Zhu Dacong's lungs were twin bellows of fire, each ragged, heaving gasp feeling as if it might tear his throat raw on its way out. His heart hammered a frantic, desperate rhythm against his ribs. This was the price of hours of relentless, flat-out running across the unforgiving Barrens, driven by a fear that outweighed exhaustion: the fear of missing out.
But he'd made it. As the sky began its slow bleed from hard blue to a softer orange, the silhouette of Sweetwater Gulch rose before him. It had been over a month since his last visit, a trip to trade a handful of salvageable screws for a meager portion of gruel. The settlement he remembered—a precarious cluster of shacks huddled around a dubious well—was gone.
In its place, sprawling across the previously barren flats south of the main palisade, was a scene of orchestrated chaos. A vast, raw wound of activity. Nearly two hundred people swarmed like ants, their movements purposeful, their voices a distant, determined hum. The very earth itself had been transformed. To his right, where he distinctly recalled a stretch of cracked, lifeless hardpan, now lay a geometric marvel. A vast grid had been etched into the ground, defined by raised pathways about twenty centimeters wide. These paths carved the land into a checkerboard of immense, rectangular plots, each hundreds of square meters in size.
It was within these earthen frames that most of the workers toiled. Over a hundred souls, bent double, were engaged in something Zhu Dacong's brain, steeped in the scavenger's logic of take, struggled to comprehend. Then it clicked, and the realization was so profoundly alien it left him momentarily stunned.
They were farming. Like the people from the stories, the people from Before. They were trying to bury seeds in the ground and coax life from it. A harsh, disbelieving snort escaped him. Fools.His grandfather, Zhu Chong, had been a farmer in Michigan Before. It was that legacy—a basement stocked with canned goods—that had seen the family through the first, darkest years after the flames fell. When the nuclear winter relented, old Zhu Chong, the stubborn soil-tiller's blood of his ancestors still strong in his veins, had tried. He'd tried to make the poisoned earth give again.
He had failed. Utterly. The knowledge that had sustained him through the Collapse became a bitter epitaph: the "Precious Experiences," passed from dying grandfather to son, and from son to Zhu Dacong himself. Zhu Dacong had always considered this inherited lore—this "Dragon-Slaying Art"—useless in a world with no dragons, only scorpions and despair.
Now, watching these people, he saw his grandfather's ghost toiling in vain. He knew the litany of doom: a single rain of glowing death would turn any sprout to poison. Mutated locusts that could strip flesh from bone. Soil so exhausted it was little more than gray dust. Strange blights that withered roots overnight. He shook his head, a pang of genuine pity for the benevolent but clearly deluded Harry Potter striking him. Good luck, he thought. You'll need a year without a single drop of rain, without a single pest, without a single mishap.It was a fantasy.
No, he would not involve himself in this certain disappointment. The bicycle was the real opportunity. The rational, scavenger's path.
He moved closer to the main gate, and the details of the operation resolved, chipping away at his certainty. He saw workers carrying buckets, wearing stifling cloth masks over their noses and mouths in the heat. Why? The answer came on a shift of the wind, carrying a familiar, eye-watering stench as they carefully poured a dark, viscous slurry onto the dark, tilled earth within the plots.
"A crop's single flower depends entirely on the fertilizer's power."The old rhyme, passed down with the "Precious Experiences," surfaced in his mind. They know.The shock was profound. They weren't just digging holes; they knew the secret alchemy of manure, of compost. This was knowledge as rare and valuable as a functional energy cell.
Then he saw the others. Teams were driving short lengths of pipe and stout wooden stakes into the corners of the plots. Others followed, fitting curved lengths of rebar between them, creating a low, skeletal arch over each plot. A framework. Understanding dawned on Zhu Dacong with a dizzying rush, stealing his breath. It was impossible. It was ingenious.
His suspicion was confirmed as yet another group arrived, unrolling great, crackling sheets of a material that made his heart lurch—clear, flexible plastic film. With a tender care usually reserved for newborns, they stretched the film over the arched skeletons, burying the edges in soil to seal it.
Greenhouses. Plastic greenhouses.
