A mudslide struck without warning. Four vehicles in a summer vacation convoy were smashed and overturned, while the others were forced to split up and retreat in opposite directions.
One side was luckier. Not far away there was an RV camping site, flat, open, and at some distance from the mountains, relatively safe.
The other side wasn’t so fortunate. Along the endless mountain road, rocks kept sliding down. The entire escape felt like running a gauntlet through gunfire: you never knew whether, when the next boulder came crashing down, you should floor the gas and rush through, or hit the brakes and wait.
People at the campsite stayed in contact with those fleeing, listening to the situation over there and growing increasingly anxious. “Can you stop? Find somewhere more stable?”
Someone on the other end shouted back, “If I could stop, why the hell would I still be rushing forward! The damn rocks keep falling, and the ground is collapsing too… damn it! The road ahead is blocked!”
“Rocks! More rocks coming down!”
“Why are there so many rocks! Is this mountain built out of stone blocks or what?!”
Total chaos.
Some people were crushed along with their vehicles, some frantically dialed emergency numbers, some were still running for their lives, and some were stranded on the road, at a complete loss.
At that moment, an RV soared up from the treetops, yes, the treetops, and flew toward the center of the mudslide, or rather, the earthquake.
“Hello, this is the RV Inn.” The extremely cramped RV stopped in front of a black sedan that had been smashed by rocks and was smoking. A woman who looked listless, with a popsicle stick dangling from her mouth, spoke casually. “Buy a ticket and get on. If you’re satisfied, please leave a five-star review.”
The people struggling to climb out of their cars: “…?”
The story begins seven days earlier.
Seven days ago, Xin Xiaoru was reborn.
The good news was that she now had foreknowledge, enough time to stockpile supplies, to learn whatever life-saving skills she could.
The bad news was… rebirth itself was bad news for her.
After five years of torment in the apocalypse, no amount of effort had helped. When she died, there was no resentment, only the dead silence of “it’s finally over.”
And now someone was telling her, “You need to do it all over again, experience it once more.” Xin Xiaoru only wanted to say, “Please, spare me!”
Death was death either way. Dying now would at least be a release, yet you insist on making me start all over again! Are you sick?!
Besides, for people with even a little money, rebirth meant they could go on spending sprees, or take their families to set up a small countryside homestead, build defenses, do infrastructure, play it safe and survive forever.
But what about her? An orphan with both parents dead, the only thing she inherited from them was this RV.
Moreover, before she became an adult she didn’t have a driver’s license, so she couldn’t even drive the RV. It was her late mother’s best friend, Aunt Qian, who helped her. Aunt Qian ran an RV campground herself. She settled Xin Xiaoru’s RV and all her belongings, taught her the precautions for using water and electricity in an RV, and only then turned that tiny RV into a home, giving her a place to stay during winter and summer vacations.
Now she was twenty years old. After graduating from a vocational nursing school, she entered a secondary Grade-A hospital with the top score and worked as a nurse for two years. Her monthly salary slowly rose from three thousand to five thousand. After deducting four thousand yuan for getting a driver’s license, twenty thousand yuan for inspection and maintenance of the RV, the money spent on upgrading the RV’s solar panels, air-conditioning lines, and various other components, as well as the money spent thanking Aunt Qian for her care by treating her whole family to meals, and repaying the money she had borrowed bit by bit from Aunt Qian back when she was a child and hospitalized for illness in pediatrics, after adding up all the odds and ends, she hadn’t saved even a few thousand yuan over those two years.
What could a few thousand yuan even do!
Even if she bought two thousand jin of grain, she’d have nowhere to store it.
That said, she still honestly went to Aunt Qian and told her about being reborn, urging her to make some preparations.
Aunt Qian laughed so hard she couldn’t stop, saying Xin Xiaoru had been driven crazy by the heat.
Xin Xiaoru said, “In a few days there’ll be an earthquake around the campground. The magnitude won’t be very big, but there was heavy rain some time ago and a lot of soil and rocks have loosened, so there’ll be a large-scale mudslide. You’ll see then.”
Even as she said this, Xin Xiaoru herself wasn’t entirely sure.
Many people, after waking from a nightmare, have a period of confusion, not sure what day it is, unable to tell whether what was real was the dream, or the present.
