Houses and cars, all the markers of a stable life, would all become worthless in the face of raw survival. They were just shells, empty and exposed.
Jing Shu shook her head, pushing away the grim thought. A fragile, irrational hope flickered in her chest. She hoped history would change, that the apocalypse wouldn't come again in this lifetime. But no matter what, the necessary preparations still had to be made. Hope wasn't a plan.
So she would never confess to her parents. She couldn't tell them about the Cube Space, about her rebirth, or about the coming apocalypse. The burden of that knowledge was hers alone to carry. To share it would be to invite disbelief, panic, or worse, to make them targets. The only way to protect them was to act, silently and decisively.
Having made her plan, Jing Shu quickly came up with an excuse to quiet Zhu Zhengqi. She typed a message, her fingers cool and steady. "Give me one more month to think it over. If I still want to be a streamer then, I will come find you. After all, one million isn't a small sum. I need to be sure."
Only then did Zhu Zhengqi, who had been bombarding her nonstop with messages, finally stop. He sent back a single thumbs-up emoji. He didn't dare push Jing Shu too hard, not when such a large sum was supposedly on the line.
Jing Shu changed into practical clothes, shouldered her large canvas bag, and pulled along a sturdy folding shopping trolley. She went to her parents' bedroom and, with a pang of guilt, dug out her father's hidden stash of cash from his old winter coat pocket, 3,600 yuan in worn bills. She left 100 behind, a small deception. She added the 6,059 yuan in her own WeChat wallet, the savings from part-time jobs.
Then, with a clinical efficiency, she borrowed another 6,000 yuan from a quick online loan platform, Jiebei, before heading out. In the Jing family, money was always managed by her mother with careful thrift. Her father, an honest man, had devoted his whole life to the three women he loved most: his mother, his wife, and his daughter. Taking his secret money felt like a betrayal, but it was for their ultimate safety.
At the small printing shop near the community gate, Jing Shu used her phone to quickly alter the electronic contract Zhu Zhengqi had sent. In three key places, she changed the numbers: she raised the deposit to 800,000 yuan, the full payment to 1.5 million, and swapped the company name to something more impressive sounding. She printed it out on crisp paper, signed it with a flourish, and pressed her fingerprint in blue ink. Tonight, when she returned home, she could use this fabricated contract to negotiate with her parents about the money. It was a lie, but a necessary one.
The first thing Jing Shu needed to do now was head to Wu City's largest agricultural wholesale market, a sprawling complex on the city's edge, to buy seeds, and while she was at it, stock up on seasonings. These were the foundations of life.
There was a saying her grandfather used to repeat: with grain in hand, one never needs to panic. Even if the world ended tomorrow, she could still live well if she had seeds and soil.
The wholesale market's greatest feature was this: no retail. Everything was sold in boxes and crates, large quantities only. That was exactly what Jing Shu needed, bulk purchases that would draw less suspicion than many small trips to a supermarket.
She spent twenty minutes in a taxi, watching the city streets blur past, and arrived at the bustling, noisy market. People were everywhere, vendors shouting, buyers haggling. Vegetable leaves and discarded packaging scattered across the damp ground, and trucks constantly rumbled through, loading and unloading. Who would believe, looking at this plenty, that in just half a year, a single cabbage could sell for thousands of yuan? The memory was a sour taste in her mouth.
The market was enormous, a maze of alleys and stalls, divided into sections for vegetables, fruits, dried goods, frozen and preserved items, and aquatic seafood. The air was a thick soup of smells, earthy, fishy, and sweet.
Jing Shu entered the vegetable section. In the middle were two long rows of massive trucks, their beds stacked high with boxes of fresh vegetables, a riot of green, red, and orange. Some trucks were already half-sold, their cargo dwindling, some entirely cleared out, while others still stretched as far as the eye could see, a promise of impossible abundance.
On both sides were smaller, permanent shops selling seeds, farm byproducts, and seasonings, doing both wholesale and retail business. Jing Shu started at one end, going from shop to shop, more than ten in a row. She purchased a dizzying variety of seeds: vegetables like bok choy and bitter melon, fruits like strawberry and watermelon, cotton, medicinal herbs like honeysuckle, sugar crops like sugar beet, grains like rice and wheat, beans of all kinds, oil crops like rapeseed and sesame, and more.
Whether they would all be used or not, Jing Shu thought, at least she would preserve some of China's agricultural lifeblood. If someday sunlight returned and farming became possible again, it would be far better than seeing these varieties go extinct, lost forever.
Every shopkeeper looked at Jing Shu, a young woman with a trolley, as if she had lost her mind. Just maize alone had more than one hundred varieties, not to mention the endless types of vegetables and fruits. Her requests were wildly unusual.
