Hearing her question, Huo Tao stared at his leg and sank into memory. After a long moment he spoke slowly, his voice betraying no emotion.
“Five years ago I was twenty, Huo Hai was fifteen. My father and I were on a mutant-beast clearing mission when something went wrong. A lot of the team died, my father died, and my leg… was injured then.”
Shen Guoguo understood.
“So they think you killed your father, that you should have died instead?”
“Out of guilt, you let them take your rations, not arguing, not fighting back?”
“No — I get the rule of survival of the fittest. I just couldn’t be bothered to argue. Arguing doesn’t help.” Huo Tao explained earnestly.
Shen Guoguo nodded; that was more like it. She didn’t want her bedmate to be some saintly martyr.
“You and your brother don’t even look alike — maybe you aren’t even blood-related,” she said, shrugging. “Think less about it. Wait here; I’ll go get the rations. Be good.”
That was Huo Tao’s family; she’d already slapped and scolded them to their faces. What they muttered afterward was none of her concern.
To Shen Guoguo, the two of them had already hit rock bottom; from here, any direction would be upward.
“Don’t worry, our days will get better,” she said, patting Huo Tao’s shoulder. She grabbed the little cloth satchel hanging by the door and stepped out.
Rubbing her fingers and admiring Huo Tao’s broad shoulders, she couldn’t help but shake her head in wonder. Such a strong man — how’d he end up disabled?
She’d never slept with a man before, but that didn’t stop her from getting a little excited.
Wait — where was she going with this? Right, sleeping arrangements.
That stone bed at home — how could two people sleep on it? No, that wasn’t the point. The point was she couldn’t sleep with Huo Tao like that — that sort of thing should wait for feelings, right? Besides, she was all talk and theory — more talk than deeds.
So the urgent problem was getting an actual bed for that barren little home. And not just a bed — blankets, pajamas, slippers, a chair, bowls and chopsticks, a washbasin…
Shen Guoguo checked her wristband balance from memory.
Good news: she still had money.Bad news: only a little, very little.
【Balance: 150 star coins】
About 150 yuan in old money, roughly. Could that buy a bed?
She’d known the original body was poorly regarded and poor — but she hadn’t expected this poor.
“Shen Guoguo! Are you blind? If you’ve got nothing better to do than follow me, what a blot on my day!” a nasty voice cut over her head.
She looked up and saw Li Ge, his arm linked with Shen Yazhi. To be fair, they were a nicely matched couple — deservedly so. Annoying, though.
Shen Guoguo flicked her dark ponytail. “So gross. Didn’t you wipe your mouth after using the latrine?”
“You—!” Li Ge couldn’t out-shout a twenty-first-century internet-savvy girl like Shen Guoguo; his face darkened. He raised a hand to slap, but Shen Yazhi stopped him.
Shen Yazhi lifted her chin, arrogant. “Tonight the family is hosting a banquet for me and Li Ge. We even invited the most famous Li family chef in Fengtu City to preside over the feast. Although you were expelled from the Shen family, you may attend.”
Fine. Life wasn’t only about surviving today; there were also exes’ invitations.
Some family members had banquets; others didn’t even have a bed. Shen Guoguo wasn’t one to suffer for the sake of face.
She dropped six cold words: “Not going. Congrats. Locked.” She walked past them and, following the map on her wristband, headed to the inner-city ration pickup.
Because of nuclear war and contamination, the world had deteriorated — plants and animals mutated and much land turned to wasteland. Places suitable for human life were scarce. Natural food, paper books, relics from the old era, and high-quality people were all precious — and mostly reserved for senior warriors, engineers, agronomists, chefs, and leadership. Ordinary warriors and defectives like Shen Guoguo only got nutritional supplements.
“At two-person rations, please,” she said, tapping her wristband at the dark machine in the pickup window as others had.
【Beep — Defective person: nutrition supplement ×2】【Authorization granted: nutrition supplement ×8】
What the hell!
The machine announced nothing for the person in front of her — why was it humiliating her so loudly? Defectives had no rights, after all.
Everyone waiting — and those who’d already gone — looked over. Shen Guoguo drew a breath, expressionless, and took the ten nutrition vials the robot handed her, stuffing them into her cloth bag. That was a week’s food for her and Huo Tao.
If there’d been a comment stream right now, someone would have tagged, “@a friend who’d eat shit” — and she’d be the top liked reply.
After a moment of playing deaf, Shen Guoguo steadied herself and began looking for shops to buy a bed. She checked a few and quietly left, stunned.
Metal single bed: 1,000 star coins. Double: 2,500.Beast-bone single: 5,000. Double: 12,000.Wooden single: 20,000. Double: 50,000.
Shen Guoguo: …
That cheap wooden bed — awful workmanship — would be junk in her old town, but here it was a hot item. Buying a bed was out of the question. Clearly she was too poor.
Just then a bloody team ran by, carrying something on steel poles down the street. “Make way! Make way!”
“Oh my god — a mutated phoenix! Which squad was this? They hit the jackpot!”
“Look at the feathers, those talons, those thighs…”
“Are we taking it to the Li family chef for processing?”
“Of course! Such a precious mutant only Li the great chef has experience handling.”
The crowd buzzed and Shen Guoguo keyed on the word “phoenix.” She squeezed through to take a look and, oh ho!
That crown, that big tail, those claws, that sharp beak — it was basically a huge hen. Just massively oversized: nearly as big as an adult pig, body the size of an ostrich.
“You call that a phoenix?” Shen Guoguo marveled at the giant mutant hen and at people’s imagination.
“Heh, what else would it be? In the old days they said that flying up to the branch turns you into a phoenix. This one nearly flew as high as the base wall, of course it’s a phoenix,” someone in the crowd said.
What an interpretation!
A group clustered in front of a two-story shop. The team leader hadn’t gone in yet and was stopped by a robot at the door.
【No reservation — entry denied】【No reservation — entry denied】
“Why are you so unreasonable?” the leader begged. “This happened suddenly; we couldn’t reserve. Where’s Chef Li? Please, show mercy. If not, let Chef Li do some pre-processing!”
“We died trying to catch this phoenix. If it isn’t processed now it’ll be wasted…”
The leader sounded desperate — even a squad leader bowed to the robot guarding the chef’s door. Shen Guoguo’s understanding of the world’s class divisions deepened: evidently, old hierarchies still held sway even in the wasteland.