The houses in the city had already grown a thick layer of green mold, and faint mushrooms were starting to sprout from it. Jing Shu knew the era of poisonous mushrooms and venomous bugs was about to begin.
Whenever she walked through the Banana Community, every building was coated in green-black moss. Soon they would look like shaggy green monsters. Bugs would breed in the moss. In a few months, the insides of the buildings would be covered in this same moss and mushrooms, with biting insects crawling everywhere. Many people would be infected by bug bites and die without a cure.
Thinking of living in a damp house crawling with mold and bugs, Jing Shu could not imagine how she had endured it in her previous life. So now she took it seriously. Every two days, the family baked the villa inside and out to dry it. Every three days, she replaced the lime desiccant throughout the house. Every five days, she and Jing An took tools outside to scrape the moss from the roof edges and along the walls.
The villa had soaked for months, and some places were no longer waterproof. Once a month, she reinforced the waterproofing to keep the humidity from seeping back in.
By now, one in five people had rheumatism. They limped from the pain. Her snake medicinal liquor was wildly popular. Supplies were scarce and her baijiu reserves were limited, so she bartered the infused wine for goods or favors.
Back to the matter of Zhang Bingbing and the father and son. People thought labor reform would be their final destination, but to everyone's surprise, the two were released within days because Zhang Bingbing was pregnant again. Zhang Dada was not even a hundred days old, yet those two beasts had made her pregnant again.
It was Wang Xuemei, who had gone to care for her, who noticed Zhang Bingbing had missed her period for a long time. She took her to a doctor for a pulse check, and the truth came out.
As for periods in the apocalypse, the rule was basically not to treat it. If you had the means, you cut up some cloth. If not, you just let it flow and let the rain wash it off. In the darkness, no one could see anyway.
The middle class traded virtual coins for toilet paper, one coin per roll. The upper class used pre-apocalypse stockpiles. Daily necessities had stopped production long ago.
Fortunately, Jing Shu had bought enough. With so many people in the house now, if they ran short, she could make pads from cotton. Cotton was skin-friendly and absorbent. Add a waterproof outer layer, and it would do.
"If the next baby is a boy, call him Zhang Erge. If it is a girl, call her Zhang Erjie," Jing Shu said. Children were rare now. When schools reopened next year, the scene would be something else.
Wu You'ai shrugged. "You provide the baby's milk. You have the most say in the name."
Every day, a bowl of hot milk—Wu You'ai delivered it personally. With how poorly Zhang Bingbing ate, there was no way she could breastfeed. Thankfully there was milk at home. Saving an infant was a blessing in itself.
This month, the problems at Jing Shu's two red nematode Feed Processing Factories were also solved, thanks to Su Mali.
Before, every three to five days, she had to haul feed from the source to the storage depot. It was a hassle, and more importantly, it burned fuel.
At a high-society party where Su Mali had invited her to exchange information and goods, she learned about her transport bottleneck. She then arranged a natural-gas cargo truck from her father and rented it to her, driver included, dedicated to shuttling between the two factories and the warehouse.
All Jing Shu had to do was tally the numbers and check the cargo. Each trip cost only thirty virtual coins. It was practically a giveaway.
The virtual coins invested in red nematode feed had soared these months. She had already put in thirty thousand coins and could keep production going for another two months. She might need to invest another thirty thousand. She ramped up her buybacks.
Last month's deal for the fat piglets from Xishan went through as planned, and she received twelve tons of gasoline. As for the feed money, she made it back from auctioning the blood mushrooms at Su Mali's event.
The more virtual coins she earned, the faster they vanished. To plug the hole at the factories, last month she brewed another round of baijiu and red wine, and made the rice wine mash she had been craving. She planned to make money with snake wine before the tobacco crop came in.
The rice wine mash was the simplest. She cooked plain rice, cooled it, added sweet wine starter, and kept it at about 37°C for seventy-two hours. After fermentation, the mash was sweet and tangy.
She had planned to ladle it into glass jars and refrigerate it. Whenever she wanted some, she would scoop out a few spoonfuls, dilute with water, bring it to a boil, then add glutinous rice balls, a poached egg, and milk. Just thinking of that fragrant bowl made her mouth water.
The poached egg had to be a jammy yolk. Take two bites, only half at a time, with the white cradling the yolk. The outside barely set, but the inside still flowed. Then swallow it in one go and lick the yolk from your lips. That was the peak of satisfaction.
But a single pot with a dozen poached eggs was no longer enough for her. So she made dozens of pots and filled two cubic meters of the Rubik's Cube Space with them. She went through several sacks of rice. She did not count the eggs. She just cracked a whole stack into the pots, which conveniently cleared out the egg stock in the space.
Two full cubic meters felt incredibly secure. Whenever she wanted some, she scooped a big bowl and there were five or six soft-centered eggs waiting. Being able to eat prepared food anytime, anywhere was her current definition of happiness.
The red wine was easy too. She had saved grapes for a long time and followed the tutorials. The only tedious part was double filtering. After that, it was just fermentation.
Speaking of which, she had to praise her own cleverness. She discovered another function of the space.
Outside, the torrential, humid weather was terrible for fermentation and brewing. So she let everything ferment inside the space. However, if there was no life present, the independent Cube Space automatically shifted to a vacuum, time-still mode. In other words, if she put fermenting items inside, they would emerge unchanged no matter how much time passed.
So she placed the brewing area together with the snakes she was raising. Chickens, ducks, rabbits, and cattle had strong odors that might taint the wine. Imagine opening a vat and smelling poultry. That would be awful.
The only creatures without a stench were the little bugs she had picked up at Xishan. After so many generations, those initial dozen bugs had multiplied and turned vicious. They ate anything. If she kept them separate, she worried they would gnaw through the jars and ruin the wine.
In the end, she put the snakes with the wine. The snakes were big and only took up one cubic meter. She used iron cages to separate them from the jars. The vats were sealed, and even if a snake slipped in, it would just turn into medicinal snake wine. Convenient.