Apocalyptic Hoarding Diary

Chapter 452: Little Harvest

As night fell, some people were still on the mountain, their flashlight beams flickering on the distant hillside.

Xu Xiaoyan stood at the door of the wooden house, looking at the scattered lights, and unconsciously touched the leaf-shaped mark on her waist with her right hand.

Lan Yue poked her head out of the house, holding two bags of pre-packaged dried goods: "Xiao Yan, should we send these to the trading point? Or keep them for ourselves?"

Xu Xiaoyan withdrew her gaze, turned around and walked into the wooden house, squatted down and looked at the bags of dried goods.

The mushrooms included pine mushrooms, green-headed mushrooms, maitake mushrooms, and some other miscellaneous mushrooms that I couldn't name but were confirmed to be non-toxic, totaling about forty kilograms.

"I have connections, and I'll sell them privately," Xu Xiaoyan said. "Don't worry about this, I'll handle it."

Lan Yue nodded and moved the bags of dried goods to the corner and stacked them neatly.

After she finished doing all that, she clapped her hands, sat down on her sleeping bag, stretched, looked at the flashlights still wandering the mountain outside the door, and sighed deeply.

"Get up at two o'clock," Blue Moon seemed to be confirming to herself, "I must get up!"

Xu Xiaoyan did not answer. She had already leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, her breathing gradually becoming even and long.

When the alarm clock vibrated at exactly two o'clock in the morning, Xu Xiaoyan opened her eyes almost the instant her watch vibrated. She quietly crawled out of her sleeping bag.

The air inside the cabin was cold and damp, and the white breath exhaled was clearly visible in the beam of a flashlight.

She put on her coat in the dark, tucked her trousers into her socks, and tied her shoelaces, keeping all her movements quiet.

Even the zipper was pulled little by little by pinching the zipper tab, for fear that the harsh metallic scraping sound would wake Blue Moon.

But as soon as she slung her backpack over her shoulder, she heard a rustling sound behind her.

"You didn't wake me up," Lan Yue's voice was heavy with sleepiness; she had already sat up.

She was groping for her shoes in the dark, her hair a mess like a bird's nest, her eyes not fully open, but her hands were already tying her shoelaces.

Xu Xiaoyan didn't reply, but simply tilted the flashlight beam towards Lan Yue to illuminate the ground beneath her feet.

Lan Yue squinted as she put on her shoes, wrapped her scarf around her neck, reached for her backpack from the corner of the wall, and stood up.

"Walk".

The two people left the wooden house one after the other.

The mountain forest at two in the morning is a completely different world from the daytime. The beam of a flashlight can only illuminate an area of ​​about ten meters ahead.

Blue Moon walked ahead, following the route she had chosen yesterday, crossing the meadow behind the wooden house, and disappearing into the pine forest.

Hiking on mountain trails at night is much more difficult than during the day.

She had only walked a few steps when she stepped on a loose stone and slipped. Xu Xiaoyan grabbed her backpack strap from behind, preventing her from falling.

"Be careful," Xu Xiaoyan said in a low voice, but it still sounded exceptionally clear in the quiet mountain forest.

Lan Yue steadied herself, nodded, and continued walking forward.

She slowed down, taking each step carefully before moving on, the flashlight beam moving slowly across the ground, making sure not to miss any corner where mold might grow.

Deep in the pine forest, Blue Moon's flashlight beam suddenly stopped.

There were indeed mushrooms there, a few white pine mushrooms that reflected a moist sheen in the beam of light.

She squatted down, pinched the base with her fingertips, and gently twisted and lifted it, and the mushroom emerged intact from the soil.

But her brows furrowed as well; the fallen leaves on this small patch of ground had been disturbed, and footprints were clearly visible.

The edges of the mushroom cluster showed obvious signs of picking; the largest and tenderest ones were gone, leaving only four or five medium-sized ones and a pile of crushed fragments.

"I've been here," Lan Yue said, putting the mushrooms into a cloth bag, standing up, and sweeping the beam of her flashlight around.

The ground in this area has been almost completely turned over, fallen leaves have been scattered everywhere, some mushrooms have been picked, and some have been trampled.

Several flowers were uprooted and thrown away, probably because the person picking them thought they weren't tender or big enough to be worth carrying down the mountain.

Xu Xiaoyan squatted down, picked up the few small mushrooms that had been thrown away, and turned them over to look at the back of the caps.

It's a green-headed mushroom, and the quality isn't bad, but the shape is a bit small, about the size of a thumbnail.

She pinched the stem with her fingernail; it was crisp and juicy, not an old mushroom.

She put the few small mushrooms into the cloth bag, patted the mud off her hands, and said, "Let's keep going up to the slope we didn't go to yesterday."

The two quickened their pace, no longer wasting time in the areas that had already been cleared.

They climbed up the ridgeline, passed through a thicket of bushes, and climbed over a large rock, finally reaching the pine forest they had marked the day before but hadn't had time to collect the pine needles.

The pine trees here are denser and thicker, their canopies almost completely blocking out the sky, and there are indeed still mushrooms.

Blue Moon found several clumps of gray tree flowers in the crevice between the roots of an old pine tree and a rock.

Underneath a thick layer of fallen leaves, I found seven or eight pine mushrooms that hadn't yet sprouted. These "muffled mushrooms" covered by fallen leaves leave a fingerprint if you lightly touch the edge of their caps.

She carefully picked them one by one and placed them on the top layer of her backpack, afraid of crushing them.

Xu Xiaoyan found some scattered green-headed mushrooms and copper-green mushrooms at the edge of the forest, near the ridgeline.

There weren't many, but they were fresh. She squatted down and picked them one by one, and the cloth bag in her hand slowly gained weight.

But overall, the harvest was far less than yesterday.

The two searched the woods for nearly two hours, covering every corner they had scouted out the day before.

We picked almost all the mushrooms we could, but even combined, they only filled two backpacks to almost full.

Blue Moon leaned against the tree trunk, tucked the flashlight under her arm, and held the heavy bag of mushrooms in her hands. She didn't complain, but the expression on her face said it all.

Xu Xiaoyan stood at the edge of the woods, the beam of her flashlight sweeping across the distant hillside.

The beam of light swept across the bushes and piles of rocks, and several hundred meters away in a ravine, she saw the beams of flashlights—not just one, but several—swaying on the distant hillside.

"There are people there." Xu Xiaoyan turned off the flashlight, pulled Lan Yue back two steps, and hid behind a tree trunk. "Over there, in the ravine, there are at least three or four people."

Lan Yue looked in the direction she pointed, and saw the points of light moving slowly on the hillside. Some stayed in one place for a long time, as if they were carefully searching a small area.

Some swept across large areas of ground quickly, as if they were in a hurry to reach the next hilltop.

Judging from their location and movement trajectory, those lights didn't seem to belong to people who went up the mountain in the early morning.

That ravine is at least a forty-minute walk from the campsite; a normal person wouldn't choose such a far place as their first stop in the early morning.

The only possibility is that those people didn't come down the mountain yesterday evening and stayed on the mountain all night.