Sometimes, fate works in very strange ways. The less you want to get involved with something, the more it seems to cling to you. Just like it did with Jing An. But that particular entanglement's a story for later.
For the next few days, the entire family plunged into a state of busy, purposeful routine. There's a shared, unspoken understanding that time's the one resource they can't stockpile.
Jing An planted a small, peculiar tree laden with candy-heart apples in the front yard, and a small apricot tree already full of delicate white apricots in the back yard. He scratched his head, examining the root balls. "Do nurseries even sell trees with fruits already attached? And why do the roots of this apple tree form such a perfect, tight cube? It's unnatural."
"What do you know?" Grandpa Jing retorted, though he too peered curiously at the compact, geometric root system. "This's modern high-tech gardening. Only with this method can so many fruits hang on one small tree. In a month or so, we'll have fresh fruit to eat right off the branch." He drooled a little at the thought, then winced as a fresh pang shot through his newly regrowing teeth. Nobody knew exactly when these teeth had started coming in, or how long the painful process would last. Mother Nature could be truly cruel.
Jing Shu, watching from the porch, suppressed her laughter. This particular apple tree, sourced from her Cube Space, occupied exactly one full cubic meter of soil. The roots literally had no room to spread out normally, so they had twisted and knit themselves together into that dense, blocky mass.
Grandma Jing busied herself tidying the front yard soil, carefully planting row after row of the free vegetable seedlings into neat, moist beds. Grandpa Jing, ladder in hand, installed the rows of pulsed xenon lamps over the greenhouse and garden, checking each connection. Jing An organized the multitude of mushroom growing kits in a shaded corner of the living room. In about ten days, if the humidity's right, they'd sprout all kinds of mushrooms: shiitake, oyster, enoki.
Su Lanzhi, wearing gardening gloves, built sturdy grape trellises along the inner edges of the greenhouse. They're already heavily laden with vines full of dark red grapes. She had constructed three long rows of trellises, each with six high yielding layers. Then, working together, they transplanted other pre grown plants: strawberries in hanging baskets, sugar tangerine bushes, hawthorn, cherry, and lychee saplings. The tree fruits were planted with their entire root balls immersed in a special soil and nutrient water mix, a technique meant to keep them productive and fresh for a very long time.
Jing Shu took on the task of preserving the surplus of other fruits. Snow pears, cherries, oranges, lychees, and yellow peaches were peeled, pitted, and processed into gleaming jars of canned goods, sealed for years of storage. Strawberries, pineapples, red dates, and grapes were sliced and laid out on drying racks. Persimmons were carefully peeled and hung to become sweet dried persimmons. Pomegranates, watermelons, and oranges were juiced, their vibrant liquids poured into clean 2 liter sealed jars and stored in her Cube Space, ready for whenever anyone wanted a fresh, cold drink.
Because of the sheer variety of fruits, and the fact that the magical apple tree itself took up a full cubic meter of her spatial capacity, even after a month of planting and harvesting, the total volume of fresh produce wasn't overwhelmingly huge. It was a carefully curated bounty. Satisfied for now, Jing Shu closed her livestream channel and left a simple message for her followers: "Going on a break. I'll resume broadcasting after the Dark Days pass."
This separation, she knew, could last ten years, or it could very well be a lifetime.
With everything prepared, the apocalypse felt imminent, a storm on the horizon. Jing Shu found herself relaxing into a strange calm, feeling the same focused quiet that settles in before a major exam, when all the preparation's done and only the test itself remains.
Perhaps it was because of this mindset that the Rubik's Cube, which she had practiced with near obsessive dedication for nearly two months, finally reached a breakthrough. One evening during practice, her mind suddenly felt clear, the colorful puzzle unlocking itself in her perception. Her fingers moved faster, more skillfully, seeming to see several steps ahead, even predicting sequences ten moves in advance.
As the last twist aligned all six faces into uniform colors, she quickly pressed the timer on her phone.
Ding~
"95 seconds!"
This was solidly at a professional ninth dan competition level.
In that moment of triumph, a sharp pain lanced through her head. The world spun, and she fainted again, slumping to the floor. The five layer cube in her limp hands shimmered faintly and reconfigured itself, the mechanism clicking and shifting until it settled into the form of a six layer cube. Her Cube Space had officially upgraded, expanding from a 4 layer cube space to a 5 layer space. Now it measured 5 units by 5 units by 5 units, a total of 125 cubic meters.
She woke up to the sound of her father's frantic screaming. Having slept on the floor all night, stiff and sore, she rushed out to the yard, finding her grandparents already there, staring in bewildered alarm.
Grandpa Jing was holding a shovel like a weapon. "Just hand it over! I'll knock it out!"
