Wei Heng's reaction was a bit odd. Gu Xi retracted her ability and glanced back at him.
Wei Heng walked over to her side and joked, "Looks like I'm in luck. My dream of being a kept man is just around the corner."
Gu Xi's gaze shifted from his clear eyes to his gaunt, pale face. After a moment of thought, she asked seriously, "Can you cook?"
Wei Heng: "...?"
Gu Xi explained earnestly, "I'll have no problem supporting you by farming, but I'm not much of a cook."
In fact, Gu Xi didn't even know which way the kitchen door opened.
Her wilderness survival skills were top-notch, but her culinary skills... well, they were basically just using her Fire Ability to cook things through.
As long as it didn't kill anyone, it was good enough.
As for the taste... in a post-apocalyptic world where resources were scarce and you never knew if you'd see tomorrow, just finding something to eat was a blessing. Who had the luxury of being picky?
Perhaps because her expression was so serious, Wei Heng thought for a moment before saying, not quite confidently, "My cooking... should be decent, I think?"
Gu Xi glanced at him without a word, then turned and walked back to the shipping container, bringing over the bag of seed sweet potatoes.
After picking the one with the highest activity from the bag and silently plundering the violent, strange energy within it, Gu Xi began to channel her Wood Element ability to sprout new shoots...
She had read up on how to grow sweet potatoes last night, so she knew what to do.
Once the clusters of sprouts she'd forced out had grown into foot-long vines, she withdrew her ability. Then she pulled a machete from a cloth bag and swung it, sending vines falling to the ground with a SWISH.
Then, the small green sprout on her fingertip instantly shot out into a three-meter-long vine whip. With a single sweep, the scattered vines on the ground flew messily in all directions.
They took root where they landed and, empowered by her Wood Element ability, quickly spread across the entire field...
The entire process was as fluid as flowing water—simple, crude, and remarkably effective.
Wei Heng, who had just found a large pair of shears to trim the vines, silently tossed them back.
He glanced at Gu Xi without saying anything, his steps feeling a bit heavy as he walked toward the farming vehicle on the side. 'We agreed to farm together, so I have to find something to do, right?'
But before he could even climb onto the vehicle, Wei Heng saw the ground beneath him begin to churn silently...
Watching the large Da Hong sweet potatoes being unearthed one by one, Wei Heng fell silent again. 'How can such a delicate-looking young woman be so crude and simple when it comes to farming?'
He couldn't figure it out.
But soon, he had no time to dwell on such random thoughts.
Wei Heng stared at the number displayed on the portable Abnormality Detector, then glanced at the Da Hong sweet potato in his hand, and was stunned!
He had originally just wanted to check if the mutation coefficient of these enormous sweet potatoes, grown in such a crude and simple manner, was within the edible range. He never expected...
After a BEEP, the number on the Abnormality Detector finally settled at 0.5!
This was the first time Wei Heng had ever seen a plant with such a low mutation coefficient!
Wei Heng glanced at Gu Xi, then bent down to pick up a few more Da Hong sweet potatoes to test them.
0.5, 0.6, 0.4... The mutation coefficients of these sweet potatoes were all under 1!
Something like this could sell for an astronomical price at the Central Base!
"Gu Xi..." Wei Heng's eyes were astonishingly bright at that moment. He didn't even notice that his voice was trembling slightly.
He turned to look at Gu Xi, only to find her staring at the sweet potato field before her, her brow slightly furrowed.
Wei Heng: ?
Gu Xi felt the problem was a bit serious.
Before forcing the sprouts, she had clearly purged all the violent energy from within the seed sweet potatoes. Moreover, she had compressed the entire growing process to the absolute minimum.
From the moment the vines landed to the time this batch of sweet potatoes matured, only a few short minutes had passed.
But that strange energy had still appeared.
It was as if it materialized from thin air and entered the plants' bodies with incredible speed...
'Elusive and impossible to guard against.' The six words suddenly popped into Gu Xi's mind.
'It seems this land isn't so easy to farm after all.'
Gu Xi let out a long sigh, casually picked up a few large Da Hong sweet potatoes, and shoved them into Wei Heng's hands. "Go cook. I'm hungry."
