Chapter 38

One second... two seconds... one minute... two minutes crawled by, each one feeling like an eternity.

Then, in an unremarkable moment, the dark patches on Aunt Huang's pale face began to fade, as if an invisible hand were erasing them. Slowly at first, but then color started flooding back into her ashen cheeks.

"Aunt Huang!" a girl shouted excitedly. "She's alive! Aunt Huang's alive!"

The crowd turned to look, and sure enough, her breathing—which had been barely there—steadied into a more even rhythm. Her fingertips twitched, as if she were stirring back to consciousness.

"She really is alive!" They joyfully checked her nostrils and heartbeat—indeed, she had improved considerably.

They'd thought eating a mutated plant meant certain death, but against all odds, their desperate gamble had paid off!

"The dosage might not be enough," Lin Tu said, pulling out an empty plastic bottle and filling it with about a bottle's worth of juice from the barrel. She handed it to Zhang Haizhi. "Stay with her, and give her more if she starts to fail. That way she won't overdose and end up poisoned by something else."

Seeing that the centipede grass had actually worked, Lin Tu felt a thrill of excitement—it meant the Plant Research Institute's findings were highly reliable! She just wasn't a professional, so she could only entrust Zhang Haizhi with this method.

"Thank you so much!" Zhang Haizhi rubbed her eyes and took the bottle with both hands, cherishing it. "How many centipede grasses did this take..."

"Not that many," Lin Tu said.

Centipede grass didn't yield much juice, but fortunately Lin Tu and Yuan Que had spent a solid day catching them. Lin Tu had always been sharp with numbers, and with a moment's recollection, she confirmed the figure. "Around twelve."

Twelve! Just from looking at the dense mass of centipede legs in the barrel, Zhang Haizhi knew that wasn't an exaggeration. How hard those twelve centipede grasses were to find, and how hard they were to catch—she could only imagine.

Zhang Haizhi felt her eyes sting. Her own team member had sold everyone out for resources, yet a stranger had willingly given them her supplies.

"We have nothing to repay you with..." Zhang Haizhi lowered her head and wiped her tears. She roughly recounted what had happened earlier—from when they'd gone to the nearby supermarket to scavenge supplies, to encountering another unfamiliar team, to the two teams joining forces because the supermarket had been overrun by mutated plants, and then to the falling-out when the other side tried to freeload off them by exploiting gender differences.

"Someone on our team lied. She betrayed us. She said she'd only told them our general location, and I believed her, but I never imagined she'd been leaving marks the whole way back. Those bastards found us in no time."

"It's all my fault..." Zhang Haizhi could no longer hold back her tears. "Aunt Huang's in trouble now, and those bastards took all our food. How are we supposed to survive? I've ruined everyone!"

Food was, without a doubt, the most important thing in the apocalypse. No pain compared to the pain of hunger—even the agony of being starved to death.

"Haizhi, it's not your fault. Shi Jie is the one to blame!"

"That's right! Sister Zhang, we'll think of something new."

"At worst, we can just move somewhere else!"

The other girls, though they knew how bleak the future looked, still chimed in to comfort Zhang Haizhi.

Lin Tu suddenly asked, "Will they come back?"

The group looked at her in confusion. Zhang Haizhi shook her head. "This place is remote. It takes half an hour to an hour just to walk in from the main gate. They only came for supplies, and now that they've taken everything, they probably won't return."

Lin Tu nodded. "Then I think you can keep living here."

"What?" The group stared at her in astonishment. "But we don't have anything left..."

"But this place has everything."

Lin Tu's words made the group suddenly recall the centipede grass she'd used to treat Aunt Huang—if the juice extracted from centipede grass could heal Aunt Huang, didn't that mean it could also purify the heavy metals in mutated plants?

"When you put it that way, there's plenty to eat around here!" one person murmured as she recalled. "The wild strawberries by the lake, snake berries, mulberries, loquats—none of those are off-limits anymore?"

"But we still don't have water to drink! The lake water's too dirty. We can't drink it at all."

Lin Tu smiled. "Mutated amaranth produces water bladders, and the water inside them is safe to drink directly." Seeing the group's delight, she continued, "Besides centipede grass, the juice from pennycress and other plants can also remove heavy metals. Houttuynia and black nightshade can be eaten directly, and there's also..." She had a good memory, and all at once she rattled off everything recorded in the lab.

The more they listened, the more stunned they became. Never having imagined that mutated plants could have such uses, they increasingly felt that surviving here wasn't impossible after all.

"There are plenty of mutated plants here, and the ones this lady mentioned, we can basically find all of them," one person said.

"And there's plenty of water, so aggressive mutated plants don't grow easily. Even if they did, we can use vetiver grass to drive them off. It's very safe."

"Could we use the purified plants to raise chickens, ducks, and rabbits?" a little girl fantasized excitedly. "Then we could eat meat! And we could build houses out of wood!"

