"Jing Shu, the medicine you gave me last time was amazing. It worked even better than expected! The patient is completely cured now. I wanted to ask if you have any other herbs. Also, where exactly did you get this medicine from?" Su Mali's text was enthusiastic, bubbly.
Any herb nurtured by the Spirit Spring was practically a spiritual treasure, its vitality concentrated. Of course, the effects would be extraordinary, far beyond ordinary stock.
As the saying goes: heroes do not ask about origins. Let us just stay friends and trade. Jing Shu wished it were that simple.
Jing Shu scratched her head vigorously, thinking. "Do you know why my grandma lived to be eighty?" She deflected with a proverb-style question.
Su Mali thought for a moment, her reply popping up. "Because she took your antidote?"
"No, it's because she never asked questions she shouldn't about my business." Jing Shu typed back, making her point.
Su Mali burst out laughing, sending a laughing emoji. "Ah, makes sense. My grandma lived to be ninety and still had plenty of energy because she spent her whole life worrying about me, not about other people's business." She turned the saying around playfully.
Jing Shu was speechless, staring at the screen. There was no way to continue this conversation with logic. Su Mali had a way of disarming.
"So, where did your medicine come from? I'm just asking on someone else's behalf." Su Mali returned to the point, persistent.
Jing Shu rubbed her chin, considering. She knew that once high-quality traditional medicine like this spread in certain circles, countless questions would follow. Still, she needed to establish some kind of legitimate front, however thin, to pave the way for future trades of medicinal plants.
"I grew it myself." She decided on a simple, unbelievable truth.
"And how did you grow it?" The follow-up was immediate.
"I sprinkled the seeds in dirt and watered them. Then they grew." She kept it absurdly basic.
"..."
Su Mali sent back a string of ellipses.
...
Meanwhile, at a private rehabilitation center in Wu City, a refined-looking middle-aged man with gold-rimmed glasses stared at the message transcript on his phone, muttering to himself, "She grew it herself? Even with the best artificial full-spectrum lighting and climate-controlled air conditioning, it's impossible to perfectly simulate the right soil microbes and seasonal conditions in this environment. And yet the lab says the quality is this high, the active compounds off the charts." He shook his head slowly.
Growing misshapen, nutrient-deficient, and stunted herbs would have been normal under artificial conditions.
Another middle-aged man standing nearby, with a cold, grim expression, let out a disdainful chuckle. He had looked through recent big data trade records and found no transactions involving significant quantities of medicinal herbs. A year ago, right before the collapse, there had been some small online purchases of common herb seeds, so maybe she really did plant them herself. She must have some secret technique or lucky conditions she wasn't sharing, he reasoned.
As the cold man reached out for his coffee on the side table, an elderly attendant behind him promptly handed him a fresh cup of milk coffee, prepared just how he liked it.
Across from him, a bald, heavily muscled man with a scar over one eye flexed his arms, glancing at the phone in the gold-rimmed glasses man's hand while he was on a video call with another old man on a tablet. "That girl said she just planted the seeds and watered them, and they grew. That's her story." He summarized.
From the tablet's speaker came an irate, crackling voice: "Bullshit! Absolute nonsense! If growing medicinal herbs of that grade was that easy, then what the hell have we, the so-called great medical families, been doing all year? Eating dirt?" The old man was furious.
The man with the gold-rimmed glasses calmly adjusted them. "Oh? But Lao Su, who you respect, said her medicine's potency far surpasses anything on the current market, even pre-collapse stock. Think about it. Your team couldn't cure that specific neurotoxin and you even went searching abroad for an antidote, but this little girl apparently solved it with a small amount of her own medicine." His tone was mild, needling.
The old man on the screen turned red with frustration, sputtering. "I don't believe that kind of quality, that concentration, could come from a homegrown plant. Not unless I see a live photo, proof it's growing now."
The bespectacled man chuckled softly and relayed the demand through Su Mali.
...
At that moment, Su Mali was lounging on a plush couch in her family's estate, with a straw between her lips, drinking from a carton of fresh milk while scrolling through a silly personality quiz on her tablet. The quiz title read: "People who chew their straws have strong desires."
Staring at her own mangled straw tip, she fell into deep, theatrical thought, her mind wandering to questionable places, a blush rising on her cheeks.
...
Meanwhile, in her villa, Jing Shu frowned at the incoming messages on her phone.
Su Mali's curiosity was unusually strong and pointed today. Jing Shu decided to ignore her for a bit, but a moment later, another message popped up, this time with a tangible offer: "one stalk of live honeysuckle plant in exchange for a full canister of compressed natural gas."
Jing Shu stared. The offer was disproportionately generous. "Fine. I needed to make this look legitimate anyway. It's not about the gas," she muttered to herself, seeing the opportunity to show a "sample."
