12: Chapter 12 Pioneering

The exact same weightlessness as the first two times.

The air around him was instantly sucked away, and the cold wind whipped sand and gravel against his face.

Jiang Lin didn't even blink an eye this time.

The snakeskin bags were too heavy; the moment his vision recovered, he let go and dropped the two bags on the left and right onto the ground with a thud.

The duffel bag on his shoulder slipped down naturally, and his numb, strained shoulders finally found a little relief.

He rubbed his eyes, which were blurred by the wind and sand, and looked around.

The camp was still there.

That khaki-colored solo tent was still quietly pitched at the base of the broken wall, its tent stakes gripping the ground firmly.

Opening the tent flap, the sleeping bag was still rolled up to one side, the aluminum foil moisture-proof mat was still in its original position, several empty buckets leaned against the inner wall of the tent, and the pile of draft paper and old pen refills was neatly stacked in the corner.

Even the four stacks of draft paper bundled by subject that he couldn't bear to take away before his last return were still there.

Only the topmost piece of paper had its corner lifted slightly by the wind.

Jiang Lin reached out and gently flattened that piece of paper.

On it was a math derivative problem he had done last time.

Functions, extreme values, inequality proofs.

On the edge of the draft paper were also the key points he had drawn himself at the time; the handwriting was dense, stroke by stroke squeezed together, ugly yet highly recognizable.

He stared at that piece of paper for two seconds, the corners of his mouth twitching.

It was hard to tell whether he wanted to laugh or sigh.

A month ago, he was doing derivatives here.

A month later, he was back here again, preparing to turn the soil and grow vegetables.

If outsiders were to judge, they might think he wasn't an academic achiever, but a madman.

The wind howled across the dark red Wasteland, but Jiang Lin's small camp seemed to have been pressed with a pause button, continuing to play only when he set foot there again.

"It seems that when I'm not here, time here is static, or the flow rate is slow to the point of being negligible."

Jiang Lin rubbed his slightly stiffened cheeks from the cold, and the heavy stone in his heart finally dropped.

If time in the Wasteland was still passing when he was gone, the tent he had set up might have long been torn apart by storms, and the water he collected might have long since evaporated completely.

The way it is now is best.

He zipped up his jacket tightly and started working.

Over a hundred jin of supplies were moved into the tent by category.

Eighty jin of compressed biscuits—these took up the most space.

He neatly stacked them at the innermost part of the tent, building a low wall like laying bricks.

This wall could not only block the wind, but it was also the foundation of his confidence to survive in this Wasteland.

The bucket was placed beside it.

Things afraid of moisture like quicklime, plant ash, and compound fertilizer were wrapped in three layers of plastic bags and carefully stuffed under the sleeping bag.

As for those few bags of precious seeds, they were stored in the innermost layer of the duffel bag.

Glycerin enemas, dry yeast tablets, potassium chloride sustained-release tablets.

These little things that might not even get a second glance if thrown into a drawer corner in the Real World were now all solemnly arranged in a row by him.

Because only after staying in a place like this would one know what it means that a person cannot contend with their own stomach and electrolytes.

After everything was back in place, he pulled out a hard-shell notebook from the bottom of the duffel bag.

Four characters were written on the cover of the notebook.

Wasteland Farming.

It was a new notebook he specially bought in the Real World.

The first page copied soil improvement steps found online, the second page was a crop trial-planting plan, and starting from the third page were recording columns left blank by days, even the date format was drawn.

It looked like he was preparing to keep experimental logs.

And indeed it was an experimental log.

He couldn't afford to do any decent experiments in the Real World.

He couldn't touch things in the school laboratory, and home was even less likely to provide him with those conditions.

But here was different.

Here the mountains were high and the emperor was far away.

And it was so far away that there were no teachers, no proctors, and no class dismissal bells.

There was only a whole expanse of rust-colored land, waiting for him to smash it open shovel by shovel.

Jiang Lin came out of the tent, strapped the military engineering shovel on his back, and first walked a circle around the broken wall.

The broken wall ran east-west, and the south side of the wall was the main area of his activities on the Wasteland.

The tent was pitched at the base of the wall, the puddle was thirty meters to the south, and the toilet was in the southwest direction.

The terrain to the south was relatively flat, extending outward from the base of the wall for about fifty or sixty meters, and then a gentle slope began to lead downward.

