"Nominate a Vice President?" Xiao Xiao repeated, her voice climbing with disbelief. "You mean the one they mentioned from the provincial headquarters, selecting another Vice President from within the official roster? That vice president?"
"Seems like people from other city branches are competing for it too," someone else in the small, anxious crowd murmured. "I heard the eastern greenhouse cluster nominated their top propagation specialist. With so many established experts vying for one spot, it's going to be incredibly tough."
Zhou Bapi was breathing heavily, the frustration of failure and the pressure of the crisis tightening his chest. He looked from the infested plants to Jing Shu's calm, expectant face. He had run out of ideas. "Fine," he said, the word exhaled like a surrender. "I don't have any other options now. As long as you can cure it, truly cure it, not just delay it, you'll definitely be counted in for the merit. And from this moment on, this entire batch of gastrodia will be under your charge and care. Even if you didn't plant the seeds yourself, whatever yield we salvage from it will count as your documented harvest for the season."
"W-what? Why?" Xiao Xiao protested, her earlier bravado crumbling into raw anxiety. "I've worked so hard for more than half a year nursing these! I monitored the humidity, adjusted the light cycles…"
Zhou Bapi shrugged, a gesture that was both weary and final. "Then you can just stand there and watch this batch of gastrodia die completely. Or," he added, his tone sharpening, "you can go ask your precious President Tie to come fix it himself. Either way, the causal chain is already confirmed. These things are red nematode eggs. The infestation is directly linked to the moment you collected that untreated rainwater during the downpour and used it to irrigate the soil. You will be held fully responsible for the loss. So, do you want to save the plants, or do you want to own the failure?"
Xiao Xiao stared at Zhou Bapi, her eyes wide with a mixture of betrayal and panic. After a long, tense pause where her jaw worked silently, she snapped, her voice stubborn but brittle. "Fine! Let her treat it, treat it! No one else can figure it out, only her. Let's see how you get yourself out of this one. I'd like to see you save so many gastrodia plants all at once." Her heart was a twisted knot of conflict. Part of her, the prideful, threatened part, hoped this arrogant newcomer would fail spectacularly, so she wouldn't have to give up her claim to the plants. But the larger, more terrified part desperately hoped for success, so the catastrophic loss wouldn't be hung around her neck like a millstone.
Jing Shu's lips curved into a faint, knowing smile. "Only those without real skill cling to tired old sayings and seniority to lecture the younger generation," she said, her voice carrying clearly in the hushed room. "Watch carefully. I'll show you."
In truth, the method was devastatingly simple. It was born not from the sterile labs of lofty agricultural research institutes, but from the desperate, collective experimentation of ordinary Chinese people facing annihilation in their fields. At this very moment, the red nematode egg crisis was erupting across every region that had dared to hope for a harvest.
Just a few days ago, buoyed by the end of the drought, the whole country had begun planting staples like gastrodia in bulk. Yet now they were horrified to discover that despite meticulous, textbook care, precise eight-hour cycles of artificial light, constant temperature control, abundant irrigation, the white, pustule-like eggs still spread everywhere, a silent plague terrifying to behold. Worst of all, every known pesticide proved useless.
The whole nation was plunging into a frantic, grassroots search for a solution. Ideas bloomed like desperate wildflowers in online forums and community bulletins, ranging from complex multi-stage filtering of irrigation water to bizarre, homespun remedies involving fermented teas and crushed herbs.
Jing Shu, however, had no intention of being the one to broadcast this method to the world. The person who had genuinely discovered it through sheer, stubborn trial and error would soon be officially recognized and rewarded. She could use the knowledge in advance within these walls, but she wouldn't steal the credit. Besides, the method wasn't a universal cure. It was a brilliant, disgusting stopgap measure, not something sustainable or suitable for mass promotion.
There was an old Chinese saying that fit perfectly: "Where there is poison, there must also be an antidote growing nearby." The red nematode eggs, it turned out, had their own natural, cannibalistic nemesis. The best way to deal with this particular poison was to fight it with a different part of itself.
She remembered the eventual interview where the true discoverer, a grizzled farmer from the north, explained his process: "I thought, if the rainwater only contained a scattering of live adult red nematodes, why did using it on the soil cause such an explosion of eggs? The government experts tried countless approaches, none of which worked. But I got to thinking… maybe the red nematodes themselves were the key. I suspected the adult ones might be eating their own eggs."
Through careful, painstaking observation and countless failed experiments, he confirmed it. Ordinary, reproductive-age adult red nematodes ignored the eggs. But the oversized, sluggish, elderly nematodes, the ones washed down from rooftops and gutters by the heaviest rains, those that had lived past their reproductive prime and lost the ability to breed, they survived by devouring the eggs of their own kind.
What was more, once those old nematodes were stressed by a soak in concentrated salt water, they became ravenously, single-mindedly fixated on consuming eggs.
So the method was born: he spent half a day sifting through tens of thousands of wriggling bugs in a barrel, picking out the thousands that were notably larger, slower, and alone. After soaking this geriatric army in strong salt water, he released them back into his infested field. They moved like living vacuums, devouring every last egg in their path.
