Chapter 68: Field Training Base
Xiang Chuan’s light sleep didn’t last long; even the Duke of Zhou in her dream had set up an electronic chessboard for her (Xiang Chuan: How come even the Duke of Zhou in my dream is so up-to-date, using the trendiest and most in holographic projection character avatar Go). The transport ship’s broadcast immediately woke her up.
[Arrived at destination. All students on this ship, please take your luggage and disembark under the teacher’s command.]
The inorganic broadcast voice sounded, and the Class Eight crowd rushed to the rear to grab their luggage and small transport robots, startling Zhu Bingwen into shouting repeatedly: “Slow down! Slow down! Go one by one! Don’t push!”
Meanwhile, the A Bite of China Club members rushed out the moment the door opened: because their luggage was all in the cargo hold, they didn’t have to squeeze with the other students to get it.
“Club President, you’re really not going to take all these to the dormitory at the training base, are you?”
Ouyang Yating frowned at the more than thirty medium-to-large food boxes. Her parents often had the secretary bring them when they were away on work trips, so she wasn’t surprised by the size of the food boxes themselves. What shocked her was the sight of more than thirty stacked together.
By common sense, you could probably only see more than thirty large food boxes stacked together in a food box production factory, right? And now there was an irrational mountain of food boxes right in front of them.
“Pity me.” Xiang Chuan wiped at non-existent tears at the corner of her eye. “Ever since I got into ancient gourmet food, I can’t stomach modern food at all. If you just starve me like this, I’ll be skinny as a rail when we get back in a week. That would be so pitiful.”
Who calls themselves pitiful? The three members immediately felt it hard to look straight at her.
“But this quantity is too much, right?” Liang Gong picked up a food box and could barely lift it. How much stuff was stuffed inside? He looked at Xiang Chuan: “We’re only staying at the training base for a week. Three meals a day, one box per meal would be twenty-seven. This is almost thirty, right?”
“Because Dad said this container can hold thirty lunch boxes, I had the kitchen AI at home make a few extra.” Xiang Chuan patted the container, which made a dull thudding sound because it was stuffed too full.
“Liang Gong, your calculation itself is flawed.” Ouyang Yating looked at him speechlessly holding the food box. Good grief, it was almost big enough to be a coffee table. “Are you sure our club president with her petite frame can eat an entire food box in one meal?”
Hearing this, Liang Gong and Ainuo, who had been silently listening to the two complain beside him, simultaneously looked at Xiang Chuan’s waist, then at the food box… Yeah, obviously not.
“What are you saying?” Xiang Chuan snatched the lunch box from Liang Gong and put it back in the container. “Don’t you need to eat too?”
The group immediately fell silent. Alright, so the club president had considered them… They thought she wanted to use this training to gain some weight or something.
Ouyang Yating and Liang Gong, who had just delivered sharp complaints, lost their steam and obediently helped Xiang Chuan with starting and operating the transport robots. Ainuo silently helped her carry the luggage.
No choice, the food was too good to pass up, especially since they hadn’t said they wanted to refuse. Truth be told, who would refuse delicious three meals? If they refused, the classmates from their class eyeing Xiang Chuan’s container at the cabin door like tigers, and a few from the next class, would probably pounce and force Ai Ye into an unequal treaty for the training period, slaving away resentfully just for a taste of ancient food.
Chirp chirp.
Hearing the sound, Xiang Chuan jerked her head up and saw several sparrows perched on the treetops, chattering and hopping back and forth on the branches, occasionally tilting their heads to watch the Class Eight students below transporting their luggage.
“There are sparrows.” Liang Gong followed Xiang Chuan’s gaze to the several fluffy brown little birds on the tree and couldn’t help smiling: “So cute.”
“After all, the field training base is right next to the ecological reserve, so it’s normal to see some small birds.” Ouyang Yating explained calmly, but her terminal in her hand was frantically snapping photos of the sparrows.
Even Ainuo couldn’t resist taking a few shots, thinking to show them to his sister and mother when he got back. He noticed Xiang Chuan staring blankly at the sparrows, motionless, and habitually patted her shoulder like he would Ouyang Yating or his cousin Nancy. Then he realized it was wrong, quickly withdrew his hand, and stepped back a few steps.
But Xiang Chuan didn’t seem to mind much. She snapped out of it, patted her face, and urged the three to hurry and move the luggage.
While following the main group to the nearby field training base, Xiang Chuan’s mind was full of those ordinary cute little sparrows. She had looked up the preservation of modern plants and animals on the internet on her first day of transmigration, but the trees around were mostly gene-modified common species, and she had never seen birds, sparrows, cats, dogs, and such. This left her puzzled and curious: Where did all the animals go? Later, when she had free time, she remembered and searched, finding out that all non-livestock animals had been placed in the large environmental protection zones of the twelve fleets. Each fleet simulated different marine and terrestrial environments to more comprehensively preserve Earth’s diverse environmental organisms.
For example, the Fourth Fleet, with ocean covering one-third of the main ship’s area, built a tropical rainforest; the Seventh Fleet, rich in various plant materials, built a subtropical plain; their own Third Fleet built a subtropical basin, or rather, a karst landform. When Xiang Chuan, originating from Earth’s Huaxia karst landform region, saw the terrain features of the Third Fleet’s ecological reserve, she felt a sense of hometown belonging toward this main ship that had voyaged through the universe for thirty thousand years.
And the non-livestock animals successfully recreated using cloning technology were all released into the reserves for management and protection out of a conservation concept, to avoid animals appearing and causing various unexpected impacts on human modern activities.
But this also reduced human-animal contact to nearly the point of unfamiliarity. The main reason was that after human medical research broke through the human lifespan limit, all nature’s animals were short-lived creatures to humans, offering too little companionship time and only adding sorrow. Over time, humans stopped raising biological pets, letting them return to the natural world in the environmental protection zones.
So modern humans developed in an environment without diverse organisms.
Seeing sparrows today, which used to be everywhere on streetside plazas, made Xiang Chuan truly realize this. It also made her especially miss the two native dogs (or should they be called Chinese rural dogs?) kept by her parents in her hometown, her brother and sister, and the two native dogs Xiao Hei and Xiao Huang. They were her playmates who accompanied her to adulthood before she went to university out of town after high school graduation. After studying, to not disturb her brother and sister, Xiang Chuan would go to the yard or downstairs to walk and play with Xiao Hei and Xiao Huang.
She remembered that during this year’s New Year visit home, Xiao Hei and Xiao Huang had aged quite a bit, playing in the yard with two little native dogs that had grown almost as big as they were back then. But a cold wind blew, and they all scurried back inside, full of energy.
Arriving in a new area—could it break the deadlock of insufficient ingredient variety?
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