Wasteland Farming: Growing a New Order from the Ashes

Behind him lies a book of extinct crops; before him stretches a slope of gray soil where nothing can grow.

In the forty-fourth year after the war, Lu Chenzhou was struck from the village register, not because he couldn't grow food, but because he knew too much about it.

Three kinds of black lay buried in the soil of Ashwell Slope: fallout from nuclear blasts, silt dredged up from old canals, and rot spreading outward from the roots. Others saw dead land. He saw accounts to settle.

He had no power that could conjure a single grain of food, only six years' worth of hands spent washing plates and tending shelters, and an old terminal he refused to wipe clean.

If the land couldn't be cleansed, he'd bring the people back to life. If crops wouldn't grow, he'd plant a new order.

This time, what grew from the gray soil would be more than wheat.