Chapter 75 – First and Second Updates

Chapter 75 - First and Second Updates

Qin Yao has been on the island for almost a year, living in a small, confined area, mostly in the hospital and the compound. She leads a routine life between two points, occasionally walking along familiar, beautiful beaches and bays.

People tend to stick to paths they are familiar with, while countless places remain unexplored.

There is still a vast amount of unseen land on the island. Sitting in the car, Qin Yao listens to Miao Cuiye introduce the events that have taken place at various locations. Miao Cuiye is an excellent guide, knowledgeable about many past stories. The island wasn’t liberated until the 1950s, and many tales of struggle have taken place here.

"Xiao Qin, look at that tree, it's already a century old."

Those who have farmed know how resilient plants can be. Even the supposedly delicate and difficult-to-care-for rubber trees have strong vitality. Miao Cuiye says that these rubber trees, due to poor management, have mostly withered and died. In another area, the rubber trees were tapped too frequently, leading to widespread disease, and they must be rested for several years before tapping can resume.

Yet, amidst this withered forest area, life still thrives. Green shoots appear next to dead trees, and strong, robust trees continue to grow vigorously next to sick ones. Nature is truly amazing.

The trees along the road stand tall, their trunks so high that from a human perspective, they look like sticks inserted by the roadside, with reddish roasted chicken legs or green mochi balls on top, making one's appetite surge.

Rubber trees are precious, and the price of imported rubber is high. Qin Yao initially thought there weren’t many trees, but that’s not the case. In previous years, there was a blind expansion of rubber land on the island, with rubber planted everywhere, leading to conflicts with local brigades.

No matter how precious rubber is, it can’t be eaten as food. While expanding rubber land, it’s crucial to ensure the planting of food crops. Otherwise, even if rubber is produced, there will be no food to eat.

Qin Yao looks at the dense rainforest in the distance, filled with trees and vines. It looks beautiful but is extremely dangerous. In such a rainforest, even gunfire and explosives are of little use. These trees serve as the best natural barriers; even if they are set on fire, the dampness would extinguish the flames.

The scenery is beautiful and ideal for wilderness survival, but the environment is perilous.

Only in such a natural environment in the south can people be hidden. In the north, finding a place to hide is challenging due to lack of food and water, and the barren winter makes survival difficult. But here, it’s different.

There is an abundance of trees here. A person familiar with the wilderness who commits a crime and hides in the forest, finding a cave to stay in, won’t suffer from thirst or hunger and can remain undetected for decades, wearing a camouflage suit.

"Xiao Qin, don’t enter the forest casually, especially ones like that. Even if you’re just ten meters away, you won’t be heard if you shout loudly."

"Sometimes, even if you’re just a few meters apart, you might pass each other in the forest without knowing." So, finding someone is extremely difficult, and every year, a few people disappear silently, never to be found, leaving no trace behind.

Of course, it’s also possible for people to appear out of nowhere. Some who were left behind might still be lurking around.

Qin Yao, curious, asks, "Will there be snakes on the plantation? What if a snake crawls in? Should we sprinkle snake repellent?"

Hearing this, Miao Cuiye gives her a strange look. "Would you reject food that’s freely delivered to your door? Isn’t that like a pie falling from the sky?"

The plantation is never short of snake enthusiasts. Fear? Not likely! There are countless people who catch venomous snakes with their bare hands. In times of severe resource shortages, hungry people will eat anything they can find.

If a large, fat snake were to barge into a settlement, the concern wouldn’t be the venomous snake but whether there’s enough meat to go around for a pot of fragrant, thick snake soup.

"It’s not a problem to encounter a single snake, but what if a tree is covered with snakes?" Xiao Qin feels that Captain Miao is exaggerating too much. Her fear of snakes is ingrained.

"A tree covered with snakes? Is there such a good thing?"

"Once, there was a bamboo forest behind my family’s house, and it was covered with bamboo pit vipers. We mobilized the whole family and caught over a dozen. It was quite exciting," Miao Cuiye says, starting to feel a bit hungry.

Just over a dozen might not even be enough to share.

