Lin Muyan pulled out her phone to check the weather, and only then learned that today it was actually pushing twenty degrees!
The dead of winter, with a high of twenty degrees, did that make any sense?
In the short time it took to think it, beads of sweat had popped out on Lin Muyan’s forehead. She hurriedly peeled off the big floral jacket and changed into a thin coat.
This freakish weather wasn’t right. Lin Muyan’s heart suddenly beat faster, she had a bad feeling.
Sure enough, the bullet comments started getting worked up.
【Here it comes, here it comes, the apocalypse is really coming! I love watching other people fight to survive the end times. Though in our real lives, of course, peace on earth and everyone safe and sound is the way to go.】
【Hahaha, you sneaky thing, there’s actually still a while before the real apocalypse hits. Just wait for it.】
【Slow, but not that slow, only a measly three months. Can’t wait to see how our Jiaojiao turns it all around in the apocalypse~】
Lin Muyan skipped past these sentimental outpourings, working hard to dig out anything of value, and she did find one.
【At first, people thought it was nothing more than a spell of freak weather, the alternating cold and heat ushering in a hopeful spring. But the nightmare begins in spring too: one natural calamity after another will play out, and a survival game pushed to humanity’s very limits is about to descend…】
Reading this, Lin Muyan was already trembling all over, breaking out in a cold sweat.
If all this was real, then she didn’t have much time left.
Three months to the apocalypse. Without proper preparation, she could scarcely imagine what manner of death awaited her then.
Lin Xiaonuan had packed her little book bag. Seeing that something was off with her sister, her face deathly pale, her lips quivering, the little one instinctively sensed trouble.
“Mom! Mom! Sis’s blood sugar’s crashed from hunger, quick, get her a couple of big pork trotters!”
Lin Muyan snapped out of it at Xiaonuan’s exaggerated bellow. By the time she’d collected herself, Wang Yanqin had already come flying over with a plate, staring at her in a panic.
“Muyan, what’s wrong? Here, drink some milk first and eat a bun, Mom will get your breakfast ready right away.”
Lin Muyan came back to herself, and looking at her mother’s anxious, caring face, something in her chest gave a jolt.
“Mom, I’m fine, I just got too hot wearing too many layers.”
But then, with a sudden clatter, Wang Yanqin dropped the plate to the floor. With trembling hands she gripped Lin Muyan’s shoulders, her voice shaking too.
“What, what did you just call me?”
Lin Muyan froze, then remembered she’d just said “Mom.”
Never mind it, then. She was her birth mother after all, and she cared for her, fretted over her this much. Even if those past matters still lacked any solid proof, what did it matter?
In this world, anyone who’ll bare their heart and be good to you is someone to cherish.
Lin Muyan looked at Wang Yanqin with a smile, gathered herself a moment, and called out that word, “Mom,” once more.
“Oh! Good child, Mom’s good child, it’s Mom who failed you, who didn’t keep you safe, who lost you.”
In an instant mother and daughter were wrapped in each other’s arms. Even Lin Xiaonuan came scampering over to squeeze in, and the three of them clung together in one knot.
The bullet comments turned sour, and a crowd of passive-aggressive needlers appeared.
【Oh-ho-ho, putting on a tender mother-daughter act over here, are we? Pah, the sight of it grates. Guards, bestow upon her one Zhang of Red! [1] “one zhang of red”, a flogging-as-punishment line from the drama Empresses in the Palace, here, a sarcastic call for someone to be beaten jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2620861_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2620861_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });】
【Forget the Zhang of Red, sentence these two, mother and daughter, to be buried together in the apocalypse instead.】
【The nerve of this vicious woman, saying such things, “didn’t keep her safe and lost her.” She’s plainly the one who made the swap, and here she is putting on an act.】
【Hold on, when does the truth finally come to light? I’m dying to see them slapped in the face. Once the truth’s out, just go offline already, we’ve still got to go watch Jiaojiao slay it up in the apocalypse.】
This round of bullet comments made Lin Muyan a little angry. Their malice ran deep, at the drop of a hat they were cursing her and her birth mother to die.
