ocean-life Chapter 168 Professor Yan's Happy Farm
Chapter 168 Professor Yan's Happy Farm
It was 4 a.m. in a mine in the western suburbs.
The fog here is much heavier than in the city, carrying a smell of sulfur and damp earth.
The once abandoned gate of the mining area now bears a brand new sign: "Changxiang City Geological Ecological Improvement Experimental Base".
The name sounds impressive, but it's just a cover for the fact that this place is actually a giant mushroom greenhouse.
Professor Yan Jin was lying on a simple table by the well, holding a steamed bun in his hand, staring at the monitoring screen, and chuckling to himself.
His signature gray Zhongshan suit was so faded it was unrecognizable, covered in mud splatters, and his hair was a mess, but he had more energy than a twenty-year-old.
"Wonderful... truly wonderful..." Professor Yan took a bite of his steamed bun, pointing to the cluster of slowly wriggling purple mycelium on the screen. "Look at this activity! Look at this metabolic rate! Just give them some decaying flesh, and they can grow three centimeters taller in an hour! If this were used to treat urban waste, it would be an absolute revolution in the environmental field!"
Sitting across from him, Wang Minyu took a sip of goji berry water from his thermos and interrupted him rather rudely: "Professor Yan, I invited you to be a farmer, not to raise pets. How's the neutralization of the toxicity of this batch of 'Ghost Umbrella' going? Pierre's soup base is almost out of stock."
"Almost there." Professor Yan wiped his mouth. "I've discovered that if you add a certain proportion of limestone powder to the culture medium and then play the evening news, the aggressiveness of these strains will decrease significantly, and they'll become... more patriotic."
"The evening news?" Guan Shan was carrying boxes of feed labeled "dangerous goods" when he heard this and slipped, almost dropping the boxes into the well.
"This is called sound wave taming," Professor Yan said seriously. "Things underground are very sensitive to frequencies. Positive energy frequencies can suppress their violent nature."
Wang Minyu remained noncommittal.
As long as we can grow edible mushrooms, we'd even play the Great Compassion Mantra for them.
Just then, the roar of an engine suddenly came from the outskirts of the mining area.
Several beams of powerful headlights pierced through the morning mist and shone straight towards us.
Then came the sound of brakes, the slamming of car doors, and a flurry of footsteps.
"What are you doing! Stop!" The old man guarding the gate (who was also a retired security guard that Wang Minyu had poached from the community hospital) shouted, waving his baton.
"Get out of here!" a haughty voice rang out.
A dozen or so figures emerged from the fog.
They were all wearing the same work pants, carrying steel pipes and wrenches. The leader was a fat man with a fierce face, wearing a name tag around his neck that read "Xinyuan Demolition".
The fat man walked to the police cordon and spat on the ground: "Who's in charge here? We're going to requisition this land! I heard there are old cables buried underneath, and we want to take them back!"
"Recycle my ass!" Guan Shan put down the box, his towering frame standing there. "This is private property, are you blind?"
The fat man shrank back slightly upon seeing Guan Shan's physique, but emboldened by his numbers, he puffed out his belly again: "Enough nonsense! This land used to belong to the state. Although it's been sold, the metal scrap underground is public property! Brothers, charge! Anyone who tries to stop us is obstructing official business!"
These people clearly weren't really there to collect junk.
Their eyes darted around, always glancing towards the well opening.
They probably heard some rumors and thought there was gold being mined here.
Professor Yan panicked, grabbed the documents on the table, and was about to run away: "Boss Wang, what should we do? What if these hooligans go down the well and trample my mushrooms? They're my lifeline!"
"Calm down." Wang Minyu pressed Professor Yan back into his chair. "It's a farm, after all; there has to be some anti-theft measures."
He took out his phone, opened an audio file named "Tu_Scream.mp3", and then connected to the newly upgraded mine broadcasting system.
"Guan Shan, turn off the lights."
"Alright!" Guan Shan grinned mischievously and pulled down the main switch.
The entire mining area was plunged into darkness in an instant, with only a faint green light (the bioluminescence emitted by fungi) flickering at the wellhead.
The demolition team members were stunned.
"What the hell? A power outage?" the fat man cursed. "Don't panic! Turn on your flashlight!"
Just as several beams of flashlight were waving erratically, a voice suddenly came over the loudspeaker.
That wasn't an alarm, nor was it a human voice.
It was a series of extremely suppressed, even slightly damp, gasps...
"Huff... huff..."
The sound, processed by the high-end headphone amplifier chip obtained from Zhou Tong, combined with the natural soundbar effect of the mine, sounded like a giant a hundred meters tall breathing right next to their ears.
The fat man's entire body jiggled: "Who? Who's playing tricks on me?"
Then, the voice changed.
It turned into Tu Jinshan's heart-wrenching screams from underground that day, interspersed with a few edited, indistinct murmurs.
"Help...it hurts so much...they're eating my leg...don't pull me down...there are dead people down there..."
The sound echoed through the empty ruins, shifting from left to right, as if countless wronged souls were breathing against their necks.
"A ghost... there's a ghost!" a timid person in the group cried out.
Even more dangerously, Professor Yan's few "guardian mushrooms" planted near the well sensed the fear hormones emanating from this group of people and suddenly became excited.
They were originally only the size of a palm, but now they have grown larger in the wind, with their purple caps opening up like umbrellas and making a series of hissing friction sounds.
Under the swaying of the flashlight, the flickering shadows looked like a group of menacing monsters.
"Oh my god! Monster! Run!"
It's unclear who started it, but the demolition team, which had been so aggressive just moments before, suddenly erupted into chaos.
The steel pipes they were holding were scattered all over the ground. The group of people cried and scrambled onto the car, and the Wuling Hongguang drove off with the ferocity of a Ferrari, tumbling and crawling away from the scene.
The fat man was the slowest runner. His pants were torn by the barbed wire, revealing his red underwear. As he ran, he kept looking back and came face to face with Guan Shan's face, which looked particularly ferocious in the flashlight beam.
"Remember to buy a ticket next time you come!" Guan Shan shouted.
The fat man's eyes rolled back, and he fainted from fright. Several of his men dragged him into the car like a dead pig.
Watching the taillights of the departing car, Professor Yan adjusted his glasses, a look of regret on his face: "What a pity. That wave of fear just now should have doubled the yield of Experimental Field No. 3. They ran too fast."
Wang Minyu put away his phone and turned the power back on: "No rush. There are plenty of people like this in Changxiang City. The more exaggerated the rumors about this place become, the better our mushrooms will grow. This is called 'ecological circular agriculture'."
He walked to the edge of the well and looked down into the bottomless darkness.
"Professor Yan, for the next batch, I need the kind that can 'calm people down.' Lately, the patients in the shop have all been too irritable; we need to cool them down."
"No problem." Professor Yan took out a small notebook from his pocket and wrote it down. "However, Mr. Wang, the water level in this well seems to have risen recently. And there's... something else in the water."
"What is it?"
"A fish." Professor Yan's expression was strange. "A fish without eyes, but with human teeth."
Wang Minyu's lips twitched.
"Pierre's in for a lot of work now."