Following.

Tang Yue drove the Martian stray dog out, taking a small shovel and a plastic specimen box to collect soil.

Every once in a while, he would go out to dig out the right soil, as a substrate for the growth of plants, and now it is not as difficult to make a soil foundation for planting in Kunlun Station as it was when he first tried it, the manure mixture that had matured earlier was quite fertile, and the microbial community was active enough to be used as a fertilizer base for fermentation, just like when making yogurt, you always have to add a little old yogurt as a primer to the fresh **.

"Old cat, how many liters of soil are you going to take this time?"

"You don't need much, you can do it yourself." The old cat replied, "When the Tianzhou-37 cargo spacecraft arrives, you will no longer need to rely on growing vegetables to provide yourself with nutrients, and the spacecraft will have soft-packed canned yellow peaches and oranges. ”

"What about Mai Dong...... We have three seeds that are recovering as planned, and five tomatoes that have started to bear fruit in the second cycle. Mai Dong? ”

No one responded in the channel.

Tang Yue patted Mingguang Armor's mask.

"Entering the no-signal zone again?"

The communication system of the joint space station was damaged in the accident, Lao Mao and Tang Yue took time to try to repair it once, but unfortunately no results were achieved, and now the communication link between the space station and the Kunlun station is quite unstable, when the space station is located on the far side of Mars, the signal of the Kunlun station cannot be received at all, that is to say, half of the day, the space station will be located in the no signal area.

During this time, the old cat on the ground Tang Yue and Mai Dong were cut off, and there was no solution, in the words of the old cat, the joint space station and the Kunlun station can only be directly connected to the dialogue within the visual range, and if you want to talk, you can only wait for the space station to run away from the back side of Mars and rise from the horizon.

But once the space station falls below the horizon, communication will be cut off.

"Well, then we'll have to wait another half hour."

Tang Yue sat facing the desert on the ground, with a shovel and a box lying flat on his knees.

In front of me is the boundless rocky beach, covered with a thin layer of floating sand, this layer of fine sand is very shallow, partly from the transport of atmospheric activities, and the other part from the weathering of rocks, under the floating sand is the rock and soil, there is no vegetation and enough water on Mars, so there is no soil environment that has been modified by the biosphere for thousands of years like on Earth, the soil here is dry and rough, it is a mixture of gravel and fine sand.

Under Tang Yue's feet, at least a meter of soil was covered with such soil.

Darwin's theory of evolution believes that natural selection is the environment in selecting the direction of variation of organisms, but in fact, organisms and the environment are mutually influential, and the reason why the earth can form the existing natural conditions in modern times, in the final analysis, can be traced back to the mass reproduction of cyanobacteria 3.5 billion years ago.

If cyanobacteria hadn't appeared at that time, Tang Yue might have been a nitrogen-breathing creature.

"Old cat, can you get in touch with the United Space Station?"

"Nope." Lao Mao said, "China Telecom reminded me that the dialing user is not in the service area. ”

"The telecom signal is really poor." Tang Yue pouted, "Let them wait, when I go back, I must carry my number to the network, and I have to complain!" Call 95598 to complain! ”

"95598 is the number of the State Grid, and you complained about Telecom but called the State Grid, do you want the power supply bureau to cut off the power of the base station?"

Tang Yue used a shovel to dig up the gravel and sand, and every time Tang Yue took the soil, the position was fixed, and a small flag was planted, so as to save the effort of looking everywhere, Mai Dong had taught him how to search for suitable soil, how to mix and ferment with manure and soil, and for such a long time to grow tomatoes and carrots by himself, Tang Yue had evolved from an electrical engineer to a qualified vegetable farmer.

He poured the dirt mixed with sand and gravel into the box, closed the lid, and began to gently tap the walls of the box, shaking it as hard as if shaking a sieve.

The purpose of how to do this is to make the small particles of soil sink, and in the shaking the soil particles will fall into the bottom of the box through the gaps, and what remains in the upper layer is the rock, and the large basalt cannot be used to grow tomatoes, Tang Yue must remove them.

Tang Yue opened the lid, grabbed the gravel out, and then began the second round of soil extraction and screening.

His movements slowed suddenly.

"Hey old cat."

"Huh?"

"I saw a small tornado."

"Little tornado?" The old cat frowned.

Tang Yue nodded, a small cyclone was swaying leisurely from less than ten meters in front of him, it looked less than half a meter high, it was dyed pale brown by the sand, it was crooked from east to west, and it was moving very slowly. It was not the first time Tang Yue had encountered a tornado in the desert, but it was the first time he had been so close to this small tornado, which was usually born on the sunny side of the sand dunes, walking along the ridges of the sand dunes or mountain slopes, and they existed for a short time, less than three to five minutes.

And they usually have a quirk, the closer a person gets, the faster they dissipate, so few people get up close and personal with them.

Seeing this thing on Mars is a bit like finding a sunning seal on the Arctic ice cap, and most people will look at it with curiosity, although it is not excluded that some long-standing non-chiefs may also be angry and smash the back of the seal's head on the spot.

Tang Yue pushed the sample box full of dirt into the cockpit of the rover, fixed it to the edge of the seat, and then picked up the remaining empty box and threw it on the ground.

"Shh......h You see, what did I find? There's a lone little tornado! We can try to catch it, a small tornado can give us energy for days, it's rich in protein, it's six times more nutritious than beef, but it's not easy to deal with...... We slowly approached it from behind, being careful not to make any noise. ”

Tang Yue chattered while sifting through the soil.

"I caught it! It struggled so hard that we could cut off its head, remove the head and guts, and eat the rest, and of course, if the time was not pressing, we could roast it first. ”

Old Cat: Congratulations to Mr. Tang Yue, after a year of struggling to survive on Mars, your hard work has paid off, you have finally achieved positive results, learned the Dafa of Bigu, and you can obtain life-sustaining energy just by drinking the northwest wind, from now on, I suggest that you can hunt tornadoes everywhere as the top predator in the Martian wasteland.

The old cat described such a scene to Tang Yue: a man on all fours and running like a vicious dog on the desert, chasing a tornado and biting, his eyes glowing red, his saliva flowing, from south to north, from west to east, non-stop, day and night lunch break, running three times a day on the Yihidi Plain.

Tang Yue: This is rabies, right?

Old Cat: The suggestion here is mad cow disease, dear.