The hum of the drainage pump finally stopped. Chen Hao plunged the wrench into the mud, panting as if he had just run three kilometers. He collapsed on the edge of the field, his trousers rolled up to his knees, his calves covered with a few rotten leaves, looking like a bloated bun pulled out of a mud pit.
"Soil permeability remediation... You make it sound like it can actually breathe." He looked up at Nana. "The land is flooded like this, how can it still breathe deeply?"
Nana stood beside the loosened soil mound, as the robotic arm slowly retracted its spectral scanning module. "The moisture content has dropped below the critical level; we can begin replanting now."
"Easy for you to say, my hands are practically numb." Chen Hao struggled to sit up, rubbing his lower back. "Do you think we could hire a temporary worker? Even a scarecrow that knows how to hoe the ground would do."
“The current workforce allocation matches the optimal solution of the survival model.” She paused. “You are the only option to survive.”
"Thank you so much, I'm so touched I could cry."
He propped himself up on his knees, picked up a hoe, and prepared to loosen the soil. He had only taken two steps when he tripped and nearly fell under the pumpkin trellis.
"Who's pulling the rope like that—" Before he could finish speaking, he looked down and froze.
It's not a rope.
It's a vine.
The pumpkin and tomato vines intertwined like two wrestling snakes, their leaves overlapping and their stems bluish-green from the pressure. One of the tomato branches was bent low, its leaves drooping and slightly yellowed at the edges.
"Goodness, two vegetables are fighting?" Chen Hao squatted down and reached out to separate them. "I thought plants just grew quietly, but I didn't know they could fight for territory too?"
He snapped the vine apart with a sharp crack, but in less than half a minute, the pumpkin's new shoots quietly climbed back up, their movements slow but resolute.
"Hey, you're pretty vengeful."
Nana approached, her optical eye switching to bioanalysis mode, and a pale blue beam swept across the entangled area.
“Light competition was detected,” she said. “The chlorophyll a absorption peak in pumpkins is concentrated in the 660 nm red light band, while tomatoes prefer the 450 nm blue-violet light band. Currently, they share a white LED light source, which leads to a structural competition between the two to obtain effective light.”
"Translate into human language."
"They felt that the other was blocking their sunlight."
"So this was... a physical altercation triggered by sunbathing?"
"To be precise, it is an adjustment of growth strategy under the competition for resources."
Chen Hao stared at the two stubbornly clinging vines and sighed, "I thought the torrential rain would be the biggest challenge, but it turns out the plants are even more difficult to manage than the weather. If you're not careful, even the vegetables will start to curl up."
He stood up, brushed the dirt off his pants, and said, "So, do you have any ideas? You can't expect me to be a vegetable mediator here every day, can you?"
Nana raised her arm, connected to the control terminal, and brought up the lighting system interface. "Spectral zoning control can be implemented. By adjusting the wavelength of the supplementary lighting, micro-environmental isolation can be created in space."
"Speak human language a second time."
"Give the pumpkins more red light and the tomatoes more blue light, so they feel like they've won."
"Oh, farming with the method of mental victory."
Five minutes later, the new lighting program started.
The lights in the pumpkin area switched to a warm, reddish tone, like a window at dusk; the lights in the tomato area were a cool blue, like morning sunlight. A 30-centimeter gap was left between the two areas, with no main light source, only basic lighting.
"That's it?" Chen Hao stood to the side with his arms crossed. "Just changing the color will make us coexist peacefully?"
"We'll wait three hours for the data feedback," Nana said. "Until then, we recommend avoiding any human intervention."
"Alright, I'll take a break." He plopped down on the edge of the field, pulled half a compressed biscuit from his pocket, and started munching on it. "Anyway, everything I do now feels like I'm causing trouble for the earth."
Time passed little by little.
At first, nothing changed.
Chen Hao yawned, his eyelids drooping. He leaned against the wooden stake, muttering, "If you ask me, we should just replace them all with shade-tolerant crops, so we don't have to watch them fight like this every day."
Nana didn't reply, keeping her eyes glued to the data panel.
Two hours later, she said softly, "A trend of separation is emerging."
Chen Hao suddenly opened his eyes: "Huh?"
"The vine contact area decreased by 62 percent, and the transpiration rate increased accordingly. The angle at which the pumpkin tilted towards the red light area increased by 17 degrees, and the main stem of the tomato shifted its extension direction by 9 degrees."
He climbed over to take a look, and sure enough—the tightly twisted stems had loosened, as if they had suddenly lost their hostility. The pumpkin vines stretched out towards the side of the red light, their leaves opening wider; the tomatoes no longer desperately tried to grow upwards, but instead spread out horizontally, their new shoots sprouting happily.
"It actually works?" He reached out and touched a pumpkin leaf, slippery and glistening with dew. "You guys used to fight to the death, and now you've learned to draw lines and govern yourselves?"
“Plants don’t hate,” Nana said. “They only respond.”
"But didn't you also say that they would fight?"
"That's instinct, not will."
Chen Hao grinned: "So I'm the only one who's both lazy and petty?"
He lay back down on the edge of the field, chewing the last bite of his dry rations, watching the two crops grow quietly. Red and blue lights shone silently, like a colorful blanket covering the earth.
"What if we add other dishes later? The peppers have to be bright green, and the eggplants have to be purple. Wouldn't this place turn into a disco?"
"Can be configured according to needs."
"What if I want to see some pink light someday? Can you put a ring of ambient lights around me?"
"The non-photosynthetically active radiation range does not affect crop growth."
"Sigh, I knew you wouldn't show any mercy."
As night deepened, the fill light became the only source of light.
Chen Hao nodded sleepily, his eyelids too heavy to lift. He mumbled, "You mean these plants... do they know they're being manipulated? They stopped hitting us when the light was changed, they're so obedient."
“They just receive signals and react,” Nana said. “It’s like when you hear that dinner is ready, you stop what you’re doing.”
"But I get angry, I complain, and I slack off."
"So you are human."
Chen Hao smiled and didn't say anything more.
In the distance, a tomato leaf trembled slightly, as if stirred by the evening breeze.
There was actually no wind.
Nana's optical eye blinked slightly, recording a minor anomaly in the opening and closing of the stomata.
The data stream scrolls silently.
Her robotic arm remained connected to the control system, and the lighting program continued to run.
Chen Hao fell asleep against the wooden stake, with biscuit crumbs stuck to the corner of his mouth. One hand dangled from the edge of the soil, only a hand's breadth away from the hoe he had once used to pry open the vines.
At the intersection of the red and blue light of the fill light, a tiny vine tip slowly peeked out, extending one millimeter toward the spacer.
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