Chapter 982 Bonfire
What’s even more amazing is that whenever an ecological crisis occurs somewhere in the world, the warning sound from the monitoring station turns into a soothing hum - that’s the land’s way of reminding us that it’s time to change the way we get along.
Three years later, in late autumn, officials from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations visited. The satellite images they brought showed that the green network centered on the mountain village had covered most of Asia. "You have created a miracle." The official shook Qi Tongwei's hand and sighed. At this time, under the old locust tree, Aunt Wang was teaching the children to weave scarecrows with straw, Zhang Dazhu was debugging the improved version of the solar insect repellent lamp, and the little fox was squatting on the millstone with a copy of "Qimin Yaoshu" rolled up in its tail.
Night fell again, and the lights of the monitoring station echoed with the starry sky. Qi Tongwei looked at the data jumping on the screen and suddenly remembered the words in the Tao Te Ching: "Man follows the earth, the earth follows the sky, the sky follows the Tao, and the Tao follows nature."
Aunt Wang taught the children how to tie straw into hunched human shapes. Suddenly, she pointed at the mountain road and exclaimed, "Look!" On the winding mountain road, seven trucks with "Organic Agricultural Products" logos were breaking through the mist. The truck beds were loaded with watermelons and strawberries, glowing with a honey-colored light in the twilight.
"It's Old Zhou from Longxi Village!" Zhang Dazhui stood up beside the insect repellent lamp, holding a screwdriver. The photovoltaic panels of the improved equipment reflected a colorful halo in the afterglow. "They came here to learn composting technology last month, but I didn't expect that they would be able to..." Before he finished speaking, the leading truck had parked steadily in the threshing ground. The door of the truck was pushed open, and Zhou Qiang, with a beard on his face, jumped out with a grinning baby in his arms.
"Secretary Qi!" Zhou Qiang pulled open the collar of his muddy shirt, revealing the same light blue veins on his neck as Zhang Dazhui's - those were the marks left by a bacterial and toxin invasion. "We grew the 'ground vein melon' according to the method you taught us, and its sweetness broke the county record!" The villagers behind him opened the carriages one after another, and the watermelons made a crisp sound as they rolled, startling the egrets perched on the locust trees.
Chen Xiaolong from Dongjiang Village squeezed to the front row carrying a bamboo basket filled with freshly picked wild mushrooms: "We built an ecological mushroom shed in the forest and used the spores you gave us to grow glowing night-scented mushrooms!" The boy's eyes flashed with excitement, and his fingertips gently stroked the naturally formed rune-like patterns on the mushroom cap. Wu Qiangdong from Qidong Village unfolded a yellowed account book, which densely recorded the changes in production after switching to earthworm composting: "The cost has dropped by 30%, but the orders have increased tenfold!"
The little fox suddenly jumped down from the millstone, and the Qi Min Yao Shu wrapped in its tail fell to the ground with a "click", and the page automatically turned to "Growing Grain Chapter 3". Its amber eyes swept over the crowd, and the tip of its tail picked up a glowing spore: "Did you hear it? The ground veins are singing." Before the voice fell, a clear resonance came from the direction of the monitoring station. On the soil health data screen, the green dots representing each village were connected into a network at an incredible speed.
However, when the moonlight climbed up the branches of the old locust tree, the atmosphere in the grain drying field suddenly became solemn. Zhou Qiang took out his mobile phone, and a pop-up window from an e-commerce platform appeared on the screen: "Due to the detection of pesticide residues, all products in your store have been removed from the shelves." Zhang Dazhu grabbed the phone and checked it repeatedly. Suddenly, he pointed at the origin information on the product details page and jumped up: "Damn it! We have never used these pesticides!"
Qi Tongwei took the phone and found a large number of similar screenshots of negative reviews in the comment area. The strawberries in the picture were dark red in color, with abnormal protrusions all over the surface - exactly the same as the mutated fruits during the fungus disaster that year. The little fox suddenly jumped onto the stone mill in the threshing ground, with golden runes all over its body: "Someone is falsifying the test data. They are afraid of this ecological network."
The night wind suddenly rose, and the alarm of the monitoring station mixed with the sound of flowing water in the mountain stream. Qi Tongwei rushed to the data center. The green network on the screen was being eroded by strange black threads, and the source pointed to a laboratory in a coastal city. "It's them!" Zhang Dazhu recognized the company logo flashing on the screen. It was the multinational agricultural company that tried to steal the data that year. "They have developed an AI algorithm that can simulate pollution data!"
Zhou Qiang from Longxi Village suddenly remembered something and took out a metal box from the secret compartment of the truck: "Someone stuffed this into the car when delivering goods today." Inside the box was a microchip with a Southeast Asian rainforest totem etched on its surface. The little fox pressed its paw on the chip, and a holographic picture was instantly projected: in the laboratory, gene-edited poisonous mushrooms were multiplying wildly in the culture dish, and the parameters jumping on the screen were exactly the same as the data format of the mountain village monitoring station.
"They want us to kill each other." Qi Tongwei's voice echoed in the silent valley. The moonlight shone through the branches of the old locust tree, casting mottled shadows on everyone's faces. Chen Xiaolong from Dongjiang Village suddenly raised a bamboo basket, and the dim light of the night-scented mushrooms gathered into an arrow in the darkness, pointing to the winding mountain road outside the village - there, more than a dozen black cars were slowly driving through the thick fog.
Zhang Dazhui picked up the solar panel of the insect repellent lamp, and the metal edge shone coldly in the moonlight: "We didn't let them succeed back then, so don't even think about it now!" Zhou Qiang protected the children behind him and took out a wrench from the toolbox of the truck: "The composting techniques I learned in these years are more effective than fists." Qi Tongwei called up the sound wave system of the monitoring station, and the old Toad radio began to play the specially processed recitation of "Tao Te Ching", and the sound waves formed an invisible barrier between the valleys.
The car stopped at the entrance of the village. A man in a suit holding a sign that said "Quality Inspection" tried to enter the village, but his ankle was entangled by the suddenly growing hyphae. The little fox stood on the highest branch of the old locust tree, sweeping its tail across the starry sky: "Look at these points of light," it pointed to the sky, and the position of the Big Dipper actually showed a trajectory similar to that of the monitoring station data network, "Heaven and earth have their own way, how can you tamper with it?"
When the first rays of morning light dyed the mountains red, the black car retreated in a panic. In the grain drying field, representatives from each village sat around a campfire, using straw to draw a new ecological network on the ground. Qi Tongwei entered the "ground vein melon" seeds from Longxi Village, the night-scented mushroom spores from Dongjiang Village, and the earthworm compost formula from Qidong Village into the monitoring station. The green network on the data screen suddenly burst into brilliant light, merging with the morning glow in the sky.
The little fox flipped through the Qi Min Yao Shu, and scribbled on the ground with a charcoal pencil curled up in its tail: "In ancient times, there was a military farming system, and now there should be a 'military land system.'" In the pattern it drew, the ecological farms of each village were connected through the network of earth veins, forming a huge symbiotic system. The mountain breeze swept across the threshing ground, carrying the sweet fragrance of strawberries and the fragrance of soil, blowing the straw scarecrow gently, as if dancing for this new life.
From then on, whenever night fell, a tiny bonfire would always light up under the old locust tree.