Adding a physical thruster wasn't really a big deal. In an emergency, the bone dragon could suddenly stretch and retract with a mechanical snap to create a burst of force, launching someone a few meters away from immediate danger. It was meant to help when you were stuck in a tight spot, pinned by heavy debris or cornered in a collapsing hallway.
Things like that were the kind of backup you hoped you would never need, but Jing Shu couldn't take chances. She was about to spend several months away from home, crossing the dark ocean, and she had to plan thoroughly.
What if an earthquake hit while she was gone? Her family needed to know exactly what to do in every nightmare scenario. She had to prepare things in advance. She laid out trackers and emergency distress devices for everyone, making sure they knew how to trigger the signals and find each other in the rubble.
She had thought of plenty of methods to escape the shifting crust. Like using jet equipment to escape quickly, but come on; you couldn't exactly bring rocket launchers to work or the market without attracting unwanted attention.
She also considered tying people to hydrogen balloons to float them out of a disaster zone, but that would take at least dozens of kilos of hydrogen to lift a grown adult. It was way too much trouble for a whole group. That trick might work for herself, though, so she decided to prep the tanks and balloons as a backup in her space.
All those pre-apocalypse earthquake guides were useless now. They were relics of a safer, softer world. Advice like hiding in a bathroom because it was less likely to collapse, not jumping from a building, and waiting for rescue teams... none of that worked anymore.
In the apocalypse, there were no rescue teams with sirens and flashing lights. Once a building collapsed into a pile of jagged concrete and choking dust, you were buried alive. Nobody came to dig you out unless scavengers showed up later with shovels to strip your cold corpse for clothes. So if an earthquake hit and the walls began to groan, your only hope was to grab a bedsheet or a length of rope and jump from the window. That was the only shot at survival.
If outside protection was a must, Jing Shu wasn't the type to leave things vague or half-finished. She has even drawn up detailed diagrams on paper, planning to build extra safety gear with Grandpa Jing's help when a real quake came. She was sure he would put his back into the work when the ground actually started shaking under his feet.
And besides physical defenses, there was one little trick she knew to predict quakes. Science still couldn't forecast earthquakes with precision, but over the past year, every quake has been accompanied by what seemed like thunder and lightning. People said quakes always brought storms, but that wasn't really true. Thunder and lightning were weather patterns. Earthquakes came from the shifting plates of the earth itself.
What actually happened was different. Every quake was preceded by a deafening rumble that rattled your eardrums, a vibration like a massive iron hammer slamming into your chest. And outside, blinding flashes of white light lit up the night sky. That wasn't thunder or lightning at all. It was earthquake light and earthquake sound, phenomena tied directly to the tremors themselves.
Put simply, if the world around you suddenly turned bright as day in the middle of the night, don't hesitate. Run as fast as you possibly can toward the nearest open space. Three or four seconds later, the deafening roar would explode through the air. If the sound was painfully loud and the light terrifyingly bright, you were close to the epicenter.
That meant you had to sprint like your life depended on it, because in just two minutes, the ground would rip open with a sickening sound. Massive cracks would swallow the land, tearing and crushing everything around them.
There was time to reach open ground if you moved immediately, but most people froze in terror and got swallowed alive before they even realized what was happening. Jing Shu decided she had to teach her family this method of survival. A few more quakes, and they would gain the necessary experience. She herself has lived through hundreds of tremors in her past life, enough to tell by the specific frequency of the sound and the intensity of the light whether it was worth running.
She wasn't always right, but she was accurate eight times out of ten. Still, she never underestimated the danger of the earth's crust. No matter the size of the quake, her rule was simple: get far from the epicenter and stay on open ground. That's the safest choice available. Well, it's the safest except for the risk of the ground splitting beneath your feet as you ran toward safety.
Oh, and she also dug out all the earplugs, noise-canceling earmuffs, and protective films she had hoarded before the apocalypse started. They couldn't block the sound of the world ending completely, but they cut the decibels by more than half, which was enough to protect her ears from permanent damage. More importantly, it meant she could finally sleep.
Otherwise, those thunderous roars went on all night, like explosions detonating right by your ear. Who could sleep through that kind of violence? A shock like that could scare someone into a heart attack in their bed. In her past life, she didn't have proper gear, so she had stuffed dirty rags into her ears. After months of that endless roaring, she had gone half-deaf. Later, people had to shout until their faces were red just to get her to understand.
By the third year of the apocalypse, conversations went like this:
"What? What did you say?"
"What is the cafeteria serving today?"
"Oh, I'm not eating."
"You said mushrooms?"
"Yeah, I already ate."
Everything was mixed up, the meanings never matching between the speaker and the listener. That's why protecting her ears was essential this time around.
As for supplies, her biggest harvest this year was filling most of her Cube Space with cooked food. Almost everything had been disguised and processed into compact forms, so it will be easier to take out later without attracting attention. Grandma Jing's silkworms had produced enough silk for another set of clothes, the delicate threads gleaming in the lamp light.
Jing Shu had stashed away plenty more silk in her space. Once the big quake hit, raising silkworms won't be possible in the shifting ruins, so Grandma Jing and Zijin could handle clothing production then. Her tobacco had been harvested twice from the indoor plots. With Grandpa Jing's help, she had turned the dried leaves into cigars.
Combined with the ones stored in her space, there still weren't many. They sold out instantly at auctions for 500 virtual coins each, almost rivaling blood mushrooms in value. She planned to grow another batch to meet the demand. The cotton she planted had been fluffed into usable fiber. Zijin wanted to weave cloth from it, but it was all half-manual work that strained the eyes in the dim light, so progress was slow.
Daily necessities were already covered in her checklists. The real question was what to bring on her trip to the US, and how to bring it without revealing her secrets. She couldn't expose the secret of her Cube Space to the team. Someone like Yang Yang, who noticed the tiniest details in a room, would spot something off immediately. She couldn't just keep pulling items from her pockets like some stage magician in front of him.
So whatever she brought, she had to actually carry on her person or in a pack. Still, it was smarter to prepare a backup plan. Weapons, food, and survival gear... those were non-negotiable. She handed a bulletproof vest to Zijin, asking her to remodel it into a thick cotton coat like the heavy ones used in the northeast.
Zijin spent three days sewing through the tough fabric, then looked at her with a weird expression. 'This coat weighs over ten kilos. Wearing it feels like strapping an iron block to your back. If it rains and it soaks up water, Boss, I can't help thinking of that story about the donkey carrying a sponge across the river.'
Jing Shu sighed. 'Fine. You and your big mouth... I will use it my way.' Wearing that twenty-kilo armored coat gave her an unmatched sense of security as she paced the villa. She ate, slept, and lived in it without taking it off to get used to the weight. Naturally, the bulletproof helmet had to stay too, but she had modified it into a wide cowboy hat style to blend in with the landscape. It was all part of her permanent outfit now.
Her strength was one of her few natural advantages, so she had to use it well. The next day, she got Grandpa Jing to forge steel greaves and wrist guards. She spent hours sewing them into her clothes to create a 'leather-steel' blend that fit her body perfectly. The weight was just right for her enhanced muscles, and she didn't even feel it after a while.
For emergencies, she could still wear the combat suit Yang Yang had given her. But for everyday life, this armored outfit with double-layer protection kept her safety at the top of her priorities.