Chapter 1006 Barrier
He remembered when he first discovered the miraculous reaction between tuberose and syrup, the spores suspended in the sugar solution looked very much like the fireflies in his mother's stories.
The birth of the brand's first product, "Frost Moon Candy", was full of accidents. On a frosty night, Qi Tongwei placed the cooled candy under a new locust tree. The next morning, he found that the surface of the candy had condensed into natural dragon and phoenix patterns, and each gully was embedded with tiny ice crystals. This discovery made him gather the team overnight, and finally replaced artificial pigments with nano-level ground mineral powder, making each candy a prism that can refract moonlight.
2. Undercurrent and Spark
As the reputation of "The Taste of the Earth's Veins" spread, the crisis was quietly approaching. One day, the Earth's Vein fluctuation warning system of the monitoring station suddenly lit up a red light, and on the holographic map, glaring black ripples rose in the direction of the city's industrial zone. Liang Lu called up the data for analysis: "It's a problem with counterfeit sugar. The chemicals they added are interfering with the Earth's Vein frequency."
Qi Tongwei did not choose legal action, but planned a special exhibition. The workshop was set up as a giant taste laboratory. Visitors wore special neural sensing helmets and tasted real and fake candies. Their brain waves were transformed into different colors of light and shadow projected on the dome. When children pointed out the counterfeits based on their intuition, the black ripples representing negative emotions were exactly the same as the pollution curve on the ground vein monitor.
"It turns out that sugar can really talk." A little girl licked her fingers covered with icing sugar, looking at Qi Tongwei with sparkling eyes, "The taste of fake sugar... is like stepping on a snail shell on a rainy day." This sentence was included in a new chapter of "Notes on the Earth's Veins", accompanied by Qi Tongwei's hand-drawn experimental records - in the microscopic photograph of the cross-section of the sugar block, the hyphae of the night-scented mushroom stretched out like a galaxy.
3. The Taste Code of the Earth
The brand's product line has gradually expanded to solar terms limited editions. The "budding candy" of the beginning of spring is wrapped in fresh locust flower powder, and a drop of dew-like mint juice will burst out when bitten; the "Guixu candy" of the autumnal equinox adopts the ancient method of nine steaming and nine drying, and the center of the candy block seals the warmth deep in the earth veins. The most popular is the "blind box candy" series, each candy corresponds to a different earth vein frequency, some people taste the sweetness of the forest morning mist, while others taste the salty and astringent of the deep sea vortex.
At a product development meeting, Zhang Dazhu made an unexpected discovery: by converting the sound wave frequency of the earth vein monitor into vibration parameters and adding them to the sugar-making process, the sugar cubes will form a unique lattice structure. When these sugar cubes are arranged in a specific array, they can slightly affect the surrounding magnetic field. "This is the Morse code of the earth." Qi Tongwei drew a waveform diagram of a dragon and a phoenix intertwined in the meeting minutes, "We are not making sugar, we are weaving the language of the earth veins."
4. Sweet Stars
Three years later, at the International Ecological Expo, the "Taste of the Earth" booth became the focus. The huge holographic device simulated the earth's earth vein network. Every time a visitor tasted a candy, the earth vein image of the corresponding area would light up. When the representative from the Amazon rainforest ate the "Rainforest Echo" candy, a real-scale giant tree projection suddenly bloomed in the device, and the flickering light spots between the treetops were exactly the same as the spores of the night-scented mushroom.
But the real climax happened on the eve of the closing. A mysterious buyer ordered a million special candies, requiring each to be injected with a specific earth vein frequency. When the cargo ship loaded with candies left the port, the global earth vein monitoring station simultaneously captured a strange phenomenon: the route formed by the candies perfectly overlapped with the ancient Maritime Silk Road, and the quantum entanglement characteristics of each candy allowed them to continuously release repair energy to the surrounding seas during the voyage.
5. Homecoming and Rebirth
On a snowy night, Qi Tongwei returned to his parents' old house alone. The copper pot on the stove had long been rusty, but he somehow built a fire and poured night-scented mushrooms and sugarcane juice into the pot. When the syrup began to boil, memories suddenly surged - when I was a child, my mother always said that you have to watch over the sugar making, just like watching over the seasons of the land.
The newly boiled syrup glowed strangely in the moonlight, and Qi Tongwei poured it into a mold with dragon and phoenix patterns. After cooling, the sugar cubes were as transparent as crystal, with tiny golden dots suspended inside, which looked very much like the Milky Way that his father had shown him. He suddenly remembered the controversy when the brand was first established. Some people said that commercializing the energy of the earth veins was blasphemous, but at this moment he finally understood: the real protection is to let the gifts of the earth integrate into life in the most gentle way.
The final chapter of Notes on Earth’s Veins was written next to the widest ring of the new locust tree: “The sky is vast, the wilderness is boundless, and the stars are rolling in the sky, asking about the vicissitudes of life. It turns out that the code of the earth is hidden in the lines of condensed frosting, in the moment when children squint their eyes and say ‘so sweet’, and in the depths of the soul of everyone who is willing to stop and taste the wind, sunshine and soil.”
The mountain wind swept across the dome of the monitoring center again, and the dragon and phoenix totems in the astronomical telescope were still flowing in the starry sky. Qi Tongwei stood in front of the workshop, watching the carriage loaded with sugar cubes driving away, and the tracks on the snow twisted into ancient runes.
The white mist he exhaled condensed into tiny ice crystals in the night, and in a trance it overlapped with the purple smoke that rose from the explosion in his memory.
"Grandpa!" The crisp voice of a child pierced through the wind and snow. The seven-year-old grandson Qi Xingye came stumbling over holding a night-scented mushroom lantern, his cotton-padded jacket stained with icing sugar. "Grandma said she would stew rock sugar and snow pears tonight, so you should go back quickly!" The tip of the child's nose was frozen red, and tiny snow crystals hung on his eyelashes. He looked very much like himself squatting in his father's laboratory twenty years ago, staring curiously at the microscope.
Back in the warm courtyard, the iron pot on the stove was bubbling, and the sweet aroma of snow pears mixed with the medicinal aroma of wolfberries filled the house. His wife Wang Shulan gently stirred it with a wooden spoon, and a dried night-scented mushroom was pinned between her white hair. It was picked when her son and daughter-in-law got married. "Try the heat." She scooped up a spoonful of pear soup, and the rock sugar cubes floating on the soup reflected tiny rainbows under the light. Qi Tongwei suddenly remembered that his mother fed him sugar water with trembling hands before she died.
After dinner, Xingye pestered his grandfather to see the "glowing candy". Qi Tongwei opened the secret door of the laboratory, and the holographic projection instantly lit up the entire room: the earth vein network around the world flickered on the star map, and the light spots representing the "Taste of the Earth Vein" branches were like scattered stars. The child lay on the side of the operating table, and his nose was almost touching the suspended candy sample. The crystal candies embedded with earth vein minerals flowed with a mysterious halo in the dark.
"Grandpa, can these candies really talk to the earth?" Xingye suddenly asked, his big eyes reflecting the fluorescence of the candies. Qi Tongwei stroked his grandson's soft hair and brought up the image of the Antarctic ice shelf restoration. In the image, their specially made "glacier candies" were sprinkled on the melting ice surface. The quantum mycelium in the candies grew rapidly when it came into contact with water, weaving into a fine protective net, forming a golden barrier that resonated with the energy of the earth veins.