Will the kemonomimi encounter Alien Ranch Story?

"Are you done?"

"That's about enough. Don't talk. The nano-aerosol will be released in a moment. Take a deep breath."

"Visceral imaging?"

"I told you to shut up, the image on my end is all crooked!"

"Oh"

"Okay, now, take a deep breath!" A hissing sound rang out beside her head. Xingyuan took a deep breath, and her head immediately became dizzy. Her thoughts seemed to sink into a viscous swamp. Then, more white mist sprayed out, and the gelatinous lining bulged outward, completely enveloping her. A layer of frost was visibly covered on the canopy in an instant.

"...Hibernation program begins, timer: 44000:00:00, start timing." Under the guise of physical examinations or disinfection, one Ark researcher and staff member after another was tricked into hibernation pods, while the last on-duty personnel who knew the truth waited for the next batch of people to arrive.

This time, there's no need for further deception or excuses, because the sun has already demonstrated through its actions that disaster has arrived.

Ursus, Saint-Germain Castle. "Lord Witt, in your opinion, what should I choose now?" The city was in chaos. The newly formed Imperial Guard was maintaining order in the streets, but thick black smoke was still rising, and people were constantly trying to escape.

“No choice is needed, Your Majesty,” Witt replied respectfully.

“Hmm, no need to choose…” The emperor raised his head and looked at the pure gold double-headed eagle statue on the table. “Do you know why the Ursus royal family uses a double-headed eagle?”

The emperor then gave the answer himself, "That is, we want them all, without having to choose, whether it's the East or the West. Witt, take the eldest prince to the refuge. As for little Ivan, I've already had him sent away."

"What do you think of Kazdel..."

“I don’t trust them, or anyone else, but at times like this, as you said, I don’t have a choice.” Each refuge plan includes a prince, plus my own private refuge; surely one of them can ensure the continuation of Ursus.

“A thousand-year-old empire,” the Emperor of Great Yan said, standing on the platform. “Let’s proceed according to plan.”

No empire with a history spanning thousands of years would bet on just one plan. This was true of Ursus, Great Yan, and Victoria. Only emerging countries like Colombia or countries like Casimir could only choose one.

The former had to concentrate their efforts to break through the encirclement of the established empires, so they were used to focusing their efforts on one option; the latter simply did not have the luxury of having both, so at the national level, they could only choose one of the two plans.

The roads were littered with abandoned vehicles and even small land transport ships. Many more people were walking. At the entrance to the official shelters announced by the Colombian authorities, crowds of people were gathered. Under the threat of machine gun fire, people had to suppress their anxiety and register their names.

The official shelters have not yet opened, but the wealthy have already sent their children and relatives away, while they themselves have either bought expensive tickets to Kazdel or prepared small private shelters.

Regarding previous disasters, it seems that all Terrans believed that this global catastrophe would be extremely fierce, but not enough to completely destroy Terran civilization. Locally, it would only be slightly stronger than a normal natural disaster. Although the wide range and extremely long duration of the disaster forced people to take refuge, it was not an unacceptable thing for the Terrans.

Moreover, in a world prone to natural disasters, they have long been accustomed to seeking refuge and migrating, and have rich experience in this regard. Therefore, although the scene was chaotic, the people were in a state of constant fear, prices soared, robberies and thefts could be seen everywhere, and criminals were hung on streetlights, at least the money had not become worthless.

The bank was still barely operating, and although the allocation of various resources and manpower was difficult, it was still able to continue. When she arrived in the Letania area, the market was in good order and was almost unaffected.

There was nothing they could do; for several days in a row, the sun rose as usual. If it weren't for the fact that wildfires were still raging across the central Casimir Plain, and the billowing smoke and the acrid smell of burning grasslands and forests were so strong that even Victoria could smell them, it would have seemed like a hallucination.

After the initial panic of the disaster subsided, many people felt that the disaster had not yet begun or had already ended, as they faced the calm sun and the world as usual. Some people who had fled outside the city began to return one after another, because the frequency of natural disasters had increased, and it was really difficult to endure in the wild.

