Chapter 5: Sand Yams
Dome 87 was the base’s all-in-one directory, equipped with GPS tracking, host vital sign monitoring, and the terminal’s built-in radiation scanner. To the average base resident, however, it boiled down to four main sections: Announcements, Learning, Job Board, and Matchmaking.
Opening the Job Board, Zhao Man saw around a dozen hunting squads recruiting. He found an opening with no gender restrictions and hit submit, only for a prompt to flash across the screen: Does not meet recruitment criteria. Hunting squad requires a minimum Beta mental strength rating of 85.
Betas had mental strength ratings too? Zhao Man had no idea where he stood. He tapped into his personal profile: Rating: 31. Recommended Vocation: Farmer.
Giving up on the hunting squads and skipping right past the medical teams, Zhao Man headed straight for the agricultural units—only to find not a single job posting listed.
Zhao Man laughed in sheer exasperation. Even in the wasteland, college grads still couldn’t find a damn job.
Switching to Announcements, Zhao Man noticed a post titled Scavenger’s Guide: Notice Regarding High-Radiation Zone Shifts Around Southwest Base No. 6. He tapped in to find a detailed schematic map. Looking at the layout, Zhao Man realized he lived on the base’s westernmost fringe, backed by a range of mountains known as Elephant Mountain, while a wide river ran along the far eastern border. The entire base was divided into the Central District, six concentric ring districts, and the outlying settlements.
The defensive perimeter formed a rough circle punctured by twelve gates distributed across the four cardinal directions. The nearest checkpoint to Zhao Man was West Gate 3.
Silently saving the scavenger zone map to his device, Zhao Man clicked into the Learning hub. Late at night was, after all, prime time for studying.
One glance inside dampened his spirits. Every course required payment upfront in full-course bundles, with the cheapest running thirty points. No refunds supported. Heh.
Adhering to the classic mindset of “might as well since I’m already here,” Zhao Man finally clicked into Matchmaking. The second the page loaded, his own pre-generated matrimonial profile popped up:
Name: Zhao Man. Gender: Male Beta. Age: 18. Residence: West Outer Ring, No. 826. Desired Partner Criteria: None. Personal Statement: Like a dream the fair hour comes, bound by heaven’s decree. Together on this wilderness of hope, let us forge a life of happiness with our own two hands, clad in warmth and blessed with plenty.
Wilderness of hope, my foot! The system even had the gall to flash a reminder urging him to set his preferred partner criteria. It was absurd. What made it even more ridiculous was that beneath such bare-bones specifications, several messages had actually been left. Zhao Man skimmed them: Alphas, Betas, Omegas, and even relatives playing matchmaker on someone else’s behalf.
Exiting this thoroughly headache-inducing app, Zhao Man closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Early the next morning, Zhao Man put on his work clothes, grabbed his backpack, and packed his machete, some rope, and a single vial of nutrient solution.
Locking the door behind him, he saw neighbors from both sides and across the way trickling out, everyone uniformly heading left.
Falling in with the main group, he noted the time: four-thirty in the morning. The sky looked like six or seven on a summer evening from his previous life—bright enough, but with the cool remnants of night still receding.
It took twenty minutes to walk to West Gate 3, where a massive crowd had already gathered outside the portal. Zhao Man looked around; the gates had not yet opened. Most of the surrounding crowd were Betas, along with a scattering of elderly or wounded Alphas standing in loose knots, conversing in hushed murmurs. Left entirely to his own devices, Zhao Man slung his pack across his chest, found a quiet corner, and waited without a word.
The moment the clock struck five, deep mechanical groans and metallic clatters echoed from the gatehouse. The scavengers pressed toward the opening and began inching their way outside.
Past the gate, the main crowd kept heading west. They were soon joined by residents from the outer squatter settlements, swelling the scavenger column to an even greater size.