The terrain below the gentle slope was not very clear, but he could vaguely see several undulating outlines in the distance, resembling a dried-up riverbed or collapsed ground.

He hadn't been to the north much.

Last time he only walked around to take a look when setting up the camp; the terrain in the north was higher, the undulations were greater, and more grayish-black rock fragments were scattered on the ground.

From the angle of sunlight, the south side received at least two or three hours more sunshine than the north side.

Although the Wasteland's sun was hazy, getting two or three hours more sunshine might make the difference between whether the crops could mature or not.

He decided to open up the land on the south side.

Holding the military engineering shovel, he walked back and forth on the open space to the south, squatting down every few steps to pry up a small piece of soil with the shovel tip and check the condition underneath.

The top layer of about five centimeters was the most severely compacted, and striking it with the shovel sounded like knocking on bricks, making a clanging sound.

Below five centimeters it was slightly looser, but still very hard; the shovel tip could insert, but prying it up was difficult.

Below ten centimeters, some gravel began to appear, varying in size, with the big ones as big as a fist and the small ones like Soybean grains.

The soil color was dark red from top to bottom, with little variation in shade, indicating that the iron oxide content was quite uniform.

He silently memorized these characteristics in his heart.

The compaction layer was five centimeters, and the gravel layer started from ten centimeters.

Turning the soil required digging at least twenty centimeters deep, preferably thirty centimeters.

This meant that every shovel he dug had to pierce through the compaction layer, dig out the gravel, and then turn up the relatively soft soil underneath.

He selected a plot of land.

At a location slightly east of the south side of the broken wall, about twenty meters from the base of the wall.

It was slightly flatter than the surroundings, with an area of about twenty square meters.

Four meters wide and five meters long.

For an eighteen-year-old high school senior farming for the first time, this area was already big enough.

There weren't many stones on the ground; they were grayish-black, varied in size, and their surfaces were covered with honeycomb-like holes, as if corroded by something.

He picked up the visible stones one by one and piled them at the edge of the plot.

These stones could be used later to press down plastic film or circled around as markers.

After picking up the stones on the surface, he stood up and stretched his waist.

Before he even started turning the soil, just squatting to pick up stones made his waist a bit sore.

The real physical labor was just beginning.

He picked up the military engineering shovel, walked to a corner of the plot, aimed the shovel tip at the ground, stepped on the back of the shovel with his right foot, and stepped down hard.

The shovel tip inserted into the soil with a muffled sound, going in less than five centimeters.

The compaction layer was even harder than he had imagined.

He pulled out the shovel, changed position, and stepped down again.

This time it went in a bit deeper, about seven or eight centimeters.

He pressed the shovel handle down, using the lever principle to pry up the soil.

The dark red soil was turned over, its cross-section smooth with almost no pores visible.

He smashed the pried-up soil chunks with the back of the military engineering shovel, hitting them several times before they broke into a pile of small soil chunks.

There were no earthworms, no insects, and no traces of any living things in the soil chunks.

Only soil, and gravel occasionally mixed in.

Just like that, one shovel, two shovels, three shovels...

Jiang Lin turned it very slowly.

Every shovel had to first be stepped into, pried up, smashed, and the gravel picked out and thrown to the edge of the plot.

Boring, mechanical, extremely physically exhausting.

In less than half an hour, Jiang Lin was already drenched in sweat.

The vibration of the military engineering shovel traveled from his palm all the way to his forearms, his web spaces went numb, and his shoulders began to ache.

Jiang Lin stopped, straightened his waist, and panted heavily.

"Don't think about twenty square meters first; just dig out four square meters and talk."

Jiang Lin said to himself.

Because just turning over this little bit of place made him feel like he was contending with a steel plate.

This sentence was very useful.

What people fear most is being crushed by a grand goal before they even get started.

A Tier-1 university was like this.

Wasteland farming was also like this.

If you stood in place and immediately started thinking about how many points I need to score, how much land I need to turn, how many years I need to live, the brain would declare a strike a step early.

But if you broke the goal down into small pieces—this problem, this page, this shovel—

things would become doable.

If it's doable, you can continue.

The military engineering shovel fell down one stroke at a time, and the soil chunks turned up.

Two hours later, several greenbean-sized blisters had already rubbed out on both his hands.

Transparent, bulging, soft to the touch.

He didn't pop them.

Popping them easily led to infection, and getting infected on the Wasteland was a fatal matter.

