Regardless of the different thoughts of the educated youth, once the rice was cooked, Shen Mu Ning blanched the sweet potato tips in water, then sprinkled them with various seasonings and prepared to eat.

When Shen Mu Ning was eating, several educated youths had already finished their meals and were washing clothes in the yard.

They watched as Shen Mu Ning finished showing off a huge bowl of food, while Ding Xiang, thinking she was being discreet, secretly glanced at Shen Mu Ning's stomach.

"Shen Zhiqing, where did all your food go? I don't see any change in your stomach."

As Dingxiang spoke, she couldn't help but feel a little envious of Shen Muning. As a girl from Sichuan, loving to eat was ingrained in her bones.

But she had the desire but not the means. She neither had the means to cook all sorts of delicious food for herself, nor did she have a big appetite like Shen Mu Ning.

"Hmm, maybe some of it was already digested while I was still eating." Shen Mu Ning's words were not just a perfunctory response to Ding Xiang.

Her body did absorb some of the energy during her meal, and the undigested portion provided energy for her afternoon activities.

Dingxiang glanced enviously at Shen Muning's limbs and belly, wishing she had such strength and appetite.

After finishing her sentence, Shen Mu Ning went to clean up the dishes, then carried the coal stove into the room and placed it in the kitchen of the space.

Yesterday, after she lit the coal stove, she tried putting it in the kitchen, and it burned well until this morning.

This solves the problem of having to restart it every time you use it.

Shen Mu Ning planned to go to the mountains to collect firewood at noon, and also practice her wood-type supernatural ability.

She discovered yesterday that there were more woody elements in the forest than when she was at the educated youth settlement, and the deeper she went into the mountains, the more concentrated they became.

So she decided that she would go into the mountains to cultivate every day at noon. She dared not leave the educated youth settlement at night, because she remembered that Chu Mingxu in the novel was a soldier with keen senses. He might find out that she was not at the educated youth settlement at any time. She would not expose such a weakness before she was sure of his character.

However, the novel states that the reason he was sent to the countryside was that his grandparents and parents were forced to step down due to political enemies. Later, Chu Mingxu's family did their best to negotiate and changed the location of his relocation to Xinshan Brigade.

Those people were wary of Chu Mingxu's strength and feared that if he stayed in the army, their family might rise again one day, and they would likely face retaliation. So they continued to target the Chu family and their in-laws.

Chu Mingxu withdrew from the army and volunteered to go to the countryside to take care of his grandparents, which made the hostile forces slightly relax their targeting of them.

In this way, the Chu family's second son and his family were able to preserve their jobs as relatives by marriage and were not implicated.

However, in 1975, an unexpected blizzard struck, causing the cowshed where people who had been sent down for reform to collapse.

Although the villagers of Xinshan Brigade provided timely rescue, Chu Mingxu's grandparents still did not survive and passed away in March 1976.

After the exoneration document for the Chu family was issued, Chu Mingxu returned to the Chu family. However, because he had a lingering resentment over the deaths of his grandparents, he never continued to serve the country and went abroad shortly after the reform and opening up.

Thinking about these things, Shen Mu Ning felt a little uncomfortable.

Although she lived for eight or nine years in the dark apocalypse in her previous life, she still remembered the warriors who died protecting ordinary people at the beginning of the apocalypse.

After she became powerful, she upheld the will of her predecessors, doing her best to fight the zombie king and protect the weak humans in the base.

Therefore, knowing that these people who were devoted to their country and dedicated their lives to the liberation and development of the nation could not have a good end due to the circumstances of the times still made her feel uneasy.

She thought that by coming here, she might be able to do her part to protect people like Chu Mingxu's grandparents.

Shen Mu Ning made a mental note of this. She wasn't familiar with Chu Mingxu yet, nor did she have the opportunity to get to know the people in the cowshed. Besides, people were still very secretive about the people living in the cowshed. It would be better to suppress it for now, wait for things to develop, and then carry out her plan to save people when the opportunity arose.

Shen Mu Ning isn't carrying a basket today; she's only prepared hemp ropes for bundling firewood, planning to carry it back directly with a wooden stick after entering the mountains.

The problem was that her basket couldn't hold much firewood, which limited her ability to carry it. She wanted to carry as much firewood as possible each time so she could make fewer trips.

Shen Mu Ning traveled light, carrying only a wood-chopping knife and hemp rope, and went up the mountain with the other educated youth.

It's not yet the busy farming season, so the work isn't too tiring each day. Therefore, the former educated youth take advantage of this time to go up the mountain to collect firewood.

Otherwise, when the busy farming season arrives, there won't be such a long rest time at noon every day, not to mention that the work in the fields is exhausting enough, not to mention the tempting mountain produce waiting for them to pick.

So during this period they did their best to gather firewood, going to the mountains almost every noon.

Even Lin Siqi and Zhang Jiayang, who were exhausted, had to go together because the older educated youth had told them the rules of the educated youth settlement when they were gathering firewood yesterday.

That is, each person who cooks every day needs to keep half a bundle of firewood in the kitchen. These can be small branches, while the thicker branches are carefully stored away for heating the kang (a traditional heated bed) in winter.

As for the firewood that wasn't used for cooking, it was stored separately in a pigsty for use in cooking when they didn't have time to go up the mountain to collect firewood or hibernate.

The educated youth stored the leftover firewood in their designated pigsties or woodsheds, and took turns burning it each day when heating the kang (a traditional heated bed) in winter. If anyone didn't have enough firewood, they had to pay the other educated youth according to the rules.

It's almost August now that this group of educated youth has arrived in the countryside. Based on the usual wintering period, there are still four months until the heavy snow closes off the mountains. At that time, they will have to rely on the firewood they have saved to survive.

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