Inside the Rubik's Cube Space, the precious ginseng and other rare herbs, nurtured by the constant Spirit Spring, were still thriving, their leaves deep green and glossy. But all the ordinary, faster-growing medicinal plants like honeysuckle and mint had already matured through multiple cycles. Back when the external weather was still scorching, Jing Shu had already harvested, then dried, air-dried, or carefully oven-dried them according to their individual properties and stored them neatly in labeled containers within the space.
She had also, as part of her cover plan, transplanted several potted specimens of common herbs into the small flower room on the villa's second floor, a sunroom of sorts. With regular watering using heavily diluted Spirit Spring water, they were growing unnaturally lush and vibrant, a testament to the water's power.
Jing Shu often brought a few of these thriving potted plants out to show her family during meals or gatherings, a way to gradually prepare them for the idea. That way, when she needed to present similar or even more impressive plants again later for trade or explanation, no one would question their origin too deeply; they would assume she just had a green thumb and good stock.
Now, with the damp season approaching, she had replanted another batch of herbs specifically for preventing and treating rheumatism and dampness, angelica, clematis, siler. She planned to use them to brew more medicinal wine, as such remedies would become incredibly popular and in high demand in the apocalypse's second year, when everyone's joints ached from the perpetual cold and wet.
Having these medicines on hand gave her a deep sense of security and valuable bargaining power. Moreover, having her family drink this wine regularly would strengthen their bodies from within and ward off ailments like rheumatism and chronic cold legs, conditions she remembered all too well the grinding pain of in her previous life.
By next month, when this new batch of common herbs matured, she could start brewing large batches of medicinal wine based on traditional recipes she had saved. Adding ingredients like snakes and scorpions, if she could get them, would make it even more potent, a true tonic. Jing Shu knew from past-life gossip that five-snake wine, for instance, was especially effective against damp-cold pains and fetched a high price.
If only she could get her hands on some snakes now. She made a mental note to check the old herbal market when it was safe.
Oh, and the bodhi tree she had planted from Mu Xiaoxuan's seed months ago, growing in its own dedicated cubic meter, was nearly mature, its leaves broad and healthy. She was already considering saving a few smaller branches to transplant into pots once it fully matured, to have living specimens.
That way, she could present them publicly if needed, sell them at a premium to wealthy buyers desperate for anti-parasitic medicine, or even trade them with the government for other scarce resources. The rest of the bodhi tree's yield, the bark, leaves, seeds, could be processed and kept for her family's own use, a private medical stockpile.
While tending to the small plots of farmland inside the Cube Space and practicing her mental fusion and manipulation ability with the Rubik Cube's image, Jing Shu suddenly noticed one of the Rubik's colored squares, a deep blue one in the middle layer, flicker subtly, as if its color had wavered for a fraction of a second.
"Was that just my imagination?" Jing Shu frowned, stopping her work. She rotated the mental image of the cube quickly, checking. She distinctly remembered restoring the correct color at position X2Y3 on the blue face earlier in her practice session. Why had it seemingly reverted to its original, scrambled color?
Solving the Rubik Cube, even a 7×7, followed a set mental formula, a sequence of algorithms. It started from establishing the central squares on each face, then restoring each concentric ring in sequence, methodically.
That core principle applied regardless of how many layers the Rubik Cube had.
But now one of the squares in the middle ring that she had just solved and confirmed had apparently changed back, disrupting the solved state.
"Did I miss a step earlier? Make a mistake?" Jing Shu retraced her mental steps meticulously, spending another eight minutes to solve the seven-layer Rubik Cube image again from the start, double-checking each move.
She shook her head, staring at the perfectly solved mental cube. "Still doesn't add up. The color was correct before the flicker. Could the Rubik Cube space itself be unstable, changing colors on its own?" The thought was unsettling.
Jing Shu solved it a few more times, watching closely, but nothing unusual happened again. She could only set the disquieting thought aside for now, attributing it to fatigue or an odd mental glitch.
"Maybe it really was just my imagination, a trick of concentration." She concluded, though not entirely convinced.
Once she finished her practice session, she did her usual evening inspection of the villa. All the dehumidifiers were running smoothly, their tanks empty into drains. The central air conditioning was set to constant dehumidify mode, and the underfloor heating was on at a low level, filling the villa with a dry, gentle warmth. Even the torrential downpour and crashing sound outside couldn't disturb the interior's comfort.
She then organized the last batch of horned frogs she planned to bring to the Agricultural Department the next day, placing them in a well-ventilated carrier, and finally went to bed, the day's strange flicker lingering in the back of her mind.
Su Lanzhi had been right in her earlier grumbling: this heavy rain, for all its pestilence, had come at just the right time in terms of the larger crisis. The extreme temperature had dropped, water shortages were no longer an immediate, lethal concern, and Jing Shu, the once "glorious frog farmer" whose trade had been based on the creatures' ability to survive drought, was essentially out of work now, her niche filled by the rain.
She sent off the final batch of several thousand mature horned frogs to the Agricultural Department the next morning, fulfilling her last contract, and even personally returned five of the healthiest frogs to her mentor Wu You'ai as a gift.
Jing Shu only kept two horned frogs at home for herself, the original pair she had raised from tadpoles with undiluted Spirit Spring water. She had named them No. 6 and No. 7, continuing the numerical pet tradition.
