Chapter 110: New Companions
Joo Joowon had originally intended to save the rat meat for Byeol, but now that the cactus had already rooted itself into it, he could hardly force it to pull its roots back out.
After all, the cactus was not brainless.
If it had chosen to do this, then it clearly believed that rat meat was more nutritious than potting soil.
Based on Joo Joowon’s limited knowledge of gardening, things like manure and kitchen waste used as fertilizer usually needed to go through composting and fermentation before they could be safely used for plants.
Otherwise, they could easily burn the roots and end up killing the plant.
Clearly, however, the cactus was not that fragile.
It was perfectly capable of absorbing nutrients directly from corpses.
This realization made Joo Joowon somewhat wary of the cactus that still looked relatively normal on the surface.
In novels, plants capable of directly feeding on corpses were rarely the friendly type.
The other cactus remained motionless at first, but the moment Joo Joowon placed it on top of another rat corpse, its roots immediately began wriggling slowly as they burrowed into the flesh.
The foxtail grass, on the other hand, showed no reaction at all.
It looked no different from an ordinary weed.
After thinking about it for a moment, Joo Joowon moved all of them to the balcony where they could receive sunlight. Then he picked up the foxtail grass and held it in front of the flowering cactus.
"You’re both plants, so you should be able to help me take care of it, right, Bomi?"
The cactus: ...?
Joo Joowon did not care whether it understood him or not and continued speaking to himself.
"You’re not an ordinary cactus anymore, so you need a proper name. Calling you by your species is too lazy. Your flower looks so festive and cheerful, so from now on I’ll call you Bomi."
"Oh, and I even came up with a name for your in-law."
Joo Joowon wore an expression of complete seriousness.
"Look, it’s a little smaller than you, and its flowers are white too. How about calling it Songi?"
Bomi: ????
"If you don’t say anything, I’ll take that as agreement," Joo Joowon said as he stood up.
"Then I’ll leave Songi in your care. I know you’re not a babysitter, and asking this is probably a bit unfair to you, so my expectations aren’t high. I don’t need you to raise it particularly well. Just don’t let it die."
Bomi: ?????
Regardless of whether the cactus had already exhausted its supply of question marks, Joo Joowon simply assumed that it had agreed to everything.
He dusted off his hands and heading straight toward the kitchen to make himself something to eat.
Today had consumed an enormous amount of stamina, and Joo Joowon was already so hungry that he could barely stand it.
Although the increase in attributes had greatly enhanced all of his abilities, it had also significantly increased his body’s demand for energy.
In the past, a single bowl of rice had been enough to keep him going for half a day.
Now, even after eating three bowls, he only felt about seventy percent full.
The cactus sat blankly on top of the mutated rat corpse, completely unable to understand what Joo Joowon had been muttering about.
It "looked" at the foxtail grass that Joo Joowon had casually tossed onto its body.
Its tiny cactus brain worked desperately for quite some time before it slowly tugged the foxtail grass away and repositioned it so that its roots could take hold near the edge of the mutated rat corpse instead.
That way, it would not compete with the cactus for nutrients.
Even though, as a cactus, it truly did not require rich soil in order to grow well, the essence of life itself was exclusive.
Even if it did not need all those nutrients, it still had no desire to watch another plant absorb what rightfully belonged to it.
The foxtail grass was pulled upright by Bomi’s roots and embedded into the corpse, no longer leaning this way and that.
It stood there quietly and peacefully, appearing as though it possessed no consciousness whatsoever.
Joo Joowon spent more than half an hour preparing a meal large enough to last him until evening.
Because of the rain, he estimated that all water sources outside had probably become unusable by now.
As a result, he was currently extremely careful with every drop of water he used while cooking.
Instead of preparing multiple dishes and soup separately, he simply threw vegetables, rice, and meat into a single pot and cooked everything together into one large stew.
As for the taste of such a meal, for someone like him who was not particularly fond of stews in the first place, it was difficult to describe.
Still, after the apocalypse, nobody had the luxury of being picky about food anymore.
As long as it was edible, that was already enough.
Joo Joowon did not dare hope for anything more.
Without a refrigerator, fresh meat simply could not be preserved for very long.
He had not managed to find many preserved meat products such as cured sausages or smoked meat around the apartment complex either, so he had no choice but to try preserving the meat himself.
Unfortunately, he was hardly an expert when it came to cooking.
The only thing he knew was that meat usually needed to be marinated for several days first, then dried, and finally smoked over fire.
Going through that entire process would take at least a week, and possibly even ten days or half a month.
Even then, he had absolutely no confidence that his improvised method of preservation, which relied almost entirely on guesswork, would actually succeed.
There was every possibility that he would simply end up wasting all of the meat instead.
Fortunately, Joo Joowon still had some preserved sausages that he had collected earlier.
They had probably been brought back by tenants returning home for the new year and simply had not been finished yet.