【Why is Susu, the cannon fodder, going home at this time?】
A sudden live comment flashed before her eyes. At this moment, Lin Su was already driving on the road back home. Seeing the comment, she felt a surge of relief.
The loud crash from the underground garage earlier was soon confirmed to have been caused by an elevator fall. At the time, the elevator was traveling downward from the upper floors. For some unknown reason, the elevator cable snapped, causing the car to plunge directly from more than twenty floors down to level B1.
The tremendous noise had been caused by that fall.
After learning the full sequence of the accident, Lin Su felt extremely fortunate. According to her usual routine, the time when the elevator fell was normally when she would be going up or down. What’s more, she had stepped out of the elevator moments before the accident occurred. That alone was enough to make her feel a lingering sense of fear.
Of course, there was another stroke of luck: there had been no one inside the elevator when it fell.
Now, seeing this belated live comment, Lin Su faintly formed a suspicion. Could it be that, in the author’s original plan, she was supposed to be inside the elevator…
Just thinking about that possibility sent a chill down her spine.
Fortunately, because the live comments had appeared, she had temporarily decided to head home early and thus avoided this completely senseless disaster. At the same time, Lin Su realized the deep malice this world held toward her.
Lin Su’s home was located in a residential community called Qingshui Villa in the suburbs of An City. The community was divided into a high-rise residential area and a villa area. The high-rise section consisted of six tall buildings, while the villa area contained nine villas.
The overall size of the community wasn’t large, but it covered a very spacious area. Nestled against the mountains and beside the water, it was richly landscaped with greenery. The high-rise residential area and the villa area were separated by a greenbelt and a lake called Qingshui Lake.
Lin Su’s home was in Villa No. 1, just past the entrance to the villa area, close to Qingshui Lake.
Before she even turned off the engine, Lin Su saw her mother walk out of the house.
“Why are you back at this hour?”
Today was a workday, and Lin Su showing up at home around eleven in the morning was indeed a bit unusual.
Lin Su didn’t explain the situation directly to her mother. Instead, she took her by the arm and led her into the house, suppressing the turmoil in her heart as she began chatting with her about everyday matters.
Her mother’s attention was drawn by the conversation, completely unaware that Lin Su’s right hand, hidden behind her back, was faintly emitting a soft glow.
“Did something happen?”
Just as they stepped through the front door, Lin Su heard her father’s booming voice.
Lin Su shook her head, carried her bag over, and sat down on the sofa opposite her father. “Nothing’s wrong at the company, it’s just something else.”
That was what she said, but faced with the concerned looks in her parents’ eyes, Lin Su didn’t know how to bring herself to speak about something as heavy as the end of the world.
Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at the barely perceptible white glow on the inside of her wrist. Lin Su decided to start with the most unbelievable thing first.
Watching the coffee table in front of them vanish and then reappear, the three people present, aside from Lin Su, were completely dumbfounded.
“Susu, this… what on earth is going on?”
Lin Su’s father was the straightforward type who said whatever was on his mind, so he immediately voiced the question that both he and his wife were thinking.
Lin Su looked at the faint glow on her wrist that was about to fade. To be honest, she herself wasn’t entirely sure what was really going on either.
Just over an hour earlier, after experiencing the loud crash in the underground garage, Lin Su had originally planned to rest in the open area beside the garage and wait for the ringing in her ears to subside.
Who would have thought that, at that very moment, the inside of her wrist would suddenly emit a dazzling white light. After the flash, a circular point of light appeared on the inside of her wrist.
Lin Su’s first reaction was that this point of light was anything but ordinary. She lingered in the car for about an hour before finally figuring out its basic functions.
The function of this point of light was, coincidentally enough, the essential “space” found in apocalypse novels.
As for how large the space was, how its storage worked, and so on, Lin Su hadn’t had time to experiment yet. But simply knowing that she had suddenly obtained such a space gave her much more confidence about the future.
Now, faced with her parents’ shock, Lin Su told them about what she had encountered that morning, focusing on the appearance of the live comments and their content.
“…I also hope that a natural-disaster apocalypse won’t happen. But the prolonged heat during this period has left me no choice but to prepare. Dad, Mom, I know that saying this so suddenly may be hard for you to accept. But no matter what happens in the future, the only thing we can do is stand united as a family and face any disaster together…”
Lin Su chose to be honest with her parents about the impending natural-disaster apocalypse because neither her father nor her mother was fragile. For the two of them to have risen from nothing in the mountains to become owners of a chain of supermarkets meant their mental resilience was far beyond that of ordinary people.
Sure enough, although things like live comments and dimensional space felt very science-fictional to them, it didn’t hinder how quickly they dealt with a crisis.
Once they accepted what their daughter said about the coming natural-disaster apocalypse, Lin Su’s parents immediately exchanged a look and nodded in unison.
“The exact time the disaster will strike…”
“What supplies should we prepare…”
“Where should we live…”
“Who should we notify…”
The family of three held a preliminary discussion on many issues. As for whether to notify government authorities or relatives and friends, that involved considerations on many different levels.
After learning that a natural-disaster apocalypse was imminent, Lin Su had been constantly thinking about how to handle the issue of making the information public. It definitely had to be made public, but how to do so, and how to ensure that everyone could make some preparations, that was another matter altogether.
