Chapter 58
Meng Xueyuan’s and Lu Xiao’s plots suffered the least damage. They had promptly dug drainage ditches and reinforced the pens. The other guests’ chicken coops and sheep sheds, however, were a mess—some smashed through by hailstones, others blown over by strong winds.
After the previous episode ended, Jiang Xunbai had gone home to do some research. Afraid that too much sun would darken his skin and lower his looks, he’d decided this episode to do greenhouse vegetable planting. Ordinary transparent plastic greenhouses still let sunlight through, so in a sudden flash of inspiration, he went for mushroom cultivation instead.
Button mushrooms needed to grow away from light, so Jiang Xunbai built a greenhouse covered with black plastic film.
Now, that plastic film was riddled with holes. The frame of the greenhouse, which he’d installed himself, wasn’t sturdy enough and had been blown over directly by the strong wind.
Jiang Xunbai’s eyes were red. His mushroom mycelium had already sprouted—on the humus soil, pearl-like snow-white little mushrooms had poked out, so cute. But now… sob!
He hadn’t cried when he was reduced to a clown by comparison on a dating show. He hadn’t cried when he broke up. He hadn’t cried when he was harassed. But at this moment, his eyes were red and tears streamed down his face.
The greenhouse he’d worked so hard to set up—he’d even planned to switch the mushrooms to better nutrient soil, pinching his nose to collect cow and pig manure, fermenting it together with dry grass. It was almost done fermenting…
“Jiang Baibai, don’t be sad. We’ll help you set the greenhouse back up,” Meng Xueyuan comforted him.
Jiang Xunbai said, “But you don’t even have time to deal with your own mess.” The fields were in chaos—there was definitely a lot to fix. One episode only filmed for five days, and Meng Xueyuan and Lu Xiao would be leaving the day after tomorrow. They wouldn’t even have enough time just to repair their own cornfield.
Meng Xueyuan said, “Your greenhouse is the hardest case, so we’ll help you first. Right, Lu Xiao?”
Lu Xiao replied, “Right.”
Jiang Xunbai immediately brightened up. These were Meng Xueyuan and Lu Xiao! With them helping, his greenhouse could probably withstand a level-12 gale, right?
[Jiang Xunbai looks like a crying child by the roadside who suddenly met immortals.]
[Jiang Baibai can be kind of… innocent sometimes. Staying away from the greasy king is really good for his career!]
[Don’t just say them—I feel heartbroken watching this. Seeing the fruits of your labor destroyed like that is awful.]
[I get it. It’s not just a financial loss, it’s a psychological one too.]
[Turns out being a farmer also requires a strong heart.]
[Not just that—when the harvest is good, you might still face the crops rotting unsold in the fields. Anyway, I won’t let my parents farm anymore.]
[I’ve freeloaded off this show for so long—today I couldn’t help donating a bit to an agricultural disaster relief fund, just treating it like buying a membership.]
[Even though there are ads, the show is still pretty conscientious—non-members can watch the livestream.]
[The shows our Yuan-yuan goes on are definitely aligned with his values.]
[A neighboring county also suffered severe damage—the funds tipped to this program have already been allocated there.]
The director also showed the audience the real side of farming.
Every guest who went to inspect the damage genuinely felt sad. The emotion spread to the bullet comments, and donations increased steadily.
After the torrential rain stopped, daylight lasted only briefly before night fell, making it inconvenient to work in the fields. So everyone went to help Jiang Xunbai rebuild his greenhouse.
Lu Xiao borrowed a high-powered searchlight from the production team, hung it overhead on bamboo poles for illumination.
The soil used for growing mushrooms didn’t smell very good. After setting up the frame, Meng Xueyuan put on boots and used a shovel to scoop the overturned humus soil back into place.
With seven people working together, they finished a very sturdy greenhouse.
Jiang Xunbai thanked them repeatedly. “From now on, this mushroom greenhouse is public. Anyone who wants to eat can just come in and pick.”
“Alright. Baibai, you should rest early too. Tomorrow you still have to fix your cornfield.”
Meng Xueyuan and Lu Xiao walked home hand in hand. After showering, they held each other and slept, getting up again at five-thirty the next morning.
