Alien Relic Hunter

Chapter 785 The Age of Hunger
In this era, the word "cooking" can almost be equated with "luxury".

Food is scarce, and everyone can't fill their own stomachs... In such a big environment, as long as they can find someone to eat, many people's first reaction is to stuff it whole into their own pockets before others find out. In the mouth...at least the taste and texture, that doesn't matter at all.

As long as that thing can satisfy your hunger, that's enough.

But on the ark, finding food is a very difficult thing.

If famine breaks out on the earth, people can choose to go deep into the mountains and forests to find food... Although it is dangerous to do so, no matter what, as long as there are living things, there will be something to eat.But on this colony ship, even if one digs three feet, all you can see is metal and concrete.

Almost all food sources are in the hands of the government and a few powerful folk forces.

A few months ago, there were still people on the black market selling dead rats strung together with steel brazes, but now, even creatures like cockroaches are almost extinct on the ark.

People almost have no Yizi to eat.

Before the disaster, although the supplies were not abundant, at least it was possible to feed and clothe most people...Many people miss their previous life, but they also know in their hearts that that kind of life will never come back... At least their generation will definitely not see the Ark restored to its previous appearance.

Lin Deng held the bag of bean sprouts in his arms, lowered his head, and walked quickly through a narrow alley.

At the entrance of the alley, sat a sallow and thin old man, with his eyes closed and his arms drooping by his sides, as if he had fallen asleep.

In front of the old man, there was a sunken aluminum bowl, which was empty.

When Linden got close to the old man, a disgusting smell of dead body penetrated into his nostrils, and he realized that the old man had been dead for a long time.

As for whether he died of starvation or some other cause of death, Linden did not know.

No one came to collect the corpses, and the people in the sanitation department also couldn't get enough food. After finishing their duties, these people just wanted to rest for a while, so as to reduce calorie consumption as much as possible... This corpse , I am afraid that it will not be disposed of until it is completely rotten.

Of course, it is also possible that they will be secretly dragged away by some people who "break through the bottom line".

"Cannibal" is no longer a story that only appears in urban legends. Just last month, the military executed a group of people who were arrested for mutilating and eating their own kind. The whole process of the execution was watched on the screen.

Those cannibals were bound by their limbs with restraint belts and curled up on the ground.Their bloodshot eyes protrude outward, their lips are full of ulcers, and their hair hangs down and covers most of their faces... They don't look like people, but the kind of people who hide in the dark sewers in horror novels. A monster known as a "ghoul".

According to the new law promulgated by the Ark, the corpse eater will be sentenced to death, regardless of whether the corpse was killed by the corpse eater or not.

But under the pressure of hunger, there will always be people who choose to take risks.

Linden no longer looked back at the old man's body, but chose to speed up his pace again.

Half an hour later, he finally returned to his residence safely.

After the Ark came out of the wormhole, the original "safety zones" protected by the army were revoked, and Linden also moved to live in a shantytown in the East Fourth District.

East Fourth District originally belonged to the upper-level area of ​​Ark. It is not an exaggeration to describe the commercial streets and luxury residential areas here as expensive. Even with Linden’s family situation before the disaster, they lived in East Sixth District... …Compared to the rent and land price in the sixth district, the East Fourth District is more than twice as expensive.

But in the process of passing through the wormhole, the entire East Sixth District has completely become an unlivable dead place. According to the official budget, it will take at least 20 years to restore these dead places to their original livable appearance .

Among other things, just repairing the damaged hull, removing radiation, and reconnecting gas and water supply pipelines and power lines, these projects will take years as the statistical unit.Not to mention that now Ark simply can't afford so many resources and manpower to rush to repair a residential area with no strategic value.

The buildings in the East Fourth District were also severely damaged during the crossing, but at least the basic life support facilities were not affected too much, and there was no problem with the airtightness of the space and the oxygen supply. As for the power outage, it was not a big problem .

more than 50 mobile searchlights are distributed at various street intersections in the East Fourth District as lighting equipment, but in order to save energy, these searchlights are only on for one-third of the day, and most of the time Residents of East Fourth District had to survive in the dark.

This shanty town was originally a high-end residential area located in a prime location, but those expensive mansions were all destroyed in the secondary disaster caused by crossing, and none of them were spared.The military used construction materials scavenged from the rubble to build patches of rough shacks to accommodate refugees from otherwise uninhabitable damaged areas.

Linden checked the simple homemade lock on the door of his house. After confirming that there were no traces of prying, he took out the key from his pocket and opened the door lock. Then he put the lock on the other side of the door and locked the door behind him. .

With a touch of excitement, he walked to the sleeping bag in the corner of the room, reached into the sleeping bag and groped for a while, before he found a small transparent crystal packaged in a plastic bag.

This is the essential ingredient in every household's cooking before the disaster: salt.

Now, the main source of sodium and chlorine is the small pills that are swallowed with those batter-like synthetic foods every day. As for real table salt, it has long become a luxury that is as difficult to obtain as vegetables.

Of course, Linden couldn't afford real table salt. These transparent crystals were actually sodium chloride that he extracted from industrial raw materials for repairing ship hulls by chemical means.

In the old era, people often mistook "industrial salt" for "table salt" and got poisoned, but in fact the composition of industrial salt and table salt is completely different. The former is also called nitrite, and its main component is sodium chloride. There is also sodium nitrite.If it is pure sodium chloride, whether it is obtained by traditional salt making process or purified from industrial raw materials, it is actually edible.

Linden used the crystallization method to separate the sodium chloride. After initially waiting for the coarse salt to crystallize, he carried out several purifications. Although it was impossible to completely free from any impurities, at least the toxicity was negligible.

The amount of salt does not need to be too much, as long as a little is added, it is enough to enhance the freshness of the dishes.

