The housing management office staff member named Zhao quickly found four people carrying drilling equipment to go to Sinan's house to dig a well.
According to Sister Zhao, these drillers were all skilled workers hired by the Shishan Military Region, and they were using Shishan military's drilling equipment.
Because there was no electricity, they had to use a diesel generator to generate electricity to start the drilling equipment, so the wages they charged were twice as much as agreed.
Si Nan didn't say anything, but he changed the original wage of 25 kilograms of rice to 50 kilograms of rice. This made the four brothers who came to dig the well very happy, and they had a great time digging the well.
When the diesel generator and drilling equipment in Sinan's house rumbled incessantly, the neighbors living nearby all came out to join in the fun.
An auntie who was familiar with Sheng's mother asked her, "Sister Sheng, aren't you with Mrs. Cheng? You said she didn't use the stream outside, so why did she go to the trouble of digging a well?"
Sheng's mother explained: "Xiao Nan said that more and more people will use the stream, and then everyone will be crowded together to use the stream water. They are afraid that it is unhygienic and will cause diarrhea if you drink it."
"Is that so?" The auntie seemed to be thinking, "As expected, you are a doctor's family member, you are quite particular. I wonder how much it costs to dig a well?"
Mother Sheng held up five fingers: "Fifty kilograms of rice."
"It's so expensive!" The other older sisters who were listening to them widened their eyes. "This is converted into points. My husband works on the construction site. He has to work for ten days to earn fifty kilograms of rice! With this much rice, our family of six can cook porridge and eat for a week! I was thinking of digging a well just now, but now I think it's better not to. There are more people, and I don't mind it being dirty. As long as the snow on the top of the stone mountain is there, the stream will not stop flowing, and it doesn't matter if the water is a little dirty."
After the crowd of onlookers gradually dispersed, Sheng's mother pulled Cheng Wei, who was standing at the gate of Sinan Courtyard watching the well being dug, and asked, "Weiwei, are you going to dig a well?"
Amidst the noisy rumble, Cheng Wei covered her ears and shouted, "Ah? What did you say?"
Mother Sheng repeated her words and answered loudly, "Of course we have to. My brother said that the natural disasters we experienced may happen again. In order to avoid the high temperature and drought and no water to drink, we must dig a well."
Her voice was so loud that the uncles who were digging wells and the aunties and grandmas who had not yet walked away from joining in the fun all changed their expressions and started whispering to each other when they heard it.
"Are we going to have to repeat the natural disasters we've experienced?"
"If that's the case, then there's no point in living!"
"Is what they said true? Or is it false?"
"You can tell whether it's true or not just by asking the soldiers."
Halfway up the Shishan Mountain, in a cave of the Shishan Military Command built deep on the mountainside, a group of Shishan officers in military uniforms and with ranks above regimental commander were holding a meeting.
After an officer reported all the situations at the foot of the stone mountain, he mentioned in passing the news that he had just received from the people that the natural disaster might recur, which attracted everyone's attention.
"What do you think of what the people are saying?" Sitting at the top of the rectangular conference table under the projected map, a division commander named Ye, with half of his hair graying, a righteous face, and medals hanging all over his chest, asked solemnly.
A dozen officers below spoke up one after another: "I think it's credible. After all, the two doomsday prophecy posts that appeared out of nowhere two years ago have confirmed several natural disasters."
"I don't think it's credible. Ever since the high temperatures began two years ago, all kinds of rumors about natural disasters have been spreading. In order to verify the authenticity of those rumors, we spent a lot of manpower, time and energy to verify the news one by one, but in the end, they were just jokes made by the people who had nothing better to do."
"So what you mean is that the news we hear this time is the same as the previous times, and we should ignore it?"
"That's not what I meant. What I meant is that instead of wasting time and energy on those unfounded news, it is better to follow the sequence of the apocalyptic natural disasters two years ago and do a good job of preventing the next natural disaster to reduce the casualties of the people."
