Chapter 83: After a fruitless search for relatives, all that effort led to nothing.

Lei Yan exclaimed in shock, "How can there be so many clouds in the ground? Could it be that immortals have descended to earth?"

The live stream chat erupted in laughter. [It was a misunderstanding after all; it wasn't some celestial being descending to earth, just dry ice.]

Lu Xuan had been unconscious for two days, neither streaming nor opening blind boxes. Now that he's awake, he naturally wants to make up for the viewers by giving them the blind boxes they missed in the previous two days.

Aside from most of the duplicate items, dry ice is one of the new items in regular blind boxes. After two hundred draws, I got more than a dozen boxes, ranging from 5KG to 20KG.

The most memorable use of this thing for ordinary people in modern times is to create stage effects, with smoke and mist creating an ethereal atmosphere.

There was no need for this in ancient times, but dry ice absorbs heat quickly when water is poured on it, greatly reducing the ambient temperature. In extremely hot seasons, it can be used as an 'outdoor air conditioner'. It is cheap, effective, and has a very high cost-performance ratio.

With the dry ice air conditioner, the villagers no longer feel so uncomfortable when farming.

While it's impossible to spread the dry ice effect across the entire area, it's perfectly fine to create a rest area for everyone.

Lei Yan marveled at the wonder of dry ice, and then quickly got to work weeding.

Lu Qing then used her water-based superpowers to fill the wooden bucket with water.

After two days of testing, she has a general idea of ​​her ability threshold.

Currently, her magical arts, or rather, her superpowers, are only at level one. In a day, she can only condense about two hundred liters of water, which is roughly equivalent to about twenty modern bottled water containers.

It's not a lot, but it's not a little either. It's enough for drinking and daily use, but it's not enough for watering the fields, which requires watering five or six times a day.

Moreover, this amount of water was accumulated over a day, which took Lu Qing an hour or two to replenish after each use. In reality, only five buckets could be condensed at a time.

The main source of water for watering still comes from the stream and the waterfall. We fill large plastic buckets with water that Lu Xuan bought and bring it back from our space.

Although her superpowers aren't very useful yet, Lu Qing still tries to use them all up every day because Lu Xuan said that this would help her improve her strength faster.

She has clearly felt the progress in the past two days. For example, she can now condense about one cup more water than she did on the first day.

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When the agreed-upon rest time arrived, the villagers gathered in twos and threes under the trees surrounded by dry ice to rest.

Li Jing, Zhang Chengming, Xiong Mao, and the others took out several buckets of chilled mung bean soup and various colored popsicles in molds from their spatial storage.

The villagers took their empty bowls and each quenched their thirst with a bowl of mung bean soup. They then casually picked out an ice pop from the mold and took a bite, their faces full of comfortable and happy expressions.

Lei Yan took an orange popsicle from his wife, took a bite, and exclaimed in surprise, "It's so cold, and it tastes like orange! What is this? And the mung bean soup everyone's drinking, did Ah Xuan help freeze it?"

Lu Qing laughed and said, "Of course not, Ah Xuan can't possibly take care of feeding the whole village. He has no obligation to do so."

"He recently got a great new thing from a fairy called a refrigerator. You can put food or water in it and it will cool down in no time. It can also freeze water directly into ice. It's very convenient."

“Ah Xuan got two refrigerators in total. One is at home, and the other is for the village. These days, the village freezes a lot of ice cubes and puts them into the mung bean soup every day, which is both cool and refreshing.”

"As for popsicles, they're basically frozen fruit juice. They're more convenient and cooler than fruit juice, aren't they delicious?"

Lei Yan finished the popsicle in a few bites, nodding and exclaiming, "The gods have so many good things. Luckily we have this, otherwise the villagers would have suffered terribly."

When he woke up today, he could clearly feel that his temperature was much higher than before he fell into a deep sleep, and that was indeed the case.

Today's lowest temperature is 40 degrees Celsius, and the highest temperature is close to 50 degrees Celsius.

Previously, the villagers didn't have much of a concept of temperature, but Lu Xuan would occasionally mention some new knowledge when chatting with Zhang Chengming and the others, and gradually everyone learned about it.

For example, what does it mean that their summer temperature used to be only 27 or 28 degrees Celsius? It means that the temperature has doubled!

Without the bio-clothing suits, most of the villagers would probably have died from the heat.

Even though most people working in the fields wear bio-suits, their faces and hands are still exposed.

Even with a straw hat and ice packs, they still sweat profusely while working.

In the past two days, some elderly people and children in the village who are in poor health have shown signs of mild heatstroke. They basically do not go out during the day and drink mung bean soup every day to cool down.

People like Ye Jing, with their special physical condition, especially need to ask Lu Xuan to exchange for heatstroke relief medicine.

The villagers had heard from Lu Xuan that there was an even higher version of the bio-clothing, but the price would be three times higher, costing 150 jin of grain, which even the village chief's family couldn't bear to exchange.

So far, apart from the Lu family of four, everyone else is still wearing ordinary clothes.

No matter how hot it gets, it won't kill you. During a catastrophe, it's good enough if you can survive and not go hungry. How much more comfortable do you want?

The disaster victims outside are probably suffering much more than they are.

The villagers chatted while drinking cold drinks and eating popsicles.

