Wang Qiqi took the formal recommendations from Jing Shu and her family, the precious signatures granting him the right to apply, and began his desperate uphill climb from social nonentity to a contender. Jing Shu, watching him go, privately felt his chances were slim to none. He lacked resources, connections, and a power base, the essential currencies of the new world. But at a critical moment, if the opportunity presented itself, she could always step in directly to tip the scales.
After all, it was far better to have someone she knew, someone who owed her, sitting in the Distribution Director's seat. Future migrations, resource allocations, and disaster evacuations would all be funneled through that single office. If Wang Qiqi really managed to become Director, their family's placement and security in any future upheaval would be significantly more comfortable.
With that cold calculus in mind, investing a few recommendations and some political capital in Wang Qiqi wasn't a bad gamble at all. Among the pile of scavenged items he had brought over as a goodwill offering, only the heavy-duty steel cutter was immediately useful to her own plans. She handed everything else, the precision calipers, the sets of tiny screwdrivers, the clamps, over to Grandpa Jing in one go. His eyes lit up at the treasure trove of tools that hadn't been manufactured in over a year.
Jing Shu planned to use her free time over the next few days to cut the stockpile of steel she had traded from Su Mali into something more aggressive than raw material. She would fashion them into crude but lethal defensive weapons, heavy darts, giant caltrops, maybe even spear points. Then, what she hurled in a fight wouldn't be mere rocks, but giant steel bolts with proper aerodynamic heft. Just imagining the scene, a reinforced steel spike whistling through the air to punch through a barricade, was thrilling.
In the old community group chat on her phone, Wu You'ai posted an official update, her text crisp and administrative: "@Everyone, the government salvage operations for the urban center begin tomorrow at 0600. Anyone can sign up. Transport to and from the staging area is free, but renting a government-issue life jacket costs 1 virtual coin. The waters around Wu City are full of submerged items that can be exchanged for virtual coins at the collection point. If you want in, hurry. Life jackets are limited. This is a viable way to earn coins. You won't lose out."
Immediately, questions flooded the chat.
"What, we still have to pay? If someone's good at swimming, can they just go in directly?"
[Wu You'ai]: "Yes, but life and death are your own responsibility. The government assumes no liability for unregistered divers. If you have personal swim rings or flotation at home, those work too, but they must be inspected for safety."
[Young Madam With a Baby]:"I'll rent out my kid's old swim ring for 0.5 coins per day. Anyone want it? Barely used."
[Wu You'ai]:"Also, the big-data exchange sheet has been updated with provisional prices for common salvaged materials and other rewards. Use that price list to decide what to look for and pull up. Don't waste your energy dragging in literal trash and try to exchange it, or you'll be the day's joke."
…
That night, with a sense of momentous preparation, Jing Shu embarked on a major reorganization. She moved whatever bulky, non-essential items she didn't immediately need from her Rubik's Cube Space, spare lumber, sacks of base soil, extra clothing, into the villa's reinforced basement. She used the cover of darkness and her enhanced strength to haul and bury all the giant, driveway-clearing rocks behind the hill at the property's rear.
The stockpile of steel rods and plates from Su Mali she stacked neatly in a corner of the villa's fenced backyard, under a tarpaulin. She managed to clear nearly half of her Cube Space's available volume, creating a hungry void. She hoped tomorrow would bring a worthy haul to fill it.
At 4 a.m. on January 8, in the pitch black and relentless drumming rain, Su Lanzhi dragged a groaning Jing Shu out of her warm bed for "work." They took the amphibious shark submarine; since her deal with Chen Nan had pivoted to trading for all the RV refit materials, the promised luxury car was gone, and they didn't dare risk taking the family's sole energy car on the flooded, unpredictable roads.
Jing Shu made a mental note that she had arranged for Wu You'ai's engineering mentor to come by tomorrow to look at the solar system. Great, she thought sourly. Another day guaranteed to offer only a few fractured hours of sleep.
"Dearest mom, dearest mom, dearest mom," Jing Shu chanted silently like a mantra against her rising irritation as she floored the submarine's accelerator, guiding the vessel-slash-vehicle out from the Banana Community. The underground garage exit was now crammed with makeshift shelters and sleeping bodies; it was no longer a viable exit for anything larger than a person on foot.
She shoved a cold, stuffed flatbread into her mouth as she drove. It was loaded haphazardly with lettuce, a greasy grilled sausage, processed chicken strips, a thin fish fillet, a smear of beef sauce, and a whole duck egg. She washed the conglomerate down with a swallow of powdered milk mixed with water. Breakfast in the apocalypse had to be quick, dense, and forgiving of temperature.
The floodwaters in the outer Development Zone, where the management department was located, had receded somewhat. Where before you couldn't even see the tops of submerged utility poles, you could at least see them now, dark lines against the lighter gray of the water. But there was no visible sign of the water level dropping in the dense urban districts farther in, which dashed the fragile hopes most displaced residents had nurtured of ever returning to their original homes.
With the population now forcibly settled, the Wu City government had immediately launched full-scale salvage operations, a grim harvesting of the drowned city, and was actively encouraging residents to help retrieve supplies from downtown in exchange for credits. Starting today, everyone who could move was busy. Disasters strike with terrifying speed, but the grinding work of rebuilding and scavenging drags on forever.
