Jing Shu's mind cleared further and further, the lingering fog of sleep and the strange sensory overload receding. With this fundamental upgrade of the Cube Space, she felt a profound, new connection, as if she were partially fusing with it, her consciousness extending into its dimensions.
Before, to enter or even just view the Cube Space, she had to consciously summon it with her mind, stepping into a pitch-black void segmented by a grid of glowing white lines. She called that the "mind-summon" mode. Now, she no longer needed that focused effort.
Though she stood physically beside her bed in her sunlit room, she also felt a persistent, dual awareness of herself inside the Cube Space simultaneously. It was a dizzying, exhilarating sensation.
It seemed that if she lifted a hand in reality, she could almost feel the cool moisture of the Spirit Spring within the space. Lush green fields stretched before her mind's eye, and there were the tall coconut trees. On her right, she sensed the rustling, clucking presence of the poultry area. On her left, she had an almost tactile awareness of the abundant supplies stacked in neat blocks. Her control, her perceptual integration with the Cube Space, had obviously risen to a new, instinctive level.
Only the visual images were ghostly, translucent, overlapping with her real-world surroundings like layered phantoms. Yet the sounds from within the space, the grunts of pigs, the low of the cow, the bleating of the sheep, were crystal clear in her mind, and even the faint droning of bees' flights over the flowering fields reached her ears as if they were in the room.
The greatest, most frustrating shortcoming of the Cube Space had always been that living people, including Jing Shu herself, couldn't physically enter it. She didn't know whether, as the Cube Space kept upgrading, it would gradually merge more deeply with her perception of reality, and whether humans, starting with her, would one day be able to truly step into it as a tangible place.
"Too noisy," she thought, mildly irritated by the mental cacophony of animal sounds. The instant she had the thought, all the auditory input from the Cube Space vanished, though the ghostly, superimposed images remained.
"Can it return to the way it was before, completely separate?" No sooner had she formed the question than her perceptual world snapped back to normal. The phantom images disappeared entirely, leaving only her familiar bedroom. The Cube Space felt tucked away, a silent potential.
Jing Shu decided to call this new, integrated awareness the "Second Form" of the upgraded sixth-tier Cube Space, while the former focused "mind-summon" mode was the "First Form." Now she could switch between the two at will, with a thought.
The immediate benefit of the Second Form was that she could monitor the Cube Space passively at any time, layered over reality, like having a constant, heads-up display of her inventory and livestock. She could even observe plants growing at that bizarrely accelerated, though still not instant, speed visible to the careful eye. This way, Jing Shu could practice with the physical puzzle cube or do other tasks while keeping a mental tab on any changes inside the space. The Second Form was perfect for calm moments, letting Jing Shu split her attention and better tend to crops and poultry without dedicating full focus.
As she had hoped, the space's dimensions had expanded from 5×5×5 to 6×6×6, that was 216 cubic meters in total. The cultivable field plots increased from 12 to 18. Subtracting the permanent one cubic meter occupied by the central Spirit Spring, Jing Shu still had a whopping 197 cubic meters of usable space left. It was wonderful. The original 125 cubic meters had become far from enough, crammed to the brim. Now it had jumped so dramatically at once that Jing Shu couldn't help feeling a surge of pure, unadulterated thrill.
She hurried through her morning wash with cold water, then devoured the breakfast Grandma Jing had kept warm for her in the dining room, six boiled eggs, three large bowls of soy milk, five fried dough sticks, five thick corn flatbreads, and a side dish of garlic scapes pickled in vinegar. Jing Shu felt her already substantial appetite had grown again. After all that, her stomach still felt room for more.
Jing An and Su Lanzhi, along with Jing Lai, had already left for work. They had managed to catch the last bus into the apocalypse-era work-point system, securing relatively stable roles. In less than half a year, such jobs would be fiercely contested by everyone with any connection, as the government fully transitioned to a labor-for-rations economy.
But because the perpetual darkness and heat lowered productivity drastically, few could hold down jobs that actually earned meaningful food. Mostly the government sent people in assigned teams to do whatever brute-force work was needed, clearing rubble, digging graves, building walls, and those people worked themselves to the bone for a little extra rations in return. In her previous life, Jing Shu's family had drifted through ten such years of grinding, hopeless labor.
Grandpa Jing, ever diligent, was out in the shaded back yard practicing with the crossbow, the soft thwack of bolts hitting the straw target a steady rhythm.
Grandma Jing was at the kitchen table, scrubbing fresh lotus roots. A large patch in their courtyard pond had ripened, and Jing Shu had insisted the day before on having honeyed lotus root, a nostalgic treat.
So Grandma Jing decided to make a big batch. A small amount would not even cover two meals for Jing Shu nowadays. For the lotus root to come out truly sweet and glutinous, it needed hours of simmering in the pressure cooker. No wonder this dish was counted among the eight classic cold dishes of certain regional cuisines, it was a commitment.