At the canteen, they saw the other guests. Everyone had gotten up very early, because all of them had cornfields that were badly damaged.
Lightly lodged corn needed to be carefully propped back up, with soil heaped high around the base to secure it. Severely lodged corn couldn’t be forced upright—that would damage the roots—so supports had to be set thirty to forty centimeters above the ground.
As for corn that couldn’t be saved and had snapped, it needed to be cleared away immediately, to prevent rot from affecting field ventilation and causing pests and disease.
Meng Xueyuan carefully lifted the corn stalks, while Lu Xiao shoveled soil to pack around the roots.
Even then, the propped-up corn was still unstable, so five or six “sister” stalks had to be tied together to borrow strength from one another.
Holding a rope, Meng Xueyuan looped it around five corn plants and tied a slipknot, to be undone once they could stand on their own.
Watching Meng Xueyuan’s posture—almost like hugging the corn—Lu Xiao laughed. “Isn’t my waist nicer to hug?”
Meng Xueyuan stepped forward and hugged him once, indulging his narcissism. “Mm.”
Lu Xiao said, “Then I’ll hug you too.”
[You little couple.]
[I really want to hug Lu Xiao’s ‘public-dog waist,’ and I really want to pinch Meng Xueyuan’s beauty waist—what illness do I have?]
[My grandma insists on watching the livestream with me. When you guys hug like this, it’s really awkward for me!]
[Can you at least give advance notice so I can change channels?]
After a full day of work, Lu Xiao and Meng Xueyuan finally repaired their cornfield.
Resilient farmers weren’t defeated by a single storm. Meng Xueyuan looked at the restored, orderly cornfield with bright, shining eyes. So good—full of hope for growth again.
Leave that hope to the next guest.
Tomorrow, they would be leaving the show and returning to their own lives.
Though exhausted, Meng Xueyuan felt reluctant to part. This nature-adjacent variety show was something he enjoyed and devoted himself to more sincerely than any business job he’d done before.
Together with Lu Xiao, he checked for gaps and loose ends everywhere—rebuilding field ridges washed away by water, weeding the vegetable patch, reinforcing the chicken coop fence… The farmland they’d inherited from the previous guests needed to be properly passed on to the next ones.
Lu Xiao patiently accompanied Meng Xueyuan as he said goodbye to plants and animals. Near the end, the pregnant cow seemed about to go into labor.
“Wife, it looks like it’s going to give birth,” Lu Xiao said nervously. So far, he’d only been a father in spirit; he knew nothing about delivery. He wasn’t omnipotent. “Right, there’s a doctor—quick, call the vet! I’ll go get them!”
For these novice farmers, the program had arranged veterinary and agricultural stations—if anything went wrong, there were places to consult.
Lu Xiao took off running. The vet was only about a hundred meters away—running over was faster than waiting for them to answer the phone.
[Brother Lu, you’re giving me the feeling that Meng Xueyuan is about to give birth.]
[Thanks, Brother Lu. Childbirth fanfic just got even more fun.]
[I never understood why Snowy Night fans were so obsessed with childbirth fic, but now I kind of get it. I just love watching Lu Dog pacing outside the delivery room, slapping himself in regret for not using contraception.]
[Up there… when you put it that way, I feel like after watching the cow give birth, Lu Xiao won’t want his wife to have kids.]
[Sorry, they really give me “they can give birth” vibes.]
[It’s not impossible for men to give birth either—two kids in three years is totally possible!]
[You guys… the point is the cow is giving birth right now!]
The birthing process wasn’t suitable for direct broadcast, so the cameras focused mainly on Meng Xueyuan.
He put on a mask and gloves, cleaning and disinfecting the birthing area.
From the moment the cow’s birth canal began to open, labor could last more than twelve hours. Meng Xueyuan wanted to stay and watch—it would be an all-nighter.
The vet arrived and said to them, “The situation’s pretty good. I’ll stay here. You two go back and sleep for a bit—I’ll call you when it’s born.”
Meng Xueyuan didn’t want to leave, but Lu Xiao simply hoisted him up and carried him away.
“Usually I don’t care if you stay up all night, but today we both worked all day. Sleep for a bit.”
Lu Xiao coaxed his wife to sleep for three hours, then quietly got up himself, planning to check on the situation.