Although bean sprouts are simple, because there are too few types of vegetables that people can eat, this seemingly monotonous ingredient was almost made into flowers by the residents on the ark before the disaster. There are at least twenty kinds of dishes that have been cooked with bean sprouts as raw materials.

But most of the dishes required frying pans and oil, and the salt could be purified from stolen industrial raw materials, but he really had nothing to do with these two things.

Based on the principle of using local materials, Lin Deng decided to cook two dishes that his father used to make: bean sprout pancakes and bean sprout soup.

He found a metal cup whose bottom had been blackened by smoke, wrapped the edge of the cup with wire, and hung it under a tripod about [-] centimeters high—this tripod was in the ruins of his residential area What I picked up was supposed to be an accessory of a certain type of camera, but the camera had already been picked up by the scavengers, leaving only this slightly deformed tripod lying among a pile of rubble.

As for the drinking water, he was quite plentiful - Linden's engineering team had an enviable perk, that is, breakfast and lunch were included, and drinking water was naturally included in these two meals.Because the work intensity of the engineering team is very high, the supply of drinking water is also sufficient, and each person can draw at least [-] milliliters per day.

As for the drinking water that was originally allocated to the residents, it was all stored by him.

Linden carefully poured the clean water stored in the plastic bottle into the metal cup, and then put half of the bean sprouts and a pinch of salt into it.

The fuel is oblate solid alcohol, which he also picked up from the engineering team... On the second day after the team leader died in an accident, he took advantage of no one to take over the job of the team leader in time to update the material call form, From the warehouse of the engineering team, he secretly brought back a lot of small but very useful good things.

I lit the solid alcohol with a fire starter, and a bright fire suddenly rose in the originally dark shed. Although the temperature did not change much, it still made Linden feel a little warm. The only damage to the East Fourth District was the power supply. Outside the wiring, the temperature control facilities have also stopped working. The outdoor temperature is maintained at around five degrees Celsius all year round, and the indoor temperature is barely ten degrees Celsius.

Fine air bubbles began to emerge from the bottom of the metal cup, and Linden felt vaguely that he smelled a long-lost fragrance.

"Probably an illusion..." He rubbed his nose, "Boiled bean sprouts... how could there be a fragrance?"

Linden smiled self-deprecatingly, and took out a dented aluminum bowl from his coat pocket.

This was the bowl in front of the old man's body, but the old man no longer needed this bowl, so Linden brought it back.

The aluminum bowl is very thin. It is said to be a bowl, but it is actually a disposable container made of aluminum foil and used to hold cooked food.The old man probably picked it up from some ruins, but judging from the thin layer of ash accumulated on the aluminum bowl, it should not have held food for a long time.

Linden cleaned the aluminum bowl, cut it from one side, and spread it out into a sheet of aluminum foil—he didn't have a pan, but it was enough to use this aluminum foil as a pancake cooker.

Linden's father used to use an electric baking pan that can hold the dough, but now Linden has neither an electric baking pan nor electricity.

He took out a bag of synthetic rations, added a little water to it, and then slowly stirred it with his fingers until the white powder and water were completely combined and turned into a sticky dough.

According to the eating method of most people, it is ready to eat at this time, but too much water will make it difficult to swallow. Generally, the batter will be thinned and then eaten as porridge.

It's just that for Linden, he still thinks that the water added is a bit too much.

He only watched his father do it before, and this is the first time he has practiced it.

Looking at the rotten dough in the bag, he thought for a moment, took out a clean piece of clothing, poured the dough on it, and wrapped the cloth tightly.

The excess moisture was quickly filtered out from the pores of the clothing fibers. Looking at the dough with at least half of the moisture content, Linden nodded in satisfaction.

The main component of this synthetic ration is actually starch. Although it is not as easy to process into various pastries as flour, as long as the proportion of water is controlled, it can still be shaped.

Linden kneaded the remaining half of the bean sprouts into the dough, added an appropriate amount of salt, kneaded the dough into a ball and flattened it, wrapped the bread in aluminum foil, and clamped it to the burning solid Over the alcohol, let the flame lick the surface of the aluminum foil again and again.

A seductive fragrance emanated from the gap in the aluminum foil, and Linden could finally confirm this time that it was not his hallucination, but a real smell captured by his olfactory organs.

How long has it been since I smelled the aroma of food?After the ark traveled through the wormhole?No, to be precise, it should be that since his father passed away and he and his mother moved into the safe zone sheltered by the army, they have never eaten cooked food again.

At that time, other than compressed biscuits, the daily food was compressed biscuits. Linden still remembers the soap-like taste... However, even compressed biscuits have become a popular delicacy now.

Just in the East Fourth District, a soldier was attacked by civilians last week. He was hit in the back of the head by a brick and died directly... and the reason for the attack was only because he was holding a cardboard box with compressed biscuits printed on it.

However, the attackers found no food in the cardboard box, which contained a pile of documents, important information salvaged from the ruined building.

Before the disappointed attackers could vent their anger on these documents, they were shot dead by the soldiers who came to support them, and the video in the news broadcast came to an abrupt end.

The smell of pancakes became more and more intense, and Linden's stomach began to make gurgling noises... He swallowed involuntarily.

At this moment, there was a sudden knocking sound outside the door of the shed.

"Is there anyone inside? Hurry up and open the door!" An impatient male voice shouted outside the door.

Linden's hand trembled, and the bread wrapped in aluminum foil fell on top of the solid alcohol, and the flames were instantly extinguished.

……

【PS This extra chapter ends here, leaving an open ending.Everyone can rely on their own imagination, combined with the background of that era, to guess the direction of the plot.As for the real ending-history never records the story of an insignificant little person. 】

(End of this chapter)