If the earthquake really happened, then it would prove she truly had been reborn.
If it didn’t happen, then it would mean it was just a long nightmare.
After making her preparations, she asked the hospital for leave and went to wait at the RV campground.
During the days of waiting, something strange happened: the RV would sometimes move on its own.
Both Xin Xiaoru and Aunt Qian knew a bit about vehicle issues. They checked everything, from the rear hatch to the chassis, and found nothing wrong, yet the RV still moved by itself.
It wasn’t charging wildly around the campground, but sliding slightly back and forth.
Xin Xiaoru no longer dared stay in the RV and chose to sleep in the house with Aunt Qian.
As a result, when they woke up the next morning, the RV had run over to the front of the house on its own!
Qian Zhengli screamed and slammed the door shut.
“It must be that I opened the door the wrong way.”
She opened it again.
Mm, the RV was still there, and its headlights even flashed twice.
Qian Zhengli: “!!!” What kind of horror-movie déjà vu is this?! A ghost car! Help!
Xin Xiaoru had already woken up; she just felt listless and low on energy, curled up in bed, feeling as though even the daylight was dim.
“What’s wrong?” Hearing the commotion, she hazily got up, and then saw the RV keep flashing its lights, and flash even more cheerfully once it saw her. If the vehicle had a tail, it probably would’ve been wagging it into a blur.
“…”
Aunt Qian hesitated a little. Why was it that as soon as Xiao Ru came out, the horror movie suddenly turned into an animal movie? Clearly it was still just flashing headlights.
Xin Xiaoru pulled Aunt Qian behind her and went out alone. The moment her hand touched the door handle, a sensation like an electric shock ran through her, raising goosebumps all over her body.
“Master!!!” A clear, childlike voice exploded in her mind. “It’s me! Your long-lost system, woo woo woo!”
Xin Xiaoru: ?
The car door opened automatically, inviting Xin Xiaoru inside.
Xin Xiaoru signaled reassurance to Aunt Qian with her eyes and entered the RV.
It was obviously the familiar RV she had lived in for years, small, cramped, cluttered with odds and ends, yet now, looking at it, she inexplicably found it more pleasing to the eye, as if it wasn’t quite so cramped anymore.
Out of caution, Xin Xiaoru didn’t respond right away. Instead, she went to the driver’s seat to check the vehicle’s startup condition.
The child’s voice rang out again: “Master! Are you going somewhere? I’ll take you there!”
Whether it was a vehicle or a pet, in Xin Xiaoru’s view, only something she could control truly belonged to her. So she still didn’t reply, choosing instead to see whether she could get the RV moving.
The answer was yes.
She drove the RV around the campground once, found no problems at all, and then parked it back where it had been.
“Who are you?” Xin Xiaoru asked. “Why do you call yourself a system? And why do you appear in my mind?”
“Um… I don’t really know either.” The child’s voice carried a hint of deliberately profound melancholy. “Ever since I became conscious, I’ve been in this vehicle. But when I talked to you, you couldn’t hear me. Later, you even threw me away! Woo woo woo!”
Xin Xiaoru’s heart stirred. “Threw you away? You mean when I went to school and to work and left you?”
“Not that at all!” the system said. “It was when you were escaping a mountain fire and saw that the RV was about to run out of fuel, you threw me away then!”
“…”
Xin Xiaoru took a deep breath.
That was the scene in her previous life when she abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot.
This system had actually gone through a stretch of the natural-disaster apocalypse with her in her previous life, and then been reborn back here together with her.
The wariness in her heart eased a little, and Xin Xiaoru chatted with it in more detail.
It turned out that the system had descended on the day when the solar magnetic storm in her previous life caused the most severe signal disruptions. It arrived within the RV’s onboard system, becoming a system that depended on the RV and Xin Xiaoru to survive.
Of course, the so-called “system” was actually just a name it gave itself, based on the TV dramas and various Baidu Encyclopedia entries it had downloaded through the vehicle’s onboard system. Even so, its functions really were system-like.
First of all, its upgrades didn’t rely on crystal cores or anything like that, but on an operation model. It needed to be run like a hotel: it needed foot traffic, goodwill, and satisfaction ratings. Only then could it level up.
