It was already very late, looking up, one could see the stars scattered and glittering across the night sky.
In the shops on both sides, lights burned, some bright, some dim.
The road was strewn with fallen zombie corpses in twos and threes.
Meng Shiwan pulled the cart straight for the bubble-tea shop.
She went into the work area, found the storeroom, and hauled out all the raw ingredients stocked inside.
She had the recipe for every kind of drink committed to memory.
As long as she stockpiled enough ingredients, she could make whatever drink she wanted from here on out.
Having cleared out the bubble-tea supplies, she wandered into the restaurant next door, took a chicken-feet-and-crab claypot meal kit from the back kitchen, and brought it back for tonight’s late-night snack.
Many chain restaurants nowadays, to keep their secret recipes from leaking, handed out pre-made meal kits that only needed heating.
People were always saying meal kits weren’t healthy, soon there wouldn’t even be meal kits to eat.
Meng Shiwan pulled the cart back to the RV and put the big and small bags of bubble-tea ingredients into the fridge’s space.
Only when it was crammed absolutely full was she thoroughly satisfied.
Every space stuffed to the brim, that was her greatest joy at present.
She took out a wok, opened the meal kit, poured it in, and heated it.
Then she pulled a bag of cat food out from under the sofa, tore it open, added some to Taxue’s little bowl, and poured in drinking water.
Taxue crunched away.
Meng Shiwan thought it over and decided to have chilled watermelon tonight.
Of the fruit she’d hauled back today, two watermelons hadn’t fit into the space and were sitting on the stairs.
She picked one up, cut it in half, and put it in the fridge to chill.
When the claypot was bubbling away, she turned off the heat to let it steep and went to wash up first.
She came out of a lovely hot shower, hair still dripping.
She tossed her dirty clothes into the washing machine to run, blow-dried her hair, and sat down to eat.
She took out her phone and started a movie, a super-soothing rustic-cooking film.
She lifted the half-watermelon out of the fridge and set it on the counter. “Taxue, I’m about to eat.”
She scooped out a big chunk with a spoon and popped it into her mouth, icy cold and utterly refreshing.
Taxue sidled over hoping for a couple of bites, but Meng Shiwan pushed its head away.
“Watermelon’s too cold, it’ll chill your belly, and meal kits are all chemicals, you can’t have any.”
Taxue tilted its head.
It felt like she was picking on a poor little cat.
Fortunately it had already eaten its fill, so it found a corner of the sofa to curl up and sleep.
Meal kits might not be healthy, but they were tasty, the chicken feet were nice and chewy, and the crab meat was fresh.
In the still depths of night, Meng Shiwan ate while watching the movie.
By the time she’d eaten her fill, washed up, and was ready for bed, it was already past one in the morning.
Meng Shiwan finished brushing her teeth, stretched out with a big yawn, gathered up Taxue, lowered the bed, rolled onto it, and fell straight asleep.
Tomorrow she would definitely sleep in properly, until the afternoon.
But at the first gray light of dawn, the RV’s security alarm went off, waking her mid-slumber.
Meng Shiwan felt for her phone, it was just past six in the morning.
“Which blind fool is disturbing my sleep? This had better be important, or I’m not letting it go.”
She opened the side display to check the security feed.
The all-around cameras mounted around the RV wouldn’t sound the alarm if someone merely passed by.
It only went off if someone lingered around the RV for more than five minutes, or made a threatening move toward it, while the owner was asleep and unaware.
Meng Shiwan had packed quite a lot of smart electronics into this RV back when she built it.
She opened the display and, goodness, a dense ring of people had gathered around the RV.
Meng Shiwan half-recognized them: the survivors who’d come down from the second floor yesterday.
She flipped out of bed, opened the window on the door, and started cursing at once. “Are you people sick? Not sleeping at this hour of the morning, what are you all doing crowded around here?”
The menacing crowd was stunned for a beat by her cursing, then grew furious in turn.
“You thief, how do you have the nerve to curse us? Where did you take all the supplies from the supermarket?”
“You can’t have hauled all those supplies off by yourself. You have to leave some for us. How can you be so self-righteous about it?”
Meng Shiwan opened her mouth to curse back, then caught the wrongness in their words.
She asked coldly, “What’s going on?”
The man leading them bellowed, “Quit the act! Last night all the supermarket’s supplies were stolen. It was definitely you. You’d better cough them up, or we’re not letting this go.”
All stolen? A supermarket that size, forget one of her, even ten people couldn’t silently haul it all away in a single night.
Unless…
There was a spatial ability user here.
She grabbed her trowel, still in her fuzzy pajamas, got out, shut the door, and marched straight for the supermarket.
The second-floor survivors hurried after her, faces set with rage, in a stance that clearly said if Meng Shiwan didn’t give them an explanation, they’d fight her to the death.
The supermarket shelves, once crammed full, were now so empty you couldn’t find a single packaging bag.
The whole supermarket had been ransacked utterly clean.
No one but a spatial ability user could have done it.
She genuinely didn’t expect to run into so rare an ability user this early.
A spatial one, no less.
With the apocalypse’s arrival, zombies were everywhere, but ability users were exceedingly rare.
The base she’d belonged to in her previous life had grown to several hundred thousand people by the time she died, with only a few thousand ability users.
That showed just how rare they were.
And spatial ability users were the treasures among ability users, the best possible helpers for moving supplies.
She looked around. The first-floor survivors were still gathered at the warehouse door, watching the scene gravely.
The supermarket theft clearly had them on edge, but by the look of them, the warehouse stock hadn’t been lost.
Meng Shiwan looked at Zhang Qiang. “The security cameras?”
Zhang Qiang was a little dazed at the sight of Meng Shiwan in fuzzy pajamas.
This get-up didn’t look like a brute, more like a female college student.
But the moment she spoke, her true nature showed. Her icy voice sent Zhang Qiang scrambling to explain.
“The power cut out for a while last night. We thought the wiring was unstable after the fire, so we didn’t think much of it. Then this morning we found everything in the supermarket gone. We went to check the footage and found the camera wiring damaged, nothing was recorded after the power went out.”
Meng Shiwan thought to herself: just as I figured.
A deliberate power cut to steal the supermarket’s supplies, that meant the culprit had no fighting strength.
In the early stage, a spatial ability user could only use the space to store things.
Only when the ability leveled up to intermediate or advanced could they evolve teleportation or a space blade and gain combat ability.
But to steal and then pin the blame on her, that was asking to die.
Meng Shiwan asked again, “Who said it was me who stole it?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Zhang Qiang pointed at a young man among the group that had followed Meng Shiwan in. “It was him!”
The accused Lin Hao: …
He’d calculated everything, everything, except that the first-floor survivors weren’t in league with them.
The loss of the supermarket’s supplies was a big deal to every survivor here.
Lin Hao had assumed all the survivors would band together to find the culprit.
He’d only needed to point the suspicion at this lone woman, and his little group could tuck themselves neatly out of sight.