"People are like goldfish, their memory only lasts for 7 seconds." Hongye stood on the rooftop, looking down at the desolate streets that had returned to basic order and commercial activity. The damage caused by the previous brilliance was like bruises and scars in the city.

“There’s no other way; our job is to persuade those who absolutely must board the ark to do so,” Dr. Warfarin said, tidying up his tools.

"What if they don't want to?"

"What do you think I carry a tranquilizer gun for?" The doctor glanced at her sideways. As a Blood Demon, her saliva and blood were natural anesthetics. Even without the tranquilizer gun, she could easily paralyze the target's senses using her Originium Arts.

"Are the doctor's tickets still sold out?"

"Ah, it's far less popular than I imagined."

Everyone's initial estimates were based on the premise that the bunker city couldn't save them, and the Doctor also used this standard to select the Ark crew members. But now it seems that things were a bit wishful thinking.

They knew that only Project Ark could save them, but other ordinary people didn't know that. Even though Kazdel's propaganda stated that the underground bunkers were not very feasible, others didn't believe it.

This has led to the fact that the Ark seats that the Doctor managed to carve out through various means are still not fully booked, which is a bit ridiculous. He still has more than half of the salvation ship tickets unsold, and he can't even give them away. It's too comical.

This is also related to the previous disasters. The academic community generally believes that since there is an Originium Star Belt, the atmosphere and crust can have such a huge destructive force. If the Ark is exposed to disasters in space without any cover, wouldn't that be even worse?

Of course, there are also some more optimistic people who trust Kazdel's technology and believe that the Ark can move to the other side of Terra, using the planet as cover, or even using the planet and the moon as a double cover.

This is indeed a very convincing argument. Some scholars in Columbia, especially those from Rhine Lab, have used detailed data to prove that if there are two planets as shelter, even if the disaster is a thousand times stronger, it will not threaten the Ark.

Yes, the Doctor thinks so too. It's not a threat, at least not before the final flash. But before that, Terra will be scorched, so there's no point in staying here.

Regardless of how other countries view it, and even some voices in the Great Yan Dynasty believe it's all alarmist and there's no need for everyone to seek refuge, tickets to the Longmen launch site are indeed extremely difficult to obtain, with dense crowds of people packed in front of the waiting room, waiting to pass through.

"Beep!" The scanner swept across the wrist, and the indifferent guard nodded. "Go ahead."

The father, holding his daughter, abandoned his luggage, fearing something might go wrong. He hurriedly passed through the fence and only relaxed completely once he was seated in the cabin, his heart no longer pounding so hard.

Those who did not qualify for shelter admission were not granted entry. Both the Great Yan Dynasty and the Longmen government stated that due to the early nature of the disaster, most shelters were not yet completed. Therefore, entry was by lottery. However, they promised that shelters would continue to be built and new slots would be released daily.

Clearly, he was the one who didn't get a spot. On the black market, the price of a shelter qualification had risen to an astronomical figure, and even the Ark qualification in Kazdel, which everyone didn't think much of, had skyrocketed. Fortunately, as an employee of the Xia Group, he successfully drew the Ark shelter qualification in the group's internal lottery.

However, what he didn't know was that even if his daughter won the lottery, she wouldn't be able to board the Ark unless the Ark's slots weren't full before the final launch, in which case she could fill in according to the time order.

It now seems highly likely that the Ark won't be fully occupied before launch. Faced with so many wealthy and powerful people and Terrans who have no choice but to commit suicide on the spot, the Doctor doesn't know what to say. He can only convert some of the spaces originally planned for them into Ark cabins, which makes others even more convinced that Kazdel is fucking cheating them out of their money.

In particular, their project to build a super-giant bunker city underground in the Dragon Ridge Mountains was exposed by an internal spy, which made more people believe it was a scam. In order to reassure people about entering the hibernation pods, the Doctor had to generate bunker cities that were also hibernating, so as to avoid the claustrophobia problem caused by years or even decades of refuge.

To this end, countries resorted to near-military threats and border clashes to force the Doctor to reluctantly hand over the hibernation pod technology. There was no other way; everyone had discovered that hibernation could not only preserve more manpower and resources but also minimize the imbalance of Terra's power structure during the shelter period.

