Condiments like vinegar, sugar, and salt do not expire in principle. They are the stable, enduring building blocks of flavor. Star anise and cinnamon keep perfectly fine as long as they stay dry, sealed away from moisture. These can be stored for the long term without worry, so Jing Shu planned to stock plenty of them in the villa's spacious basement, where they would be safe and accessible, without using up precious room in her Cube Space for such bulky, non-perishable items.
Jing Shu secretly wiped a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth, her stomach clenching at the thought of all that flavor. Then she said to the shop's brisk, calculating auntie, who was still tapping her calculator, "Aside from the vinegar, give me ten cases of every other seasoning you have." That would be two hundred kilograms of each.
The auntie finally looked up from her numbers, her eyes sharp and assessing as they settled on Jing Shu. "Every single seasoning? Are you sure about that?" Her tone held a mix of disbelief and budding commercial interest.
Jing Shu nodded, her face serious. "Yes, I'm sure." She paused, then added, "As for the aged vinegar, I'll take thirty of the big cases."
The vinegar came in heavy 5-liter carry jugs, the soy sauce and oyster sauce in slightly smaller 1-liter jugs, and the rest, things like pepper and cumin, were packed in 500-gram or 250-gram foil pouches.
The auntie regained her composure, a professional smile returning to her face as she began scribbling out the order on a carbon-copy pad. She glanced at Jing Shu again and asked, almost casually, "Our douban paste, chili paste, and chili powder sell very well, you know. The margins are good. Do you want some of those too?" She figured this young woman was a first-timer, maybe opening a restaurant, so she gave a friendly nudge toward higher-profit items.
Jing Shu thought it over quickly. Her plan was solid: for the first month she would focus on stocking raw ingredients, and for the second month she would shift to processing and preserving foods. She would certainly pickle a lot of vegetables then. Homemade chili paste would be better, made from peppers grown in her own Cube Space, and she could make douban paste herself too, though it might not taste exactly like the store-bought brands she remembered.
"Then add ten cases of the douban paste," Jing Shu said. She swallowed unconsciously, the memory of spicy, savory beans already on her tongue. The auntie gave her a strange, sidelong look. This girl had been gulping and almost drooling since she walked in. Was she ill, or just very, very hungry?
The auntie tapped away on her calculator, the buttons beeping softly. Jing Shu, not the kind of customer who blindly accepted whatever price the shopkeeper named, quietly opened the calculator on her own phone and did the math in parallel.
"A total of 12,890 yuan," Jing Shu said first, before the auntie could announce the figure.
The auntie nodded, impressed, ran the numbers one more time, and said, "Correct. Orders over ten thousand come with a free case of curry blocks, our promotion." At once, Jing Shu pictured a steaming plate of curry chicken over rice, the sauce rich and yellow, and her mouth watered all over again.
Jing Shu left her home address, paid from her dwindling funds, took the flimsy paper invoice, exchanged phone numbers with the auntie, and arranged for delivery just before the market's closing time. Pleased with the transaction, she left the shop and continued deeper into the now-quieting market.
She had only 1,630 yuan left. The vegetable stalls were already emptying, their leftover produce sold at a discount, and the seasoning shops around her were starting to pull down their metal shutters. Jing Shu decided to top up her order a bit more. She circled back to a different shop and bought whole peppercorns, brown sugar, and several jars of Wang Zhihe fermented bean curd, that pungent, savory delicacy. She asked the shop to add these items to her larger delivery.
She had only 30 yuan left in her pocket after that, and night had fully fallen, the market lights blinking off one by one. So Jing Shu wheeled her empty trolley to the roadside and took a taxi home.
Earlier, after work, Jing Shu's father had quietly planned to take out 500 yuan from his secret stash to buy a birthday gift for Uncle Sun's son. When he opened his hiding place, only a single, lonely 100-yuan note remained. For a long moment, Jing Shu's father's expression shifted through shock, then unease, and finally a stubborn, resigned reluctance, as if he was remembering the familiar fear of being financially overruled by the little demon king of the household, his wife.
When Jing Shu returned, she found her father sitting on the edge of their bed with a constipated look on his face. He was sighing softly, debating whether to confess the missing money to Jing Shu's mother. Jing Shu's mother was cooking in the kitchen, and her voice floated out, fond and slightly exasperated. "You little rascal, you always come home right at dinner time."
The aroma from the kitchen carried a faint burnt edge. Her mother's cooking was still as reliably unreliable as ever. Looking at her mother's face, still fairly young and pretty ten years earlier, without the deep lines of constant worry, Jing Shu's throat tightened with emotion. She did not dare imagine the gaunt cheeks and head of white hair that severe malnutrition would bring ten years later. The image was a knife in her heart.
She tucked away her emotions, locking them down tight. They only hardened Jing Shu's resolve to sell the house and the cars and stockpile supplies, so that the three of them would not only have enough to eat during the coming apocalypse, but would live well, and safe.
They had just finished the slightly charred dinner when the delivery trucks arrived, the mushroom bags and the massive seasoning order coming together. Under her parents' utterly puzzled gazes, Jing Shu directed the deliverymen to carry dozens of big, heavy boxes straight into her bedroom, stacking them against the wall.
