Coconut leaves went without saying. The poultry in the Cube Space, the chickens and ducks, ate whatever green material was available, stripping the fronds clean.
Naturally, the felled coconut tree trunks couldn't be wasted either. Jing Shu went to the local charcoal plant, now mostly idle, and used the heavy, immovable hydraulic machines there to press the fibrous coconut wood into over a dozen tons of dense, compressed charcoal bricks, stocking ample clean-burning fuel for the colder and colder weather ahead.
At the same time, with this fuel secured, she decided to keep the villa's boiler room running continuously for the entire second year, maintaining dry heat. There was plenty of charcoal now, a small mountain of it stacked under tarps.
Nothing produced in the Cube Space ever went to waste. If she could repurpose something, she did, creating a neat closed loop of a biological cycle, where waste from one process fed another.
When next year's torrential rains came and everything outside turned soggy and damp, she would have to prevent her stored food from molding. The Cube Space was large for now, so she would store everything perishable inside its dry, stable environment first. If mold really set in later in conventional storage, crying would be useless.
Jing Shu also needed to make more desiccant, lots of it. Otherwise thick mats of mildew would crawl up the corners and walls, a perfect warm, damp nest for every kind of bug to breed.
Within a few months of the floods in the previous life, building exteriors were covered in fuzzy green and black mold. All kinds of bugs, centipedes and silverfish, crawled everywhere, and bright, multicolored, likely toxic mushrooms sprouted from damp wood.
There was mold outside the buildings and penetrating dampness inside too. You can imagine the result. If the first year killed with heat and thirst, the second year's pervasive damp killed just as surely, more slowly. Many people ended up with chronic rheumatism, joints swollen and painful.
If you have never lived through it, you can't understand the grinding misery. In unending rain, houses soaked for months let water seep into every brick, every layer. It dripped from the ceilings. It dripped bugs. Clothes, quilts, mattresses, everything stayed perpetually wet and icy cold to the touch. Nights were colder still. People lay awake shivering under damp blankets and woke from the cold over and over throughout the night.
You woke with aches all over, body stiff. The sensation of damp qi entering the body was miserable, a deep chill. Look away for a moment and clothes hung to dry or bedding would develop fuzzy mold spots. By morning, tiny bugs, mites, would be crawling all over them.
Steam from the rare, precious hot bath collected into huge drops on the ceiling. That was how every ordinary household lived in the second year. Big drops beaded on ceilings and walls, always falling, while rain outside seeped in through cracks with a vengeance.
In the previous life, Jing Shu's daily routine was to hang a plastic bag above the bed to catch drips and collect a sackful of red nematodes and rainwater by morning. Sometimes a fat red nematode would drip straight into the mouth as a midnight snack, a waking nightmare.
During the one hour of power each day, she blasted everything, shoes, blankets, clothes, with a hair dryer, the hot air a fleeting luxury. Blow and blow, pride and joy, ahem, off topic. The memory was vivid.
Speaking of desiccants, before the apocalypse she had stockpiled plenty of quicklime specifically for that second year. Some had been used earlier on traps in the villa during the early chaos. The rest, still sealed in bags, would serve as primary desiccant.
Its moisture absorption was among the best, cheap and effective. Aside from releasing large amounts of heat when it absorbed water, which required care, there were no real drawbacks. It was perfect for scattering in the villa's courtyard corners and along wall bases.
As for calcium chloride, the best for adsorption, it was too expensive per kilogram and she needed too much volume, so she didn't buy it, a calculated trade-off.
Instead, Jing Shu installed several industrial dehumidifiers in the villa's key rooms, used the central air system's dry mode, fired up the underfloor heating when needed, and ran the wall-hung boiler for warm air circulation. With all these big guns, she refused to believe the house would stay damp. If it did, she would think of something else, adapt again.
She also planned to add another waterproof membrane layer to the villa's exterior walls and roof, but that would have to wait until the torrential rains and flooding actually began. There was no good, unobtrusive excuse to do such major construction now.