Just as the Lin family was deep in discussion, Lin Su’s phone rang.
She picked it up and saw that it was indeed a message from the property manager of their residential community.
The message was quite long. After reading it, Lin Su’s expression showed both a hint of relief and a sense of heaviness.
Seeing this complicated expression, the observant Lin mother asked directly, “Did something happen?”
Lin Su shook her head, not intending to bring up the matter of the female lead, Cheng Jiajia, just yet.
Yes, the content of this message was related to the female lead, Cheng Jiajia.
To be honest, Lin Su didn’t know whether it was a coincidence or not, but Cheng Jiajia lived in the same residential community as her. The difference was that Lin Su lived in the villa area, while Cheng Jiajia lived in the high-rise section. Lin Su had learned this information from the delivery details of Cheng Jiajia’s group purchase at the supermarket.
After seeing that information, Lin Su had contacted the property management to inquire about the situation.
Now the property manager replied that Cheng Jiajia was not a homeowner in the community, but a tenant who had moved in just two days earlier.
Qingshui Villa was a high-end residential community, and the rent was not cheap. Cheng Jiajia didn’t seem to be in particularly strong financial circumstances. Yet she had chosen to rent a place in Qingshui Villa and was also able to scout Lin Su’s family supermarket in advance. From this, Lin Su could be completely certain that Cheng Jiajia knew far more about the future course of events than people like them did.
And that was indeed the case.
Several kilometers away from Lin Su’s home, in the high-rise residential area, Cheng Jiajia was directing renovation workers to install a full-steel security door on the apartment. At the same time, all the windows were fitted with interior security grilles. Those grilles were made of solid steel bars as thick as a child’s arm. From a distance, they looked somewhat like prison bars.
Hearing the noise from the renovations, neighboring residents came over one after another to see what was going on.
When they saw that Cheng Jiajia, a tenant, had arbitrarily altered the apartment’s fittings, they all began to offer advice and dissuasion.
Facing these attempts to persuade her, Cheng Jiajia explained aloud that she had obtained the landlord’s permission, but inwardly she sneered, waiting for the day when the natural disaster arrived and these people would be crying in despair.
The neighbors found it hard to believe that any landlord would allow a tenant to remodel a home like this. But since Cheng Jiajia said so, and homeowners in the owners’ group chat had also stated that they agreed, there was nothing more these outsiders could say.
At this moment, Lin Su was looking at the discussion unfolding in the owners’ group chat. Someone in the group had posted photos of Cheng Jiajia’s apartment. Naturally, photos of Cheng Jiajia herself had also been uploaded.
Many homeowners were puzzled as to why such a delicate, pretty young woman would renovate a rental apartment to look like a prison.
Seeing these photos, Lin Su became even more certain that Cheng Jiajia knew a great deal. She immediately contacted an acquaintance in the high-rise section and asked them to keep an eye on Cheng Jiajia’s movements.
After Cheng Jiajia had talked the neighbors into leaving, her mood did not improve. She had started having frequent dreams the previous week, dreams that were like prophecies, telling her that the future would be a natural-disaster apocalypse. Having read plenty of apocalypse novels, Cheng Jiajia took action right away.
Cheng Jiajia believed that, relying on her own abilities, she would definitely become the female lead of this apocalyptic world. After all, not only did she have precognitive dreams, she also possessed a “[1]“golden finger” refers to a special ability, advantage, or cheat-like power that a protagonist typically has in novels, especially in fantasy or apocalypse stories. It allows the character to … Continue reading jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1674259_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1674259_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });golden finger,” the standard cheat for a protagonist.
After arranging for someone to keep watch on Cheng Jiajia, Lin Su began experimenting with the functions of the space.
Lin Su didn’t know how the space had come into being, but she was certain that its carrier was the small round dot on the inside of her wrist.
When the dot first appeared, it emitted a white glow. Over time, that light gradually weakened until it disappeared completely. From the naked eye’s perspective, all that could be seen on the inside of Lin Su’s wrist now was a small white dot about the size of a soybean. On Lin Su’s fair skin, such a dot was hardly noticeable.
Yet Lin Su could feel a foreign sensation on the inside of her wrist. That feeling reassured her, it meant that this space wasn’t some mystical abstraction, but something that truly had a physical carrier, and that carrier was the small white dot.
After confirming this, Lin Su placed a burning candle, an ice cream, a kettle of boiled water, a baby chick, and a potted succulent into the space.
Lin Su couldn’t see or touch the space, nor did she know how large it was, but she could sense the state of the items after they were put inside.
The entire experiment began sometime after one in the afternoon and continued until six the next morning. One by one, Lin Su took the items back out of the space.
The ice cream was still cold, the boiled water was still scalding hot. Even the succulent showed no change at all. The only regret was that the lively little chick had lost all signs of life.
Lin Su reached out and touched the chick’s body, finding it still warm and soft.
As for the candle that had been burning when it was first put into the space, it had already gone completely out.
Combining these two observations, Lin Su could confirm that the space was capable of preservation, but there was no air inside, it formed a state similar to a vacuum.
After that, Lin Su would need to experiment with how long the space could preserve items, as well as how long living creatures could survive after entering it.
Both of these experiments required time to prove. During this process, Lin Su began gathering supplies.
References[+]