Chapter 78 - 77: Free Robot Vacuum Curly

Sev Steele blanched a basin of mutated goosefoot and tossed it with a little refined salt to make a cold dish. Without scallions, garlic, red peppers, or a splash of hot oil to bring out the spices’ aromas, the flavor would be somewhat lacking, but it still counted as a proper dish. Next, she blanched the shepherd’s purse, scooped it out, and filled the pot with fresh water, adding a handful of dried mushrooms and a pinch of refined salt. She let it boil for five minutes to fully release the mushrooms’ savory umami. Then, she poured in the two liters of milk left over from the morning. Once it returned to a boil, she stirred in the blanched shepherd’s purse. Just like that, a fresh pot of milk and vegetable soup was ready.

The staple foods for the meal were dried yams, roasted Mutated Ant Eggs, and Mutated Aphids.

Since transmigrating, this was the first time Sev had eaten fresh wild vegetables. Before this, she had survived on the dried ones saved by her body’s original owner. The long-lost sensation of eating fresh greens washed away the exhaustion of her day’s labor. Thinking back to her past life, where she had lived comfortably without worrying about food or clothing yet still occasionally fell into sentimental melancholy, she couldn’t help but sigh. It turned out that people were more likely to feel happiness when living in harsh, difficult environments.

Hayden Hanson ate her simple cold dish and found it quite delicious. She had clearly just boiled the goosefoot and added some salt. He wondered why it tasted so much worse when he used such a simple method.

After eating their fill, Sev started processing the mutated Dragon Claw Beans piled in the corner of the kitchen. Hayden took the initiative to help wash them, while Firestone added firewood to the stove. Sev tossed the washed pods into the pot in batches, boiling each for half an hour before scooping them out and plunging them into cold water.

Because of the sheer volume of pods, Hayden offered up his wooden bathing tub. Although using it felt quite unhygienic, conditions were too limited here, and Sev could only turn a blind eye. The wasteland was no place for people to be picky—at least, paupers like them had no right to be.

Once the pods were peeled, they needed a new container for further soaking. This was where the large water vat Sev had scavenged came in handy. Otherwise, with so many pods needing a cold-water soak to neutralize their toxins, they wouldn’t have had a container large enough to hold them all.

Even after boiling, the pods’ outer skins remained tough and flexible, making them difficult to tear off. To solve this, Hayden used some scavenged scrap metal strips, sharpened them into small knives on a rock, fitted them with wooden handles, and handed them to the children. By making a single slit and gently pulling along the cut, the fuzzy outer skin could be easily peeled away.

The four children worked very diligently, ensuring not a single shred of skin was left behind. While Sev handled the boiling and scooping, Hayden joined the kids in peeling the pods.

While patiently focusing on the task, Hayden felt a sudden longing for a family swell in his heart. In the past, when he was a mercenary, he had always enjoyed the carefree freedom of being a bachelor with no dependents. He wasn’t like his teammates with families, who pinched pennies on food and necessities to save every possible cent for their wives and children. But at this moment, he felt that having a warm home like this—with a woman and children waiting for him every day to share meals and do household chores together—would make all the frugal living worth it.

They worked until past one in the morning before finally finishing all the pods. When the four children couldn’t stop yawning, Sev sent them off to bed early, but Hayden insisted on staying to help her until the very end.

As Sev crawled into bed, she had a nagging feeling that she had forgotten something. However, she was far too exhausted; the moment her head hit the pillow, she fell asleep instantly.

She slept very deeply. Perhaps subconsciously, she felt that since the rat tide had retreated, they had moved to a new home, the holes in the wall were patched, and they had harvested hundreds of pounds of Dragon Claw Beans, she could finally rest easy for a while.

By the time she woke up, the bright sun was already high in the sky. Sev checked her watch and saw that it was past ten o’clock. Rusty and the others had been up for a long time. While she was asleep, Hayden had come over to help change the water in the large vat so the pods could continue purging their toxins. Even though his genes were slowly breaking down, his physique as an Ability user was far superior to Sev’s, allowing him to wake up fully rested by eight o’clock.

By now, the children had grown to trust Hayden implicitly; even without their mother’s express permission, they were comfortable letting him into the house on their own.

While Sev was washing up, Rose padded over and whispered, "Mom, I woke up this morning and gave some green light to the crops planted in the wooden boxes. A few of the stronger seed babies have already broken their shells! They’ll grow little sprouts soon and poke out of the soil."

"How did you know?" Sev asked in surprise.

"The seed babies told me!" Rose replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "I gave some green light to the seed babies in the iron boxes too, and they were so happy!

"Oh, right, Mom! I also found an unknown plant that was almost dead in the pile of mutated shepherd’s purse in the kitchen corner. It looked so pitiful, so I gave it a tiny, tiny bit of green light too. Just a tiny bit, really! I didn’t waste it." As she said this, the little girl’s expression grew a bit apprehensive.

Logically speaking, her Ability belonged to her, and she was free to use it however she pleased. However, Rose felt that her green light was fueled by all the delicious food her mother provided. Therefore, wasting it without her mother’s permission felt wrong.

Hearing this, Sev finally remembered the mutated wild garlic she had gone to such great lengths to bring back yesterday. She smacked her forehead, dashed into the kitchen, and rummaged through the pile of shepherd’s purse leaves on the ground until she dug out the wilting plant. Fortunately, she had dug it up along with the surrounding soil. If it had been completely separated from soil and water for an entire day, it likely wouldn’t have survived.

The wooden boxes she had scavenged were quite large, holding at least twice the volume of her original broken box. Figuring that Coco Holden and Curly must be a bit cramped in the smallest box, Sev decided to transplant them into a larger one. She would leave the smallest box for the mutated wild garlic; after all, it was just a single plant and didn’t need to monopolize a large container.

When Sev went to transplant Coco Holden and Curly, she found that Rose had already communicated with them. Curly was incredibly cooperative. Not only did it not resist, but it thoughtfully used its vines to gather the scattered dirt at the bottom of the old wooden box, transferring it over to help level its new home.

Seeing the bottom of the old box left spotless, as if it had just been thoroughly swept, Sev couldn’t help but laugh. If their Curly grew a bit larger, could she use it as a free robotic vacuum?

The sunlight hit the box at just the right angle, allowing Sev to suddenly notice some unevenly carved patterns on the bottom. In her body’s original memories, this was just an ordinary small wooden box, kept around simply because it was a relic left behind by her birth parents.

When the orphanage had disbanded and she was taken in by her adoptive parents, she had brought the box with her. Years later, upon coming of age and no longer requiring legal guardians, she had left her abusive adoptive parents without a second thought. When she departed, they hadn’t allowed her to take a single item from the house. The original Sev had left with only this broken wooden box and a tattered set of spare clothes.

Staring at the carvings on the bottom of the box, Sev felt something was off. Normally, for aesthetic purposes, decorative patterns were carved or painted onto a box’s surface, particularly its lid. Who would carve intricate designs into the bottom of a box?

Her curiosity ignited, Sev crouched down to closely inspect the markings. They didn’t depict the usual motifs of flowers, birds, fish, or insects, nor were they common interlocking branches, cloud scrolls, or geometric fretwork.

Instead, the simple, elegant strokes seemed to form the image of... a towering ancient tree?