Second, its upgrade path was unclear. In her previous life, it had never been able to transmit its voice to Xin Xiaoru, and it had spent all that time inside the onboard system trying to integrate with the vehicle. It took three or four years of integration before it could finally control the RV, by which point Xin Xiaoru had long since abandoned the vehicle because it ran out of fuel.
As a result, the system lost its owner.
Now, by a twist of fate, it had come back together with its owner. After adapting for a few days, it managed to contact Xin Xiaoru directly in a state of full integration with the RV, finally achieving a complete connection with its owner’s consciousness!
The system was extremely excited!
Xin Xiaoru… well, Xin Xiaoru’s excitement was limited.
After all that talk, the little system didn’t actually know what it could do after upgrading. In her previous life it had remained at Lv0, and now it was still the same.
“Forget it. Run it like a hotel, huh? Then let’s give it a try.”
She first tried catching snails and bringing them back, then tried bringing Aunt Qian onto the RV. The system said neither counted as guests.
“Aunt Qian is family,” it said shyly.
So Xin Xiaoru temporarily drove back to the hospital and invited a nurse she was close with to come eat hotpot in the RV.
This time, it counted as having a guest. The system also activated its rules, appearing in Xin Xiaoru’s mind in the form of a notice board:
Guest stays one night, pays RMB 100, and gives a five-star satisfaction rating. Upon first successful completion of the RV Inn task, the RV will gain the ability of flight.
Xin Xiaoru: !!! Flight?!
She was completely stunned!
“You mean literally?” she asked.
System: “Yes, Master!”
Xin Xiaoru grabbed the nurse’s hand. “We haven’t seen each other in days, stay in the RV tonight and chat! But let’s do a bit of role-playing! In the pitch-black night, on a damp evening, a wandering traveler misses the inn while rushing on their journey and thinks they’ll have to sleep out on the street. Just then, a gentle breeze lifts the curtain of a carriage by the roadside, revealing a warm yellow glow inside. A peerless beauty sits in the carriage and beckons to the traveler: ‘Why not stay inside the carriage and just make do for the night’… Hey! Why did you hit me?!”
Her colleague said irritably, “So you’re the peerless beauty, and I’m the traveler who gets eaten by a demon beauty, huh?”
“Who said anything about eating you! I’m just inviting you to stay together! Oh, right, just to make it feel more ceremonial, remember to leave me a hundred-yuan bill and a five-star review tomorrow~”
As she spoke, Xin Xiaoru took the lead and transferred a hundred yuan to the nurse’s WeChat, winking at her repeatedly, determined to see this little ‘performance’ through to the end.
The nurse had no real objection either. Besides, she had a 6 a.m. early shift the next day, and staying in an RV parked next to the hospital was indeed much closer, so she agreed out of curiosity.
“Will this really work?” the system wasn’t sure.
Xin Xiaoru wasn’t sure either.
After all, that hundred yuan was really just for show, she transferred it to the “guest,” the “guest” transferred it back, back and forth. It was hard to say whether that counted as exploiting a loophole in the rules.
Forget it. If she tried to run it properly as a hotel and look for real guests, who would even come?
The next day, the nurse left behind a hundred-yuan bill, and she even really left a note with five stars drawn on it.
And then…
A notification panel appeared out of nowhere in her mind:
Income for this task: 0. Customer satisfaction: 5 stars. Deducting friendship bonus: 4 stars. Actual satisfaction: 1 star. Task failed. Please, proprietor, do not take crooked shortcuts. Try harder and strive for better results.
Xin Xiaoru: “…Damn it!”
Zero income was one thing, but customer satisfaction actually got watered down because of friendship?!
So the RV itself was only worth one star, and everything else was the nurse’s affection?! …Thinking about it that way, sis really does love me~ …No, this is not the time for that!
Xin Xiaoru was beside herself with anger. “What do you mean by taking crooked shortcuts? We’re calling this a free stay, providing service to the customer! Do these rules even understand human social norms?!”
The rules panel still glowed coldly with the same line:
Please, proprietor, do not take crooked shortcuts. Try harder and strive for better results.
Xin Xiaoru: “…Fine.”