After marching west for over ten minutes, all traces of human habitation vanished, leaving only a three-meter-wide dirt road flanked every few paces by a planted tree. His terminal pinged with an alert, indicating they had exited the base’s protective energy dome and crossed into a moderate-radiation zone: Warning: Do not approach high-radiation areas.
Zhao Man recalled that taking this road straight west from West Gate 3 led to only one designated scavenger zone. Just as he was fretting that this massive crowd would strip the area bare, leaving him empty-handed, the procession began to splinter. Some kept moving west, while others scattered in all directions along narrow footpaths snaking off the main road.
Zhao Man stood dumbfounded, unsure which path to take. After a minute’s hesitation, he resolved to stick to the main track and push westward toward the base’s officially marked scavenger sector.
The farther he went, the sparser the crowd became. The sea of three to four hundred people that had poured through the gate had dwindled to just twenty or thirty. Zhao Man stopped, pulling up the map he had saved the night before. To his surprise, he had practically crossed the marked scavenger zone, yet all along the way he had seen nothing but useless weeds and gnarled trees—not a single bite of anything edible.
In that brief moment of distraction, the remaining twenty-odd scavengers vanished into the brush. Shrugging off his doubts with a “might as well see it through,” Zhao Man continued westward. A towering mountain rose in the distance; it looked deceptively close, but after nearly an hour of trekking, it remained far out of reach.
Off to the south of the road, Zhao Man spotted a low hill rising roughly five stories high. The trees upon it were sparse, nowhere near dense enough to form a forest. Approaching the slope, he followed the guide he had read last night and scanned the topsoil first. Unsurprisingly, it registered as high-radiation ground.
Not daring to scale the hill, Zhao Man worked his way along the perimeter, testing as he went. Not a single pocket of low or moderate radiation showed up. Refusing to admit defeat, he plucked a leaf and tested it:
Beep-beep. High radiation. Inedible.
He plucked and scanned relentlessly. Half an hour later, having circled the entire base of the hill, he gave up hope: high-radiation earth simply could not sustain edible plant life.
Looking up at the low hill, Zhao Man gave himself a silent pep talk. Drawing his machete, he shaved down a walking stick and began picking his way up the incline. Sweeping the brush ahead, he climbed and scanned the earth in tandem. Finally, beneath a massive, curved boulder, the sensor registered a patch of moderate-radiation soil.
The rock was tall, nearly two meters high, and clustered at its base were six stalks of what looked like wild water dropwort, standing calf-high with stems as thick as a finger.
After thoroughly sweeping the perimeter with his stick to make sure no hidden dangers lurked, Zhao Man leaned in to scan the plants.
Beep-beep. Moderate radiation. Suitable for limited consumption.
Ecstatic, Zhao Man scanned the rest of the plant’s leaves. Once he verified the entire stalk was edible, he grasped it firmly, pulled it up by the roots, folded it carefully, and stashed it in his pack.
Out of the six stalks, two proved edible. Delighted with his haul, Zhao Man studied the overarching boulder. The stone curved gently upward, casting a cool shadow over the ground below. Combined with the nearby tree canopy, it kept this tiny pocket far damper than the surrounding terrain.
Committing the formation to memory, Zhao Man decided against climbing any higher. He spent the next stretch scanning the surrounding area, but it seemed his luck for the day had been exhausted on those two stalks of dropwort; by the time he reached a sandy, scree-covered slope, he hadn’t uncovered a single edible specimen.
Gazing across the sparse, withered vines trailing over the sand, Zhao Man squinted into the distance. He was facing the great mountain directly now, with the main road slanting behind him.
Below the sandy ridge lay a hollow thick with bracken ferns. Sliding carefully down the edge of the scree, he braced himself against a tree trunk and peered two meters ahead. A sudden drop-off seemed to lie beneath the sand slope; the broad fern fronds cascaded downward, concealing the ground below and giving no hint of the depth. The more Zhao Man stared, the more uneasy he grew. Convinced something was lurking within that verdant tangle, he didn’t dare venture forward to test it.