"It's easy for you to say that. Now the Xingcheng government is moving all the survivors from Xingcheng and more than a dozen surrounding counties and cities to our Shishan. It is estimated that the number of people is no less than five million. With so many people, no matter how much manpower and supplies we have in Shishan, it will not be enough! If we don't confirm the news spread by the people, it will only cause panic. At that time, people will scramble for supplies and refuse to cooperate with our military construction. Everyone will only think about themselves. Even if we have guns, we can't shoot at the people."
"Are you going to check them one by one? How long will it take? Even if you find someone, how can you be sure that the news is true?"
......
"Okay, everyone, be quiet." Seeing that the officers below were getting more and more excited and about to quarrel, Division Commander Ye frowned and interrupted them: "Send a team to find out whether the news is true. Remember to do it in secret and don't alert the enemy. In addition, we must speed up the construction of the base in all aspects. Make sure to build all the houses and equipment before the severe cold of the doomsday warning, so that the people have a place to take refuge."
A younger officer hesitated for a moment and said, "Commander, our Shishan is located in the southwest. Except for a few areas that have snow and ice in winter, other places are wet and cold. It doesn't snow all year round, and we have never provided heating like in the north. Now that the severe cold is imminent, even if we repair the heating pipes, we don't have gas, coal, and electricity to supply heating. And according to the confirmation of the doomsday warning, every natural disaster will come early. I am worried that this severe cold will also come early. What do you think about heating..."
Commander Ye remained silent, his brows furrowed.
He had an air of authority that came from being in office for so many years that everyone held their breath and listened to his instructions.
"The existing coal in Shishan will be reserved for heating in severe winter, and will be supplied first to industrial areas, agricultural greenhouse planting, animal husbandry areas, military personnel, and residential areas for their families." General Ye thought for a while and spoke.
His dignified voice was filled with a hint of helplessness: "At the same time, remind the people to cut down trees early for the winter. If necessary, you can release a small amount of coal and redeem it for points."
"Yes!" All the officers answered loudly, packed up the documents on their desks, and got up to leave.
Cheng Wei didn't know that her unintentional words had attracted the military's attention and caused an investigation.
After she saw that the water from Sinan's well was extremely clear and tasted like the natural sweet mountain spring water, she quickly took out 50 kilograms of rice and asked the four well diggers to dig a well in her yard.
Originally, Sheng's mother felt sorry for the hard-earned food for the family and was still hesitating whether to dig a well. But now, seeing that Cheng Wei wanted to dig a well, Si Nan said that after digging rice for Cheng Wei, she would take another 100 kilograms of rice and dig two more wells in the empty houses rented by her uncle and aunt's families. Sheng's mother no longer hesitated and also took out 50 kilograms of rice and asked the well digger to dig a well.
The three families went to Keeling County and brought back a large amount of rice and flour. Each family brought back five bags of rice weighing 100 kilograms. They had the food and hired someone to dig a well. The neighbors nearby were not surprised, but just marveled at their good luck that they could find so much food in just one trip, which set off a new trend among the neighbors to go out and look for supplies.
Digging a well is not an easy task, because the rocky mountain and hard soil, and one must determine whether the location will yield water. Digging a well takes half as long as digging in other places, and it took almost three days to dig five wells.
After Si Nan and the other two paid the well diggers their wages in grain, the bricks ordered by Cheng Suming were pushed to the door by the brick factory workers on flatbed carts and piled up.
Cheng Suming found some time out of his busy schedule to find twenty workers to help repair the house. The agreed wages were three kilograms of rice, three kilograms of flour, and a can of meat per person per day. He selected experienced construction workers who were all hardworking.
They wanted to make themselves familiar with Doctor Cheng Suming so that they would be more approachable when their family members were sick and asked him to treat them. In less than a month, they completed all the work.
During this period, they built a greenhouse on the roof in accordance with Sinan's requirements. The four walls were built into double fire walls. After the walls were covered with cement, three circles of grooves were built on the inner walls at a distance of 1.5 meters up and down, which would be used for growing light vegetables, strawberries, etc. in the future.