After all, once they go in, the gates won't open for at least ten years. So, when they come out, whether their former subordinates will still obey them is a pressing issue for the rulers of Terra. But hibernation is different. For everyone, this long period of time is just a blink of an eye.

Given that this group of people were willing to use force or even die together for a peaceful death, the Doctor had no choice but to reluctantly hand over the technology and then dispatch Rhodes Island's special operations team to kidnap them one by one.

These guys can choose to die on the spot, but Terra's scientists, scholars, philosophers, skilled technicians, engineers, agricultural experts who are extremely good at farming, and brave and skilled commanders are all valuable assets that cannot be wasted. Even if it means kidnapping, we must take them away, stuff them into hibernation pods, and send them to the Ark.

"Do you want to be gods?!" The exorcist screamed incoherently with a rag stuffed in his mouth, but the black-haired girl in front of him was unmoved. She simply tied him up tighter, pulled out the rag, and replaced it with a sock, stuffing it back in. "Shut up, take him away!" Ye Ban washed his hands with water in disgust. This civil engineering exorcist's socks could practically be used as biological weapons.

"Is everything packed?" Texas leaned against the car window, a cigarette between her fingers. "It's all taken care of. Jingzhe is the best civil engineer from the Celestial Master's Mansion. She went to the Zuo Mansion to pack up the others. I hope everything goes smoothly for her."

"Don't worry, she took half of our potent hypnotic aerosol. It's Xia's research and development achievement. Even the fiercest beast can be knocked out in 5 seconds and won't wake up for 6 seconds."

With a clatter, the Taoist priest was stuffed into a life support box and thrown into the truck bed, which was already filled with such boxes, neatly arranged like rows of French bread, with advertisements on the outer shells saying "Alloy Coffins, 30% Off".

The vehicle also bears the words "Paradise Bird Funeral Company." Is there any vehicle that could more easily smuggle people out of the Great Yan than a funeral procession? Moreover, it's perfectly normal for such a vehicle to have a cold storage and a large number of people sleeping in coffins inside. The only troublesome part is to make up each person and use special soft clay to change their appearance, so that even if they are stopped on the road and their boxes are opened for inspection, no problems will be found.

"Let's go, let's get these people out of here first." The vehicle quickly left the Celestial Master's residence, but the cops from Da Yan didn't arrive until several hours later. It wasn't that they were slow to react, but rather that the Left Vice Minister's family and the Celestial Master's neighbor had both called the police. So, which side should they go to first?

Chapter Ninety-Nine: Famine

Chapter 99

Humans, regardless of their species, are forgetful. A month after the disaster, the market has basically returned to normal. Whether it's shelters or arks, the time before they can be put into use is incredibly long. In the end, a disaster that will happen years or even decades later is no match for the problem of food next month.

After the initial panic, a month passed as if nothing had happened. By the end of the second month, most people believed it was just an accident and that the real disaster was still a long way off.

While some elites have purchased large numbers of shelter qualifications and civilians have actively registered their personal information, this trend has gradually begun to decline. Some people have even begun to resist this registration and movement restriction, believing that it interferes with their freedom and lives—and these people are mostly urban residents with relatively good living conditions.

As for the agricultural residents in the suburbs, they are still cleaning up the mess caused by the previous small-scale solar storms. The most serious one is Kazimir, where wildfires are almost unstoppable, costing many firefighters their lives and are difficult to control. In the end, they can only be regarded as a natural disaster and left to rage.

"The price of grain has risen by 30% in a single day. This is not a good thing." Kazimierz is one of Terra's granaries. A single fire burned all the unharvested crops and newly planted seedlings to the ground.

With the mass deaths of pastures and livestock, and the contamination of water sources by carcasses, it can be said that more than half of the country's harvest has been completely lost this year in Kazimir.

The remaining half was only slightly better than a complete crop failure, because they were able to replant with fast-growing turnips and potatoes in time. However, they were struggling to even sustain their own country's basic survival, let alone export it.

However, food production in Kazdel was also greatly affected by the Ark. Question: What took up the most space on the Ark? Answer: Food, the food that would sustain the colony until the harvest season.

