Even if she had to pay out of pocket for the transport, it was worth it, a necessary expense for security and convenience.
Right now the most valuable things in the world were grain and energy resources. Unfortunately for everyone else, Jing Shu, with her stockpiles and Cube Space, lacked neither, a position of rare strength.
As for Hengda Logistics, the company mentioned, was not their local contact guy named Heng Jin? As expected, after the apocalypse he had squeezed his way into the official supply chain system and was now taking government contracts, a survivor's pivot.
"Fine. I will contact him. Once the RV is back, I will see how 'bad' it actually is." Jing Shu said it flatly.
She hung up and immediately messaged Heng Jin on WeChat, pulling up his contact from the past.
"Are you about to ship an RV back from the northern port?" She got straight to the point.
"We are. How did you know?" Heng Jin replied quickly, then narrowed his eyes on his end, suspicious.
"Because that RV was procured for me. It is mine." Jing Shu typed the words.
Heng Jin: "..."
Fate between people really was weird, unpredictable. Jing Shu had never expected to do business with Heng Jin again, under these circumstances.
Before the apocalypse, Jing Shu was a so-called "three-no" girl in his eyes, no serious relationship, no stable income, and no influential social circle. Basically, she had no romance, no real money, and hardly any high-powered social life. She had earned a little cash by giving a minor testimony for him once, a legal matter where he, as a wealthy second-generation heir to a logistics company, needed a character witness.
After the apocalypse, with famine and harsh conditions everywhere, the world turned upside down. Jing Shu lived comfortably in a villa and had no worries about food or drink, appearing well-off. She even had the clout now to have the Armed Police or special operatives bring an extravagant RV all the way from America just for her, a level of access that was baffling.
Meanwhile, Heng Jin had run all over the place, leveraging his family's trucks and contacts, struggling for a full year to merge his remaining assets into the government transport system, hauling official supplies for them to earn points and protection, and now he would essentially be working, hauling for, the same "three-no" young woman from before.
What a gap. The reversal was stark.
Heng Jin's emotions were complicated, a mix of disbelief and reluctant respect. "Didn't expect the owner of the special RV from America to be you. But even if we're old friends, I can only give you a small break on the shipping. Fuel and risk are real." He kept it professional.
"Okay. What do you want? Quote me." Jing Shu was direct.
Look at that, the woman whose WeChat step count had ranked near the bottom every day before, indicating she barely left home, was still outrageously rich now. What had happened to Jing Shu this past year? The question hung unasked.
"Eight hundred virtual coins, or sixty kilograms of grain. Half the route can go by coastal barge, but there is still over a thousand kilometers by land after that. That burns a lot of diesel." He laid out the cost.
Eight hundred virtual coins was about half a year's base salary for an ordinary civil servant now. With that, you could theoretically buy half a year of two bowls of white rice per day. In contrast, a family of three living mainly on maggots and the weekly vegetable ration would spend only about fifty virtual coins a month on basics.
That was the new gap. Grain would only grow more valuable as the apocalypse dragged on, hardening into a new class divide. Those who couldn't afford grain would only fall farther behind, scraping by on manual labor and a bare-minimum government stipend.
Jing Shu thought for a moment, weighing her options, and decided to pay in virtual coins. Her grain was more precious, less replaceable.
She had traded the second batch of frogs to Niu Mou at the breeding center for 300 kilowatt-hours of electricity credits, 200 bottles of mineral water, 500 virtual coins, and received another 300 virtual coins as an official commendation for her earlier rescue work. She also had a small regular "salary" from her nominal community position. More than enough. If she didn't spend the coins, they would just sit as numbers.
She wasn't about to use her hard-earned virtual coins to buy rice that would likely mold in the pervasive damp of the apocalypse's second year anyway.
"Make it eight hundred virtual coins. I will transfer two hundred as a deposit now, and pay the rest on delivery when I inspect the vehicle." She proposed the terms.
"Deal." Heng Jin agreed, efficient.
With a major worry about transportation settled, Jing Shu felt lighter all over, a weight off her shoulders. That night, while practicing with the mental image of the Cube in her quiet room, her mind felt crystal clear, focused. Her understanding of the 7×7 cube's patterns rose another level. She could finally restore it from a complete scramble smoothly, without long pauses.
Going from smooth to truly masterful, instinctive, would be another big threshold. She found that practicing a little every day, maintaining the mental muscle memory, boosted her proficiency a lot over time.
But the physical 7×7 cube, when she took it out, was much bigger than a regular 3×3, a hefty block. Every time she pulled it out to fiddle with, her family gave her strange, puzzled looks, not understanding the obsession.
Especially when she sat on the sofa, eating fried chicken from a plate and sipping a cold drink while simultaneously solving the cube with her free hand. It was like a parent watching a kid play video games instead of doing chores, endlessly annoyed. These days Su Lanzhi had said it several times, her tone exasperated:
"If you don't want to be a streamer anymore, find a stable job in the system. Or trade some piglets for a proper position at the Livestock Breeding Center and raise pigs. It is honest work.
Don't just sit around eating and drinking all day while hugging that broken cube. 'Honored Frog Breeder' sounds awful as a title. Besides, water isn't that scarce anymore. In another two months, once reservoirs are stable, everyone will be able to raise frogs if they want. You will be out of work." Her logic was practical.