She went to the Cube Space, carefully transplanted a thriving honeysuckle plant into a ordinary ceramic flowerpot, thought for a moment to add value, and added a stalk of robust astragalus root next to it, snapping a clear photo and sending it over.
...
The bespectacled man at the rehab center shook his head with a low whistle, amazed, and turned the tablet to show the photo to the old man on the screen.
The old man gasped, his breath hitching audibly. "This is sacrilege! Honeysuckle is one thing, but if that astragalus is alive and thriving like that in a pot, under a damned dust sky, I'll livestream myself eating shit! No, I'm heading back immediately. I need to see what tricks this girl is pulling with my own eyes!" His voice rose to a shout.
His entire worldview, his lifetime of botanical knowledge, was crumbling. Someone had just told him that one plus one equaled five, and presented a photo as evidence, and he didn't know whether he had gone insane or if the entire world had changed its rules.
...
Su Mali messaged again, relaying the drama: "That old expert guy says if the astragalus survives and is real, he'll livestream himself eating shit. He's flying in from Guangdong to see for himself. Take good care of that astragalus, don't let it die." She added a grinning emoji.
Jing Shu: "???"
"What on earth was going on? Wait... was an actual expert, a big name in traditional medicine, actually coming?" Her heart skipped a beat with a sudden thrill of excitement.
This was exactly what she wanted, the kind of attention from the right circles. The more impressive her herbs looked despite her seemingly amateur, simplistic methods, the more she would appear to be a hidden master with secrets. Everyone would assume she was deliberately keeping her real techniques hidden, playing dumb.
It was the classic strategy of reversing expectations, showing the unbelievable to invite belief in deeper mystery.
Su Mali stopped messaging after that bombshell. Jing Shu wasn't in a rush either. She needed to proceed with extreme caution with medicinal herbs. They were far more valuable than food, and revealing just enough to intrigue influential people without provoking outright greed was a delicate dance.
Never expose something so tempting that even those far stronger than you would be moved to covet it, to take it by force. That was her rule.
...
Time flew, and by mid-December 2023, the world, or at least their part of China, was enjoying its calmest and most comfortable month since the apocalypse began. There was no critical shortage of maggots for protein, and water, while rationed, was abundant compared to the summer.
During this stable period, Jing Shu finished all the planned renovations and preparations on her villa:
The villa was now fully enclosed beneath a massive, clear PVC canopy, like a giant bubble, complete with the manual windshield wiper system along the slopes. At each corner were slanted drainage pipes connected to four massive, dark plastic collection tanks, with overflow outlets and dug channels leading water down to the back mountain.
A solid garage for the RV had been built on the cleared land behind the villa, also protected by its own separate waterproof PVC cover.
The coal shed, built back in March, had been reinforced with a sealed door and additional plastic sheeting to keep driving rain out.
Every nook and cranny of the villa, every closet and cupboard, had been stocked with small cloth bags of lime desiccant. Dehumidifiers stood ready in rooms, dryers were wired, and wall-mounted heaters were tested.
The fish and shrimp in the courtyard pond had multiplied like crazy in the warm, fed water. Jing Shu had taken advantage of the lingering autumn heat to net and dry a huge batch of small shrimp, salted fish, and various other pond seafood for the cellar, along with plenty of crayfish made into spicy mala dishes, filling an entire cubic meter of storage for future midnight snacks.
Inside the Cube Space, the chickens, ducks, rabbits, and pigs had also bred excessively in the ideal conditions. She selected and slaughtered a mature batch, turning them all into seasoned dried meats and smoked sausages for long-term storage. They were her personal, high-protein snacks for the coming difficult year, never to leave the Cube Space, a private reserve.
The last harvest of vegetables and fruits from the courtyard and greenhouse had been sliced and dried as well, forming her final layer of emergency vegetable reserves.
She spent days organizing poultry feed, mixing dried vegetable scraps, weeds, and roots from the Cube Space with crushed dried shrimp, orange peels, and minced garlic. Nutritious and long-lasting, they would be stored in sealed drums for the animals.
Even the accumulated mountain of chicken manure had been sun-dried, processed, and mixed with other ingredients to create fermented pig feed. Her livestock wouldn't be going hungry anytime soon.
Fish feed was even simpler: leftover bones and poultry entrails from butchering were coated in egg wash and tossed into the pond, creating a lively feeding frenzy of leaping carp.
The extreme, lethal heat had gradually waned week by week, dropping day by day until it settled around 40°C, still hot but survivable. Just as everyone sighed in relief, starting to hope the worst of the apocalypse was over, the calendar turned, and the second year of Earth's Dark Days began with a subtle shift in the atmosphere.
And as the villa's water collection tanks ran low from daily use, the long-awaited, predicted first heavy rain of the new epoch finally arrived one afternoon, the sky darkening ominously before unleashing a torrent that soaked the parched, cracked earth in minutes.