[Wang Dazhao, No. 1]:"The way you describe it makes my mouth water. I went to queue at the supermarket last night for two hours, but all the seasonings were sold out, not even a bag of pepper left. Now when I cook at home, I only use salt, and everything tastes so bland it's hard to swallow."
Wang Cuihua sent a voice message, her tone sharp with practicality: "I heard the wholesale seasoning market is shut down by the authorities. Next time you go to the supermarket, focus on buying some cooking oil if you see any, otherwise you won't even be able to stir fry vegetables in the future. You will be boiling everything in water."
[Feng, No. 3]: "Aiya, the meat in my fridge has maggots in it! Tiny white ones! But they've all frozen into the ice. Can it still be eaten? Damn it, there's only electricity for three hours a day now. The meat in my fridge has become like this, and I have no idea what to do! Throwing it away feels like such a waste!"
[Wang Xuemei, No. 2]:"Meat is meat, what can't be eaten? Just pick out the maggots and boil it thoroughly. All the snacks and frozen foods in the supermarkets are gone, confiscated or bought up. You're lucky you still have meat to worry about. Some people are down to just rice porridge."
[Feng, No. 3]: "I'm not that worried, to be honest. I stored over ten 20-jin bags of rice (roughly 10 kilograms each) early on. I don't believe there won't be any supplies by the time I finish that."
See, in the early days of the apocalypse, people still clung to the fragile hope that the light would return, that normalcy was just around the corner. They hoarded with a future return in mind, not a decade of darkness.
Jing Shu shook her head slightly, a faint, weary smile touching her lips as she read the chatter in the group. She ignored it, swiping the notifications away. She quickly finished roasting the last batch of quails, the rich aroma still clinging to her clothes, and stored them all in the cool, timeless void of the Cube Space. Then she swapped out a few full barrels of ice from the automatic ice maker and left them conspicuously in the yard, a small piece of visible normalcy. After equipping herself fully in her protective suit, she set out for a walk with Chicken Number 1 on a makeshift leash, partly for the chicken's exercise, partly to scout the neighborhood atmosphere.
A wall of intense, dry heat rushed into her lungs the moment she stepped outside the villa's climate controlled bubble, and sweat immediately began to pour down her body beneath the suit, a familiar discomfort. In the dim, dusty twilight of the community, only the plump, ridiculous silhouette of her chicken flapping its wings contentedly could be seen, the creature completely unfazed by the oppressive heat. Not far away, faint, flickering lights could be seen from within a few of the other luxury villas with their glass domes, lonely beacons in the dark.
Jing Shu realized with a start of caution that although the villa district was relatively secluded, it was still part of the larger community. With the expected flood of government assigned new residents next year, her family's situation would need to be meticulously hidden. One had to stay low key, to blend into the new gray normal. For example, with a simple pair of binoculars or a telescope from the upper floors of Building No. 25, one could probably clearly see the apple trees in her villa yard, their branches heavy with ripe fruit, a glaring anomaly. So Jing Shu made a decision. She wouldn't clean the thick layer of dust and grime that had accumulated on the tempered glass dome of her villa.
Let the dust accumulate. The thicker, the better. That way, even with lights on inside at night, the fish pond and the vegetable plots in the yard would be concealed behind a blurry, opaque film. No curious or desperate neighbor would be able to see what condition the villa was really in, what luxuries it might hold.
By now, most residents in the community no longer casually turned on their main lights, conserving their precious electricity quotas. They used flashlights or candles instead for moving around at night. Life was slowly, inexorably reverting to something more primitive. Without gasoline, private cars were abandoned, slowly becoming skeletons on the roadside.
People turned to bicycles and electric tricycles charged during the three hour power window. At what passed for rush hour now, the streets were filled with the jingling of bicycle bells and the occasional, labored honk of a public bus. The traffic police, in heavy uniforms, were once again kept busy directing these new, slower flows.
Those still commuting to work were mostly civil servants, public sector employees, or workers in the new state run factories. Almost all private businesses, from small shops to large corporations, had shut down, unable to operate without power, supply chains, or customers. Reports on the radio said that over half a million migrant workers had left Wu City to try to return to their home villages, while hundreds of thousands who used to work outside the province had returned here, adding to the local strain.
Another few hundred thousand were simply idle at home, with no work and dwindling hope. Idle hands bred trouble, discontent, and crime. The government's move to slaughter poultry and hire the unemployed for processing was also a clever way of keeping masses of people occupied, their hands and minds busy with survival labor.
Planes had already stopped all commercial flights due to the unpredictable atmospheric conditions and lack of fuel. Maintaining the railways under such extreme heat and with reduced power required massive, around the clock manpower, so train schedules were cut in half. Fortunately, her family no longer needed to travel out of town. But Su Lanzhi had mentioned hearing from her eldest brother that some distant relatives from a harder hit province were planning to come to Wu City, seeking refuge.
This hadn't happened in Jing Shu's previous life. Her heart thumped with nervous tension upon hearing it. Could her actions, her family's relative stability, have already triggered another butterfly effect, pulling unforeseen variables into their orbit?