"It's like this," Jing Shu explained, adopting a polite, official tone. "I am from the National Bureau of Agricultural Environmental Protection and Ecological Testing. Here is my work ID." She flashed her phone screen, showing a professional-looking ID card she had hastily made herself on Baidu the night before. "I need a wide variety of seed samples for biodiversity cataloging and preservation research. If you have other rare or heirloom varieties, please sell me some too."
At times like this, she had learned, the longer and more bureaucratic the title sounded, the harder it was for others to figure out what the department actually did. And if you tagged on a 'bureau' or 'authority', people immediately worried about whether you might be inspecting their goods for compliance or could cause trouble.
Sure enough, the shopkeepers' expressions shifted from suspicion to polite, slightly nervous smiles, and they eagerly began to explain their products. Jing Shu listened carefully, labeling every packet of seeds with notes on planting times and conditions. At checkout, the shopkeepers, perhaps feeling they were contributing to some important national project, often tossed in extra items as goodwill.
One gave her a box of sweet potato and yam tubers for sprouting, another gave her a sack of potato seed pieces. These things were considered nearly worthless, but the shopkeepers, feeling charitable, offered them gladly. Jing Shu thanked them profusely and gratefully packed them into her growing trolley.
To her surprise, she even found a stall selling ready-to-fruit fungus bags: enoki, lion's mane, shiitake mushrooms, and more. These required no sunlight, just moisture, and could sprout within ten days, producing three harvests. But once Jing Shu brought them back, she had her own way, with the Spirit Spring, to ensure they kept growing far beyond their normal cycle.
Mushrooms were among the very few vegetables that could still grow in the deep darkness of the apocalypse. They had saved countless lives. Jing Shu, though she had grown sick to death of bland oyster mushrooms from her past life, still welcomed the idea of having different, flavorful mushrooms to eat.
She bought two inoculated bags of each variety, filled out her home address on a slip, and arranged for delivery directly to her doorstep later in the week.
Finished with seeds, she moved deeper into the market, her trolley wheels rumbling over the concrete.
Though seeds were cheap, often just a yuan or two per packet, the sheer number of varieties added up. Jing Shu spent a total of 1,030 yuan, a small fortune in seeds that represented future life.
Soon, Jing Shu found a large seasoning wholesale shop, its front open to the alley. Right at the entrance stood ten massive ceramic vats of aged vinegar, each as tall as her waist, lined up in a grand, pungent display.
"Hello, boss. Do you offer free delivery?" Jing Shu asked, glancing at the middle-aged woman behind the counter, who was hammering numbers on her calculator with lightning speed, her fingers a blur.
"Free delivery on orders over two thousand. Look at what you need, no bargaining," the woman said without raising her head, her voice sharp with busyness. Then she shouted over her shoulder at a young man hurriedly arranging goods on a pallet: "Hurry up with that order for Friendly Supermarket, they're urging again."
It was clear that although the shop was tucked away, its business was thriving, filled with loyal returning customers from restaurants and stores.
Jing Shu walked inside, the air thick with the smells of soy, spice, and vinegar, and began checking the prices on handwritten tags. She couldn't help but marvel: wholesale really was cheap. The discounts were staggering.
But here, wholesale meant a minimum purchase of five crates per item. No single boxes.
Shanxi aged vinegar: 270 yuan for five crates. Low-sodium salt: 180 yuan for five crates. Soy sauce: 140 yuan. White sugar: 300 yuan. The numbers were a siren song.
Jing Shu almost thought she had gone mad with desire. Just looking at these rows of seasonings made her mouth water with remembered flavors. Especially sesame oil. A single splash in a hotpot or over noodles left an aroma lingering between the teeth for hours. The memory was a physical ache.
Only heaven knew that in the apocalypse, even grain would vanish, let alone surplus used for making seasonings. At most, strategic rations like salt were distributed by the Government in tiny, precious portions once a week. A pinch was a treasure.
In those days, every grain of seasoning, every drop of vinegar, would be priceless, worth more than jewelry.
In her past life, after the great flood washed away her family's home and all their belongings in the second year, Jing Shu never tasted any proper seasoning again. She either ate the bland, mass-produced communal gruel doled out at distribution points, or she foraged for carrion to boil.
Carrion was a new species evolved from the long darkness, a kind of fast-growing, rotting organism that bred endlessly in damp, dark swarms. They were easy to catch, but tasteless. Boiled in plain water with a bit of bark for bitterness and a few precious grains of salt, and if incredibly lucky, sprinkled with a few scavenged wild scallions, it counted as a decent meal. That was the high point of flavor in her later years.