A month passed without any waves in time, and during this month, Chen Xin's life didn't undergo any changes. He woke up every day to the sound of his phone alarm, just like how he used to wake up naturally in the past.
In the shelter where there's no sight of daylight, judging day and night by light was meaningless, so to avoid sleeping through time, Chen Xin reset his phone alarm.
Since quitting his job a few years ago to write novels, this was the first time Chen Xin turned his phone alarm back on.
Returning to a routine schedule was a new experience for Chen Xin, at least he felt his mental and physical states had improved a lot.
A regular schedule naturally brought about regular habits. After getting up, Chen Xin would brush his teeth and wash his face, open a pack of self-heating food for breakfast, and use the heating time to do a ten-minute exercise to work out.
By the time he finished warming up, breakfast was ready, and eating at this time really stimulated his appetite.
After breakfast, Chen Xin would first check the operational status of various equipment in the shelter and fill up the generator with oil.
After starting the generator to supply power to the entire shelter, he would spend the rest of the morning in the greenhouse planting.
Though there's no need for weeding or pest control, watering, fertilizing, and loosening the soil were still necessary.
Watering and loosening the soil were not difficult. Although Chen Xin hadn't done it before, with the video materials on the computer, he could manage to roughly meet the planting requirements.
The vegetables weren't growing very lushly, but they were basically growing healthily, with nothing much amiss.
The only thing that Chen Xin found unbearable was fertilizing.
When Chen Xin moved into the shelter, he didn't buy any chemical fertilizers. The soil in the greenhouse was taken from a nearby farmer's vegetable garden. The soil quality was definitely not a problem, and since it was the farmer's own vegetables, there were no chemical fertilizers or pesticides used.
However, when the farmer sold him the soil, he specifically reminded him that to make the vegetables tasty, fertilizing was essential.
The farmer was referring not to chemical fertilizers, but to the legendary... farm manure.
This simply referred to the liquid obtained from the fermentation of the black water part of the previously discussed water recycling system in the shelter, and the gas produced during fermentation was the famous biogas.
Under normal circumstances, rural areas generally have biogas digesters. Human and animal waste, straw, and other organic materials are filled into the digester. With the decomposition of biogas bacteria, methane is produced, which can be used for daily cooking, heating, lighting, and power generation.
This is a very common facility in rural areas of the Flame Country, which was vigorously promoted in the 1990s for handling human and animal waste and improving rural living conditions.
The black water treatment system of the sewage treatment system Chen Xin installed also followed the same principle, using bacteria to decompose the organics in reclaimed black water, thus realizing the recycling of water resources. As for graywater, since it contains residues like soap, shampoo, and detergent, it can't be added to the biogas digester directly, as these would kill the bacteria used for decomposition in the digester.
Chen Xin had considered using biogas as an energy source in the shelter before, but after calculations, he realized that his own waste production was not enough to meet the gas production needs of a biogas digester, so he had to give up this idea and didn't use biogas as an energy source.
However, even without using biogas energy, the biogas digester could still serve as an important means of sewage treatment, effectively decomposing the organics in the sewage and speeding up the recycling of water resources.
It's just that the smell of the fermentation tank used for sewage treatment was...
Compared to a month-unwashed pile of smelly socks in a boys' dormitory, it's like the difference between stinky tofu and Swedish surströmming.
The stench... Chen Xin went in with his gas mask on, yet he was still almost brought to tears by the fumes.
Fortunately, the sewage treatment tank was outside the container room, and considering the smell, Chen Xin had also opened forced ventilation, so it wouldn't spread throughout the shelter.
The reclaimed sewage that had been fermenting for a month was loaded by Chen Xin into plastic buckets prepared beforehand and then poured into the soil in the greenhouse, one scoop after another.
Though the smell of this stuff was truly overwhelming, it cannot be denied that nature is a complete cycle; only these decomposed organics can help the plants thrive.
After fertilizing, it was time for watering, but what surprised Chen Xin today was that when he was halfway through watering, the hose ran out of water.
This gave Chen Xin a shock. He quickly ran to check the water tank and the sewage treatment tank, only to find that his water tank, capable of storing three tons of freshwater, was already empty, while the sewage treatment tank was only half full.
Looking at the empty water tank, Chen Xin didn't understand why he ran out of water when the sewage treatment tank and water recycling system were in place, even collecting water vapor from the air.
However, having no water means having no water. Though there was still plenty of drinking water and only two and a half boxes of pure water had been used, leaving a good amount of stock, the domestic and greenhouse irrigation water had run out.
Now Chen Xin had to find a way to replenish the freshwater, otherwise he would face a water shortage crisis or use stored drinking water to supplement domestic use.
Using drinking water to supplement domestic use would be the last resort if there were no other options. Chen Xin would not do so if there was any other choice available.
If not using drinking water to supplement domestic use, there were only two paths open for Chen Xin.
Firstly, Chen Xin could choose to take the risk and open the shelter door to go outside and look for freshwater resources.
A month has passed, and with the meteors' collision-induced fires likely extinguished as dust covered the skies and the temperature gradually dropped, it should be relatively safe to leave the shelter now.
This was also part of Chen Xin's original plan: to open the shelter one month later, go out and install the shortwave radio antenna, and establish contact with other survivor groups. If possible, he could also trade supplies with a few companions in the city.
At the very least, Chen Xin knew for sure that one of his companions in the city hadn't prepared a planting greenhouse. If he brought fresh vegetables, he could trade them for quite a lot with her.
However, there was a problem with this plan: how would Chen Xin bring the freshwater back?