There were few cars on the highway, and Shan Ran sped home as fast as she could, catching a half-hour nap at a gas station along the way.
She finally pulled up to the house on the morning of the third day, the fourth day of the fevers.
She hadn’t been idle on the road, either.
First she’d contacted Xie Qingheng on the Second Continent, only to be told that both Xie Qingheng and his father were feverish and unconscious.
In the end she reached one of Xie Qingheng’s assistants who hadn’t come down with fever and had him ship over a batch of weapons.
The Third Continent banned firearms, though enforcement wasn’t all that strict.
Shan Ran had contacted the black market, but they told her things were a little unstable lately and she’d have to wait a week to take delivery, so she’d turned to Xie Qingheng instead.
The assistant replied that the weapons could reach the District 1 docks in about three days.
Xie Qingheng was Shan Ran’s childhood friend.
When she was twelve, her parents died in an accident, the family company’s shares were carved up among the Shan relatives, and her assets very nearly got snatched away entirely.
It was only because the Xie family interceded that the very young Shan Ran managed to keep a portion of her assets, including this villa, far away on the Third Continent.
After living with the Xie family for two years, Shan Ran left the Second Continent and came here, and by now she’d been living on her own for six years.
Right now, a fair number of packages were piled outside the villa’s courtyard gate, all supplies Shan Ran had bought online the moment she came to her senses.
Today was the fourth day.
More people were falling feverish and unconscious, while at the same time the first wave of the feverish were beginning to wake, one after another.
Then they would discover, quite by accident, that they had abilities, some panicked, some overjoyed.
In another day or two, as people slowly adapted to their powers, some would decide they were children of destiny, the protagonists of the world, some would take it as a sign of the coming apocalypse, some would insist it was punishment sent down from the heavens because the great families up above had exploited the Third Continent for far too long…
All sorts of talk ran rampant, uproar everywhere.
Forget a couple of days from now, even now, there were hardly any supplies left to buy online.
After searching for ages, Shan Ran finally managed to grab some by paying several times the going rate.
Once the order was placed, she carried Meng Xinye to a guest bedroom on the basement-one level, then started sorting through the packages.
Just then the doorbell rang.
Outside were several construction crews, another thing Shan Ran had arranged on the way home.
Shan Ran’s property covered over a thousand square meters: the villa’s footprint was three hundred, with three floors above ground and two below, all in a minimalist style, square, clean, airy.
The huge floor-to-ceiling windows were gorgeous, and an absolute disaster in an apocalypse.
First she had the workers knock out all the floor-to-ceiling glass and wall it up, leaving only ordinary windows for ventilation and light, and even those would get iron bars fitted on the outside.
The front door itself was a thick, double-leaf bulletproof steel door, that could stay.
A full layer of solar panels would go on the roof, and two large power-storage units in the basement.
After that, the courtyard wall would be raised and thickened, topped with barbed steel mesh.
Inside the courtyard, a ring of deep pits would be dug around the wall, the bottoms studded with steel rebar ground to upward-pointing spikes.
Anyone who dared jump down would die.
At the courtyard gate, a steel plate would be installed that could be raised automatically or by hand, to let vehicles in and out.
The workmen stared in silence at the rough blueprint Shan Ran had sketched.
No, this wasn’t a house.
This was a fortress.
Their eyelids twitched.
They snuck a careful glance at the owner standing before them and said nothing further.
There’d been no shortage of apocalypse chatter these past few days, the world was already sliding into chaos, and it was only natural for the rich to want extra protection, even if this young woman’s protective measures were laid out a touch ‘too’ meticulously to be normal…
But the pay was generous, so everything was negotiable.
The crews threw themselves into the work together, and sure enough the pace was quick.
Shan Ran supervised for a while, then got ready to go out for supplies.
Just before setting off, she went to Meng Xinye’s bedside.
First she fed him water through a needleless syringe, then changed the gauze on his head.
Meng Xinye’s white tee was stained with blood, so Shan Ran simply peeled it off and wiped him clean with a damp towel.
He’d looked like a fresh-faced college kid, she’d assumed he’d be on the skinny side, but his build turned out to be quite good.
As the towel passed over his torso, Shan Ran gave him a little squeeze, just for good measure.
Nice to the touch.
Shan Ran didn’t carry much in the way of moral baggage.
To sit on an ability this overpowered and ‘not’ use the tool right in front of her to level up would be a waste, a criminal squandering of a heaven-sent gift [1] 暴殄天物, recklessly throwing away something precious jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2777441_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2777441_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
And also a sitting duck.
To keep from getting sniped, she could only turn herself from a target into a gun with serious killing power.
Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d use just any tool.
It had to be at least handy, good-looking, practical, loyal, well-built…
She crouched at the bedside, studying the handsome sleeping face before her.
Maybe it was the fever, but the red mole at the corner of Meng Xinye’s eye had taken on a more vivid color, making him look like a frail Sleeping Beauty.
Let’s see whether this Sleeping Beauty can be used yet.
Shan Ran pressed her lips to his, hesitated a moment, then extended the tip of her tongue.
She stirred it around at random a few times, withdrew, and took stock of her own body.
No change whatsoever.
Just as she’d expected, if he hadn’t awakened, she couldn’t get an ability from him.
She’d just have to wait until Meng Xinye woke up.
Then she drove off.
The other residents of the villa district, drawn by the commotion of the construction, came over to look, and after watching for only a moment, hurried home to fortify their own places in imitation of Shan Ran.
Nearly half the people living in Shan Ran’s villa district were from the Second Continent, some doing business back and forth between the two, some here for holiday getaways.
The richer the person, the more they treasured their life.
The three continents were laid out roughly like a fan.
At the top, smallest in area, was the First Continent, below it came the Second and then the Third.
