Wen Ya was twenty-eight this year, yet she hadn’t so much as held a boyfriend’s hand.
While everyone else her age was being badgered into marriage, she lived free from the noise. Her parents had passed away, as had both sets of grandparents, leaving just her and her older brother. Seeing so many people around her get cheated on and end up in messy divorces, she didn’t have the slightest urge to find a partner anyway.
Back when she turned twenty, she had acquired a portable dimension. Inside stood a two-story bamboo lodge built over an underground warehouse where time stayed completely frozen. Outside stretched a small plot of arable land, a mini sea, a winding river, a modest mountain, and a pocket-sized grassland.
It lacked the magic spirit spring or the hyper-accelerated crop growth featured in typical web novels, but it did allow her to plant and harvest using pure mental focus. That was her absolute favorite feature—she had no interest in slaving away in the dirt every day.
Her guilty pleasure was reading post-apocalyptic fiction. She devoured every subgenre she could find.
At first, she genuinely believed the world was coming to an end. Terrified, she rushed into a stockpiling frenzy. She bought a thousand fifty-pound bags of rice, five hundred twenty-pound bags, and another five hundred ten-pound bags. Next, she hit up a local oil press and loaded up on fifty thousand pounds of cooking oil, supplementing it with wholesale peanut, olive, and corn oils. Since she didn’t care for those three as much, she topped it off with a hundred individual one-pound jars of freshly ground sesame oil.
She added five hundred fifty-pound bags and a hundred twenty-pound bags of high-gluten flour, followed by a hundred fifty-pound bags of all-purpose flour and another hundred twenty-pound bags of dumpling flour. Then came five hundred one-pound bags of potato starch from Liushugou, a hundred bundles of glass noodles, and ten symbolic bags of cornstarch.
As for spices—star anise, cinnamon, cumin, bay leaves—she ordered two massive crates of each. Being a die-hard spice lover who couldn’t enjoy a meal without a kick, she went overboard on the barbecue seasoning, snagging fifty full pounds of extra-spicy blend.
Though crops in her spatial plot grew at normal speed, it was more than enough for a party of one. She bought seeds in bulk, reasoning that if plants mutated after the apocalypse like they did in her novels, farming would become fatal. It would be a tragedy to lose her life to a rogue cabbage.
She purchased livestock in small numbers to avoid overcrowding the limited terrain, sectioning them off with fences. She planted two saplings for every fruit she liked to eat—again, space was at a premium. She stocked the waters with freshwater fish, shrimp, crabs, and marine life, making sure to get both male and female crabs, along with a few varieties of seaweed so they could breed naturally.
Because time stood still inside the warehouse, she went wild on pre-cooked street food. Spicy hot pot, grilled cold noodles, royal pork belly wraps, nori rice rolls, savory rice packs, spicy dry pots—she bought fifty portions of each, alongside dozens of her favorite restaurant dishes.
Since post-apocalyptic life meant no more dessert shops, she bought a mountain of ice creams, popsicles, and boba milk teas—half cold, half hot.
She was a die-hard carnivore, and since her spatial livestock would take time to mature, she bought massive supplies of raw meat. Who knew when the end of the world would hit?
Then came the survival gear. She bought several machetes for zombie-slaying, plus a few traditional straight swords, paying top dollar to have them professionally sharpened. Firearms? Sorry, no black-market connections for those. She settled for self-defense gear she actually knew how to use, including several stun batons.
Her power source of choice was a solar-powered generator. Gas generators were out—the noise would attract swarms of zombies.
When she finally checked her bank account, her stomach dropped. She was completely broke.
Driven by desperation, she listed her two properties for sale. If the apocalypse hit, ordinary houses would be uninhabitable anyway; every novel agreed that survivors had to flee to fortified safety zones.
With her house money in hand, she raided pharmacies for antibiotics, painkillers, styptics, fever reducers, cold medicine, and a stash of heart medication—just in case the horror of the wasteland gave her a sudden heart attack. She grabbed cough syrup, eye drops, and calcium supplements, figuring that if she managed to survive long term, she’d need to combat bone density loss.
Tissues, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and fragrance-free shampoos and body washes filled the rest of her order.
For get-away vehicles, she stuck to bicycles and electric scooters. Cars were too expensive up front, and once the apocalypse hit, abandoned cars would litter the streets—all you needed was gas to drive off. She managed to buy a few dozen drums of gasoline, though it required visiting every gas station in the city and suburbs due to strict purchasing limits.
During her rare breaks from panic-shopping, she read more web novels. Having finished the post-apocalyptic shelf, she moved on to general spatial-dimension tropes.
That was when reality hit her like a bucket of ice water. Characters with spatial dimensions transmigrated everywhere—historical eras, alternate universes, book worlds.
“Holy crap,” she muttered, wide-eyed. “I need to prepare for everything else, too!”
Clothing was the hardest part to plan for. She had no idea whether she’d be transmigrating into a book or reality, the modern era or ancient times. The safest strategy was buying bolt after bolt of raw cotton cloth and teaching herself to sew. That way, no matter where she landed, she could make whatever she needed by hand.
She bought massive quantities of plain cotton—useful in any era—and smaller batches of other fabrics to store away.
She spent a full, grueling year preparing. But when the dust settled, her savings were drained, her stockpiles were overflowing, and… nothing had happened. No apocalypse, no dimension-hopping, no transmigrating into a book.
She had spent an entire year stockpiling for absolutely nothing.
Sighing, she realized she had to face reality: life went on. The warehouse was packed, but her bank balance was practically zero, and you couldn’t survive in the modern world without cash.
To rebuild her funds, she became a food vlogger. Instead of filming restaurant reviews, she filmed home-cooked meals right in her rented apartment, gradually building a steady follower base.
Whenever she cooked too much, she stored the extras in her frozen warehouse or sent them out as fan giveaways. Early on, her cooking skills were mediocre at best, but with the entire internet full of recipes and tutorials, she learned fast.
She wore clothes she sewed herself, ate food she cooked herself, and crafted her own hair accessories and jewelry.
Before long, her channel brought in a comfortable multi-million-yuan annual income. Instead of hoarding the cash, she funneled it straight back into supplies.
By this point, she was buying purely for utility. Aside from pig trotters, chicken feet, and beef tripe, she stopped hoarding cooked meals, buying whatever caught her fancy day to day. She occasionally traveled, but once the pandemic hit and masks became mandatory, she stayed put in her rented apartment, never bothering to buy another house.