Multiple measures are first taken to waterproof, prevent leakage and crack the ground, and then a geothermal layer is built. Bricks are used to divide the ground into ten small squares of about eight square meters in length and width. Small holes are made in the four corners to facilitate water drainage, and paths are left between the small squares, leading to each square for easy classification and planting.
The greenhouse downstairs is divided into four small squares. Three grooves are still built on the wall. The roofs of the two greenhouses are built into triangular translucent roofs. The beams are made of steel bars as thick as wrists, and are matched with new wood the size of a bowl.
The bulletproof glass installed on the roof was purchased by Si Nan before the end of the world. He told the masters who were repairing the house that it was just ordinary glass, using glass as tiles to form a natural light-transmitting layer.
In this way, even if there is heavy snow, the roof can support the pillars. If there is no snow, it can absorb some sunlight and promote photosynthesis for plants.
The masters did as instructed one by one, and also rebuilt the windows on the upper and lower floors, installed thickened anti-freeze crack glass, and rebuilt the entire house with cement, repairing the fire wall and heat channel outside, the kang stove inside, the chicken coop, the kitchen shed roof outside, and the woodshed...
Each one was strictly and meticulously crafted according to her ideas. Sinan was quite satisfied and asked them to help pack the unused silt and dry soil that had accumulated behind the stream building, at the foot of the small rocky mountains, into the woven bags of fertilizer and feed that she had picked up before.
After moving back to her house, she filled all the blocks separating the upstairs and downstairs greenhouses with soil. Each block was filled with at least seventy centimeters of soil, and the grooves were filled with thirty centimeters of soil. Only then was the work completed.
When they finished work, Si Nan gave each of them ten pounds of flour in addition to the original wages, and also gave them a small bag of candy and biscuits to take home for the children.
This made the construction workers very happy. They praised Cheng Su Ming and his wife for their generosity to everyone they met, and told everyone how good-tempered Cheng Su Ming was as a doctor. They said that they would not have to go to the military hospital at the base when they were sick in the future, because although the medical treatment there was free, the medicines were really not cheap. If they went to the Cheng family and asked Cheng Su Ming to see a doctor, maybe they could exchange medicine for treatment.
After Sheng's mother and Cheng Wei visited Si Nan's home, Sheng's mother also began to think about growing vegetables.
However, her house had no roof, so she could only use half of the yard to build a greenhouse. She also needed to build a fire wall, a kang stove, and a woodshed. So, no matter how much she felt bad about losing her food points, she gritted her teeth and went to the Statistics Department to exchange her points for bricks, cement, steel bars and other building materials, and asked the group of masters that Sinan had hired before to help her rebuild the house.
Cheng Wei had always been spoiled, had no worries about food and clothing, and had a simple mind. She felt that having so many buildings in the yard would take up too much space and make it inconvenient to move around.
If it was extremely cold and snowy, she, a girl who had grown up in a southwestern city, would not be able to play in the snow or have snowball fights happily, so her family would only repair the fire wall, the kang stove, and the chimney, and nothing else.
Time passed slowly. It had been more than two months since Sinan came to Shishan. At the foot of the Shishan, which was originally empty, countless high-rise buildings had been built densely. The walls of the base had also been repaired and divided into residential areas, industrial areas, agricultural planting and animal husbandry areas. The population of the survivors in the base had gradually increased from tens of thousands to nearly four million, and all kinds of chaos had gradually emerged.
A month ago, the Xingcheng government team brought a large number of government teams and survivors to Shishan. In addition, Kyoto also sent four senior officials to interfere. The three leadership teams were fighting for who would be the leader of the base. After nearly a month of fighting, the Shishan military won the victory and took control of the Shishan base.
The Shishan base did not restore network communications and electricity during this period. With so many people pouring in, it was impossible to register and check them one by one, which gave many people with criminal records the opportunity to commit crimes. In the past month, Shishan has been plagued by incidents of smashing, stealing, robbing, murder, rape, and other incidents.
After Commander Ye took back the position of the main leader, the first thing he did was to send people to build power supply equipment, such as building wind power, water power and other power-generating equipment in various places in the Xiaoshishan and Dashishan mountains to restore the power supply.
