"Jing Shu, the medicine you gave me last time was amazing. It worked even better than expected! The patient's completely cured now. I wanted to ask if you have any other herbs. Also, where exactly did you get this medicine from?"
Any herb nurtured by the Spirit Spring was practically a spiritual treasure. Of course, the effects would be extraordinary.
As the saying goes: heroes don't ask about origins. Let's just stay friends.
Jing Shu scratched her head vigorously. "Do you know why my grandma lived to be eighty?"
Su Mali thought for a moment. "Because she took your antidote?"
"No, it's because she never asked questions about my business."
Su Mali burst out laughing. "Ah, makes sense. My grandma lived to be ninety and still had plenty of energy because she spent her whole life worrying about me."
Jing Shu was speechless. There was no way to continue this conversation.
"So, where did your medicine come from? I'm just asking on someone else's behalf."
Jing Shu rubbed her chin. She knew that once traditional medicine like this spread, countless questions would follow. Still, she needed to establish a legitimate front to pave the way for future medicinal plants.
"I grew it myself."
"And how did you grow it?"
"I sprinkled the seeds and watered them. Then they grew."
"..."
Meanwhile, at a rehabilitation center in Wu City, a refined-looking middle-aged man with gold-rimmed glasses stared at the message on his phone, muttering to himself, "She grew it herself? Even with artificial lighting and air conditioning, it's impossible to simulate the right conditions in this environment. And yet the quality is this high."
Growing misshapen and stunted herbs would have been normal.
Another middle-aged man with a cold, grim expression let out a disdainful chuckle. He'd looked through recent trade records and found no transactions involving medicinal herbs. A year ago, there had been some purchases of seeds, so maybe she really did grow them herself. She must have some secret technique she wasn't sharing.
As the man reached out for his coffee, an elderly attendant behind him promptly handed him a cup of milk coffee.
Across from him, a bald man with a single eye flexed his muscular arms, glancing at the phone in the gold-rimmed glasses man's hand while video-calling another old man. "That girl said she just planted the seeds and watered them, and they grew."
From the phone came an irate voice: "Bullshit! Absolute nonsense! If growing them was that easy, then what the hell have we, the so-called great medical families, been doing all year? Eating dirt?"
The man with the gold-rimmed glasses calmly adjusted them. "Oh? But Lao Su said her medicine's potency far surpasses anything on the market. Think about it. You couldn't cure that poison and even went searching elsewhere for an antidote, but this little girl solved it with a small amount of her medicine."
The old man on the screen turned red with frustration. "I don't believe that kind of quality could come from a homegrown plant. Not unless I see a photo."
The bespectacled man chuckled and relayed the demand.
At that moment, Su Mali was lounging with a straw between her lips, drinking a carton of milk while scrolling through a personality quiz on her tablet: "People who chew their straws have strong desires."
Staring at her mangled straw, Su Mali fell into deep thought, her mind wandering to questionable places.
Meanwhile, Jing Shu frowned at the incoming messages.
Su Mali's curiosity was unusually strong today. Jing Shu decided to ignore her, but a moment later, another message popped up: "one stalk of honeysuckle in exchange for a canister of compressed natural gas."
"Fine. I needed to make this look legitimate anyway. It's not about the gas," Jing Shu muttered.
She transplanted the honeysuckle into a flowerpot, thought for a moment, and added a stalk of astragalus, snapping a photo and sending it over.
The bespectacled man shook his head with a low whistle and showed the photo to the old man on the screen.
The old man gasped, his breath hitching. "This is sacrilege! Honeysuckle is one thing, but if that astragalus is alive and thriving, I'll livestream myself eating shit! No, I'm heading back immediately. I need to see what tricks this girl is pulling with my own eyes!"
His worldview was crumbling. Someone had just told him that one plus one equaled five, and he didn't know whether he'd gone insane or if the entire world had.
Su Mali messaged again: "That guy says if the astragalus survives, he'll livestream himself eating shit. He's flying in from Guangdong to see for himself. Take good care of that astragalus, don't let it die."
Jing Shu: "???"
"What on earth was going on? Wait... was an expert actually coming?" Jing Shu's heart skipped a beat with excitement.
This was exactly what she wanted. The more impressive her herbs looked despite her seemingly amateur methods, the more she appeared to be a hidden master. Everyone would assume she was deliberately keeping secrets.
It was the classic strategy of reversing expectations.
Su Mali stopped messaging after that. Jing Shu wasn't in a rush either. She needed to proceed cautiously with medicinal herbs. They were far more valuable than food, and revealing just enough would intrigue influential people without provoking greed.
Never expose something so tempting that even those far stronger than you would covet it.
Time flew, and by mid-December 2023, the world was enjoying its calmest and most comfortable month since the apocalypse began. There was no shortage of maggots for protein, and water was abundant.
During this time, Jing Shu finished all the renovations on her villa:
The villa was now enclosed beneath a massive waterproof PVC canopy, complete with windshield wipers. At each corner were slanted drainage pipes connected to four massive collection tanks, with outlets and channels leading water down to the back mountain.
A garage for the RV had been built on the empty land behind the villa, also protected by a waterproof PVC cover.
The coal shed, built in March, had been reinforced with a sealed structure.
Every nook and cranny of the villa had been stocked with small bags of lime desiccant. Dehumidifiers, dryers, and wall-mounted heaters were all in place.
The fish and shrimp in the pond had multiplied like crazy. Jing Shu had taken advantage of the lingering heat to dry a huge batch of shrimp, salted fish, and various seafood for the cellar, along with plenty of crayfish made into spicy mala dishes, filling an entire cubic meter for future midnight snacks.
Inside the Cube Space, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and pigs had also bred excessively. Jing Shu slaughtered a batch, turning them all into dried meats and sausages for long-term storage. They were her personal snacks for the coming year, never to leave the Cube Space.
The last batch of vegetables and fruits had been dried as well, forming her emergency reserves.
She organized poultry feed, mixing vegetable scraps, weeds, and roots from the Cube Space with dried shrimp, orange peels, and garlic. Nutritious and long-lasting, they'd be stored for the animals.
Even the mountain of chicken manure had been sun-dried, processed, and mixed with other ingredients to create pig feed. Her livestock wouldn't be going hungry anytime soon.
Fish feed was even simpler: leftover bones and poultry entrails were coated in egg wash and tossed into the pond, creating a lively feeding frenzy of leaping carp.
The extreme heat had gradually waned, dropping day by day until it reached 40°C. Just as everyone sighed in relief, hoping the apocalypse was over, the second year of Earth's Dark Days began.
And as the villa's water tanks ran low, the long-awaited first heavy rain finally arrived, soaking the parched earth.