True. With water no longer critically short, what couldn't be cultivated with effort? The weather was still hot, but there was enough water for basic agriculture, people could eat maggots with a side of stir-fried greens, and folks, having endured the worst, were already quite satisfied with this improved life.
Jing An veered off topic, squinting at the large cube. "I remember the cube I bought for my girl years ago was not that one. It was a normal sized one." He tried to place the discrepancy.
Jing Shu kept twisting the cube's layers quickly, the plastic clicking. "Mom, my strength just won't allow me to raise pigs. I will have better, more suitable work in the future." She deflected vaguely.
"Oh really? If you won't raise pigs, are you going to raise a divine beast? Planning to fly to the heavens on it?" Su Lanzhi sorted a basket of dried yardlong beans as she spoke, her hands busy. "Why do I feel like these dried vegetables keep multiplying? We eat them, but the pile doesn't seem to shrink."
Besides the dried beans, there were baskets of dried bamboo shoots and dried bracken fern. Jing Shu had also replanted a new batch of chili plants in the Cube Space and dried all the ripe peppers as well.
Last year before the collapse she had sun-dried over 100 jin (roughly 50+ kilograms) of ground chili powder, and they still hadn't finished it, it was so potent. Next year they would mostly just toss a few whole dried chilies into dishes for flavor, conserving the powder.
Dried chilies also helped drive dampness from the body according to traditional medicine, which would keep them from developing lingering damp ailments during the coming year of constant rain and chill.
The milk powder project had cost Jing Shu several more days of dedicated work.
They were producing dozens of kilograms of fresh milk daily from their cow and couldn't possibly drink it all fresh, so she turned the surplus into yogurt curds, shaved ice yogurt, ice cream, and hard cheese. After storing over a month's worth of those, Jing Shu started the process of making shelf-stable milk powder and solid milk tablets.
Milk powder required specialized equipment for drying. After searching for a long time in abandoned industrial zones, she found a derelict milk powder processing plant on the outskirts of Wu City. She brought her own portable generator, pasteurized the milk in a large low-pressure pot, then used the plant's still-functional centrifugal spray dryer to produce pure, additive-free milk powder.
It was an inefficient process at small scale: ten kilograms of milk yielded only about one kilogram of powder. Jing Shu made over a hundred kilograms of it, enough to last her family through the apocalypse if needed, then used the factory's old tablet press to compress some of the powder into thumb-sized milk tablets for easy carrying.
There were still sealed, empty metal cans in the abandoned plant. After sterilizing them with boiling water, she tinkered with the seaming machine for a while, figured it out, filled the cans with milk powder, and sealed the lids. Homemade canned milk powder, finished.
So when she later hauled a full handcart of these professional-looking cans of milk powder home, everyone's expressions were priceless, a mix of awe and confusion. Back when Jing Shu had first said she would process the cow's milk into powder, Su Lanzhi had scolded her for making unnecessary trouble.
"What is the point of all that hassle? If you have milk, just drink it. Or make yogurt." Her mother had argued.
"But milk powder keeps for years. We can use it in emergencies or for travel. It will be more valuable later for trading. It is also a good gift." Jing Shu had countered.
Grandma Jing, practical and old-fashioned, still didn't quite understand the need. "Wherever we might have to go, we just lead the cow along. No milk powder needed." Her solution was simple.
Jing Shu had stared at her then: "..."
The image of leading a dairy cow through floodwaters or migrations was absurd.
Jing Shu hadn't expected that a bit over a month later, when discussing hypothetical evacuation plans, Grandma Jing would really insist on bringing all the poultry, every chicken and duck. The cow was probably included in her mental list.
Anyway, no one in the family had expected Jing Shu to actually pull off making proper milk powder all by herself.
Wu You'ai, visiting, gave a genuine thumbs-up, impressed. "There is nothing you can't do. Really." The compliment was earned.
Seeing the neat, professional packaging and smelling the rich, sweet aroma after opening a test can, Su Lanzhi couldn't help praising her too, finally conceding. "I admit, this is really well done. My girl is good at everything... except studying." She added the classic qualifier.
"Emmm, thanks, Mom." Jing Shu accepted the backhanded compliment.
While her dear mother complained almost every day that Jing Shu needed to get a real job and kept pushing her to raise pigs for stability, the person she most wanted to avoid in this life, the Saint Su Mali, contacted her again via WeChat. As expected, the trouble, the entanglement, came from that batch of traditional medicine traded last time. The message notification glowed on her screen.
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The author write 末世前,静姝还是三无女青年靠着给恒紧作证收入了一笔钱;恒紧则是物流公司不缺钱的公子哥.It was literally translated as "Before the end of the world, Jing Shu was still a "three-no" young woman who earned a sum of money by giving testimony for Heng Jin; Heng Jin, on the other hand, was a rich young master from a logistics company."
"三无" (sān wú) or "three-no" in here was another Chinese slang. It was usually stand for a person who is lacking three things. The exact meaning can shift a little depending on context, but in web novels it usually means:
No relationship – single or not dating.
No income or savings – financially struggling or living paycheck-to-paycheck.
No social circle – very few friends or social connections.
It paints a picture of someone who's quiet, low-profile, and not doing well socially or financially—not necessarily pathetic, but definitely "ordinary and invisible."