He wrapped a circle with a Band-Aid and continued turning.

The Band-Aid lasted half a day before being worn out by the shovel handle; he replaced it with a new one, and it wore out again.

At noon, the blisters popped on their own, leaking a bit of transparent liquid.

Holding the shovel handle hurt piercingly.

Gritting his teeth, he dispersed the force to other parts of his palms, and the speed of turning the soil slowed down, but he didn't stop.

He treated himself as a track-type tractor without emotion.

Thinking of nothing in his mind, he only stared at the hard-to-move inch of land under his feet.

When he was exhausted to the extreme, he would stop, sit on the turned-over soil chunks to catch a rough breath, and chug a couple of mouthfuls of mineral water.

On the Wasteland, the exhaustion brought by physical labor was extremely pure; there was no social pressure, no mental inner friction, only muscle soreness and sweat evaporation.

A whole day, his waist was about to break, his hands were about to be ruined, and he had barely dug out less than 4 square meters of land.

The depth was about fifteen to twenty centimeters, not reaching the thirty centimeters he wanted, but he really couldn't turn it anymore.

His arms were shaking, the palms of his hands were rubbed bright red, and the web space between his right middle finger and thumb ached vaguely.

He inserted the military engineering shovel at the edge of the plot, bent down to pick up the last few pieces of gravel that had been turned out, and threw them into the stone pile at the edge.

The stone pile had already accumulated into a small pile, with seven or eight fist-sized ones and over a dozen smaller ones.

"This isn't farming at all; it's clearly working in a quarry."

Jiang Lin regretted not bringing labor protection gloves.

While thinking, he tremblingly pried out a compressed biscuit from the iron bucket.

For dinner, he ate a whole compressed biscuit, chewing until his jawbones ached.

Well-fed and watered, he took an empty bucket and a little mineral water from the tent.

He shoveled a few shovelfuls of soil from different depths with the military engineering shovel, poured them into a cup, added water, stirred well, and let it sit.

The liquid in the cup quickly turned into a dirty dark yellow.

He took out pH test paper and dipped it in.

The color quickly shifted towards orange-red.

Jiang Lin raised the test paper to his eyes and compared it with the color chart.

Around 4.5.

Even more acidic than he had anticipated.

"As expected."

He said in a low voice.

Acidic, compacted, barren.

It almost matched the descriptions of those red soils he had looked up in the Real World.

This instead gave him an inexplicable sense of relief.

The unknown was the most terrifying.

Being able to correspond with things in textbooks and materials showed that it at least made some sense.

If it made sense, there was a way.

The sky had already grown dark.

The wind began to carry the cold, hard scent unique to the night.

Jiang Lin didn't dare to continue pushing hard.

One thing he learned from staying on the Wasteland for more than forty days last time was that a person couldn't stubbornly fight against physical strength.

Especially when he was all by himself.

If you hurt yourself, no one could clean up the mess for you.

Carrying the military engineering shovel, he walked back, his trouser legs and shoe uppers covered in red soil, and his gloves coated with a layer of grayish-white lime powder, looking at first glance like he had just been dug out from some construction site.

After returning to the camp, he first washed his hands and face with treated rainwater, drank a few more mouthfuls of mineral water, and pushed down the dryness in his throat.

Then he crawled into the tent, zipped it up, and turned on the camping light.

Once the warm white light lit up, the darkness and cold outside were separated by a layer.

Sitting in the tent, Jiang Lin took out today's record book and wrote down everything he had just done in the fields from beginning to end.

Quicklime dosage estimation.

Soil color.

Soil-turning depth.

Resistance perception.

pH test paper readings.

Even things like his right web space being numb and considering wrapping cloth strips around the handle for shock absorption were recorded.

Writing to the end, he stopped his pen and looked up towards the tent door.

Outside the tent, the wind was still blowing.

He lowered his head and wrote on the last line of the notebook.

[Day 1, turned about three square meters of land, depth fifteen to twenty centimeters. Severe soil compaction, moderate gravel content. Blistered palms, aching web spaces, continue tomorrow. Goal: Dig another 4 square meters of land tomorrow, striving to reach a depth of over twenty-five centimeters.]

After finishing writing, he was too tired to keep his eyes open, only remembering that he hadn't taken his medicine yet.

So he felt out a dry yeast tablet and a potassium chloride tablet, took one of each with mineral water, and crawled into the sleeping bag to sleep.