When Jing Shu came out of the space, her mind clear and focused, she studied the Cube in her hand, which had already transformed into a five-layer form. This Cube was the physical key to evolving the space, a tangible anchor. No matter how far it was from her, as long as Jing Shu willed it, she could summon it back into the Cube space in an instant. The true Cube space, however, existed firmly in Jing Shu's spiritual world, invisible and untouchable to others, a sanctuary no one could ever steal.
Right now the Cube space measured sixty-four cubic meters. To upgrade it into a 5×5×5 space of one hundred and twenty-five cubic meters, Jing Shu first had to master the five-layer Cube. She had to solve it within its new time limit, proving her command over its increased complexity.
Which meant the algorithms were critical. She would need to download all the formulas later and store them, committing the sequences to muscle memory. Practicing the Cube and upgrading the space could wait until night, when she had peace and quiet. For now, the most important thing was stockpiling supplies in preparation for the apocalypse that would arrive in two months. The clock was ticking in her mind.
It was two in the afternoon. Her parents were at work and wouldn't return until late evening. Jing Shu had to take advantage of this time alone to draft a detailed plan, to think without interruption.
But then her stomach growled, a loud, insistent reminder. She had only eaten a light breakfast, and the exertions of the morning had left her hollow.
"All right." Jing Shu walked into the familiar kitchen, rolled up her sleeves, and began moving with a practical efficiency. She rinsed rice, sliced preserved sausage into thin coins, washed a handful of greens, and greased the bottom of a clay pot with a smear of oil.
When the rice had cooked, the aroma beginning to seep out, Jing Shu turned off the heat, cracked in two eggs directly onto the steaming surface, and let them cook with the residual heat for five more minutes. She lifted the lid and drizzled in her homemade seasoning sauce, a mix of soy and sesame oil. The fragrance of rice and sausage mingled perfectly, rich and savory, and the two sunny-side eggs gleamed with a mouthwatering sheen, their yolks still soft.
"Bugs in the apocalypse really can't compare to a bowl of rice," she murmured to the empty kitchen, the truth of it a physical ache in her chest.
Bite of sausage, bite of rice—Jing Shu chewed slowly at the small table, letting her tongue and teeth savor the back-and-forth, the textures and flavors, until her taste buds were fully satisfied. The final lingering flavor slipped down her throat, warming her, leaving her floating in a quiet contentment.
Compared to the endless bugs, the boiled leather, and even the carrion she had been forced to eat during the apocalypse just to fill her stomach, this simple meal was truly beyond measure, a glimpse of heaven.
Carefully, Jing Shu scraped the last bit of crispy rice crust from the pot, licked up every drop of sauce and shred of greens from her bowl, and let out a small, satisfied burp. She quickly washed the pot and bowl, tidied the kitchen until it shone, and opened her phone. In her notepad, she began listing out a detailed plan, her thumbs moving swiftly. With a plan, she could calmly and methodically collect supplies over the next two months without descending into panic.
At the same time, she opened a browser and downloaded and saved video tutorials and PDF guides for solving Cubes from five-layer up to seventeen-layer, storing the files in multiple places. She even printed the most crucial algorithms out on the family printer, stacking the neat pages to store them inside the Cube space later, ensuring she was fully prepared for every future upgrade.
That afternoon, after Jing Shu finished drafting a long, comprehensive shopping list worth millions—food, water filters, seeds, tools, medicines, batteries—she realized with a sinking feeling a serious problem: she had no money. Her personal savings were a pittance.
High-interest loans were out of the question. Even after the apocalypse, the Iron-Blooded Government would still exist, its records intact. If you dared borrow and refused to repay, they would come after you ruthlessly, their enforcement brutal, until you screamed for mercy. Debt didn't vanish with the sun.
Jing Shu grabbed a pen and a notebook, quickly jotted down possible ways to raise money, each line a necessary betrayal of the normal life her parents had built:
Sell her mother's precious collection of stamps and old banknotes, a hobby she had cultivated for decades.
Sell their current downtown apartment, about eighty-six square meters. In her previous life, the family had abandoned it in the second year of the apocalypse when massive floods drowned half the city. To be precise, nearly thirty percent of the world's landmass had eventually gone underwater. It was doomed property.
Sell the family's commercial shop, a small but steady source of income. In her previous life, it had been sold for six hundred thousand yuan to fund her attempt at becoming an internet celebrity. Now it would fund their survival.
Sell her parents' two cars. After the apocalypse, petroleum would be strictly restricted and unavailable to civilians. Buying a cheap electric or solar-powered vehicle would last much longer and attract less attention.
Demand that Uncle Sun finally return the one hundred thousand yuan he owed her father. That money was a ghost from the past, but it was theirs.
Oh right. Last year, they had also purchased a cheap villa near the mountains on the outskirts of the city, with Jing Shu's name on the deed. It had been meant as her dowry, a gift for a future that wouldn't come.
The villa had two floors, each one hundred and sixty-eight square meters, with a large sun terrace on top. Since her family was in the renovation business, Father Jing had personally handled the interior design once the house was finished, pouring his heart into it. He had even secretly dug out a spacious basement, draining every last bit of their savings to do it. It was their hidden project.
The villa couldn't be sold. Its location was excellent, on higher ground. In her past life, downtown had been abandoned, and the government began building a new fortified district on the outskirts. In a post-apocalyptic world where order still barely held, secure, stand-alone homes like this became hot commodities, worth more than gold.
"For now, this will do. I'll add more ideas later." Jing Shu muttered, tapping the pen on the paper. "First I need to secure some funds to buy supplies, then I can move on with the rest of the plan." She narrowed her eyes in thought. Meanwhile, on the table, her phone screen kept lighting up. Zhu Zhengqi's WeChat messages chimed nonstop, filled with more false encouragement for her to become an influencer and promotional pitches, a buzzing annoyance.
"Wait." A cold, practical idea formed. "I can just trick my parents by saying I want to be an influencer. That way the money will come easily." Jing Shu smacked her thigh lightly. If she repeated the same request she had made in her past life, the funding problem would be solved quickly. Otherwise, she really had no believable excuse to persuade her parents to sell the shop, the cars, and the apartment. They would never agree to such drastic action on a whim.
After all, how could anyone believe her if she claimed the earth would lose sunlight in two months and be plunged into endless darkness? They would think she had lost her mind. Yet that was exactly what would happen, the undeniable truth.
But it wasn't even the most frightening part. About a month from now, she remembered, China's authorities would announce to the public that a planetary collision was imminent. Fragments from a shattered asteroid in the upper atmosphere would spread and shroud the earth, blocking out sunlight.
The authorities urged everyone to prepare and even handed out generous subsidies for emergency supplies. Unfortunately, their prediction was that the sun would vanish for only one month. No one, not even the top scientists, imagined that it would be ten long years before sunlight fully returned.
Even worse was what followed. The earth, deprived of sunlight, should logically have frozen. But in reality, that first year the global temperature soared into record-breaking, oppressive heat, lasting for an entire year of darkness and drought. The laws of climate were broken.
The disasters brought by this scorching heat were immense. Crops failed completely in the fields. The oceans warmed. Freshwater fish boiled to death in their lakes and rivers. Tropical regions turned into deserts overnight. Sea levels rose, drowning island nations and wiping them from the map, triggering desperate waves of refugees. Then, starting in the second year, as the atmosphere destabilized, torrential floods and unending, cold rains followed, a pendulum swing of extremes.
Finally, the true drawback of losing the sun revealed itself in full. The earth, its heat bleached away, plummeted into a global deep freeze, an age of extreme cold.