only his upcoming rations, but also his confidence to survive on this Wasteland.

He targeted a completely withered and yellowed potato plant, inserted the shovel a palm's width away from the root, and pried it hard.

The dark red soil split open, and the soil chunks flipped over.

A few round things rolled out from the mud.

Jiang Lin quickly dropped the shovel, squatted on the ground, and used his hands to push away the red soil.

They were indeed potatoes.

But they were completely different from the large, plump, smooth-skinned yellow-fleshed potatoes sold in supermarkets on Earth.

The potatoes grown in the Wasteland were at most the size of a golf ball, and the small ones were about the size of pigeon eggs.

Their skin was as rough as if covered in a layer of scales and was pitted all over. What was even more alarming was that the skin of some potatoes bore eerie dark green patches.

"They really are hideous."

Jiang Lin tossed a potato in his hand with mixed feelings in his heart.

Although he had been mentally prepared long ago that it was impossible to grow any fine varieties in the Wasteland, this appearance was still a bit too shabby.

But he didn't stop and continued to swing the shovel.

Plant after plant, ridge after ridge.

Although they were small in size, the quantity was surprisingly not few.

Five or six small potatoes could be dug up under each plant.

When he finished digging up all ten square meters of potatoes, a small mountain of potatoes had already piled up at the end of the field.

A preliminary estimate showed that this fifty-square-meter plot yielded about over a hundred catties of potatoes.

Converted to yield per mu, it was roughly one-third of the normal yield on Earth.

But in the Wasteland, which lacked fertilizer and water, this could already be considered a miracle.

In the evening, Jiang Lin ushered in his harvest dinner.

He picked a few of the largest potatoes and, holding a folding pocket knife, peeled off the potato skin like peeling an apple.

Cut into pieces, put into the pot, boil in water.

The potatoes of the Wasteland were difficult to boil until soft. Even after rolling in boiling water for twenty minutes, poking them with a sharpened wooden stick still felt somewhat resistant.

Scoop them out and blow on them to cool.

Jiang Lin took a big bite.

The texture was dry with an extremely heavy sense of starch, and chewing it in his mouth left a slight earthy and astringent taste. Swallowing it even choked his throat a bit.

This definitely couldn't be considered delicious. Compared to the soft and sticky potatoes his mother stewed in beef soup, eating this thing was practically like eating a lump of starch.

However, when this hot, heavy starch fell down his esophagus into his stomach, that sense of fulfillment was irreplaceable.

This was solid carbohydrate, food that could provide huge amounts of heat and restore a person's strength.

Jiang Lin ate in large mouthfuls, even dipping a little more than usual into the base of table salt that he normally couldn't bear to use much of.

After finishing the last bite, he leaned against the snakeskin bag filled with potatoes and let out a long breath of turbid air.

Those eighty catties of compressed biscuits had been eaten down to the bottom by him.

But he no longer had to calculate how many grams he could eat each day.

These hundred-plus catties of potatoes, together with the Pumpkins and Pumpkin vines still continuously producing, were enough to sustain him until the next round of large-scale sowing and harvesting.

The warning line of survival had finally been thrown far behind him.

Only Jiang Lin hadn't yet had time to properly enjoy a few full meals before the Wasteland taught him a cruel survival lesson.

It was an evening when the dark red clouds on the horizon rolled like boiling blood.

Soon after, an unprecedented fierce wind swept across the Wasteland.

That second-hand khaki tent that had accompanied him for over a hundred days finally reached the end of its life.

The rainproof ox-hide fabric had long since become as thin as cicada wings under the long-term grinding of wind and sand, and the fierce wind, like an invisible saw, tore at the tent's framework.

With a crisp sound like tearing silk, a half-meter-long tear was ripped open in the outer tent.

The fierce wind, carrying coarse red sand, poured into the tent, making the camping light sway unsteadily, and the potatoes piled in the corner rolled all over the floor.

Jiang Lin tightly grabbed the main pole of the tent, his entire body being tossed and pulled sideways by the wind.

He also realized that this tent could not last through the next hundred days.

He needed a shelter that could withstand the Wasteland storms.

The day after the wind stopped, Jiang Lin immediately started infrastructure mode.

He utilized that broken wall as the main load-bearing wall.

On the leeward side of this wall, he picked up the engineering shovel and began to dig downward.

In northern villages, the most primitive yet effective building for coping with extremely cold weather was called a dugout.

Digging downward could maximize the use of geothermal temperature for heat preservation, keeping it warm in winter and cool in summer.

Jiang Lin spent three days digging a large square pit two meters long, two meters wide, and about half a meter deep under the broken wall.

Next were the building materials.

There were no bricks on the Wasteland, so he could only carry an iron bucket and walk trip by trip to the dried riverbed dozens of meters away to pick up stones that had been washed relatively smooth by ancient water currents.

After moving back and forth for dozens of trips, deep purple bloodstains were squeezed out by the nylon rope, and once soaked in sweat, it hurt like needle pricks.

With bricks, cement was still needed.

Physics and chemistry common sense saved him once again.

The dark red soil on this Wasteland was rich in iron oxide. When dry, it was like stone, but as long as enough water was mixed in and repeatedly trampled and kneaded, it would turn into red clay with extremely strong stickiness, acting as a natural inferior cement.

Jiang Lin poured the acidic water fetched from the puddle into the dug-up red soil, rolled up his trouser legs, and trampled and stirred in the mud pit like a primitive potter.

Then, using the broken wall as the main load-bearing wall, he piled up the stones piece by piece, filling the gaps between each layer of stones with thick red mud.

Whenever he encountered corners, he used the engineering shovel to smash the stones to level them.

When the walls were piled nearly one meter high above the ground, he stopped.

Added with the half meter underground, the entire internal height was about one and a half meters, enough for him to move around inside while hunching over.

Next was capping the roof.

He laid the dry, thick, decaying logs dug out from the riverbed horizontally between the stone wall and the broken wall to act as roof beams. Then, hardening his heart, he dismantled the completely ruined tent and spread the remaining waterproof ox-hide fabric flat across the wooden beams to serve as a waterproof layer.

Finally, he covered the waterproof cloth with a thick layer of red soil and patted it solid bit by bit with the back of the shovel.

A crude stone-mud dugout with an area of less than four square meters, half underground and half above ground, looking like a large mound of earth from the outside, was complete.

On the night he moved in, the temperature dropped slightly, and the wind outside started blowing again.

But sitting inside the dugout, the thick earth walls isolated most of the howling wind.

The underground structure made the indoor temperature several degrees higher than outside.

He laid out the moisture-proof mat, placed his labor-insurance military overcoat underneath himself, and lit the camping light.

The warm white light lit up in this cramped but sturdy mud house, and the mud marks and stone textures on the walls were clearly visible.

Sitting on his sleeping bag, Jiang Lin looked outside through the small wooden door, only half a meter high, that had been deliberately left.

In the night, the eighty square meters of green farmland swayed slightly in the wind, like an isolated island cleaving through the waves in a dead ocean.

He took a deep breath of safe air carrying the scent of dry soil and picked up his ballpoint pen.