But there was a critical, maddening catch: you absolutely couldn't accidentally mix in any young or mating adults. If you did, they would simply breed instead of eat, and all your meticulous efforts would be wasted, resulting in an even worse infestation.
This method worked for an emergency salvage operation, but it was hopeless for daily use. Every new irrigation would bring a fresh wave of eggs from the sky, which meant picking out elderly nematodes every single day, soaking them, then releasing them again. No crop, and certainly no delicate medicinal herb, could survive such perpetual, traumatic torment.
That was why the official government solution, still in development, sought to solve the problem at its root, by developing and distributing filtration systems to clean all irrigation water of eggs altogether.
"Bring me two large buckets," Jing Shu instructed, cutting through the speculative murmurs. "One filled with heavily concentrated filtered salt water, another empty one for scooping."
Before long, a bucket of clear, purified salt water was ready. Jing Shu grabbed a fine-mesh net from a storage hook, shrugged on a spare raincoat hanging by the door, and headed for the main entrance. "Wait here for me," she said over her shoulder, leaving them all bewildered.
For others, the process of harvesting the specific nematodes was agonizingly time-consuming. But Jing Shu had the Cube Space on her side. She stepped outside into the damp, gray morning, found a large puddle of recent rainwater teeming with the red threads of life, and simply swept her net through it. She dumped the writhing mass into her Cube Space not to store, but to use as a sorting chamber. Inside that mental dimension, her consciousness could identify and isolate with inhuman speed. Any nematode over ten centimeters long, moving slowly, and crucially, not intertwined with another, was flagged as an aged specimen.
What took the original discoverer seven or eight hours of backbreaking, eye-straining work, Jing Shu accomplished in just ten minutes of focused concentration. She transferred the selected ancients out of the space and into the empty bucket, ending up with a sloshing half-bucket of the lethargic, elderly pests.
Curiosity got the better of everyone waiting inside. They drifted out from the sterile hallway, crowding under the building's wide eaves to watch Jing Shu at the edge of a drainage ditch. To the untrained eye, it just looked like she was aimlessly scooping and shaking her net, as if carefully selecting the plumpest grains of rice from a pot.
"Tch," Xiao Xiao muttered sourly, unable to stay quiet. "It's just scooping bugs. Why does she need to take so long? Making a show of it."
"All right, let's go," Jing Shu said, hefting the bucket. The nematodes inside barely stirred. She smiled faintly to herself, deliberately not explaining, leaving the method shrouded in mystery as she led the puzzled procession back inside and up to the third floor.
There, under the glaring grow lights, she calmly dumped the bucket of old nematodes directly into the prepared salt water. They reacted instantly, coiling into tight, crimson spirals, a seething mass of apparent distress.
Everyone stared, wide-eyed and confused. "What's she doing now? We already know salt water kills nematodes."
"Didn't President Zhou already try soaking the plants in it? It didn't affect the eggs."
Next, Jing Shu used a small sieve to scoop out the now tightly-curled nematodes. With a flick of her wrist, she scattered them over the infested gastrodia plants, distributing only a dozen or so to each tray. In a matter of moments, all five racks were dotted with the motionless, salt-saturated coils.
Then came the miracle.
The nematodes that seemed dead or dying suddenly stirred. As if waking from a poisoned sleep and catching the overwhelming scent of a feast, they uncurled. Their blunt heads quested, touching the stems and leaves. Then they began to feed. They devoured the white eggs at a visible, shocking speed, their bodies moving with a singular, desperate purpose. One by one, then in clusters, the pearlescent dots disappeared, scraped clean from the plant tissue. At this rate, less than half an hour would see the entire gastrodia crop cleansed completely.
Gasps of astonishment, sharp and involuntary, filled the humid air. No one, not even Zhou Bapi with his decades of lore, had expected the solution to be so bizarrely simple, so elegantly grotesque.
Zhou Bapi was ecstatic, his earlier fatigue burned away by wonder. "You're incredible!" he exclaimed, clapping his hands together softly. "Old man that I am, I knew I wasn't wrong about you! How in the world did you ever think of this method?"
Jing Shu took a spray bottle and gently misted the plants and the feeding nematodes with a light additional shower of salt water, accelerating their frantic consumption. "A… friend of mine worked this out through countless experiments in his own fields. What you've just seen isn't the full, detailed method. There are more, precise steps involved in the selection and preparation, so I strongly advise none of you try to replicate this on your own without the complete procedure." She looked pointedly at Xiao Xiao, whose face was now pale with shock. "In a couple of days, he'll be publishing the complete, verified process to the agricultural net."
"Of course, of course!" Zhou Bapi agreed, bobbing his head. "Whoever invents it has the right to speak first. Just saving this batch of gastrodia alone is a huge contribution to the association's assets. A meritorious deed, without a doubt." He beamed at Jing Shu, then at the now rapidly-cleaning plants, as if she had just performed alchemy.