Because you can't eat right before harvest season, you also need to consider problems caused by technology, climate, or various other unforeseen circumstances along the way. You need to leave a considerable amount of food surplus, and these are what account for the largest dead weight load of the Ark.

Based on a daily consumption of 400g of dry rations per person, and deducting approximately 30% for recycling and reuse, each person needs at least 200g of dry rations per day. This is without considering the psychological and physiological damage caused by eating this stuff continuously for almost 3 months. In other words, without redundancy, each person needs to prepare 18kg of compressed dry rations, the kind with a density higher than a rock.

We really can't live like this, even in this state of cultural breakdown. It's not for any particular reason, but that so-called efficient food service is actually incredibly inefficient because you also have to provide psychological support to these people.

They will become passive and unmotivated, and coupled with the inevitable loss of vitamins, which may lead to hospitalization and the consumption of more troublesome medical supplies, the slight increase in efficiency caused by using these synthetic foods is completely not worth the cost.

Emergency food is only for emergencies. This means that for a person whose hibernation pod is only 2 cubic meters in size, the supplies prepared for him, including redundancies, are about 2.5 cubic meters of food-related supplies, of which only 0.5 cubic meters are compressed dry rations.

This is why the single-layer hibernation device is as thick as 10 meters; most of the space is used to store their living supplies, unless the doctor believes that the Terrans could survive from the Stone Age by hunting fish even on an alien planet.

For this reason, the vast majority of grains and various food products produced in Kazdel were used to manufacture the Composite Ark food project, as well as for the necessary seed saving. So what takes up the most space in each person's 2.5 cubic meters of food supplies? It's the seeds.

One acre of land requires at least 5 to 6 catties of seeds, and the seeds cannot be ground or compressed, so their volume is quite huge. To maintain the self-sufficiency of the entire future colony, the space occupied by the seeds alone could fit another person, the number of people in the existing Ark seats, into the space. However, if you don't bring the seeds, then putting people in there would only result in a suspended death sentence.

The technology of synthesizing starch in the air is usable, but the technical problem is that the required chemical reagents are not much lighter than the seeds you bring, and you also need to bring larger equipment. Without achieving industrial scale, the unit production efficiency may actually be lower than that of directly growing crops.

The prerequisite for industrial scale is that the colonies expand to a large enough size and have a sufficient industrial population to mine raw materials, manufacture food, and maintain equipment. However, the problem is that colonies of this size can basically be self-sufficient, and such equipment is just icing on the cake. Colonies that need to consume stored food and imported food cannot form industrial-scale production at all.

Moreover, while air can synthesize starch, it cannot synthesize all the nutrients needed by humans. In addition to staple food seeds, there are also various vegetable and fruit seeds. That's not all; the doctor also has to stuff in enough Terra biological samples and seeds, and even bring a whole bunch of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria cells.

Finally, there's the Ark passenger. Even if hibernation is used to reduce most of the consumption on the road, the supplies they need would require a much larger and heavier load on the Ark than they themselves. This is why, after careful calculation, the early people decided to simply send their brains instead.

However, Kazdel is packing food and sending it up, which means that the famine in Terra will arrive on schedule next year. This is a mixed blessing for the Ark Project. On the one hand, the famine victims will be scattered everywhere, making it much easier to select Ark passengers. On the other hand, people who are about to starve to death will have much lower expectations for the future, making it much easier to break up their family structures.

On the downside, the international situation will become extremely severe, and the spread of famine will be a huge blow to the construction of shelter cities, because workers also need to eat. The food storage pressure in shelters is even greater than in the Ark. At least the Ark only needs to provide food for colonists in the first year, while shelters can feed their inhabitants for at least 10 years.

Everyone is hiding grain underground or in the air, but one of the three major grain depots has been rendered useless this time. A 10% reduction in grain production does not mean a 10% increase in prices, but rather the starvation of 10% of people who cannot afford grain. Now, its production has decreased by about 20% to 30%, and consumption has increased even more, resulting in a reduction of at least 50% in the actual amount of grain in circulation.

If this can be considered a heavy blow, then according to Lao Xia and the meteorological observations of the space station, there is even more fun waiting for the Terrans. Don't think that the real solar storm is still a while away, and that you can rest easy during this period.

