Chapter 597: Chapter 21: "Special Equipment" Fruit Greenhouse
Juliet One indeed made no report of this recently emerged "grass house"; it was not out of neglect, nor was it that she had not patrolled the area. Rather, to Juliet One, that so-called "grass house" did not qualify as an architectural structure at all.
A common building should have a foundation, walls, and support pillars, yet the "grass house" lacks any of these elements; one simply cannot consider it a "house."
Wang Shuai moved swiftly; a few back-and-forths, and he arrived in front of the neat and tidy grass house, covered by grass, five meters in length and width.
Though appearing nonchalant, he is not so. Coming from a military family, Wang Shuai would run on foot from Zone A to Zone C every night, circling around the periphery of the desert.
In the entire North Campus, no one, other than Juliet One responsible for patrolling Zone C, knew better about this area. Whether a sand dune shifted its position, or a rock had weathered into sand, Wang Shuai knew it all clearly. Thus, when a "grass house" suddenly appeared on the route, he immediately reacted.
Concerning the thatched hut, he too, like Romeo One, was not intentional about reporting it; instead, he was curious as to who had built this grass house that could withstand the desert winds of Zone C. As one must know, the sandstorm blowing from the deep desert on the first of each month in Zone C is most fierce, comparable in force to the "Katrina" hurricane that once ravaged the Middle West of America.
A few years earlier, before the construction investment in Zone C was increased, there had been an incident where a student dormitory, along with its occupants, was swept away in the middle of the night, and it was the campus robots that found and brought the people back from deep in the desert.
He did not yet know that the building he was currently standing on was the dormitory of Xiao Xian and Zhang Yiyi.
Not far away, the concrete of the stairs that had not yet set reminded Romeo One that it had been to this place; it searched its database, confirming its presence here three days ago. At that time, at the same location, there was a pile of broken wood.
"Eh, this grass house?" Wang Shuai wanted to take a look inside the grass house but couldn’t find any windows or doors.
Following the moonlight, he gazed at the "wall" of the grass house; looking down from the "wall," there were no walls; the base of the grass house bore no traces of mud or water.
This was not a house, at least not in the traditional sense. It was not a reinforced concrete structure, nor made of bricks and wood. If there were a need to purchase a large quantity of cement and bricks, it would inevitably require a purchase from the materials center.
The grass house used the simplest makeshift structure. What was odd was that it had no formal walls, nor crossbeams or pillars for support, let alone conventional parts of a house such as windows and doors.
Romeo One and Wang Shuai— a robot and a person— each occupied one side, moving and roaming around beside the grass house.
One would have to observe very carefully to discover that the base of the wall was a row of grass stems.
"Cattails? No, that’s not right. Can cattails grow so densely packed? Even a single finger of mine can’t poke through," using a bit of effort, Wang Shuai’s finger could only slightly part the outer layer of the grass, unable to peek into what secrets the interior of the grass house might hold.
Romeo was all too familiar with cattails as a species, but it also had never seen cattails that grew over two meters tall. Moreover, the structure of the cattails had changed.
"In some location of Zone C, two suspicious objects were spotted," Juliet reported during her patrol, having detected two moving targets.
"Romeo One, and Zone A’s Wang Shuai," Juliet One approached the grass house, not understanding what a man and a machine were doing downstairs of two female students’ building in the middle of the night.
"Juliet One, try using your blade to cut these cattails," Romeo One had already tested using a grass-cutting tool, unable to cut them normally.
A blade emerged from Juliet One’s body, its shape quite special, resembling two reversed willow leaves combined into an outside figure-eight shape.
It’s said that it’s not the only blade; these blades, when spun rapidly, resemble flaming wheels and can even detach from the body, flying out whirling.
About the blades on Juliet One responsible for Zone C, there’s a story within North Campus.
Zone C spans the largest area while having the least number of robots in the entire North Campus. Such a contradictory combination easily prompts certain people within North Campus to believe that carrying out rule-breaking deeds in Zone C would likely be the most difficult to detect.
Back when Wang Shuai was an Intermediate Class student, a severe brawl occurred in Zone C. At that time, a newly promoted Advanced Student from Zone A and an experienced Intermediate Student from Zone B had a conflict over some matter.