The truth, the truth, she would get to the bottom of the truth!
And one thing mattered even more: she wasn’t about to die so easily. Not only would she survive the apocalypse, she’d lead the whole Lin family to survive it too, to live well and good, just to spite them to death!
**
After seeing Lin Xiaonuan off, Lin Muyan announced that she too would be leaving.
Before she went, she quietly dug with the Golden Shovel one more time in the courtyard. This time she turned up another ball of white light, bigger than the one before.
Lin Muyan recognized it at a glance as White Space. She reached out eagerly, and her portable space expanded to ten square meters, the height unchanged, which thrilled her to no end.
According to the bullet comments, the apocalypse would descend in three months. Before then, she had to stockpile more goods, and the White Space was the best cheat tool there was: the bigger the better!
Whether or not the apocalypse actually came, she had to hedge her bets. Today she’d cash out the gold nuggets and start by buying some dry rations to stock up.
Leaving the urban village, Lin Muyan headed straight for the downtown she knew so well.
First she went to a gold shop and sold off the gold nuggets, netting close to a hundred thousand yuan.
In a wealthy household’s eyes this money wasn’t even enough to pick your teeth with, yet now it had become a vast fortune.
The money to prepare for the apocalypse could only come out of her own pocket. For one thing, she wasn’t certain the apocalypse would truly come, so it wouldn’t be right to put out a hand and ask her parents.
For another, her birth family wasn’t well off, the bullet comments said the family was still in debt. Her mother kept house and took the odd bit of casual work, earning hardly anything at all.
Her father’s wages as a renovation laborer were hard-earned too, with no income on most days, what little came in was a drop in the bucket against the debt.
Her big brother had just graduated and was in the agent business, money only showed up when he closed a deal, otherwise it was just a dead-end salary.
And there was still a grade-schooler in the family to put through school, no small expense.
Leaning on the Shen family’s resources, Lin Muyan had earned a double degree by twenty, from a top institution no less, she could land a high-paying job whenever she liked. But she couldn’t go job-hunting yet, she’d wait out these three months and see how things stood.
If the apocalypse did come, going off to find a job now would be brainless.
Placing a sliver of trust in the bullet comments, Lin Muyan decided to first run a three-month apocalypse prep, and figure out the rest later.
A hundred thousand in her pocket, Lin Muyan went straight to the farmers’ market.
She dove into a rice-flour-grain-and-oil shop and put in an order for a hundred thousand yuan’s worth of goods.
It wasn’t a huge order, so the owner didn’t grow suspicious. After settling on a time for Lin Muyan to come collect the goods herself, she left.
Three hours later, the Golden Shovel refreshed. Lin Muyan ducked into a public toilet and dug into a corner.
She wanted to see what could be dug up from a latrine.
What came out was a top-grade chunk of raw jadeite of superb color. Lin Muyan saw at a glance that it was worth a fortune, and right then and there she made a beeline for the antiques market with it.
A piece of raw jadeite this size, by Lin Muyan’s reckoning, it would fetch at least twenty million, and that was a conservative estimate.
She wasted no time finding one of the jade shops. She pushed the door open to find the shopkeeper, a drowsy old man, minding the place, he cracked an eye at the young person who’d walked in and didn’t bother to acknowledge her.
Lin Muyan rapped on the glass counter in front of the old man and got straight to the point.
“Do you buy raw stone here?”
“What kind of raw stone? Ordinary Hetian jade and the like, I don’t take. Now, if it’s a high-quality gemstone, that I might consider…”
“What about raw jadeite?”
The moment the words left her mouth, the shopkeeper bolted upright, his old eyes lighting up, and he said at once: “I’ll take it!”
References[+]