I can upgrade the shelter
Chapter 45 Meat in the Apocalypse (Please Recommend, Please Collect)

Chapter 45: Chapter 45 Meat in the Apocalypse (Please Recommend, Please Collect)

After hosting Mo Qingyan and Ding Ning for a meal at his shelter, Chen Xin sent them both off.

And once they left, Chen Xin’s shelter returned once again to its quiet state.

He plugged in the refrigerator, adjusted it to confirm it was working, and then placed the vegetables he had harvested earlier inside for cold storage to ensure they wouldn’t spoil.

Besides the vegetables, the canned luncheon meat and pork exchanged from Mo Qingyan were also placed in the storage room, while the case of alcohol was moved to his bedroom. He took out a bottle to place in the nightstand, and the rest he stashed under the bed.

Although he wasn’t a heavy drinker, in this post-apocalyptic world, having a small drink before bed could help calm the nerves and improve sleep quality, which is why Chen Xin specifically traded a case of alcohol with Mo Qingyan.

Moreover, the key point was that with the onset of the apocalypse, such things would become exceedingly rare. After all, brewing requires grains, and when people are struggling to fill their bellies, there would be no extra grains available for brewing.

These pre-apocalyptic beverages would also become rare and valuable resources, increasing in worth the longer the apocalypse persisted.

However, Chen Xin had no intention of stockpiling alcohol as a resource. On one hand, with the system at his disposal, as long as he continued to upgrade the shelter, once the greenhouse production was sufficient, brewing would not be difficult and wouldn’t require deliberate stockpiling.

On the other hand, waiting for alcohol to become highly valuable would take a long time, more than enough for Chen Xin to develop his own brewing capabilities and expand the greenhouse to ensure it could support grain production for brewing.

Of course, some of the premium collections in Mo Qingyan’s wine cellar were still quite tempting for Chen Xin. Perhaps he could trade with her for some good alcohol in the future?

This thought crossed Chen Xin’s mind and made him consider it, but he didn’t dwell on it as it wasn’t an urgent matter for the time being.

Among the supplies exchanged from Mo Qingyan today, what Chen Xin truly considered worth stockpiling was the canned pork.

As the apocalypse arrived, humanity’s original grain production was nearly wiped out, and raising poultry and livestock was naturally out of the question. Meat resources would become precious, even more so than alcohol in some respects.

After all, alcohol could still be brewed using greenhouse-grown grains, but pork, beef...

Even if the country had established underground farms before the apocalypse, such goods would remain luxuries for the privileged few and would not flow into ordinary shelters, unlike before the apocalypse where they were accessible to everyone.

Though the country had devised plans prior to the apocalypse for obtaining food for shelters post-apocalypse, neither mushrooms nor rat meat were viewed as comparable to pork or beef in taste.

Of course, there was hope for the taste of artificial synthetic meat?

As demand creates markets, artificial meat might become popular in the near future, with improvements in taste making it more meat-like becoming a basic requirement.

But for Chen Xin, this provided an opportunity to anticipate whether the upgraded greenhouse would feature animal husbandry functionality.

If he could gain access to animal husbandry, perhaps Chen Xin could secure a stable source of meat.

While humans won’t die from not eating meat, malnutrition is not the state to survive an apocalypse. Consuming animal protein is necessary for maintaining human health and nutritional balance.

Despite the difficulty of filling one’s stomach in the apocalypse, being well-fed and well-nourished would significantly enhance one’s quality of life in such a world.

However, one issue did trouble Chen Xin: where to source animal breeding stock.

The system upgrade might enable the shelter to rear animals, but Chen Xin’s system only had the upgrade function, and he didn’t know if acquiring animal husbandry capabilities would come with a few live animals.

In this environment, trying to find live animals himself was no easy task.

But perhaps larger shelters might have animals? Not to mention, mice and worms, two of the key food sources prepared by the country before the apocalypse, were planned to sustain humans alongside mushrooms.

Yet the idea of eating mice and worms still unsettled Chen Xin, who wasn’t yet in an "eat anything" mindset.

While rat meat counts as a legitimate ingredient before the apocalypse, albeit a bit exotic, it could be a good source of animal protein during the apocalypse if hygiene could be managed.

As for earthworms, most people didn’t actually eat them before the apocalypse, but in "Wandering Earth," after humanity moved underground following Earth’s freezing, edible earthworms became one of the main food sources, making this concept widely known.

The current Blue Star environment is not much different from that in "Wandering Earth," given that the environmental challenges are somewhat similar, though Blue Star hasn’t reached the extreme conditions depicted, nor have people moved into kilometer-deep underground cities.

These differences are of course due to the technological gap between fiction and reality. After all, while digging a kilometer-deep hole was somewhat feasible for real humans, constructing a kilometer-deep city was beyond current capabilities.

Moreover, humans don’t need to dig such a deep hole.

In "Wandering Earth," building such a deep underground city was a practical need, whereas in reality, to avoid the extreme cold in apocalyptic weather, digging sufficiently deep to harness geothermal heat for warmth is a feasible solution, but existing technology limits this, and it’s not truly necessary.

With current technology, humans can build underground cities, like Montreal in Maple Country which has a 17-kilometer underground city constructed since the mid-20th century, over half a century ago now.

But the depth of this underground city is only that of conventional underground structures, equivalent to modern underground pedestrian passages or shopping streets, not the exaggerated five-thousand-meter depth of "Wandering Earth."

Realistically, undertaking construction at such depths is nearly impossible for humans.

Though the Montreal underground city may not be deep, it can withstand the annual four to five months of sub-minus thirty-degree long winters.

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