noveltune Chapter 560 Growing Well
Chapter 560 Growing Well
Three months is neither a long nor a short time.
But for a rapidly expanding satellite city, three months is enough to turn it into a crowded and bustling metropolis.
Buildings rose one after another along the streets, and shop signs filled every main street.
The streetlights were spaced 20 meters apart instead of 50 meters apart.
After nightfall, the entire city was brightly lit, and from a distance, it even resembled the main urban area of Qing City.
The number of farmers' markets has also expanded from the initial two to four.
The stalls in the free trade area were busy from morning till night, with vendors selling vegetables, meat, daily necessities, and handicrafts, their shouts rising and falling.
But Xu Xiaoyan didn't participate in any of this excitement.
For the past three months, she has hardly left her house; the greenhouse in her yard is her whole world.
Two crops of vegetables were planted. The first crop consisted of bok choy and lettuce, which sprouted quickly and grew vigorously.
In less than a month, the entire field was covered in lush green leaves, and when they were harvested, they were so tender that you could squeeze water out of them.
For the second crop, she replaced it with spinach and garland chrysanthemum, which are more cold-resistant and grow just as well as the first crop.
The bean vines whirred upwards along the bamboo trellis, and clusters of small white flowers bloomed, producing long and tender beans.
Needless to say, the loofahs were even more amazing. The loofah vines seemed to have taken some kind of growth stimulant, and their tendrils snaked up and covered half of the greenhouse roof.
Large, yellow flowers hang beneath long, slender, emerald-green loofahs, some over a foot long, and they are quite heavy when picked.
She planted potatoes and sweet potatoes in another open space in the yard, carefully turning the vines, adding soil, and watering them.
When it was time to harvest, digging up the soil revealed clusters of round, plump, white potatoes underneath.
The sweet potatoes are also growing well, with purplish-red skin covering plump flesh, and when you break them open, you can see the orange-yellow core inside.
Xu Xiaoyan put all of these items into her spatial storage. She never took these things to sell at the farmers' market, not because she didn't want to, but because she didn't dare to.
Three months ago, she originally planned to set up a stall at the East City Market to sell vegetables and earn some pocket money once things calmed down, but before the plan could be implemented, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse.
The influx of people from the four satellite cities did not slow down; instead, it grew stronger, with new faces carrying families and bags of belongings on every street.
Along with these crowds came hidden illnesses.
Initially, there were only a few sporadic cases, which did not attract much attention.
Someone posted on a forum that their neighbor had a fever, and the reply below was "Just take a fever reducer and you'll be fine."
Someone in the group said that someone downstairs was coughing badly, and the reply was "It's normal for the season to change."
However, the number of cases did not disappear on its own as everyone had hoped; instead, it continued to spread, growing from just a few people to dozens, and from dozens to hundreds.
Among those who migrated from other satellite cities, many of the viruses were highly insidious. When they first arrived, they looked exactly like normal people, able to eat, drink, walk, and move around.
But a few days later, he started to have a fever. It took less than a day for the fever to go from low to high. Coughing, fatigue, and muscle aches appeared one after another.
The most critical problem is that the medical conditions in Satellite City No. 5 are far inferior to those in the main urban area of Qing City back then.
During that period, although Qing City was in chaos for a while, it had a solid foundation. Hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies were scattered throughout the city, there were enough medical staff, and the reserves of emergency supplies were relatively sufficient.
However, Satellite City No. 5 was entirely newly built, and the construction speed of medical institutions could not keep up with the rate of population growth.
There are only two small health centers in the entire satellite city, with a total of only a few dozen doctors and nurses, and even more limited medicine reserves.
Many people who contract the disease simply cannot get an appointment and have to tough it out at home.
If you can pull through, you live; if you can't, you can only watch your condition worsen, from lethargy to being bedridden, and then to being on the verge of death—all within a few days.
Xu Xiaoyan closed the door and turned the second-floor bedroom window from being wide open to leaving only a narrow crack for ventilation.
She minimized the time she spent going downstairs every day to the yard to tend to the greenhouse while wearing a mask.
I water the vines once at dawn and check on them again at dusk, spending all the time in between indoors.
She hasn't opened the forum for several days.
The last time I looked at it, the screen was full of posts asking for help and posts from people who were sick.
Some people are looking for fever reducers, some are asking which clinics are still open, and some are posting online saying that their elderly family members have a fever of 40 degrees Celsius and have been waiting in line at the health center for three hours without getting a turn.
Those posts were too distressing for her to read, so she simply stopped looking at them.
After all, watching too much won't help; it will only make you more anxious.
On the windowsill of the second-floor bedroom, the row of sharpened bamboo arrows is still neatly stacked.
For the past three months, no one has climbed over her wall. The iron nails on the top of the wall have developed a thin layer of reddish-brown rust, which gleams dull in the sunlight.
Every night, the patrol team appears at the street corner on time, their flashlight beams sweeping across every courtyard wall and every alley corner.
Footsteps approached from afar and then receded into the quiet of the night.
Xu Xiaoyan stood at the window, looking out through the narrow crack. The street was deserted, and the occasional person who walked by had their head down, wrapped their coat tightly, and hurried past.
There was no stopping, no talking, and none of the groups of people chatting idly on the street that used to gather. Everyone tried to minimize contact and interaction with others.
She turned around, walked back to the bedside, sat down, drew the curtains a little, then opened her phone, pulled up a downloaded audiobook, turned the volume down to the minimum, and leaned against the headboard to listen slowly.
The sunlight streaming through the gaps in the curtains cast a thin beam of light onto my pillow.
She stared blankly at the light, thinking to herself that she should build another trellis for the bean vines tomorrow, and that she should also fertilize the loofah.
She didn't want to worry about the chaos outside for the time being; she wanted to protect this little corner of the world in the courtyard first.
The rain started falling on the evening of the third day.
At first, it was just a fine drizzle. Xu Xiaoyan was drinking tea by the window on the second floor when she noticed it. She just looked up and glanced outside, but didn't pay any attention to it.
As the night passed, the rain intensified from a light drizzle to a downpour, pattering against the roof tiles and flowing down the eaves in continuous curtains of water.
Water quickly accumulated on the street outside the courtyard wall, and the murky muddy water, carrying mud, sand and debris, slowly flowed along the roadside.
The water in the low-lying area was ankle-deep, reflecting the grayish-white sky and giving it a dark, somber hue.
The heavy rain lasted for three days and three nights, blurring the line between day and night, and filling the air with a damp, stuffy smell that made it hard to breathe.