"When I was five or six, I used to catch snakes with my brother." Miao Cuiye tells Qin Yao about her daring childhood memories, like playing with pythons.

There might be some exaggeration, but Qin Yao and Xie Hongni are captivated, finding the tales of snake-playing youth like legendary stories.

Xie Hongni, who had been sent down to the countryside in Qian Province, where there were many Miao villages, finds Miao Cuiye even more like a Miao woman from those villages.

"When you were a child, did you have a lot of material to write about in your essays?" Qin Yao had asked her many questions, hoping to write about Miao Cuiye’s stories, but she hadn’t heard about these key childhood adventures, which she finds incredible. Some people are tough, and perhaps there’s a source to that toughness.

Thinking back to their childhood, children born in the year 2000 were in after-school classes, only able to see animals in zoos, while Miao Cuiye had seen so much that any single experience could make an excellent narrative essay.

Playing with snakes? Isn't that old news? Let’s include it in the story to add some vividness to the protagonist.

"Composition?" Miao Cuiye, who had been enthusiastic just a moment ago, felt a headache at the mention of it. "I can't write compositions. I hate writing them the most."

"Your experiences can all be written into compositions. They are far more meaningful than those stories about helping old ladies."

Xie Hongni and the nearby Third Brother Qin had been enjoying the scenery and not paying much attention to the conversation between Miao Cuiye and Qin Yao. However, they couldn’t help but feel somewhat embarrassed.

As children who grew up in the city, both of them had written about "helping old ladies" in their compositions when they were young, and it made them feel like their red scarves were shining even more brightly...

Xie Hongni and Qin Xuecai exchanged glances and immediately understood each other.

Xie Hongni found it amusing. In the past, she thought that two people with vastly different cultural backgrounds would find it difficult to converse. In reality, they still had a lot of common ground.

"What’s so meaningful about that? It’s all just play." Miao Cuiye waved her hand. "The thing I wrote the most about when I was a kid was helping others."

Qin Yao smiled slightly with her lips pursed. She sometimes felt that there was a deviation in language education. Writing compositions should be about recording genuine emotions and true thoughts and feelings.

But for ordinary children, fabricating stories about helping others was the norm in compositions.

At this moment, the story in Qin Yao’s mind became a bit clearer. Even when creating fictional novels, one couldn’t rely entirely on imagination. There needed to be a certain source of real material. The more details, the more believable it would be.

The car entered the farm. Besides a large area of rubber trees, various crops were also planted. There were office buildings, dormitories, a hospital, and a grocery store. There were several hundred regular employees, along with other educated youth, soldiers, and militiamen.

The building was three stories high, with a flower bed in front, an open field playground, and a basketball court. Children were playing and chasing each other on the court. In the center, there was a flag-raising platform with a five-star red flag flying in the air.

The shade trees here were mango trees, and there were a few jackfruit trees at the corners. The mango trees had already borne fruit—half green and half yellow, clearly not fully ripe. The mango tree they passed by had already borne fruit, but if you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t notice the small green mangoes beneath.

The jackfruit trees at the corners were tall and dry, with only two or three ugly, small fruits attached. There were also papaya and longan trees, but they had no fruit.

When Farm Director Zhao Hongxing met them, he was eating pineapple. A pineapple was cut into small slices, and he invited them to try it with a toothpick. Xie Hongni and Qin Xuecai had rarely eaten this before, as it was uncommon in the north.

This perfume pineapple was overly ripe, with sweet flesh that was cloyingly sweet and had a fermented taste, as if it had been soaked in alcohol.

It was indeed very sweet and delicious, but after a few bites, it became cloying, not thirst-quenching, and made you want to drink water.

Along the roadside, there were green coconuts that resembled stones. On the racks, there were yellowed old coconuts. Next to them, large knives were strewn about. The opened coconut shells still had some white coconut flesh that hadn’t been peeled off.

Qin Xuecai discovered that there were many fruits on this island that he had never tasted before. When he was a child, he mostly ate apples and persimmons. During his time in Qian Province, he often ate a fruit called "thorny pears," especially when made into dried fruit, which was very delicious. It was sour and refreshing, and when thirsty in the mountains, eating a piece would refresh your mouth.