Jing Shu finished a bowl of cold, sweet ice cream with a happy sigh, scraping the last from the sides. The first year of the apocalypse, for all its horrors, was still the easiest in retrospect. The later years only got stranger and worse, and the preparations she needed only multiplied, an endless list.
Just as the artificial sun finally fulfilled its immediate mission and the public no longer lacked water for the moment, a temporary reprieve, and just as she finally stole a short breather, the chat groups on her phone grew lively again. The ongoing saga of the solar distillers was drawing to its inevitable close.
After finishing the emergency water distribution, the government turned around and saw a whole crowd of these economic goblins causing trouble again. A pyramid scheme, of all things, preying on desperation. Enraged, they used an iron fist. Anyone whose app account was found to hold more than a thousand virtual coins, indicating major profiteering, was arrested within two days, and the public got another harsh lesson about order.
[Wang Chao]: "@Zhang Lingling, pay me back my hard-earned money. Let us all punish her together."
[Wang Can]:"Scammers, the lot of you. Promised we would earn together, then ran off with our money to live it up. Some class monitor you are. What a witch."
[Shi Lei]:"Even when water was tight, the dribble you collected wasn't enough for a sip. I went broke buying a collector. Worse, my relatives cut ties with me over this. You have harmed people."
[Wang Chao]:"Exactly. I bought three units and dragged my family and friends into it. Now water isn't scarce, I can't recruit anyone. The worst part is the collector doesn't even work. You talked such a good game. Look at us now."
This was the crowd-pleasing scene of comeuppance from the previous life. Back then, Jing Shu had already left the group in disgust and missed the live spectacle. In this life, Jing Shu cracked open Brazilian pine nuts from her stash, sipped cold watermelon juice, reclined in the electric massage chair, and enjoyed the digital drama unfolding on her screen.
It felt great, a quiet vindication.
Meat pies don't fall from the sky. Only traps do. Unless you are Bill Gates and make money with your eyes closed, you earn through your own work and collect the fruits of your labor, a simple truth so many forgot in their desperation.
[Mu Xiaoxuan]:"Today's news says knockoff water collectors popped up nationwide and harmed a lot of people. The ring leaders have been busted and sent to labor rehabilitation. I heard the people at the very top of the pyramid made thousands to tens of thousands of virtual coins. They blew it all on hoarded rice and flour, which were recovered by the authorities. The app was shut down too. No more recruiting."
"Then shouldn't victims be compensated in virtual coins?" Someone asked hopefully.
"The government said no compensation. Bear the consequences yourselves. It was your own poor judgment." The reply crushed that hope.
Zhang Lingling finally came out into the chat, sobbing via voice message. "Listen to me. I am a victim too. Otherwise I would have been arrested with the others. I opened 20 accounts and lost everything. I pulled everyone in for your own good, so we could all make money. Some of you did earn a few dozen points back. You are better off than me. You lost a dozen. I lost a few hundred." Her voice was tearful, defensive.
[Wang Chao]:"I don't care about the rest. Just return what I invested and I will give back the distillers."
[Xiao Yun]:"Right. Refunds. You sold this stuff for a living and now you want to cry to us?"
Zhang Lingling cried in the group about how miserable she was, how sincere her intentions had been, and how she had never expected this ending. She begged for forgiveness for the sake of all their years as classmates, for old times' sake.
[Zhang Lingling]:"How have I treated you all? What kind of person am I? If I meant to scam you, let my family be washed away by floods next year and crushed by an earthquake the year after."
She thought about swearing to be struck by lightning personally and decided it was too scary, too immediate. If the bet was on herself, she didn't dare. Better to bet on the family, a vague future. The current drought would kill them anyway, she likely reasoned. Where would a flood even come from? An earthquake was even more fantastical.
She really had to give a mental thumbs up to her own cleverness, the perfect, consequence-free curse.