With no other choice, she could only try to do things properly. She drove the RV back to the campground, took out all the miscellaneous clutter inside and put it into Aunt Qian’s storage room, tidied up the interior décor, replaced all the sheets and bedding with new ones, took photos, and uploaded them to Airbnb, turning it into a special RV homestay. The title was bolded:
“Wherever your destination is, that’s where we’ll stop.”
It was summer vacation, and Yicheng, being half a tourist city, used to have quite a few students coming to visit during the holidays.
But that was before.
Now it wasn’t just Yicheng. Across the country, some places were being hit by torrential rain, others by drought, others by extreme heat. In some areas, massive hot and humid air currents rose and collided, forming hailstorms that smashed down without warning, shattering plenty of doors, windows, and car glass.
Let alone tourists, there were very few people even going out on the streets for no reason.
Yicheng was now hot and rainy, oppressively humid. People avoided going out unless necessary. Only during the morning and evening commute did crowds appear; at other times the streets were empty, baked by waves of scorching heat.
After spending most of the day cleaning up the RV, there were still no inquiries at all.
“It really won’t work just putting it online…”
She started driving around aimlessly, picking up milk tea, popsicles, and the like along the way.
Suddenly, a huge explosive crash sounded ahead. Xin Xiaoru jumped in fright. She saw the second floor of a glass office building suddenly shatter, and a person fell through the broken glass wall, slamming heavily onto the ground.
She instinctively rushed over to check the situation, calling the police and an ambulance at the same time.
But just as the call connected, she walked closer to the injured person and saw his eyes, his pupils fully dilated.
They were completely black eyes that no one who had been dead for a while should ever have.
Yet this person was still moving. He looked toward where Xin Xiaoru was standing, stretched out a hand, as if trying to grab something, or perhaps asking for help.
Xin Xiaoru’s scalp went numb with terror.
It was July 16, 2036. There were still two months to go before the concentrated outbreak of disasters and the full spread of the zombie virus. Why was there a zombie here already?! Had the zombie virus begun spreading ahead of time without anyone noticing? Or had her rebirth caused some unpredictable changes in this world?
“Hello? Hello? Please speak,” the dispatcher urged from the other end of the police call.
Xin Xiaoru suddenly backed away and instinctively crouched behind a trash bin to hide herself. She briefly described the situation of the fall at this building, then hung up and stared intently at the building’s main entrance.
It was a very ordinary office building, completely unremarkable, nothing out of the ordinary just five minutes ago.
But now, Xin Xiaoru sensed something was different.
Outside, people were screaming, calling the police, and gathering to watch, yet the glass building itself was eerily quiet. No one came to the windows to check what had happened. And yet there were traces of movement inside, clearly, there were people in there. They just didn’t care about the person who had fallen outside.
A horrifying suspicion struck her. She no longer dared to observe any further. Like she’d seen a ghost, she took off running, jumped into her RV, and drove straight onto the ring road heading away from the city center. On the way, she stopped once to refuel, filling the tank completely, and then spent all of the few thousand yuan she had left buying the cheapest rice, twenty yuan per bag, ten jin per bag.
A total of 150 bags, all loaded into the RV, and she sped straight toward the campground a hundred kilometers away.
Her heart was pounding wildly. As she drove, Xin Xiaoru recalled the trajectory of the apocalypse from her previous life.
It was still early, hopefully she was just overthinking things.
A piercing alarm sounded in her mind, urging her to flee. When she finally reached the campground, she let out a breath and immediately checked the messages on her phone, especially those from her hospital colleagues.
There were 99+ messages, all discussing today’s fall.
“They sent the person to the hospital next door. They say he’d already been dead for three days, no idea how he fell from the second floor today.”
“No way? Didn’t people say he was still moving after he fell?”
“Rumors getting exaggerated.”
“Maybe someone saw it wrong?”
“The police have already sealed off that building. They’re checking the situation now, looks like it’s probably a pretty serious homicide.”
“Wild. This is the first time something like a murder case has happened around me! People getting sent to the hospital from fights are pretty common, though.”
Slender fingers scrolled through the phone, reading all the messages in the group chat from beginning to end, finally stopping on one line.
“There are sirens again. They’re probably bringing in more personnel.”
A local police station only has a limited number of officers and auxiliary police. Even if they reinforced them for a homicide case, it wouldn’t amount to many people.