There were also purple, oval fruits that looked like grapes but weren’t. The flesh contained water and was crisp and refreshing to chew. After eating, your hands would become sticky and slippery.

After coming to the island, he saw even more unfamiliar fruits. It was fascinating. The fruits here were so sweet. The bananas were amazing, unlike any he had eaten before.

After eating bananas for the first time since arriving on the island, Qin Xuecai was amazed. They were big and sweet, with fragrant flesh. He guessed there must be many monkeys on the island, and perhaps the Eastern Continent in "Journey to the West" was right here.

It was a pity that the monkeys on Mount Emei didn’t have such good fortune.

When Farm Director Zhao Hongxing heard Qin Xuecai's introduction, he asked curiously, "Are you a cook? Perfect timing. We need someone to help in our canteen."

Zhao Hongxing was almost forty and had lived on the island for more than twenty years. He had practically grown up on the farm. His father was a soldier. By ancestral home, they should be northerners. After conquering the island, the whole family moved here to stay and cultivate. Many farms were initially transformed from military divisions.

"I can make many signature dishes." Compared to his father, Qin Chuanrong, Qin Xuecai had learned a variety of skills. After being sent to the countryside, he became particularly good at making sour soup. No one's sour fish soup or sour noodle soup was as delicious as his.

At this time, pork was precious, but there were plenty of fish and shrimp. Qin Xuecai thought that even if he came to the island, he wouldn’t starve. At worst, he could cook fish and shrimp in sour soup every day.

The fish and shrimp stranded on the tidal flats were free, and there were always fish in the streams in the woods.

"Sour soup? Great, make some for everyone to try in the next two days."

In the north, the cuisine is predominantly salty, featuring many pickled dishes to accompany meals, whereas in the south, sour, spicy, and sweet flavors prevail, especially sourness. In hot regions, sourness is particularly favored as a seasoning. The sourness of sour soup is the best seasoning; plain boiled cabbage is difficult to pair with rice, but sour soup with cabbage makes it easy to finish several bowls of rice. Even without meat, you can enjoy a hearty meal.

Zhao Hongxing took them to visit the canteen. Xie Hongni was given the task of washing and peeling vegetables. An auntie was seated beside a large water basin, holding a big knife to peel a pineapple. After simply peeling it, she used a small knife to remove the pineapple eyes along the patterns.

"Why so many pineapples in the kitchen?"

"A lot of pineapple dishes for lunch."

There’s no choice now; they primarily eat seasonal produce. Given the abundance of pineapples, they need to consume them before they spoil, so the canteen’s dishes have become pineapple-based: stir-fried pineapple, pineapple cakes, pineapple duck, pineapple meat...

"Pineapple duck?" Hearing the dish’s name, Qin Xuecai couldn’t help but widen his eyes in shock.

Are bitter melon duck, dried bamboo shoot duck, roast duck, and grilled duck not delicious? Why turn it into pineapple duck? Is it actually edible? Is it truly delicious?

Miao Cuiye said to Qin Yao, "The pineapple duck at the farm is incredibly delicious. I’ll treat you to it today."

Qin Yao nodded and asked, "Do you know how to prepare lemon duck?"

Qin Yao had tasted lemon duck once in the hospital canteen, and she found it quite good. Duck has a distinct gamey flavor, so it must be masked with strong flavors, either spicy or sour. Masking it with sourness is the most cost-effective method. The lemon duck she tried seemed to use pickled lemons instead of fresh ones.

"Ask the chefs here; they know how to make it. Though if you want to know how to pickle lemons, I can tell you that."

Qin Yao could communicate with the kitchen chefs here, but Qin Xuecai and Xie Hongni faced a language issue. A large part of the island population speaks Cantonese, including the youth sent from Yangcheng. Qin Xuecai and Xie Hongni spoke Mandarin, and while others could understand them, Qin Xuecai and Xie Hongni couldn’t understand Cantonese.

"Brother, study hard here, and let me steal some skills from you in the future."