With electricity, the communication network equipment that had been repaired before can also be used. The next step is to check the identity and household registration, arrest those with criminal records, and take them to the more remote western district for detention or labor reform.
There gradually formed the West District shantytown, which was a mixed crowd and everyone was afraid of. Like the shantytowns of the poor living outside the base, people were reluctant to set foot in them.
The Giant Stone Town where Sinan is located is naturally the core part of the Stone Mountain Base.
The original Jushi Town Government has been taken over by the Shishan military and has become one of the Shishan command centers.
In the fan-shaped area spread out from the Shishan Command Center, as Lin Jianyuan expected, except for the few houses of the indigenous people and the old stone houses on both sides of the three-kilometer-long stream where Sinan lived, the houses in other areas were basically demolished and rebuilt into narrow high-rise buildings for those who had jobs and points to exchange for houses, or for some work units and factories that provided food and accommodation, with more than a dozen people crowded together in dormitories.
At this time, the old stone house where Si Nan and his friends lived had become a popular place with rising prices. Many people who came to the Shishan base later and had abundant supplies wanted to pay a high price to exchange for their houses, but they were all politely declined.
On the night when the electricity was restored, Si Nan was so excited when he saw the long-lost lights and the phone showing that the network signal had been restored that he called his uncle, aunt, Gao Moli and others immediately.
Sadly, no one's call went through.
Si Nan was extremely anxious. It had been nearly three months since the earthquake, and she had been in Shishan for two months. Logically, her uncle and aunt Gao Moli should have listened to her and set off for Shishan after the earthquake. However, it had been three months, and there was still no movement from them.
Cheng Suming comforted her: "Maybe they were delayed by something. Wait for three more days. If they haven't arrived yet, we can rent a jeep from the military and go to your hometown to take a look."
Recently, the Shishan base has been hiring a large number of workers to gradually repair the roads leading to various places from Shishan. The purpose is to allow soldiers to drive large trucks out to find usable quilts, clothes, old bricks, steel bars, various household utensils and other supplies in the ruins of various places, bring them back for cleaning and reuse, and exchange them for the survivors who do not have these utensils at the lowest point price.
If someone wants to go back to his hometown to look for lost relatives and friends, he can spend a certain amount of food points and go on a military truck that is searching for supplies. He can also spend more money to charter a smaller military jeep and have a soldier drive him to his destination.
Si Nan didn't understand why Cheng Suming asked her to wait for three days, but Cheng Suming said that in his dreams his uncle, aunt and their family were all safe and sound, so there shouldn't be any problems.
"I'm not that worried about my uncle and aunt. I'm most worried about Gao Moli." Si Nan sighed, "G City is too far from Shishan. Even if I want to hire a car to go find her, we are thousands of kilometers apart. The distance is long, and those roads may not be filled and rebuilt like Shishan. I'm afraid I don't have the ability to go find her."
"She will definitely come to Shishan to find you." Cheng Suming said firmly, "You don't have to worry."
"Why are you so sure?" Si Nan looked strange.
"No reason." Cheng Suming took off his coat and put it on the armrest of the sofa in the living room. He turned around and sat down, casually resting his arms on the sofa. He closed his eyes and said, "In my dream, all your relatives and friends are by your side."
He looked very tired. Si Nan stopped talking, took out a kettle that had been boiled earlier from the kitchen, poured him a cup of hot water, and placed it in his palm. "You were very busy at work today. Are you tired?"
"A little bit." Cheng Suming opened his eyes and took a sip of the hot water in his hand. "There was a criminal riot in the West District today. Many poor people were injured. A group of soldiers who went to suppress it were also injured to varying degrees. Many injured people who needed emergency treatment and suture surgery were sent here."
"It's so chaotic over there." Si Nan sat beside him, massaging his shoulders and kneading his temples, "Then you don't have to go chop wood tonight."
Since a month and a half ago, when the Shishan military reminded everyone to stockpile as much fuel as possible to survive the cold winter, all the survivors in the base have been frantically cutting down trees and stockpiling firewood for the winter.