That's right, your guess is correct. After all, No. 6 was the frog she had specially nurtured, and now it ruled its own territory under the pond's broad lotus leaves, bold enough to snatch food from the much larger piranhas. Such a fearless frog deserved a proper name and status.
She officially registered these two frogs as her personal pets with the household registry. From now on, no matter the bitter cold of winter or the blazing heat of summer, even if she had to relocate to the ends of the earth, she would take them along. They were family.
Ahem, sentimentality aside, their true, practical purpose was to guard against the parasitic leeches and bloodsucking insects that would come with the floods. Horned frogs were voracious predators of such pests.
She wasn't sure if she would have future pets named No. 2 and No. 3, like hypothetical dogs or cats. She would leave that to fate and opportunity.
The next day, before the whole family left home for work, she insisted on giving each of them one of her homemade, broad-brimmed rain hats with integrated neck capes. "If you don't want to have to shave your head bald when we get back, wear these at all times outside, even under an umbrella. Don't take them off." Her tone allowed no argument.
These hats were not just waterproof; the fine mesh layer around the brim and neck also blocked red nematodes from landing on hair or skin. Though they looked a bit ugly and quaint, they were extremely comfortable and breathable.
Su Lanzhi had learned the hard way. She once greeted a colleague at work in the Agricultural Department hallway, only for a red nematode to leap from a wet windowsill onto that person's head in an instant. The parasite latched onto hair so tightly that even dodging was impossible, and the two ended up embarrassingly stuck together by the hair until someone with scissors freed them.
That wasn't even the most awkward scenario. Imagine Jing An at the Livestock Breeding Center, bending down to inspect a pig, only to get his hair tangled with the pig's bristles via leaping nematodes. That would be far more embarrassing and difficult to resolve.
Out in the apocalypse, you had to protect yourself proactively. These were lessons written in blood, or at least in severe inconvenience and humiliation.
Once everyone had left for the day, Jing Shu threw herself into the final, urgent preparations for the incoming great flood she knew was coming.
Wu City's terrain was a natural basin surrounded by mountains, which meant that when this year's massive floodwaters came from the saturated hills and rising water tables, the entire low-lying city center would be submerged, a giant bowl filling up. The surrounding outskirts and foothill communities, however, would remain largely intact, being on higher ground.
The old district of Xishan, though located on relatively higher ground and traditionally safe from normal flooding, was densely populated, filled with aging, poorly maintained buildings that couldn't be easily renovated or fortified to hold more people or withstand prolonged damp.
Her community, on the other hand, was a newly developed district on the city's southern rise. It had vast tracts of still-vacant land, low population density, and many newly built, sturdy apartment complexes that were still largely unoccupied, most of them hoarded by real estate speculators before the collapse. Entire blocks stood empty, skeletons of a failed boom.
That was precisely why seven of the city's thirteen surviving district government offices had relocated to this area after the apocalypse began, for the space and newer infrastructure.
Her community had now become one of the most desirable in Wu City, thanks to its superior elevation, large size, and mix of villas and solid apartments, making it the most prestigious and sought-after residential area in the city for those who could secure a spot.
When half the city was submerged, chaos and desperation would be inevitable. Opportunistic looters and displaced people would thrive in the confusion, and her villa, even with her family inside, could be a target. If they had to evacuate even briefly, the villa would be left unattended.
Jing Shu's first priority was to strengthen the villa's passive security to lethal levels.
The villa was already enclosed by the high, tempered glass walls, surrounded by surveillance cameras and the perimeter restraint traps, making it nearly impossible for casual thieves to break in by scaling the walls or smashing through the glass in a short amount of time without tools and noise.
The main remaining weakness was the front gate itself. It only had the non-lethal restraint trap buried before it. If someone was careful, bypassed that, and managed to pick the robust lock, there would be nothing to stop them from simply walking in.
To fix this, she carefully relocated a section of the stored electrified fence netting to cover the interior side of the front gate and its immediate approach. That way, even if someone unlocked the gate, the moment they pushed it open and stepped through, they would contact the charged wires.
Her second line of defense was a set of crude but powerful automated crossbows she had built herself from spare parts. She positioned six or seven of them on tripods in the entryway, aimed at the gate, with their triggers connected to the gate's opening mechanism via fine wire. Opening the front gate past a certain point would trigger the mechanism, unleashing a volley of heavy bolts. Anyone not killed outright would be gravely injured and unlikely to proceed.
If that still wasn't enough, the steel spike plates she had installed last year above the courtyard entrance, triggered by weight on the porch, would finish the job. Anyone who dared step foot inside and survived the earlier traps would be impaled from above.
Finally, she would monitor everything through the wireless surveillance camera feeds on a dedicated tablet and could return home quickly if an alert sounded, hopefully before any intruder could make it past all these traps or do significant damage.
Her second major preparation was for sleeping arrangements during the worst of the flooding.
The original plan, based on Yang Yang's message, was for Heng Jin's logistics transport to arrive in Wu City with her RV by late December. That way, she could take possession of it, repair it if needed, and no matter how badly damaged it was, her family could at least squeeze inside and use it as a dry, mobile shelter during the flood evacuation days if they had to leave the villa.
But Heng Jin had been delayed for more than ten days en route. When he finally sent a message, it wasn't with an ETA, but to say his convoy had gotten lost due to washed-out roads and poor signage, and he couldn't find his way back to the main highway. He was stuck.
Jing Shu stared at the message on her phone: "???"
"It's not our fault. It's the road's fault. And the map's. And the rain's." His follow-up excuse came through, typical.