In the end, caution won out. He turned to scramble back up the sandy bank, only for his footing to give way. Flailing in a panic, his left hand grabbed a handful of vines while his right snagged a tree branch, finally arresting his slide. Exhaling a long breath of relief, Zhao Man moved to leave, only to notice that the uprooted vine in his grip had pulled back the sand to reveal a root as thick as an adult’s wrist.
Zhao Man crept over and carefully chipped away the sandy crust with his machete. A moment later, a brown, woody root the length of an infant’s arm and the thickness of a wrist lay exposed.
He pinched it with a thumbnail; it offered firm resistance. Snapping it in two with a hard crack, he revealed crisp white flesh inside. Wasn’t this a yam? Zhao Man pressed it against the scanner on his wrist.
Beep-beep. Moderate radiation. Suitable for limited consumption.
This time, his excitement was genuinely uncontainable. He wanted nothing more than to belt out three triumphant shouts to the sky, but terrified of drawing unwanted company, he forced himself to swallow the urge.
Checking the time, he saw it was eleven in the morning. Zhao Man set down his pack, cut a thumb-thick digging stick with his machete, and began carefully unearthing the roots along the vines.
Beneath nearly every trailing vine lay a plump root. Looking across the dense network covering the sandy bank, Zhao Man felt his heart hammering against his ribs. The yams varied in size; the shorter ones were palm-sized, while the longest matched the length of a full arm.
After two solid hours of digging, Zhao Man had harvested every reachable yam on his section of the slope. Pushing any farther forward would leave him with zero footholds, where a single slip would send him tumbling straight into the bracken fern hollow below.
Staring at the harvest piled before him, Zhao Man felt like diving in and rolling across them. “Since you all grow in the sand, I’m calling you sand yams,” he murmured to himself. He packed eight of the smaller roots into his backpack and gathered five of the longest into his arms. The high-radiation duds he piled to one side, then retraced his steps back toward the main road.
Reaching the roadside ditch, he tucked the yams deep into a thick patch of foxtail grass to hide them, then took a short detour back toward where he had been digging. Less than five minutes down the path, he spotted the expansive sandy slope again, its gray gravel contrasting starkly with the lush sea of green fern fronds sprawling beneath it.
Edging a little closer to the knoll, Zhao Man caught sight of the fern leaves shifting. It wasn’t the uniform, lazy swaying caused by a passing breeze, but a distinct, localized rustle—something heavy was gliding beneath the fronds. His mind instantly flashed back to the serpents behind his home, and he backed away from the hill in a hurry.
After sprinting several paces, the thought of the unharvested sand yams still buried on that slope made his heart ache with reluctance. Pulling up his terminal, he framed the trembling patch of ferns through the camera. Confirming that the footage captured only the shifting fronds with none of the sandy bank exposed, Zhao Man stowed the device and hurried back to the foxtail grass.
Drawing his machete, Zhao Man began cutting down the tall foxtail grass, which reached up to his thighs. Harvesting a thick armful, he carefully wrapped the forearm-length sand yams. The arm-length specimens he snapped in half, swaddling them in grass as well. He then bundled a larger sheath of grass, tucked the wrapped yams snugly into the core, and bound the entire package tight with cord, ensuring nothing could be seen or shaken loose. After lining the bottom of his backpack with another layer of grass, he secured his blade, hoisted the grass bundle onto his shoulder, and set off toward the base.
It was nearly three in the afternoon, the sun beating down at full strength. The road was deserted. Zhao Man kept strictly to the shade cast by the roadside trees as he marched toward the perimeter.
Sweat poured from every pore, leaving his mouth parched and his throat burning. He had forgotten to bring water.
Plodding forward without pause, he finally caught sight of the massive base gate. Seeing him trudge up with nothing more than a bundle of wild grass, the guards lounging against the perimeter wall didn’t even twitch. Flashing his terminal across the scanner at the gate, Zhao Man passed smoothly through the checkpoint. The very first thing he did upon crossing his own threshold was reach for a drink of water.