Then Jing Shu took out the fabricated contract and showed it to her parents, explaining in a rehearsed, excited rush, "Zhu Zhengqi helped me find a top marketing team to package me as a gourmet food influencer. I'm going to livestream myself cooking while selling premium food products, so I went to the wholesaler this afternoon to get these seasonings for content and for future sales."
Since Jing Shu could not reveal the Cube Space, she needed a legitimate, open explanation for the sudden stockpiles, so her parents would not grow suspicious later as more and more supplies appeared. Jing Shu felt like a genius for coming up with a plan that killed three birds with one stone: it explained the purchases, secured funding, and gave a reason to move to the villa.
"Why buy so much? Can you even use it all?" As the family's primary cook and accountant, Jing Shu's mother naturally kept a tight grip on the household budget. She eyed the mountain of boxes with deep suspicion.
"We'll need over a thousand jin of vinegar just to make hundreds of jars of pickles for the show and for sale," Jing Shu said, her voice full of business-like certainty. She then walked her parents through the entire modern pipeline of building an online persona and hype strategy, how much hiring a 'water-army' for engagement would cost, and how lucrative sponsorship ads would be once she became popular. She used terms she'd vaguely remembered from her past life's brief brush with the industry.
Never underestimate what some parents will sacrifice for their children's dreams. They will sell a house to get into a good school district, and they will do the same for what looks like a promising future career.
"We need that much money?" her father asked, his brow furrowed as he looked at the contract's numbers.
Her mother answered before Jing Shu could. "For our daughter's future, we will sell pots and pans if we must. We prepared ourselves to spend when our girl chose the performing arts path. Did Lao Liu next door not invest several million for his son's music studio?"
The decision to pour money into this livestream career was made with startling speed. With only one daughter, they cherished Jing Shu to the bone. Her happiness was their blueprint.
Jing Shu added another layer to the plan. "The persona we're building is a rich second-generation heiress who cooks and sells her own artisanal food. That means I should stream from a luxurious setting, like the villa. We need to renovate a few key places there to suit the content and look high-end."
Her father worked in renovation, which would save a great deal of money.
"All right," he said, nodding slowly as he switched into problem-solving mode. "I will find some reliable workers tomorrow. We can get labor and materials at my cost price. When funds are freed up from your… venture, we can redo things exactly how you want later." Whatever the three women in his life wanted, he supported unconditionally. It was his life's rule.
"We'll sell the shop, and sell my car," Jing Shu's father said without a moment's hesitation, making the same choice he had in the previous life, but this time for a survival Jing Shu couldn't explain.
Jing Shu nodded eagerly, like a little pecking chick. "Relax. I will break even in three months, I promise. Then I'll buy you something even better."
"Sell my car too," Jing Shu's mother chimed in, though she still looked a little worried. "But even then, we are still short about six hundred thousand. Should we sell this apartment and move to the villa full time?"
"Commuting more than thirty kilometers to work from the villa will not do," Jing Shu's father objected practically. The villa was too far from their jobs and the city center.
Jing Shu offered a compromise plan. "The contract says we must pay an eight-hundred-thousand deposit within three days. Why not sell the shop and Dad's car to cover the deposit first? If time is tight, we can borrow the difference from Auntie, Uncle, and the other aunts. We still have a full month to scrape the rest together before the final payment."
By suggesting borrowing, she would also, she knew, let her parents see her aunt's true colors early, when the request for money was made. In this life, Jing Shu intended to bring that enemy into the light well before the apocalypse could make her more dangerous.
They agreed. They immediately took out their phones and posted the shop and car listings on 58.com, pricing them low and marking them as urgent sales requiring full payment upfront.
"Dad, look at this," Jing Shu said later, casually showing her father her phone. "Today is Uncle Sun's son's twenty-third birthday. Did you send a gift?" She showed him a boastful photo from the son's social media Moments.
"Not this year," Jing Shu's father said gloomily. With his secret stash gone, what gift could he possibly send?
"Oh, Dad, look at this next one," Jing Shu continued, scrolling. "Uncle Sun's son just got a new Mercedes. He even wrote, 'Thanks to Dad for the amazing birthday present.' So rich." As soon as she said it, she saw her father's face darken, a mix of hurt and anger flashing in his eyes. Knowing not to push too far, she slipped away to her room. As for Uncle Sun's one hundred thousand yuan debt, she thought, it was high time for him to cough it up.
Back in her room with the door closed, Jing Shu first stored the promising mushroom grow bags in a dedicated one-cubic-meter section of the Cube Space, where time was normal and they could begin fruiting. Then she moved all the seasoning boxes into the Cube Space as well and used her unique, x-ray-like view to check their contents.
The unopened salt, chicken bouillon, sesame oil, and other items were all in the correct quantities with fresh production dates. Only then, satisfied, did she put the physical boxes back in her bedroom. It sounded like an absurd amount of seasonings, but stacked high in three neat rows against the wall, they did not actually take up much room. On her phone, in her secure notes, Jing Shu checked off each item on her master list and carefully noted the quantities.
Sorting and cataloging her stockpiles was, Jing Shu realized, becoming her happiest time. It was a concrete, measurable step toward safety. It felt, in a strange and satisfying way, like counting money every single day.
===
Author's note:
All prices and items were verified and cross-checked with reference data and past wholesale rates. Every expense was carefully calculated, real and effective, not made up. O(∩_∩)O