After breakfast, Jing Shu, with rare free time before her own tasks, helped Grandma Jing prepare the honeyed lotus root while simultaneously keeping the Cube Space's Second Form active, using the dual awareness to mentally reorganize the newly expanded spatial layout.
Grandma Jing had already washed and peeled the lotus roots and sliced them into thick segments. Now, aside from Jing Shu herself, the creature closest to the mutated chicken, No. 1 (Xiao Dou), was undoubtedly Grandma Jing, because Grandma Jing always fed No. 1 all the vegetable scraps and peels. No. 1 gobbled them up with ridiculous delight.
That was right. No. 1 had gained another vital role in Jing Shu's home, organic garbage disposal.
Anything edible that was a byproduct, whether bones or peels or root ends, even almond shells, as long as it was plant-based and food-related, No. 1 could and would eat it. At the moment it weighed about 45 jin (roughly 22.5 kg), larger than a typical medium-sized dog, its feathers gleaming with unnatural health.
After finishing a whole box of lotus root peels and getting a few affectionate pats from Jing Shu, Xiao Dou puffed out its chest importantly and resumed its daily patrol of the villa's perimeter. Xiao Dou wouldn't permit any bug or rodent to live on its domain. It also kept order in the chicken coop, breaking up squabbles so the flock stayed harmonious. As a chicken, its responsibility was immense. This generation's master is not easy to serve, it might have thought, if chickens could think in such terms.
What Jing Shu needed to do now was lift the "skullcap" from each lotus root segment, pack the cavity with pre-soaked glutinous rice, then pin the caps back on securely with toothpicks. After that, into the giant pressure cooker they went, along with red dates and dark brown sugar, for a long, slow simmer. Once cooled, they would be sliced, drizzled with the reduced syrup, and sprinkled with dried osmanthus flowers. Each slice tender, sticky, and fragrant, honeyed lotus root was done. Slurp, so good.
There were so many lotus roots that Grandma Jing and Jing Shu worked side by side all morning to finish. Jing Shu quietly tucked an extra portion into the Cube Space for sneaking bites later. The rest were sealed in containers and chilled, perfect as a refreshing nightly cold dish.
Simultaneously, Jing Shu finished mentally reorganizing the space. Over the past half year, she had eaten through some stored items herself, and there were necessary changes to the poultry area's allocation. The new layout, in brief:
One cubic meter for the central Spirit Spring.
18 cubic meters of cultivable fields (the new plots).
2 cubic meters for the fish schools.
18 cubic meters allocated for poultry (chickens, ducks, the cow, pigs, sheep).
The remaining 177 cubic meters formed Jing Shu's current general storage. Items occupying one cubic meter each included, seed bank, daily necessities and clothing, spare animal feed, specialized fish and insect feed, the beehive, water for the bees, and then her precious hoard of pre-made meals, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, yogurt shaved ice, honey lemon tea concentrate, potato curry chicken, spicy blood-and-offal hotpot, braised black pork ribs, prawns in tomato sauce, steamed hairy crabs, fried fish bites, fried chicken bites, seafood and shrimp congee, carrot and corn mutton soup, mushroom chicken soup, pork rib and lotus root soup, crucian carp tofu soup, and corn pancakes. That was a total of 22 cubic meters for the pre-made meals alone, plus the others.
Items occupying two cubic meters each included, steaks, popcorn chicken and fries, coconut milk, and the collective stash of chicken, duck, and quail eggs. Totaling 8 cubic meters.
The rest, 9 cubic meters of assorted dried nuts and fruits, 14 cubic meters of gasoline in drums, 11 tons of mineral water (roughly 11 cubic meters), 15 cubic meters of bulk flour and cooking oil, 20 cubic meters of her precious cone-shaped boulders (replenished and then some). Jing Shu still had 78 cubic meters blissfully free. She planned to plant more vegetables in the new fields and store the harvest inside. If she waited until she craved something to eat it, she would have to wait many days for it to grow. Proactive stocking was key.
During this half year, Jing Shu had finished off the initial stock of steaks, beef jerky, various other cooked meats, plus one cubic meter of hot pot, fried fish rice, roast quail, soy milk, and more. When she had time, she would need to cook and stock up again. In the last life she had starved too long, too deeply. Without an abundant, visible buffer of food in the space, she felt a primal panic.
Right. She had also immediately planted medicinal herbs in all six of the brand new field plots. With hospitals out of medicine and supply chains dead, she had once hoped the promised artificial sun would allow for large-scale, state-run cultivation to restart.
But that dream had lost to harsh reality. After ten years of apocalypse, medicine had become incredibly scarce, a luxury traded for fortunes. The nation had been forced to pour vast, inefficient resources into scattered medicinal herb cultivation projects. She would stockpile an early batch herself. It also let her test a theory about the differential time-compression in the Cube Space's fields. She would compare growth rates between the slow-maturing coconut trees and these faster, smaller herbs. Knowledge was survival currency.