"..." Wei Heng, who had just been full of complicated emotions, was instantly demoted to the role of cook.
「Half an hour later.」
Cradling the fragrant, sweet, soft, and chewy steamed sweet potato in his hands, Wei Heng let out a satisfied sigh. "Things with a low mutation coefficient really do taste different! This is delicious!"
"Gu Xi, I've never eaten such a delicious sweet potato! The flavor is absolutely incredible!" Wei Heng gave her a thumbs-up.
Gu Xi: "..." 'How am I supposed to tell you that the reason these sweet potatoes are so delicious is because I used my ability to purify them again right before they were cooked?'
"In the future, we'll grow even more delicious things," Gu Xi said seriously, nodding.
After they finished the simple lunch, Wei Heng shooed her back into her room to rest while he turned to clean up the makeshift kitchen.
'He could tell the young woman's ability wasn't that strong, maybe only level three or four. She had just forced such a large patch of sweet potatoes to grow, so she must be exhausted.'
Gu Xi glanced at him and didn't refuse. 'A division of labor is a good thing.'
After cleaning the kitchen, Wei Heng looked up at Gu Xi's shipping container home. After a long silence, he opened his personal terminal.
[...]
Gu Xi wasn't in the habit of taking afternoon naps. She just lay on the bed for a short while to rest her mind before heading out again.
Wei Heng was squatting on the ground, gathering the sweet potatoes from the field.
Seeing Gu Xi come out, he clapped the dirt off his hands and smiled. "You're awake? Why didn't you sleep a little longer?"
"I couldn't sleep," she said, slowly walking over.
Wei Heng had already gathered most of the sweet potatoes, leaving only some of the vines scattered untidily on the ground.
Gu Xi stared at the sweet potato vines for a while, then suddenly asked Wei Heng, "Didn't you say you have connections? Could you pull some strings to get a few chicks?"
After a pause, she added, "Or piglets would be fine, too." She wasn't picky; any mutated animal would do.
Wei Heng looked at her with some surprise. He tossed the last few sweet potatoes into a basket at the side and waved his hand dismissively. "That's something I can't get..."
For the past few years, although the country encouraged people to leave the bases to reclaim land and grow food, privately raising mutated animals was still forbidden.
But there was nothing to be done about it.
Take chickens, the most common type of poultry, for example:
Before the apocalypse, almost every rural household would raise a few chickens. They generally didn't attack people, and even if their aggressive instincts were provoked, their attack power was very limited and hardly lethal.
But the mutated chickens of today, while not much different in temperament and still not proactively attacking humans,
were about ten times their pre-apocalypse size, standing nearly as tall as an adult human. Their sharp beaks were over half a foot long, and their sharp talons were larger than an adult man's two hands combined!
If you were careless enough to get pecked or clawed, not many people could withstand it.
Common livestock like pigs, sheep, and cattle were in much the same situation.
That was why, for all these years, the country had never permitted the private raising of mutated animals.
When the military cleared out mutated animals in the wild, they would also assess the situation:
Mutated animals with a high danger coefficient would be killed on sight. More docile ones would be sent to designated locations to be raised by specialists from the base.
As for common poultry and livestock, they were also raised uniformly by the base, slaughtered and processed on a schedule, and then sent to designated points of sale.
If ordinary people wanted to eat meat, they could buy it with money, just like before the apocalypse.
In reality, however, very few people actually bought this meat. There was no other reason than the fact that after the animals mutated, the taste of their meat... was truly hard to describe.
In short, almost no one could stomach it.
Seeing Gu Xi suddenly ask about this, and remembering how she had been staring at the sweet potato vines on the ground earlier, Wei Heng thought for a moment and said, "I just tested them. The mutation coefficient of these sweet potato vines is around 3. The base should have people who will come collect them..."
But Gu Xi was thinking about something else.
'This morning, when these sweet potato vines had just grown, their mutation level was still very low, similar to the sweet potatoes in the ground. The mutation coefficient should have been around 0.5.'
'But now, only a few hours have passed, and the mutation coefficient has already reached over 3.'
Gu Xi glanced at Wei Heng. 'This is so obvious, there's no way he hasn't noticed...'