Jing Shu suddenly remembered, the memory clicking into place like a key in a lock: when it came to natural enemies of the carrion scavenger, frogs were absolutely the top candidates, efficient and voracious. Second only to that were the maggots everyone usually looked down on, despised as filthy, which in their larval stage were fierce competitors for the same decaying food sources.
In the first, desperate year of the apocalypse, countless people survived by raising maggots in buckets of waste, a grim but effective protein source. And where did all those maggots ultimately get their food? From the same carrion and rot that attracted the carrion scavengers. The maggots outcompeted the beetle larvae. The cycle of life was harsh indeed, a brutal closed loop, and no one in the food chain was spared from what felt like heaven's cold, mechanical retribution.
Jing Shu felt that the bees she had introduced to the second-floor greenhouse were enough for that controlled space, and they were pleasing to the eye, a touch of normalcy. In the villa's yard and pens, one fat chicken and the indefatigable Xiao Dou were more than sufficient, ensuring every bug that dared show itself was pecked clean, a feathery janitorial service.
What she was mainly planning now was to raise frogs on a larger scale—as a "business" and as strategic gifts. After all, in the apocalypse, one had to have a legitimate, visible endeavor, a reason for one's relative comfort. "Frog breeder" had a useful, humble ring to it.
At the beginning of the apocalypse, people were easily rattled by new horrors. On the one hand, the sheer rampant spread of the carrion scavengers terrified them, a visible symbol of decay invading their homes. On the other hand, the tiny bugs indeed brought endless practical troubles: ruined food, sleep interrupted by itching bites that swelled into painful welts. In her previous life, whenever Jing Shu was forced to sleep in a temporary shelter or an abandoned building, carrion scavengers always found her, biting her ankles and neck until she was speckled with red, itchy bumps.
Even with floral water and essential oils, it was impossible for ordinary families to keep their entire houses as thoroughly protected as Jing Shu did with her resources and foresight. So, when clever, observant people discovered that gifting a live frog or two earned immense gratitude and could be traded for favors or scarce items, they simply began raising frogs themselves in buckets or bathtubs. This was practically the perfect pet for the times: it needed no dedicated food, surviving on the endless supply of bugs alone.
Thus, once personal stocks of floral water and medicated oils ran out, a new trend spread through word of mouth: In the apocalypse, the best housewarming gift, the ultimate gesture of goodwill, was a live, healthy frog.
A household frog, released in a kitchen or storage room, could solve nearly all crawling and flying bug problems within its range. Frogs quietly became one of the new, unexpected luxuries of the apocalypse, like prized dogs or cats before the end. Families that kept frogs were admired, even envied, for their foresight and relative peace.
"The optimal ambient temperature for most frogs is about 32°C," Wu You'ai recited, as if reading from a textbook. "They've nearly gone extinct in the wild around here now because of the heat spikes and drought, which is why the bug populations are exploding without check. So if you're asking because you want stir-fried bullfrog, fried frog legs, braised forest frog, or dry-pot bullfrog, I'm afraid that's not happening anymore. The edible varieties are functionally extinct locally." She calmly said this while picking up a glossy cola chicken wing with her chopsticks.
"Emm, so in your eyes I'm just a foodie, thinking about my next meal even during a bugpocalypse?" Jing Shu rolled her eyes and said, pushing her rice bowl, "Any kind of frog will do. The uglier and hungrier, the better."
"My professor's lab still has a few surviving South American horned frogs from a behavioral study. They're vicious, eat a lot, and are surprisingly easy to raise in captivity. Their giant mouths make up half their bodies, and they're cannibalistic—they even eat their own kind if not fed enough. Do you want those?" Wu You'ai asked, her tone clinical.
Jing Shu clapped her hands softly. "Perfect. I want those. The meaner the better." An efficient, predatory amphibian was exactly what she needed.
After dinner, Jing Shu brought Xiao Dou, the fat chicken, on a leash to her grandparents' attached house next door and gave it a thorough, room-by-room inspection. As expected, near a slightly damp corner in the laundry area and under the kitchen sink where a potato had quietly rotted, they found small congregations of carrion scavengers, though not many. After all, most of her grandparents' dry food and staples were stored in the fridge and sealed containers at Jing Shu's villa. Jing Shu decided she would bring Xiao Dou over every day for a morning patrol, letting the chicken peck clean any invaders, to prevent a full-blown infestation.
The carrion scavenger issue had to be taken with the utmost seriousness. If one only noticed the problem after the food stores were already ruined, it would be too late to salvage anything. Just like that man in the community, Luxury Car Dealer, who only discovered in the middle of the night that carrion scavengers had infested not just his bedroom but his entire pantry. Over a dozen precious bags of rice, his last reserve, were seething, ruined. For it to have gotten that bad, it meant he had already run out of properly sealed, edible supplies, and the starving bugs, with nothing else to consume, had migrated to his bed seeking moisture from his skin.
Jing Shu did not even want to imagine how many thousands of carrion scavengers had bred in the walls and floors of that now-cursed house. And this was the same man who once complained in the group chat that Jing Shu had not warned everyone earlier about stockpiling? Hah. Serves him right. Let's see how he survives now without his hoard or his pride.
