Chapter 5 - 4: Fooling the Illiterate Brat

Unfortunately, she had to maintain her persona as a wicked adoptive mother. Suppressing her urges, she said coldly, "What are you all standing around for? Hurry up and prep the food."

As soon as she spoke, the eldest, Rusty, nimbly grabbed an iron nail and carefully pried open the metal buckle on the synthetic sack, which had been sealed by the Guards. Once they saved up ten of these sacks, they could be exchanged for five Contribution Points. They absolutely couldn’t afford to tear it.

The second eldest, Firestone, hurriedly pushed a large wooden tub over to catch the wild yams pouring out. The third and fourth boys pulled open a torn gunny sack and took out the dry grass inside. They skillfully grabbed the bundles and smacked them against the ground a few times, shaking off the loose dirt before carrying them to a makeshift woodshed they had built in the corner of the yard.

The Safe Zone officials allowed residents to build their own structures in their yards. However, the family lacked materials and had no idea how to build a real house. They could only manage to rig up a crude woodshed to store firewood and kindling for the winter.

Rusty and Firestone were already holding soft-bristled brushes, carefully scrubbing away the mud clinging to the wild yams’ skins.

As for peeling them? That was completely out of the question. Anything that could be stuffed into a synthetic sack and brought home was moderately irradiated food. Wasting even a tiny bit was a crime.

Watching them handle the ingredients with such care left a sour, bitter ache in Sev Steele’s heart. Six- and seven-year-olds on Azure would only be in the first grade. They would have adults dropping them off and picking them up, some still needing to be chased around at mealtime to be fed, or even unable to tie their own shoelaces. But here in the wasteland, they were already shouldering the hardships of survival.

Sev’s eyes grew hot, and tears threatened to fall. She hastily averted her gaze, looking toward the two youngest boys instead.

The two little ones had already finished dealing with the dry grass she had casually stuffed into the torn gunny sack, and were now staring at the massive mushrooms in dismay. Young as they were, they knew mushrooms were poisonous and couldn’t be eaten. They couldn’t understand why their adoptive mother would go through so much trouble to forage these toxic plants and bring them back.

In truth, Sev wasn’t entirely certain that these mutated black boletes were actually non-toxic. But how could she resign herself without even trying? After all, in this wasteland, the diets of those living in The Slums were far too monotonous. Whenever edible plants were foraged, they were basically just boiled or steamed and eaten plain. The sole seasoning was coarse salt.

After the war, aside from some high-tech electronics preserved in basements, the vast majority of factories had been abandoned, and the machines inside had rusted into scrap metal. High-precision chemical plants were even rarer—fewer than one in a hundred had survived. The price of refined salt had skyrocketed, leaving only coarse salt affordable for people in The Slums.

Sev had no intention of boiling these large mushrooms to eat directly. She planned to sun-dry them into mushroom chips to use as a seasoning.

"Go get the bamboo mat, then break these big mushrooms into small pieces. I have a use for them once they’re dried," Sev ordered in a deep voice.

The third boy immediately scurried off to the woodshed and dragged out a tattered bamboo mat, which was their dedicated surface for drying food. However, he still looked at Sev with a hint of hesitation. "Mom, these mushrooms are poisonous. Will we still be able to use the mat to dry other food later?"

"It’s torn anyway. I’ll take a trip to the Mutant Purple Bamboo Forest tomorrow, chop down a few stalks, and weave a new one."

"You know how to weave bamboo mats, Mom?" Firestone asked suspiciously. He remembered that his adoptive mother had spent five Contribution Points to buy this very mat. After a year of being battered by the wind and sun, it was already falling apart. If she knew how to weave one, how could she ever bear to spend Contribution Points to buy it?

"Er, well... When I went to sell scrap metal a while ago, I bought a pre-apocalypse encyclopedia from the junkyard. It just so happens to have instructions on how to weave bamboo mats," Sev lied.

In reality, the original owner of her body had indeed exchanged one Contribution Point for an old book at the junkyard, but it wasn’t an encyclopedia at all—it was a middle school math workbook. It was likely brought to a bomb shelter by fleeing parents who didn’t want to delay their child’s education.

Later, this workbook naturally became junk, used to prop up wobbly table legs and the like, causing it to wear out considerably. Plus, its contents were completely useless to the impoverished residents of the Safe Zone, otherwise she couldn’t have traded for it with just a single Contribution Point. The only reason the original owner had bought such a piece of junk was simply to own a physical, paper book from before the apocalypse.

She had grown up in an orphanage until the age of ten. Although the caretakers there weren’t highly educated, they had at least received over ten years of schooling. Whenever they had spare time, they would teach the children how to read and do basic math. By the time the original owner was ten, the knowledge she had acquired was roughly equivalent to that of a third or fourth grader.

Later, when she left the orphanage and was taken in by her malicious adoptive parents, her life consisted of nothing but chores, beatings, and verbal abuse. She ended up forgetting almost everything she had once learned. But later, after meeting that person who told stories about Galaxies and the vastness of the universe, a thirst for knowledge was reignited within her heart.

Even if she couldn’t understand any of the problems in the workbook, she could at least barely recognize some of the simple characters in it. Every night, she would touch the book, feeling the tangible texture of the paper that represented knowledge, satisfying her hidden desires.

After inheriting the original owner’s memories, Sev had thought of using this book as a shield. This way, any knowledge she displayed in the future that the original owner shouldn’t possess could be attributed to what she "learned" from this book.

As for the transmigration novels she had read in the past, where the female lead suddenly became incredibly knowledgeable after possessing a body and fooled people with lies about a white-bearded old grandpa teaching her in her dreams—she found that utterly brain-dead. That was clearly treating everyone around her like a fool.

And the reason she dared to use this workbook to bluff was because none of the four children could read, and extremely few people around her had an education level past elementary school.

After all, having lived through a ten-year nuclear winter before returning to an irradiated surface, many of the elderly had frozen, starved, or succumbed to illness. The middle-aged and elderly people who were still alive today had mostly awakened Abilities. And those who had awakened Abilities naturally wouldn’t live in The Slums. They either joined the Mercenary Guild or moved to other Safe Zones.

In other words, she could comfortably pull the wool over the eyes of her four children and the people around her without fear of being exposed.