The vision unfolded in his mind with crystal clarity: sunlight, that life-giver, would pass unimpeded through the clear skin. But the killing rain, the rad-filled downpour, would be caught, channeled away by cleverly dug ditches, never touching the precious soil within. It was a shield. A defiance of the sky itself.
The breath he finally drew was sharp, whistling through his teeth. All his scavenger's cynicism, his grandfather's legacy of failure, evaporated. This… this could work. The thought was a physical blow, a conversion. The bicycle, the trash, the incremental gains of a scavenger's life—it all crumbled to dust before the monumental, terrifying, beautiful promise of that grid of covered earth.
Sow one grain in spring, reap ten thousand in autumn.The old saying wasn't just poetry; it was a memory of a world that worked. It was the most beautiful thing he could imagine. The trash could go to hell. He was, he realized with a ferocity that shocked him, a farmer's grandson. His bones ached for the soil.
Getting into Sweetwater Gulch, getting close to the mastermind behind this—that was the key. He knew, with the certainty of blood, that the agricultural sage here had to be Han. Only a Han would know the deep, dirty secrets of fertilizer. His own black hair and eyes were his ticket in.
And he had knowledge to trade. He had already spotted a flaw. The fertilizer… it wasn't fully matured. Its potency would be lessened. The master was skilled, but perhaps not perfect. Zhu Dacong could help. He wouldhelp.
At the gate, his eyes found his target: a Han man, clearly someone of importance given his clean clothes and confident bearing, overseeing the guards. This, Zhu Dacong was sure, was the agricultural master. Mustering all his courage, he threw back his filthy hood and strode forward, channeling the heroes of his grandfather's martial arts tales. He would announce himself with the wisdom of his lineage!
He cleared his throat and, in his somewhat rusty but passable Han tongue, declaimed the first thing that came to mind, the most impressive-sounding secret phrase he knew: "Seek the dragon, part the gold, observe the encircling mountains; one encirclement is one barrier—"
He froze. Wrong script. That was from Grandfather's grave-robbingstories, not the farming ones. The "master" before him was staring, utterly baffled.
Flushing beneath the grime, Zhu Dacong tried again. This time, the words flowed, the ancient, rhythmic song of the earth: "The Rains, the Awakening of Insects, the Vernal Equinox, the Pure Brightness, the Grain Rains… The Grain in Ear, the Summer Solstice, the Slight and Great Heat…"He recited the entire Twenty-Four Solar Terms, the farmer's celestial clock.
The man before him, Zhang Tie-Zhu, deputy commander of the guard, stared with even deeper confusion. After a long pause, he grunted, "What the hell are you babbling about, old-timer? Look, you're Han, so I won't smack you. Speak plainly."
Zhu Dacong swallowed, his grand entrance in tatters. "My lord," he said, switching to a more direct approach, "my family has ancestral knowledge of farming. Do you… do you need more hands?"
Zhang Tie-Zhu looked the wild-eyed, dusty, strangely poetic scavenger up and down. The man was clearly touched in the head, but he was Han, and he'd mentioned farming. With a sigh, figuring it was above his pay grade, he jerked his head. "Come on. The Big Man wants to see you."
The process was more twisted than Zhu Dacong had hoped, but the outcome was the same. He stood before the legendary Harry Potter Michael himself, and poured out his story, his grandfather's knowledge, his critique of the immature fertilizer.
Michael listened, his eyes sharp. A real farmer? Or a fraud? The solar terms were convincing. The fertilizer tip was specific. This man had value.
When Zhu Dacong finished, panting slightly, Michael clapped him on the shoulder. "You're hired. Work hard." He then leaned in, his tone shifting to one of blunt, Wasteland practicality. "Finding you a Han wife might be tricky. But do a good job?" He grinned, a flash of white in his weathered face. "A black one or a white one? That, I can probably manage."
Zhu Dacong blinked. Then, a slow, fierce smile spread across his own face. It wasn't the promise of a wife—any wife—that ignited the fire in his chest. It was the promise of the land. The plots. The chance to make the old rhyme real again. He nodded, once, sharply. He was home.