Chicken Number 1 waddled ahead, wriggling its tail feathers and pecking happily at all kinds of bugs on the ground without needing to flap its wings to fly. It was a efficient little exterminator. Soon, Jing Shu knew, new and more revolting species of corpse eating bugs would arrive, drawn by the unseen deaths, likely a mutated offshoot connected to the current insect crisis.
The black fungus beetle species had now been officially declared completely wiped out in Wu City, thanks to the sterilisation campaign, though during its brief, vicious two week rampage, it had caused over ten thousand confirmed deaths in the city alone. How many had died nationwide from the viral fevers it spawned, Jing Shu didn't know, the statistics were no longer published. Before the apocalypse, the news had been filled with reports about arresting corrupt officials.
The first month after the darkness fell, it was all about catching celebrities for tax evasion or "immoral conduct." This month, it was uniformly about confiscating goods from hoarding food factories, with only occasional, grimly satisfying reports on how much more chaotic and collapsed foreign countries had become.
In her own remote community of just over a hundred households, five residents had already died two from the viral flu, one from heatstroke, one from a failed robbery attempt, and one old man simply didn't wake up one morning. A 4 to 5 percent death rate was, she knew with cold hindsight, relatively low for this stage of the apocalypse.
Jing Shu once again found herself drawn to the back of the community, where a wild, untamed hill rose, covered in rampant weeds and littered with exposed granite boulders. After long, careful thought, she had decided her ultimate, personal trump card for survival had to involve this granite. Metal was scarce, ammunition finite, but stone was here, heavy, and devastating.
Over many days, she had secretly stored large granite boulders in her Cube Space. Then, using a heavy pendulum saw within that mental realm, swinging it back and forth with her spiritual will, she cut the rock. It left deep, curved grooves in the massive stones, a technique she had read about, said to date back to Greece's Mycenaean civilization. In the real world, shaping stone like this without modern machinery was nearly impossible, but within the Cube Space, her spiritual power reigned supreme, allowing for precise, brute force manipulation.
Even so, it cost her the simulated wear and tear on dozens of different tool concepts and twenty full days of concentrated mental effort to complete thirty of these ultimate weapons, filling another fifteen cubic meters of her storage.
She cut the granite into tall, sharp cone shaped pillars, each thicker than a person's arms could encircle, and taller than a person. The sharp, pointed tip could impale enemies, or if dropped in a crisis, embed into the ground to form instant, formidable rows of stone barricades. In direst need, they could even be hastily arranged into a makeshift stone shelter for cover.
Each granite cone weighed well over two tons. Jing Shu's plan was to use the Cube Space as a launch platform. She would accelerate them within the space using spiritual force and then, at the critical moment, release them from the space's boundary at the desired trajectory, letting their built up inertia complete the attack like massive, crude arrows or catapult stones.
In her secret practice sessions with smaller rocks, the best result was launching them more than twenty meters away, creating a small crater on impact. With the ongoing strengthening from the Spirit Spring, her power, control, and effective distance would only increase.
If Jing Shu's life were ever truly in mortal danger, she could instantly materialize and drop seven or eight of these granite cones at once from a short range. They would smash anything or anyone beneath them to pieces. If one volley didn't finish the threat, she could, if possible, pull the cones back into the Cube Space and throw them again, a terrifying recycle of destruction.
But this technique came with an absolute rule, if she ever used it, there could be no survivors among those who witnessed it. She would never allow the secret of the Cube Space and her abilities to be exposed. The only witnesses who could be allowed to know were the dead. This was her ultimate, desperate trump card, a true last resort. A gun could be explained away, found, traded for. But how could she possibly explain conjuring multi ton granite pillars out of thin air?
So, in addition to her daily routine of tending her chickens, handling manure, fetching water, and cooking, Jing Shu now added the mentally exhausting task of practicing with and maintaining her granite arsenal. Since her primary space was nearly full, she buried many of the finished cones in pre dug pits on the back hill, hiding them from sight, planning to retrieve them instantly via the space when needed.
The weapon was undeniably powerful, but it also had clear drawbacks, enormous size and weight, limited effective range, and the fact that after several violent impacts, the granite cones would eventually crack and shatter. Once the sharp, penetrating tips were gone, their immediate destructive power would plummet.
The idea had originally come to Jing Shu when testing a repeating crossbow within the Cube Space. She realized she could use the same principle of storing momentum inside the space, nock bolts, draw the string, and then release both the string and the bolts from the space at the same instant, projecting them outward.
The advantage was the potential for overwhelming, rapid firepower, ideal for dealing with many enemies at once. The disadvantage was poor accuracy and, unless she used specialized broadheads, weaker killing power compared to the sheer mass of the stones. Arrows might not kill as decisively, might only wound.
These past days, Jing Shu had also spent time simply handling her handgun, practicing raising it and aiming dry, not daring to fire a single shot. She dared not waste the precious bullets or risk the sound drawing attention in the quiet community.
She had also tried out the crossbows. They were simple and convenient to operate but frustratingly inaccurate in her hands. In the worst case scenario, she could operate several crossbows within the Cube Space simultaneously, unleashing a storm of arrows in a general direction to saturate an area and kill a target. She was no novel's protagonist who could magically hit bullseyes after a little practice, her skills were pragmatic, born of repetition and a focus on survival, not finesse. Better to stick to methods that were simple, brutal, and relied on overwhelming force or surprise.