Some were talking about what was happening in the fields, while others were lamenting how the stream had become noticeably shallower in the past two days. Among them, Zhang Chengming mentioned an interesting story to Lei Yan, who had been sleeping for two days and was relatively out of touch with the news.

"Yesterday, Li Tuo was tired from work and had nothing to do, so he washed his entrenching tool clean and left it in the sun for a while. Then he put some oil on it and cracked an egg on it. Guess what? The egg was cooked in the blink of an eye! You can use the entrenching tool as a pot now!"

Lei Yan was surprised. "You can do that? That sounds really interesting." He couldn't help but want to try it out.

Lu Xuan, who was sitting to the side, happened to see the revelations from the viewers in the live chat, and his expression became somewhat subtle.

[Haha, did anyone see Xingbo's trending topics today? It's so funny! Yesterday someone tried to make mutant eggs like Li Tuo, but the smell of the fried eggs poisoned them, and they had to be rushed to the emergency room.]

[Of course I saw it. That idiot thought it would be fine as long as he didn't eat it, but he underestimated the toxicity of the mutant egg. He didn't expect that even the taste was poisonous.]

[It's so ridiculous it could easily be on the list of most baffling human behaviors of the year.]

[Friendly advice: Children should not try this. It could be fatal.]

Lu Xuan: Sure enough, there are always people who like to court death in any era.

The villagers chatted about other things.

Suddenly, someone said, "It's so hot now, I wonder if the people who go out to look for their relatives will get into trouble."

The others paused slightly. They calculated that those people had been gone for six or seven days. By now, they should have found their way back to where they were.

If we were moving fast, we might already be on our way back.

As soon as they started talking, someone rushed over and shouted, "They're back! The people who came down the mountain are back!"

Everyone was startled, and several people stood up abruptly in excitement.

Lu Qing asked with concern, "I wonder if they found the person successfully."

Lu Xuan didn't speak, but observing the newcomer's unpleasant expression, he already had a guess in his mind.

This guess was confirmed when they returned to the cave and saw several people lying in a row, looking haggard and barely alive.

The women from several families hurriedly fed their husbands the heatstroke medicine they had obtained from the village chief, while asking Zhao Yong, the only one who still seemed to be in good spirits, what had happened.

Li Tie asked in a deep voice, "You couldn't find a single one of them?"

Zhao Yong said with a bitter face, "We couldn't find Baisong Town at all."

The surrounding villagers were shocked. "How come they haven't found it? Could it be that even Baisong Town was buried by the earthquake?"

"No," Zhao Yong explained, looking somewhat embarrassed.

The villagers thought they were in such a sorry state because they were devastated by not finding the person, but the truth was that they turned back halfway before even reaching their destination!

They did initially follow the direction they had originally taken up the mountain.

However, with Lu Xuan leading the way up the mountain, they barely memorized the route. The mountain path was rugged and the vegetation was dense. On the second day of their journey, they began to stray off course and lose their way.

When the ground shook and another earthquake struck on the third day, the group, who were already traumatized by earthquakes, were terrified and decided to back out.

But before they could turn around, they encountered a group of wild boars that were also frightened and charging around. The group hurriedly fled, but in their panic, they lost their way completely.

Over the next few days, the temperature continued to rise, and one biosuit was not enough to keep up with. The cooling patches were used for much less time in the high temperatures. After getting lost in the mountains for two days, the condition of several of the older men deteriorated, and they almost lost their ability to move.

Today, Zhao Yong gritted his teeth and hardened his heart, leaving them in a shady place so they could go out and find their way on their own.

If he hadn't been lucky enough to find a familiar direction and run into the people who went out hunting that day to help carry the person back, they might have died in the mountains, let alone find the person.

The villagers listened in silence, and the live stream was filled with question marks and speechlessness.

They were willing to morally blackmail the streamer to go out and find their daughter, and I thought they were very determined. But this is what they got?

After all that searching, I found nothing.

The group set an example for the other villagers with their actions, showing them just how vulnerable they were during the cataclysmic period without Lu Xuan's protection.

Zhao Yong's father had relatively mild symptoms among those who were lying down; he only had mild heatstroke and recovered in a short while after taking some heatstroke medicine.

Next were Zhou Yunshan, who caught a heatstroke, and Sun Dahai and He Lao Er, who suffered from moderate heatstroke. The latter two lay in bed for more than half an hour before recovering.

The group of people who had regained their senses looked embarrassed and ashamed, clearly feeling that the outcome of their ordeal was shameful.

When Li Tie asked them, "Do you want to look for more people?"

The group shook their heads in unison, "Forget it, let's take care of ourselves first. If something really happens to our daughter, it's her fate."

They can't really disregard their living relatives and their own lives.

Li Tie was not surprised at all and did not say anything. He patted Zhou Yunshan on the shoulder and said, "We have cleared land in the mountains. You can rest for a couple of days and then farm with your families."

The topic of "reclaiming wasteland?" predictably diverted the attention of the group.

When the villagers said that Lu Qing and Lei Yan also possessed immortal arts, the villagers could now drink cold drinks and eat popsicles every day, and they were all shocked and opened their mouths wide.

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Author's Note: If all goes well, I will start updating daily from now on, for as long as I can~