"Why couldn't we?"

The group looked at each other. They had just been cast into hell, and suddenly they felt a twist of fortune—light at the end of the tunnel.

"But if you're going to build houses, you'd best use 'Cage Building Materials.' They can effectively block mutated plants," Lin Tu said, and took the opportunity to ask, "Have any of you seen mutated water hyacinth?"

"Mutated water hyacinth?" The group wanted to help Lin Tu, but they genuinely had no knowledge of that mutant plant.

Lin Tu roughly described what mutated water hyacinth looked like, and someone suddenly gasped—

"Is it the one outside the supermarket! There's a ton of it at the visitor center of the Wetland Experience Hall too!" She hesitated. "But there's so much of it there, it doesn't seem like something that rare."

Lin Tu asked, "Are they producing white, ceramic-like pellets?"

The group thought for a moment, then said without hesitation, "Yes!"

Lin Tu was overjoyed.

The visitor center wasn't far away. Zhang Haizhi handed Aunt Huang over to the others and immediately led Lin Tu over there.

Perhaps because water hyacinth preferred shade, it didn't grow on surfaces facing the sun. The sky was already growing dim, and it wasn't until they approached the wall near the back that Lin Tu spotted clear signs of water hyacinth on it.

Lin Tu, who had spent the whole day desperately searching for water hyacinth, finally breathed a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, it was getting late and not a good time to stay out. Lin Tu said goodbye to Zhang Haizhi, and early the next morning she drove back to the site. Two girls sent by Zhang Haizhi were already waiting there. They had come to help, and also to invite Lin Tu and Yuan Que over for lunch. Lin Tu turned down their help, but couldn't refuse the meal, so she agreed.

The visitor center had about twenty-odd water hyacinths, and within half a day they were mostly caught. Lin Tu stacked the cages at the visitor center, planning to transport them to the bus in the afternoon and haul them back to the research institute.

For now, she took out five packs of braised duck tongue and five packs of pickled chicken feet from her Single-Use Backpack and stuffed them all into the bag she was carrying—you couldn't show up at someone's place empty-handed—and after a moment's thought, she also grabbed two large bottles of cola and a few packs of instant noodles.

By the time she reached the outdoor survivors' camp, they had already set up a big pot.

The fire beneath it was burning fiercely, and the pot was cooking all kinds of mushrooms. The rich, fragrant aroma of mushroom soup wafted through the air, making mouths water.

"Sister Haizhi is amazing!" a young girl bounced over to greet Lin Tu. "She finds mushrooms with perfect accuracy—she's a true local of Yun City. Too bad her skills had nowhere to shine before, since everything was just mutated plants. But thanks to you catching those centipede grasses and squeezing out the juice, we could purify the heavy metals in the mushrooms. Sister Haizhi made a point of saying these mushrooms are super fresh—you have to try them!"

Next to the pot, there were several banana leaves spread out, laden with all sorts of berries, fruits, and wild vegetable leaves.

These people were outdoor survival enthusiasts to begin with, so it was no surprise they recognized so many wild plants.

Lin Tu thought they'd probably do just fine living here. As she thought this, she handed the bag over.

The girl opposite her spotted the two large bottles of cola inside and hurriedly refused. "No way! No way!" She ran off like she was fleeing for her life to fetch Zhang Haizhi.

Lin Tu hadn't only brought cola—there were also duck tongues, chicken feet, and instant noodles, especially the noodles, which were basically hard currency in the apocalypse.

Zhang Haizhi tried to refuse but failed, and accepted the items. She kept note of both these things and the mutated plants. From now on, whenever she found supplies, or if Lin Tu ever needed anything, she would repay her without hesitation.

Zhang Haizhi handed the items over to her team members.

The girls tore open all the duck tongues and chicken feet, pouring out every last drop of sauce from the packaging and mixing it with the wild vegetables. The instant noodles were tossed into the big pot to cook with the mushrooms. They opened one bottle of cola first, only opening the second when the first ran out, so the fizz wouldn't go flat.

Everyone enjoyed a merry picnic together. After the meal, when all were fed and content, they began cleaning up. Zhang Haizhi came to find Lin Tu—

"There's a radio station inside the Ecological Wetland Park. We used to go there often to listen to broadcasts, and we learned a lot. There are many people out there fighting to survive just like us. As far as I know, there's a camp of at least a few hundred people at Nanhai Lake further south. I was thinking..."

She said seriously, "If you'd be willing, Miss Lin, I could restart the radio frequency at the Ecological Wetland Park and share all the knowledge you've told us with everyone. All of us will remember to thank you!"

Lin Tu nodded without hesitation—not for the gratitude. "I'm willing, but make sure you include the Plant Research Institute's name." This was, after all, information those scientists had risked their lives to send to the world.