Birth in nature always involved suffering—he wanted to see it and learn a lesson.
As soon as he moved, Meng Xueyuan woke up too. His eyes could barely open. Drowsily, he grabbed the hem of Lu Xiao’s shirt at the back—wherever Lu Xiao went, he went, showing complete trust.
Lu Xiao had planned to trick him back into bed, but seeing this, he couldn’t bear it and carried him out on his back instead.
In the latter half of the night, the moon was bright and the stars sparse. Walking along the road, some of the noisy frogs had quieted, and the insect chorus took center stage.
Lu Xiao suddenly thought of the first time the two of them sang a love song together on stage—when they met each other’s eyes, both went slightly off-key. Aside from CP fans covering their ears, they’d been mocked all over the internet.
When they reached the cow’s birthing area, Meng Xueyuan was fully awake and climbed down from Lu Xiao’s back.
He’d fed this cow for four days—naturally, he was attached and hoped everything would go smoothly.
Lu Xiao stood to the side, thinking about something with an unreadable expression.
After another two hours of ordeal, the cow finally gave birth to a calf.
Lu Xiao thought to himself that he absolutely had to carefully calculate the days his wife drank royal jelly.
The newborn calf was wet all over, snow-white, looking extremely fragile. But nature endowed it with the ability to stand within an hour of birth and walk by the next day.
Human babies weren’t nearly so easy—they needed to be fussed over in adults’ arms for at least a year.
Unless Meng Xueyuan could lay eggs like a real queen bee, letting the little ones live in a hive and undergo some kind of bizarre development on their own, instead of staying in his wife’s belly for a long time.
Lu Xiao hugged his wife tightly and, in the middle of the night, sent his dad a dutiful son’s greeting.
Meng Xueyuan, meanwhile, was delighted that everything had gone smoothly. He personally prepared a nutritional formula for the mother cow and was full of affection for the calf as well.
“It’s a pity we’re leaving tomorrow.”
Lu Xiao said, “If you really can’t bear it, we can buy them.”
Meng Xueyuan said, “Huh? Where would we keep them?”
The dutiful son replied, “We could keep them at my dad’s golf course. The grass is green all year round.”
Meng Xueyuan was tempted, but a golf course wasn’t as good as raising them back with the clan. More importantly, cows weren’t humans—they couldn’t easily fly and transfer like people. He couldn’t put them through all that just for a momentary fondness.
Meng Xueyuan said, “We can see them in the livestream later. Let’s ask the director to take good care of them.”
…
As dawn approached, Lu Xiao went back to pack their luggage. Meng Xueyuan, still full of affection for the big cow and the calf, ran up the slope to cut a basket of grass the cow liked to eat, then fed the rest of the poultry and livestock.
Not a single chicken or duck was missing—quite a feat.
The sky over the Lu residence was also just beginning to lighten.
Shen Ning woke from a dream, stretched an arm out from under the covers, and reached for the phone by the bed to check the time.
A little after five.
Just after five, and there was a text message from his youngest son sent two hours earlier.
Three in the morning? Had he annoyed Yuan-yuan again?
On the lock screen, he couldn’t see the full text. Shen Ning unlocked the phone and saw the short message.
[Dad, I love you.]
Shen Ning: “……”
Lu Fengge sat up. “Up so early?”
Seeing Lu Xiao’s message, he asked, “Didn’t you mute it? Did it wake you up?”
“No.”
Shen Ning rubbed his forehead. “I dreamed of your three good sons at kindergarten age. They wanted to play with the three well-behaved babies in the next class, but they couldn’t talk. The three of them got stung all over the head by bees and ran home covered in bumps.”
What a headache. Shen Ning lined them up to apply medicine. The three little milk buns had tear-filled eyes but stubborn expressions.
Lu Fengge was speechless. If only one son was stupid, he wouldn’t care. If all three sons were dumb, then to avoid Shen Ning tracing it back to genetics, he reluctantly defended them: “Remember this lesson, and they won’t do it next time.”
But why were there bees here? Who poked the hive first? If his sons still needed a beating after the medicine, he’d give it.
Shen Ning worried, “No. They said they’d dare to do it again next time.”
Lu Fengge: “……”