This planet was far larger than the Earth Shan Ran originally came from, with a greater proportion of ocean, and the straight-line distance from the First Continent to the Third was very long, so transport between the two sides usually passed through the Second Continent’s strait.
The First Continent was the most developed in both economy and technology, and held the world’s resources in an iron grip.
Its class system was rigid, dividing everyone into several ranks.
The seven families, three great and four lesser, were the highest of all, and the three great families were the very top of the top.
They each held one of seven regions, and together with a central administrative district, the First Continent was divided into eight zones.
They jointly nominated a Chief Executive from outside the seven families, but the entire Cabinet beneath him was made up of “their own people,” which made the Chief Executive essentially a puppet.
The Second Continent’s three Districts were administered by the three great families with the four lesser families assisting, and the Third Continent was governed directly by the Second.
All this Shan Ran had learned from the book’s background.
In fact, the Third Continent’s internet was sealed off, unless you had a special route and proper authorization, an ordinary person couldn’t see the network up above.
It was like a one-way “wall.”
Some people here didn’t even know the top-tier families existed.
So many scraped by through grubby, undignified means [2] 蝇营狗苟, scrabbling like flies and stray dogs just to survive jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2777441_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2777441_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, merely staying alive was hard enough, so who had the spare energy to worry about who the people up above were?
Shan Ran knit her brows.
Having come from the Land of Flowers, the thing she loathed most was the filthy caste system of a certain neighboring East Asian “great nation.”
The book hinted as early as the first chapter that the heroine, Rong Shuyao, was the lost daughter of one of the top families.
She hadn’t finished the book, but Shan Ran could guess there’d surely be a “returning to one’s roots” arc later on.
The apocalypse came, and the great families still stood unshaken.
Shan Ran tapped her fingers a few times where they rested on the steering wheel, wondering whether Rong Shuyao’s background might affect her own future culling operations.
If it really did, then she’d just wipe them all out.
Most of the shops along the street were shuttered, especially those near the residential compounds, long since stripped bare.
Shan Ran drove straight to a large supermarket.
Land was expensive and people scarce around here, you had to drive to get to it, and lately fewer and fewer dared to go out by car, so there was still quite a lot left on the shelves.
Once inside, Shan Ran started sweeping the place clean.
Grain, oil, seasonings, meat.
Dried sausage and cured pork, as long as the temperature stayed low, these didn’t need refrigeration.
Ready-to-eat braised dishes, easy-to-store crackers, bagged bread, canned goods, plus some snacks.
There was one kind of rock-hard bread with a shelf life of a full year, Shan Ran cleared it out entirely.
As she shopped, she thought to herself how nice it would be to have a spatial ability.
They said some people’s spaces had no flow of time, food went in and came out exactly the same.
Sadly, she didn’t have one, so the things with a one-week shelf life, roast chicken and duck, burgers and sandwiches, she could only buy a little of.
Shan Ran didn’t usually drink, but she still picked up some liquor to keep on hand.
After that came all kinds of daily necessities.
Lastly she bought a few dozen sets each of men’s and women’s clothing: work pants, work boots, fitted tanks and long-sleeves, and shell jackets for ease of movement, plus everyday casualwear, and thermal clothing and thick down jackets in case the temperature dropped.
The men’s sizes were based on Meng Xinye’s measurements.
Call it advance payment for a soon-to-be tool.
The supermarket had suspended delivery for the time being, but the few remaining employees still helped load everything onto Shan Ran’s vehicle.
Shan Ran was driving the biggest car the household owned, an enormous heavy-duty RV.
The body was seamless single-piece construction, the material extremely thick, bulletproof and freeze-proof, with a ten-ton winch at the rear.
When she’d first bought it, Xie Qingheng had joked that even if zombies came someday, she’d have nothing to fear in this thing.
Now this big fella was finally proving its worth.
Xie Qingheng did have a bit of a crow’s-mouth.
By the time she finished buying all this, the sky had gone dark and the car was packed full.
Shan Ran didn’t linger and drove straight home.
The crews were still at work, they’d set up several large floodlights for the night.
Shan Ran’s timeline was too tight, so they had to run morning and night shifts to finish.
Shan Ran pulled the car into the garage, then ferried the supplies down to the basement bit by bit.
The elevator was right by the garage, which made the hauling fairly convenient.
A little after ten at night, the night-shift foreman came to take over.
The floor-to-ceiling windows had all been knocked out, the rubble gathered in one corner of the courtyard to be carted off together in the morning.
Part of the brick wall on the ground floor was already laid.
Efficiency was high.
A group of workmen huddled together to chat during the shift change.
“The owner of the villa over there came to me this afternoon. I didn’t have time, so I sent my nephew over to work for them.”
“You’ve even got someone to spare. Everyone around me who isn’t feverish is run off their feet, don’t know where the word got out, but tons of people out there are coming around wanting their houses retrofitted.”
“Look at this owner, went out once this afternoon, came back tonight hauling all that stuff. Bet she cleaned out a whole supermarket.”
“You lot had better go stock up too. Lay in plenty of food. Something really feels off lately, my wife went to the market by our place, yesterday there was still some stuff, today she went a bit late and it was all gone, every last scrap, cleaned out!”
“Good thing this owner pays nice and quick, wages several times the usual, settled same-day in cash. When I get home I’m making my whole family get up early to go buy things.”
“Does she know something on the inside? I heard a lot of the owners around here are from the Second Continent. Their information’s gotta be better than ours, not like us here.”
“Course it’s different. I heard on the Second Continent they eat well, live well, high wages, good air too, maybe nobody over there’s even sick with fever.”
“All right, enough wild speculation. Hurry home and rest, stock up on plenty. We’re back at noon tomorrow to change shifts again.”
“Got it.”
“……..”
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