Qin Yao liked dishes like pineapple duck and lemon duck. The canteen also served a type of pickled vegetable—or rather, a side dish—known as chili mango, which was great for eating with rice or noodles.

Qin San stayed in the kitchen to observe, while Qin Yao and Miao Cuiye walked out of the back kitchen. Miao Cuiye patted her chest and said, "I’ll catch a snake in a couple of days and treat you to a delicious snake soup."

"It tastes sweet and fresh."

Qin Yao twitched her mouth. She had asked so many questions about poisonous snakes, definitely not out of a desire or curiosity for snake flesh. She didn’t eat snakes; eating snakes would cause her nightmares.

"They say the mulberries here are good. Take me to pick some mulberries, please."

"Alright."

One of Qin Yao’s main goals for this trip was to get a few mulberry seedlings to plant by her house and let Chen Baozhen’s family plant one too. Mulberries are easy to grow; there are many wild mulberries in the mountains. Planting mulberries at home requires little effort, and the mulberries here are very sweet.

Fresh mulberries, whether made into mulberry fruit tea, mulberry milkshakes, or mulberry yogurt, are absolutely delicious.

Miao Cuiye took Qin Yao to pick two large bowls of fresh purple mulberries. They washed and ate them by the well, sharing with some children. Qin Yao had already decided which three mulberry seedlings to dig up and take back.

After lunch, Qin San’s sour soup received unanimous praise. He stayed in the canteen as a chef, and Xie Hongni helped in the back kitchen, earning a few dollars a month.

Facing the youth here, Xie Hongni showed a rare smile. The conditions here might not be better than before, but whether it was the staff or the youth, they were all from other places, speaking languages she didn’t understand, which made her feel a sense of familiarity. She didn’t want to be around familiar faces, especially those who had persecuted her back in school.

Now, being in an unfamiliar place felt like removing a shackle, making her feel more relaxed.

Qin Xuecai and Xie Hongni told the farm that they had decided to get married, so they were given a room. In fact, housing was tight on the farm, and ordinary people lived in simple wooden houses. These houses require extra attention during typhoons.

"If there’s a strong typhoon, go to the school."

After settling in, they went to the telephone room together to queue for a call home. The call was made to the factory to have Mother Shen Guixiang come to the phone.

Qin San spoke to Shen Guixiang first and said he had found a partner. Shen Guixiang on the other end was delighted.

"Have your sister talk to me."

Qin Yao answered the phone, "Mom."

"Your brother is here. Is he controlling you? Don't be too hard on your husband."

Qin Yao laughed, "Mom, my third brother arrived just in time."

She still had the confession letter Gu Cheng wrote last night in her hand. He had written it seriously, with clear and logical points, which amused Qin Yao.

Qin Yao wasn't a petty person. Most of the time, she just went with the flow, but of course, she never neglected herself. She made sure to eat, drink, and dress well.

"That's good. When are you going to let me hold a grandchild?"

Qin Yao replied calmly, "Mom, if you work hard today and get a good night’s sleep, you’ll have a grandchild by tonight."

"You little brat, you’re really trying to drive me crazy."

After a few more words, Qin Yao hung up the phone with a happy heart. She rarely had the chance to tease her parents like this before, but in front of Shen Guixiang, she found herself becoming bolder and turning into a mischievous child.

Miao Cuiye, who had been listening to her conversation on the side, pulled her aside and whispered, "Actually... if you don’t want to have children too soon, you can bring some... you know what back from here."

Qin Yao asked, "You know what?"

"You know what." Miao Cuiye raised her thick eyebrows, "A kid was just playing with it."

Qin Yao was speechless, realizing Miao Cuiye was talking about condoms. Back then, condoms were quite thick and reusable.

Some children didn't know what they were for and thought they were balloons. They stole their parents’ condoms and played with them at the village entrance, creating quite a scene.

When these kids grew up, they realized what silly things they had done.

"The quality here is good and they’re cheap. You can bring a lot back. I'll teach you how to choose." Miao Cuiye, with unspeakable intentions, encouraged Qin Yao to shop, assuming that the couple had high salaries and could afford to buy plenty, even if they throw them away after one use, cough cough.