Due to the massive wildfires in Casimir, a large amount of dust has been released into the atmosphere. In addition, the sun's brightness is weakening. As a result, Ursus, Columbia, and Da Yan will be hit by the most powerful cold wave in history this year.

The Victoria Valley will experience the most severe heatwave in history, as well as torrential winter rains, due to the impact of cold air masses and warm equatorial ocean air masses that have been evaporated by the sun. Given the topography of the Victoria Valley, the combination of drought followed by flooding will make large-scale crop reductions, if not complete crop failure, inevitable.

As for Glassvale, the entire nation is grateful that they built a super-large artificial lake for tourism, which can not only store water to cope with the winter rains but also the summer drought.

Colombia's summer drought is not a major problem, and the sun's bombardment has caused large-scale melting of the Sami Mountains in the north. However, while the drought is not a major issue, floods and mudslides are a bigger problem.

Several reservoirs in Colombia are running low on water. The fierce floodwaters from upstream almost swept away Colombia's largest hydroelectric power station and reservoir on the spot. Fortunately, the timely release of water, at the cost of sacrificing a small area of ​​agricultural facilities along the coast, alleviated the disaster.

Now that their reservoirs are at high water levels, the problem of high temperatures and drought in the coming summer will be much easier to solve. However, when winter comes and cold waves arrive, the number of people who will die in Colombia's favelas and shelters is chilling if one only needs to make a slight estimate.

"Is our water storage system still working well?" The Doctor couldn't help but ask about Kazdel's own water storage and agricultural systems, which he normally didn't need to worry about at all.

"It's not a big problem, just a minor one." Old Xia said there was nothing to worry about. "A reduction in production is certain, but it's not that serious. In fact, in our agricultural system, this level of disaster is only considered a small-scale disaster. As long as it's not a 20-kilometer-diameter meteorite hitting the ground with a bang, followed by a seven- or eight-year-long cold winter, it's easy to deal with."

Most planets in the universe don't have a satellite as large as the Moon to act as a shield, so it's perfectly normal for a meteorite tens of kilometers long to suddenly smash into your other hemisphere, creating a bunch of volcanoes and putting on a show of winter coming—as long as the meteorite doesn't fall right on your head.

"And even in the worst winter, it's not a huge problem. We can just switch to cold-weather crops. I have plenty of cold-weather crops here. We can plant this in the winter and water-pot bulbous shrubs in the summer, and there won't be any problems."

The water jug ​​bulb shrub is a berry-bearing shrub and one of the ingredients for Covenant condiments. Its root system consists of huge nodules that can store large amounts of fresh water during heavy rains for use during droughts, making it ideal for cultivation on desert and arid planets.

It also works well for dealing with places like target colonies where there are distinct rainy and dry seasons, but some targeted modifications are needed. If you're lucky, it should improve the soil to some extent instead of causing a large loss of organic matter.

"The real problem isn't the climate, but that our bunker city's needs overlap with those of the Ark, and our manufacturing capacity probably won't be able to complete both projects within the expected timeframe."

"Prioritize the needs of the Ark, and the scale of the underground cities is not actually that large." Originally intended for almost all those who remained in Terra, they were essentially large underground cities, somewhat similar in size to Neo Tokyo-3 in EVA.

The giant hemispherical underground space is divided into thirty layers from top to bottom. The bottom layer is the geothermal power generation layer, followed by the cold steam condensation layer, then the water storage layer, then the planting layer, and finally the more than twenty residential layers.

Now, due to hibernation, the original plan of five such cities that could accommodate more than 20 million people has been reduced to one, and the number of floors and the size are shrinking.

However, it still requires storing a huge amount of food and supplies, and it also requires a terrifying amount of engineering and construction capacity. Compared to Kazdel's underground bunker city, even the Great Yan's bunker city plan seems like a small-scale toy.

The Great Yan's bunker city is a cylindrical structure that utilizes the underground refuge facilities of the ancestors. It must be said that the millennium-old empire has abundant resources; they have enough ancestral bunker facilities and space launch silos to be converted into bunker towns.