Xin Xiaoru frowned deeply. In the end, she directly dialed 110.
“I’m a witness. I saw the deceased still moving at the time, and the condition of the deceased looked very much like zombies in zombie movies. Officer, the people you send to investigate should be prepared with guns, take riot-control measures, and also wear masks.”
The police officer on the line fell silent for a moment, then sternly advised Xin Xiaoru to return to reality and not confuse film and television works with real life.
Although they didn’t accept the absurd zombie explanation, the police still recorded Xin Xiaoru’s testimony.
In a sense, the body had already been dead before it fell from the second floor, but the fact that it was still moving after the fall had been seen by many people. Whatever strange ideas this girl who called in might have had, she was still one of the witnesses.
“Can we reach you at this number? We may need to contact you again later to take further statements.”
Xin Xiaoru: “Yes.”
After hanging up, Xin Xiaoru repeated what she had told the police in the colleagues’ group chat.
Whoever took it seriously and whoever joked about it, she pushed it all to the back of her mind. What mattered now was downloading all kinds of offline maps and looking for batteries, generators, and the like…
Sigh. So many hassles, and the biggest hassle was having no money to prepare any of this!
In her mind, the system reminded her at just the right moment, “I can guarantee the RV’s fuel and power usage!”
Xin Xiaoru froze.
Right! She still had an RV plug-in!
The nurse had stayed here for one night. Although it hadn’t helped her complete the task successfully, it still provided some popularity and satisfaction, allowing the system to recover a bit of energy.
Just then, after being silent for most of the day, Airbnb suddenly chimed with a notification.
“You have a new booking request. Please confirm.”
Xin Xiaoru raised an eyebrow and muttered as she opened the app, “Who would it be, at a time like this…”
Airbnb encourages both hosts and guests to use their real profile photos. This person’s avatar showed them under a dim bridge, wearing a baseball cap and a mask, with deep-set eyes. At a quick glance, he looked like a quiet, good-looking young man with a strong aura, but as everyone knows, anyone wearing a hat, mask, and sunglasses is a peerless beauty, so that couldn’t be taken seriously. Judging just by his eyes, he looked like trouble, as if he might dash off to get into a fight at any moment.
Without a second thought, Xin Xiaoru immediately rejected the booking request.
No joke, she had almost already confirmed that the zombie virus had arrived early. How could she possibly go looking for trouble by letting a man who looked this fierce move in?
The very next moment, an Airbnb private message popped up:
“30,000 per night, booking one week, total 210,000. Contract can be signed and payment handled offline. If you’re not at ease, you can bring someone with you.”
Her hands typed faster than her brain:
“Deal. Bank card number is xxxxxx…”
Only when the text message notification showed that 210,000 had actually arrived did Xin Xiaoru suddenly come back to her senses.
What on earth am I doing?!
“System, if I sell you, will you come back on your own?”
If the system had a physical form, it would definitely roll its eyes hard. “I can control the RV. This time, even if you want to ditch me, you won’t be able to.”
Reassured, Xin Xiaoru immediately put the 150 bags of rice into Aunt Qian’s warehouse at the campground, then worked up the courage to head back into the city center to pick the guest up.
Well, [1]“People die for money; birds die for food” means: people are often willing to risk everything—even their lives—for profit or material gain, just as birds risk their lives to get food. It’s … Continue reading jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1674620_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1674620_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });people die for money, birds die for food. The ancients truly didn’t lie!
One second she was still suspecting a zombie outbreak and fleeing the city center as if chased by ghosts; the next second, she was coming back for the sake of 210,000!
“Please break out a little later!” Xin Xiaoru prayed.
The place where the guest was waiting was an intersection.
In the sweltering heat, he was wearing a black long-sleeved athletic top and long pants. The white stripes on them were stained with a rusty color. A hiking backpack was slung over his back, bulging with all sorts of things, there even seemed to be a tent. His baseball cap and mask were perched on his head like fixed accessories, exactly the same as in his profile picture.
The moment she opened the door and the man walked over, Xin Xiaoru felt a wave of heat wash over her. A faint smell of blood filled her nose, and her whole body reacted uncontrollably, every hair standing on end.
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