CHAPTER 363: CHAPTER 14: EXTERNAL AFFAIRS

A month has passed, the season has transitioned from early summer to midsummer, and the weather has become increasingly hot.

It seems as if the heavens have forgotten about rain, and this summer in Virginia is exceptionally dry. The outdoor sun scorches everything, leaves droop, and the grass and trees on the ground are nearly scorched.

As for when it will rain? No one knows. Weather forecasts have long disappeared, and humanity’s ability to combat natural disasters has sharply declined.

Outside Avoni Town, captured white slaves are operating the integrated water and fertilizer drip irrigation system, with pipelines mounted on wheels, slowly moving through the wheat fields.

The town has ready-made farmland machinery, highly mechanized; as long as there’s electricity and fuel supply, thousands of acres can be cultivated with minimal labor.

Unfortunately, there’s a severe shortage of fertilizers, with the relevant factories already shut down. The town only has a small amount of stock, which is quickly being depleted.

The most crucial issue is the lack of good seeds.

Many people curse the seed companies for being unscrupulous, deliberately preventing farmers from saving seeds.

But hybrid systems inherently can’t be saved for seeds, or like seedless watermelons, the seeds are completely degenerated and simply nonexistent.

Modern agriculture has already evolved into being intertwined with industry, and when industry collapses, agriculture inevitably follows suit.

The consequences of lacking quality seeds are extremely severe; even survivors who want to farm find themselves staring blankly at the land because they simply can’t find the needed seeds.

Even someone like Zhou Qingfeng, who had prepared in advance, couldn’t procure original seeds through normal channels.

These are generally used for breeding and are not accessible to ordinary people, ultimately bought from ’Dongda’ agricultural company at a high price, and not in large quantities.

In the aftermath of the virus crisis, survivors worldwide face an agricultural crisis, and once the scavenged food runs out, cries to the heavens will be useless.

But for the ’Holy Light’ team, the situation isn’t too dire; farming is still possible. Many of the captured white slaves are local residents familiar with agricultural production.

They started the water pumps, drawing water to the drip irrigation system’s water tower. Once the water tower is filled, the large drip irrigation machine slowly moves out, watering the wheat seedlings along the fields’ ridges.

The wheat field in front spans over three thousand acres. Due to a lack of fertilizers, the growth is only average. A yield of two to three hundred kilograms per acre would be remarkable. But with such a large planted area, there will be some harvest by autumn.

Beside the wheat field, there is another thousand acres of potatoes, next to those are cassavas, beside those are soybeans, corn, peanuts, and sweet potatoes.

The ’Holy Light’ team knows their agricultural skills are lacking, so they have diversified staple crops to avoid being wiped out by pests or diseases — but instead of pests, a drought has struck.

A year ago, Americans could still squander energy, running air conditioners indiscriminately in their non-insulated, non-heatproof wooden villas.

Even the arrival of a drought didn’t scare them; they just thought of ways to pump water.

But now...

"There’s not enough electricity supply!" Zhou Qingfeng, sweating profusely under the scorching sun as he surveyed the drought-stricken fields, lamented repeatedly beside the farm road.

Over the past month, four ’Katrina’ aircraft have been transporting people and supplies everywhere. The population of the ’playground’ shelter has grown from more than a hundred to over five hundred — making electricity supply suddenly tight.

But household electricity isn’t the main concern; it’s the electricity needed for production that’s crucial.

Last year, the shelter only cultivated a little over a hundred acres, planting things like potatoes, tomatoes, chives, and broccoli, making everyone think farming wasn’t hard.

This year the ’Holy Light’ team deliberately opened up a few thousand more acres, planning to grow more rice and wheat to replenish staple food reserves, only to be surprised at how large the electricity demand for agriculture is.

In order to ensure the rice fields could seed and spike, more than half of the 6,000 to 7,000 kilowatt-hours generated by the shelter’s photovoltaics each day was used for pumping water and driving farm machinery, but it still wasn’t enough.

The team is very worried about this.

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The captured Sani, wearing a sun-shielding straw hat, stood beside the wheat field, skinny and watching Zhou Qingfeng and others inspecting from an electric cart. His gaze was filled with silent curses.

A year has passed since the apocalypse descended, with death and slaughter becoming a numbing daily routine for survivors, but becoming slaves is still an unbearable humiliation for them.

Especially the once-proud white men, who had imagined dying from illness, starvation, thirst, gunshots, or knife wounds many times, but had never thought they’d end up enslaved one day.

What made it even harder for them to accept was that they were enslaved by what they considered inferior "yellow monkeys," and also subjected to the lashes of black overseers.

The ’preferential treatment’ towards white women further wounded the pride of white men, yet surviving white women abandoned white men without hesitation, let alone spoke of fidelity or chastity.

It indeed took nothing more than a bowl of beef noodles to sway them away, and they behaved even more docile than when with white men — the Han men disliked their body odor, so they accepted the ’apocrine gland removal surgery’ without hesitation.

One has to note, sweat glands and mammary glands are controlled by the same genes; women with big breasts often have developed sweat glands. Now, they removed the odor-causing apocrine glands and kept the well-developed mammary glands...

Every member of the ’Holy Light’ team, young and old, laughed joyously, thrilled to the point of exploding, and strongly demanded continued external expansion to provide humanitarian aid to more survivors.

But for white men, this was akin to the time when Paris was occupied by German troops during World War II, when French women willingly threw themselves at the invaders, a deeply inexplicable shame and anger growing in their hearts.

"Sani, stop staring, be careful, that black dog Omar might trouble you," another white slave next to him signaled with his eyes towards the sky, whispering a reminder.