The Planting Industry R&D Management Department looked the same as the day before, except now the crisis was visible. Every single vegetable in the hydroponic racks and soil beds was speckled or crusted with the telltale white eggs. Some desperate staff were trying to remove them by hand with tweezers, a painstaking process that barely made a dent and risked damaging the plants further.
As soon as Jing Shu arrived, Su Lanzhi practically pushed her toward the infested rows. She got to work. The process was mind-numbingly repetitive. She kept having to sort out the specific elderly nematodes from containers of collected rainwater, soak the selected bugs in concentrated salt water until they coiled, then carefully release the stressed creatures onto the plants.
It took most of the day to clean every infested bed in the department's modest greenhouse. By the end, her head was spinning from the monotony and the close, focused work. She felt half-delirious, the way you do after staring at a complex pattern for too long, or after manipulating the endless possibilities of a Rubik's cube until your brain short-circuits.
That thought, the Rubik's cube, made her pause. It made her think something was subtly off with her Cube Space lately. She couldn't put her finger on it, but the feeling had started after that last automatic reset and expansion. Either way, she was convinced that once it upgraded to its next form, the secret or the irregularity would reveal itself. The more she thought about its potential, the more impatient she became. A pity the technology, or the magic, or whatever it was, wouldn't allow her to force the upgrade yet.
Seeing the deep exhaustion etched on her daughter's face, Su Lanzhi's heart ached with a mixture of gratitude and guilt. She swore silently she wouldn't let Jing Shu do this kind of brutal, manual pest control again. Let someone else on the payroll handle it, even if they were slower.
It was only sheer luck that Jing Shu had been here. Anyone else would have needed ten days to half a month to achieve the same cleanup, and by then the vegetables would have been either devoured by hatched nematodes or withered from the stress. Her intervention had saved the batch.
"Alright, Mom," Jing Shu said, straightening up with a soft groan and wiping her hands on a rag. "These are nearly mature. Whatever you do, don't water them again with untreated water, or there'll be a fresh wave of eggs. By the time the next planting cycle starts, there should be an official, scalable solution from the agri-tech people."
This stopgap method wasn't the result Jing Shu wanted to be known for anyway. She wanted the broader scientific community focused on how to grow food at scale with low costs and high reliability. When the time was right, her mother could simply advocate for and implement a proper water filtration system and raise a perfectly clean crop, using that tangible success to push her career to the next level. Give it two more days. The timing for that reveal should be ripe.
"Hey, where are you rushing off to without eating the dinner ration?" Su Lanzhi called as Jing Shu grabbed her raincoat and headed for the door, the light already failing outside.
"I'm going out to look around," Jing Shu called back, not slowing down.
"In this darkness, with floodwater everywhere, where are you going to 'look around'?" Su Lanzhi's voice was tinged with worry, but Jing Shu was already gone, the door closing behind her.
…
The rain hammered down on the drowned skeleton of Wu City, a constant, soaking roar. The government had sent a small swarm of salvage boats, inflatable rafts, repurposed ferries, a few proper barges, into the deeper channels that were once streets. Their mission was to pull up anything of value from the abyss. If Jing Shu didn't go make a haul for herself now, in this window of chaotic opportunity, how could she ever face the empty, waiting void of her Rubik's Cube Space? Give it a few more days of organized salvage, and anything truly valuable, the sealed containers, the intact machinery, the forgotten stockpiles, would be gone, hauled into government warehouses.
Before the flood, these places, electronics warehouses, medical supply depots, industrial tooling centers, had been strictly guarded, their contents catalogued and claimed. Now, with the waters over the rooftops, everything was legally and practically ownerless. Ahem. Finders, keepers.
From her vantage point on a semi-submerged overpass, Jing Shu could see that the tallest buildings in central Wu City were still completely submerged, not even their communication spires showing above the dark water. Military helicopters thumped overhead, their rotators fighting the downpour, sweeping powerful spotlights across the choppy surface in organized grids.
On the water itself, hundreds of salvage boats bobbed like bathtub toys, each crewed by teams of newly hired salvage workers. They were all strong swimmers who had passed brutal physical tests and were now equipped with decent, if basic, gear, wetsuits, knives, buoyancy compensators.
Some of the larger, official boats had advanced computer-controlled grappler hooks and sonar. Others were more basic, relying on divers to visually locate and grab items before signaling for a hoist. The most traditional boats, often just large rowboats commandeered from parks, carried no technology at all, just coils of rope to be tied by hand around whatever was found and hauled up by pure muscle.
In the apocalypse, labor was the one thing still in abundant supply. The grain to feed these workers would be distributed to the population anyway, so the government logic was to give it to those who could produce immediate value, turning calories into recovered assets.
So here, amidst the floating debris and the rain, most of the real work depended on human beings holding their breath and plunging into the cold, dark unknown, groping for ghosts of the old world to haul back into the new. What used to be worthless, a pallet of lightbulbs, a crate of kitchen knives, a roll of industrial plastic sheeting, could become critically useful after the world ended.