Carrion scavengers wasted enormous amounts of food in the early apocalypse, a hidden tax of decay. People as careless and arrogant as Luxury Car Dealer, once stripped of their food security, likely formed the desperate vanguard that drove the social trend from petty theft to organized home invasions, violence, and even murder as human nature decayed faster than the organic matter. Jing Shu saw it clearly now, the sequence of events falling into place: the six months of humanity's darkest, most open cruelty were finally about to begin. That was when the true robbery and killing gangs appeared, marking the psychological point of no return, the true arrival of the apocalypse in the human heart.
Sure enough, the evening news broadcast led with the bug story, officially naming it the 'carrion scavenger' and explaining its life cycle and habits with grim animations.
They also exposed black-hearted, illegal farms that had tried secretly raising live poultry in basements for higher black-market profits, which instead led to massive, concentrated poultry deaths from disease. As a result, mountains of untreated chicken corpses became breeding grounds, and carrion scavengers spread wildly from these epicenters, with billions of fertilized female bugs swarming out to breed. In just three days, they invaded households nationwide. The government was now mobilizing to spray approved chemicals and burn the known poultry carcass piles to combat the crisis.
The polluted, algae-choked lakes were also shown, their surfaces shimmering unnervingly with endless swarms of these bugs. The reporter warned that soon, countless more mature females would fly off in search of new places to reproduce. Without natural predators to check them, carrion scavengers would become a lasting biological plague, a man-made natural disaster.
Scientists interviewed on the science channel even claimed, with dramatic gravity, that carrion scavengers now stood unchallenged at the top of the local food chain and would soon devour all unprotected grains, posing an existential threat. But they were proven wrong not long after, as nature always finds a balance, however brutal. That part of the story will be told later.
The news segment concluded by advising that certain medicated oils and strong herbal scents could repel the bugs. Until the government found a large-scale solution, households were urged to use them strategically to safeguard their remaining food.
After the broadcast, Jing Shu gave her villa's defenses one final, meticulous inspection, testing the trigger mechanisms on the traps at the front and back doors. Still feeling a thread of unease, she used three kilograms of precious white rice to trade with Liu the manager from the now-shuttered Suning appliance store for a full, high-end infrared night-vision monitoring and alarm system he had in his personal storage. The man's eyes had lit up at the sight of the rice.
Money had already lost most of its value, becoming pretty paper. Food was the true, hard currency. After the coming six dark months of chaos, paper money would be utterly worthless, useful only as kindling.
Once installed, the new surveillance system, the alarms, the 24-hour air-conditioning to keep the electronics cool, and the ice machines for food preservation overloaded her UBC solar system's capacity. The dedicated power supply could no longer keep up with the sudden drain. Jing Shu had no choice but to bring out her gasoline-powered generator from the storage room, its familiar chugging noise now a calculated risk, burning roughly one liter per day. Fortunately, she had 15 tons of gasoline stockpiled in sealed drums in the Cube Space, enough to last for decades at this rate, though she still planned to save the bulk of it for potential future migration or trading.
Now, whenever anyone or anything larger than a cat approached the villa's perimeter, Jing Shu's phone received a silent video alert. If someone tried forcing a door or window, a piercing alarm would sound both on her phone and from speakers mounted under the eaves. Advanced indeed, a technological shield. At last, lying in bed listening to the generator's distant hum, Jing Shu felt a layer of secure, watchful peace.
The next day, Wu You'ai arrived with a ventilated plastic crate, inside which were five hefty South American horned frogs. Their bodies were wide and flat, their giant circular mouths and bulging, sleepy-looking eyes gave them a comical, almost cartoonish appearance, so different from the slender, leaping frogs of local fields.
Jing Shu and Grandpa Jing spent the afternoon building a simple, covered two-square-meter pen by the edge of the artificial pond for them, with a shallow water area and plenty of damp hiding spots. Grandpa Jing frowned as he hammered in the last post. "Why build such a big, fancy place for just a few ugly frogs? They could live in a bucket."
"I'm planning to breed them. This could make real money or trade goods later. Grandpa, you see how every household is overrun by bugs now? It's only going to get worse. If we raise more frogs, we can give or trade them to neighbors. Then they won't have to worry about carrion scavengers eating their last grains." Jing Shu explained, spreading a layer of clean gravel.
Grandpa Jing dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, thinking a small frog, no matter how bug-hungry, could not be worth much in the grand scheme. To him, they were just odd pets, a granddaughter's whim.
Later, when Grandpa Jing went inside, Jing Shu secretly selected one large male and one robust female frog and placed them into a prepared, humid terrarium section of her Cube Space, carefully separating them from the quail enclosure. She fed them with No. 3 high-protein feed from her stores, hoping they would adapt quickly and breed. The controlled, perfect environment should accelerate their cycle.
Jing An finally returned from his multi-day trip with his truck. His spirits were high, not weighed down by the general gloom, and he brought back two coveted boxes of factory-sealed bottled water. He told Su Lanzhi as he unloaded them, "Your eldest brother's family out in the county is really something, so generous. I just helped them transport some reclaimed wood, a small task, but they insisted on giving me all this water. By the way, your eldest brother mentioned a relative from the old hometown was planning to come over to the city soon. Did you know about this?"
Su Lanzhi, who was helping carry the water, nodded, her expression turning thoughtful. "They said something about it over a month ago on the phone, that someone was coming from back home to seek opportunities, but there's been no follow-up word. Why, have they arrived already? Who is it exactly? My parents' generation has almost all passed away, and the younger ones I've lost touch with." A faint worry line appeared between her brows.