The trees on Xiaoshi Mountain and Dashi Mountain have basically been cut down, and people are now cutting down trees in the mountains outside the base.
As there are more and more survivors in the Shishan base, robberies and murders often occur in the base alone. Outside the base, without the supervision of soldiers and patrols of the patrol team, if you are alone and targeted, you will surely die.
So now many people go out of the base to cut down trees or search for supplies, and they all make appointments with people they know and go out in groups.
When there are more people, everyone can take care of each other if they encounter highway robbery.
However, many people in the base have their own jobs and don’t have time to chop wood during the day, so they chop wood at night.
In order to store a large amount of firewood for Si Nan to keep the room warm, and also to give people the impression that he was also short of firewood, Cheng Su Ming went out to chop firewood with Yang Wentao almost every night during the past two months of work.
"It's okay, I'll just take a break." Cheng Suming put down the cup in his hand and said, "The severe cold is not far away, we should store as much firewood as we can. You should stay at home with Cheng Wei and Aunt Sheng at night to prevent someone from breaking into the house and robbing us while we are away."
In the past two months, many people came to Cheng Suming's house to see a doctor and get medicine. At first, he was not willing to see a doctor and get medicine privately, because there were not many medicines stockpiled in the Sinan space, and many of them were non-renewable and manufacturable.
But those who come to see the doctor are all honest and ordinary people. They usually have common ailments such as colds and fevers, headaches and diarrhea, dislocated arms, minor injuries requiring simple sutures, etc. They only need to take some common medicine granules or eat some Chinese herbal medicine to cure their illness.
Correspondingly, the patients would give some bedding, clothes, various scarce supplies such as candles, flashlights, large bundles of firewood, etc., various foods, wild vegetables, fruits and mushrooms, and even various Chinese herbal medicines picked from the mountains as medical expenses.
Sinan would use these things for his own use. If he couldn't use them, he would sell them at the street market, or exchange them for the seeds he wanted, fertilizers for chickens, ducks, geese and other livestock, canned pheasant and rabbit meat, and some daily necessities such as homemade thousand-layer cloth shoes, hemp ropes, backpacks and other household gadgets, homemade flower pots, jars and pots, etc.
She filled up the free space in her house, and Cheng Suming no longer refused to treat patients at home.
As a result, Cheng Suming's name became famous in the nearby area and even in the entire base.
Everyone knows that there is a three-story building along the stream in the center of the base where a surgeon lives. He has many medicinal herbs at home that can be used to treat diseases. He is also a doctor, so he earns points and has no worries about food and clothing. He also charges all kinds of items as medical fees for treating patients. It can be said that he has everything at home and lacks nothing.
This made many bandits want to steal and rob. Many times, they tried to break into houses in the dark and windy night. However, either two highly alert geese heard the noise and cried loudly, waking up Cheng Su Ming and his wife, who then joined forces to take care of the bandits. Or they were caught by the night patrol team or the army and sent to the West District for trial.
In short, so far, no robber has entered their house and stolen anything.
However, this does not mean that the bandits will stop. To be on the safe side, when Cheng Su Ming and Yang Wentao go out to chop wood, they will ask Si Nan and others to stay at home, so that if they encounter thieves, they can ask the patrol team to deal with them.
Si Nan said, "I'll go with you tonight. I stay at home every day to supervise the workers to do this and that, and I don't have much time to go out and look around. I can't let you do the hard work all the time."
"Okay, let's go out on the tricycle tonight." Cheng Suming did not object, stood up and went to the kitchen to cook.
Si Nan quickly stopped him and said, "You are so tired, why are you still cooking? Go lie down on the sofa for a while, I will cook tonight."
Cheng Suming was pushed by her to lie on the sofa. She considerately took out a very warm cashmere blanket from the space and covered him with it. Then she turned around, put on an apron, and went to the kitchen to cook.
Cheng Suming was busy from morning till night and was extremely tired. His eyelids felt like they were weighed down by a huge weight and he gradually fell asleep.
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