Jing An was dancing a bizarre one handed jig. In one hand he held a fishing net, and the other hand was frantically swinging… a fish. But the fish refused to let go, its mouth clamped firmly onto his index finger as if superglued. Jing Shu saw it was a sizable, and apparently very angry, crucian carp.
The scene was utterly indescribable.
Grandpa Jing struck the body of the fish with the flat of the shovel multiple times. It was clearly dead, yet its jaws remained locked. Jing An's finger was bleeding. Grandma Jing, practical as ever, suggested cutting into the fish's jaw from the side with a kitchen knife.
Jing Shu covered her face with her hands. Her father looked utterly pitiful, but she didn't feel sad. In fact, she had to fight hard not to laugh out loud.
Finally, Jing Shu stepped in. She rubbed a little cooking oil into the fish's clamped mouth, slipped a small black bag over it, and in an instant stored the entire bagged, fish attached appendage into her Cube Space. The problem was solved in minutes, something that had completely stumped the rest of the family.
"All I wanted was to catch something casually for lunch," Jing An moaned, inspecting his bruised and bitten finger. "Who knew this fish would be so ferocious?" He shivered. Were all the fish in their pond secretly piranhas? It felt too dangerous.
"From now on, I have to be the one to catch the fish," Jing Shu declared. "The pond's basically wild now. They've gotten fierce." She stirred the water with the net. The fish scattered in a silver flash, and using a quick, subtle motion with her Cube Space, she scooped up a netful of small, scrambling lobsters. She tied them up with string, laughing. "Look at these lobsters! This big one even has a tiny fish in its claws. Lunch'll be spicy crayfish."
"Good. My granddaughter hasn't wasted all those meals I cooked for her." Grandma Jing laughed so hard her mouth could barely close. She loved eating spicy lobsters, always sucking the entire body clean at once.
"Why am I not even as good as my own daughter?" Jing An muttered, applying a bandage. He changed the subject. "I saw on social media that there'll be no sunlight during the Dark Days. Should we buy some vitamin D supplements? And others?"
"I already bought them. A whole case of assorted vitamins," Jing Shu said calmly. She remembered how, in her previous life, vitamins had been sold out in the first wave of panic buying, followed quickly by restrictions on health insurance card purchases for them. This life, she had everything prepared well in advance.
Later, Jing Shu finally had a quiet moment to inspect her newly upgraded Cube Space. She was thrilled. In her previous life, she had never achieved this level, but now, in just two months of focused effort, she had.
The center of the space still contained the precious 1 cubic meter Spirit Spring, its water glowing softly. Surrounding it were 12 of the mysterious black cube fields, ready for planting. The remaining 112 cubic meters of empty storage space made the new 5 layer space feel cavernous, more than twice as large as the 4 layer one. Even the number of black cube fields had increased by six, which filled Jing Shu with deep satisfaction.
She spent mental energy organizing the new 5 layer Cube Space and carefully re planning her supply categories:
1 cubic meter of assorted seeds
3 cubic meters of chicken, duck, and quail eggs
10 cubic meters of assorted dried fruits
1 cubic meter of backup animal feed
1 cubic meter of specialized fish and insect feed
1 cubic meter for her bees
1 cubic meter of water for the bees
5 cubic meters of gasoline
1 cubic meter of Haagen Dazs ice cream
1 cubic meter of pre cooked beefsteak
1 cubic meter of assorted fruit juices
1 cubic meter of beef jerky, diced rabbit, and other cooked meats
1 cubic meter of knives, daily necessities, and simple clothing
5 cubic meters allocated for raising 10 pigs
8 cubic meters for 2 milk cows and 4 sheep
4 cubic meters for chickens
2 cubic meters for ducks
1 cubic meter for quail
1 cubic meter for rabbits
2 cubic meters for fish fry
In addition, she spent a full day collecting 15 tons of bottled mineral water into the Cube Space, which occupied 15 cubic meters. This was emergency water, a backup in case the villa's own filtration system ever failed.
Over the next three days, she managed to buy 10,000 liters of gasoline in small, careful batches, occupying another 10 cubic meters. When she tried to buy more, new restrictions had already taken effect, limiting purchases per ID card.
Most of the household's bulk rice, flour, and cooking oil also went into the space to dramatically extend their shelf life, occupying another 15 cubic meters.
In total, she had used 87 cubic meters, leaving a comfortable 25 cubic meters of free space for future needs.
Jing Shu also reorganized the black cube fields. She dedicated 4 cubic meters to fast growing fruits, planning to juice and freeze them to face the coming scorching sun. The leftover pulp would be excellent feed for the pigs. Another 8 cubic meters were planted with vegetables: tomatoes, eggplants, pumpkins, broad beans, sesame, soybeans, and more. These'd be ready to transplant to the greenhouse in the early days of the apocalypse, ensuring an uninterrupted harvest.
In the blink of an eye, the calendar turned to December 31. The last day of the old world.