I'd reached my limit.
The reason Earth could support such enormous numbers of plants and animals now was that its land had once been
nourished by other organisms, which had enriched it with different elements and
nutrients to feed the plants.
But... the nutrients in the earth had a finite capacity, after all.
I remembered Tian Feng once saying that people in Neon usually farmed for three years, then let the land rest for one, so the nutrients that had been
used up could replenish themselves.
And I remembered that, for a time, here in our country... well, back in my hometown, a Neon company had leased some land. But for the
first five years, they hadn't planted
anything at all. They'd let weeds grow wild in that rich, dark soil, while the people from Neon did nothing but raise cows and sheep.
A lot of people couldn't understand it. Only later did we learn that the five years of leaving the land fallow were necessary because the local farmers had used
fertilizers and pesticides without restraint, and had already
depleted the soil's nutrients. All the company was doing was letting the land recover to its original state.
After that, the people from Neon planted strawberries... all of them for export.
I'm not bringing this up to say anything about Neon. No matter how you looked at it, our country and Neon had a long-standing feud. I'm only saying...
The land might already have been overexploited.
For more than twenty years, plants had grown like crazy, spurred on by the virus. They'd plundered the earth's nutrients at any cost. Now... it seemed like they were
already nearing their limit, didn't it?
Put simply, the soil was deteriorating, its fertility was running low, and it could no longer sustain this kind