But that wasn’t Miao Cuiye’s main purpose. She was just a little curious, curious about which size Captain Gu would use.

"You'll teach me how to choose?" Qin Yao was in awe of Miao Cuiye's gossipy little look.

The unmarried Miao Cuiye was indeed bold.

"Should we get some?"

Miao Cuiye nodded frantically, "Buy, buy, buy!"

After saying that, she smiled a little sheepishly, like a shrewd saleswoman.

The two were whispering at the telephone room entrance, speaking in low voices that only they could hear. At that moment, another woman was on the phone, wearing blue pants and an ordinary outfit.

This plaid-shirt woman was holding a basket and glanced at Qin Yao several times. As she left, she almost bumped into Qin Yao. The woman covered her basket and hurried away.

Qin Yao found her actions rather strange. What could be in the basket?

The woman’s earlier gaze had made her feel uneasy.

Qin Yao used her X-ray vision and discovered that the basket contained ordinary sewing supplies, scraps of cloth, two handkerchiefs, and some miscellaneous items. If you lifted the cover, nothing unusual would be seen on the surface.

But one of the handkerchiefs had a hidden compartment, inside which was a letter.

The content of the letter wasn't a code, and Qin Yao hadn't intended to pry into someone else's privacy, but a casual glance revealed a strange sentence: "Republic of China Year xxx."

Her heart missed a beat. Who still uses this method to keep track of the years? What kind of person would do that?

Qin Yao and Miao Cuiye walked out, and she secretly observed the woman in the checkered pattern shirt. She noticed her meeting with several people and using a radio behind the treehouse to listen to a suspicious broadcast, along with a series of strange numbers.

Qin Yao carefully searched for any other hidden materials and discovered some letters and codes. After examining them, Qin Yao realized that these people were planning to burn down the rubber trees at night.

Tonight, during the shift change, there would be a gap in the guard rotation. With inside-outside cooperation, they planned to set fire to the rubber plantation.

Several people had been incited, and the promise was that if they completed this task, they would be helped to escape overseas to enjoy a life of lavish indulgence.

"Xiao Ye," Qin Yao called Miao Cuiye and quietly wrote a note for her: I just saw a woman secretly listening to a suspicious broadcast. I think something is off.

Miao Cuiye's eyes widened, and a thought flashed in her mind. "Could it be... they plan to burn down the rubber trees?"

Miao Cuiye had loved watching war movies since she was young and was quite knowledgeable about the complexities.

Qin Yao pointed out a person to her, and at this moment, Miao Cuiye was no longer curious about a certain man's type. She focused on watching the people with Qin Yao.

The two of them discovered that there were indeed people meeting, and their methods weren't sophisticated. Some were truly naive, and those who weren't naive wouldn't have been deceived—they were the ones who were lazy and dreamt of a better life.

"Should we tell the field supervisor?"

Miao Cuiye whispered, "Shh, the fewer people who know, the better. I know another male captain. The new arrivals have no ties to this place. We'll ambush them tonight so as not to alert the enemy."

Miao Cuiye wasn't that innocent; many from the older generation were fine, but their children might not be.

That night, Miao Cuiye arranged for people to ambush, and Qin Yao joined in the action, hiding together in the rubber forest. Qin Yao used a "Luck" skill on herself, so even if she couldn't avoid everything else, she could at least avoid the mosquitoes.

At that moment, she found the usually unreliable Miao Cuiye to be quite dependable, exuding a certain leadership charm as a woman.

In the dim light of the night, Qin Yao looked at the person lying next to her and had a flash of inspiration. Her mind was now filled with many stories.

In such an environment, it was the perfect time for creative thinking. Ambush? Hiding? Evading? She had often heard that by the river, one could hold a reed in their mouth to breathe while submerged, or even more exaggerated, a person covered in mud hiding in a swamp, their face buried in the mud, breathing through a thin tube, hands tightly gripping the roots in the mud to prevent themselves from sinking, awaiting the enemy's arrival.