Ice Age: I can control plant growth

Chapter 104: Food and Grass

Hearing the voice, the two men sat down and looked at Li Mu seriously.

"A Fei, it's your turn."

Li Mu greeted Hong Pengfei next to him and said no more.

Although Hong Pengfei was still a little nervous, he thought that this was the first task given to him by the city lord and he had to do it well.

So he took two deep breaths, then looked at the middle-aged man and asked, "Please introduce yourself first."

……

Half past four in the afternoon.

Li Mu sat up and stretched, "It's finally over."

"You two go back and eat. Meet me on the first floor of the City Lord's Mansion at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning. We will have breakfast there."

Hong Pengfei and Hu Li nodded gently, "Got it."

"You're welcome. See you tomorrow."

Li Mu waved at the two of them and said.

Hong Pengfei and Hu Li didn't say politely. They waved to Li Mu and walked outside.

There were more than a hundred people coming for the interview this time. At first, they showed up in groups of three or five, but later on, they grew to groups of more than a dozen.

Li Mu originally wanted to be lazy and let Hong Pengfei ask questions on his behalf while he just listened from the side.

But as more and more people came later, he could only go on stage with Hu Li and limit the interview time for each person to five minutes.

While interviewing, he asked the two people beside him to write down each person's information with pen and paper for follow-up inspection.

Among the people interviewed, seventy to eighty had farming experience. All of them were over thirty years old, and ninety percent were male.

According to the interview process, most of these people are genuine and can talk about the various key points of growing crops.

But there are also a small number of people who are just unqualified. They come here and pretend to know a lot based on some agricultural videos they have watched on the Internet. However, once they are asked about the details, such as which month to plant rice and which pests to pay attention to, they will be exposed.

The rest of the people claimed that they liked plants and loved farming. They were all relatively young, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-five, and most of them were girls.

When interviewing these people, Li Mu would focus on asking them what plants they knew and whether they had ever grown potted plants in their lives. However, based on their performance, the true situation could not be revealed for the time being.

So Li Mu did not accept anyone on the spot, but gave a unified reply: go back and wait for notification.

As for whether the student will be admitted in the future, it will be left to his two assistants, Hong Pengfei and Hu Li, and he will not be involved in person.

Anyway, even if you are admitted, there will be a one-month probation period, and those who perform poorly during the probation period will be directly dismissed.

Strolling back to the City Lord's Mansion, Li Mu did not choose to have dinner, but went straight back to the laboratory.

He had to take advantage of his hunger now to create plants that could make military ration pills.

When mentioning Bingliang Pills, he thought of the compressed biscuits he had eaten before, but he didn't feel that they were very filling. Instead, they tasted just like ordinary biscuits.

In ancient times, there was a kind of military rations for marching and fighting, called "fried noodles". When Li Mu first heard the name, he thought it was fried noodles, and thought the ancient times were awesome. Later, he learned that the "noodles" were flour, but this touched on his blind spot in knowledge: Can flour be fried and eaten?

It was not until he looked up relevant information that he realized that the fried noodles eaten by the army were made by frying flour and salt directly, then cutting them into small pieces and drying them to become "dry food". When eating, just put them in water and boil them.

But the taste of this dry food is really bad, and it can only fill the stomach, so Li Mu plans to improve it.

He found the seeds of four crops, wheat, sesame, peanuts and walnuts, from a pile of plant seeds, put them together and started the experiment.

These four plants have different habits. Some bear fruit underground, while others bear fruit on branches. Moreover, wheat, sesame, and peanuts mature in half a year, but walnuts are perennial and bear fruit continuously.

After some thought, Li Mu finally decided to set the plant template as a semi-annual herb, which would have to be replanted after being harvested once.

Then a green light flashed, and four seeds of different sizes slowly merged in the palm of his hand, eventually forming a new brown seed the size of an egg.

Then he put the seeds in his hand into the flowerpot and began to promote transformation. At the same time, he thought of many ideas in his mind: absorbing source energy, maturing in half a year, rich in starch, etc.

As one tenth of the source energy was absorbed, five minutes later, the sprout broke out of the shell and slowly turned into a plant similar to wheat.

This plant has only two sword-shaped green leaves on both sides, and in the middle of the green leaves is a long stalk, about half a meter high. At the top of the stalk are three round fruits the size of ping-pong balls, hanging scatteredly.

The surface of the fruit is covered with a black hard shell, and its appearance looks a bit like a walnut with the flesh removed.

Li Mu picked a fruit, crushed the shell to reveal the white flesh inside, and then he put it in his mouth and chewed it without hesitation.

"Hmm...it has a mixture of sesame, walnut, and peanut flavors. It's also chewy like a pancake. Overall, it tastes sweet."

Li Mu enjoyed the taste of the fruit pulp as he chewed it. The more he chewed, the more delicious it became, as if he was eating dried beef.

The fruit pulp was chewed repeatedly in his mouth dozens of times before he slowly swallowed it after a minute.

Then he picked up the glass of water and gulped it down, but after a while he felt slightly full.

At this point, Li Mu knew that the experiment was successful, because his appetite was three times that of a normal adult man, which made him feel full, which meant that such a small fruit was equivalent to three handmade steamed buns.

"It doesn't look like a tree, but rather a bit like wheat, which evolved from dogtail grass. I probably won't be able to eat this thing many times in the future, but the hunting team going out on a mission must always have it on hand.

Let's call it "Bingliangcao" and the fruit "Bingliangwan".

After some brief thought, Li Mu gave the newly created plant a name.

There is no core in the Bingliang Pill, so the seed of the Bingliang Grass is the entire Bingliang Pill.

Li Mu now has many kinds of new plants he created, but he only has one mother plant.

In the past, whenever I needed it, I relied on it to induce labor, but this is not a long-term solution after all.

It just so happened that he had just interviewed a large number of applicants today, so the next task was to select some suitable people from them to plant some of these plants.

Planting them earlier will also allow them to grow naturally sooner, so he won't have to consume energy to stimulate their growth in the future.

After the experiment, Li Mu went to the restaurant on the first floor to have dinner.

Although he had just eaten a Bingliang Pill, he was not completely full and could still eat a little more. Besides, Aunt Wang's cooking skills were really good.

After all, the only things in the world that should not be missed are delicious food and fine wine!
(End of this chapter)