Tang Yuan spent an entire day putting together a simple plan. Starting with the four basic necessities—clothing, food, shelter, and transportation—she expanded the list to include many other things. Since it happened to be summer vacation, once she finished making her plan, she immediately began stockpiling supplies.
She started with the absolute necessities.
There was no need to mention rice, flour, grains, cooking oil, and other staples. These things couldn’t be lacking, so she bought them by the ton.
Then came warm clothing, quilts, fabric, and even cotton itself.
She also stocked up on all kinds of snacks and beverages. Because she was worried about running out of money, she specifically bought products that were approaching their expiration dates.
Since they were close to expiring, these products were extremely cheap.
She also bought bottled mineral water. Looking at the huge pile stacked like a small mountain inside her space, Tang Yuan still felt that it wasn’t enough.
She had drinking water, but what if she really ended up in the apocalypse?
The novels she’d read said that water resources were extremely important in the apocalypse as well.
So she spent tens of thousands of yuan buying several hundred enormous plastic barrels. Each barrel could hold more than a thousand liters of water, and their capacity was absolutely massive.
Once the barrels arrived, filling all of them was another enormous task.
Next came pots, pans, bowls, utensils, cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea.
Looking at the shelves packed to the brim inside her space, Tang Yuan couldn’t help thinking:
There are so many things. Can one person possibly eat all of this even in an entire lifetime?
But then she thought about it again.
It was better to stock up too much than to desperately need something later and discover that she had run out.
That would be unbearable.
She was particularly careful when stocking up on sugar.
This stuff was somewhat special, and she was worried that buying too much at once might attract unwanted attention and get her into trouble. So Tang Yuan didn’t purchase it on a large scale.
Instead, she went to villages and townships in the surrounding area and bought one box from each small grocery store or vegetable shop.
Besides, sugar couldn’t exactly be eaten as a meal. More than a thousand pounds was already enough.
She also bought quite a bit of brown sugar.
Then there were candies.
Using the excuse that she was preparing for a wedding celebration, Tang Yuan went to candy stores and bought several thousand pieces of various candies. That alone filled another dozen or so boxes.
She estimated that if she actually ate them all herself, she would probably end up with diabetes.
Then there were medicines.
As long as something could be purchased on the market, she bought some, regardless of what illness it was intended to treat. She even stocked up on medicines and supplies for young children.
There were also things that every woman needed: sanitary pads, body wash, shampoo, facial cleanser, skincare products, soap, laundry detergent, washing powder, and so on.
All of these were purchased by the box.
She also went to places that sold seeds. All kinds of seeds—anything she could buy—she purchased some and stored away.
As for fruits and vegetables, beef, mutton, pork, and chicken, there was even more.
The fruit was purchased directly from its places of origin, where it was both inexpensive and high quality.
Thinking about what she would do if she ended up in the apocalypse and encountered an extreme cold spell, Tang Yuan went to a coal-producing region and stocked up on 300 tons of coal in several batches.
This should be enough to keep me safe, right?
After finishing all of this, she checked her bank account.
Nearly ten million yuan had already been spent.
For the first time, Tang Yuan felt that she had gone completely crazy.
She had spent so much money on something that hadn’t even happened.
But another voice inside her kept telling her:
What if it really happens?
She sighed.
Anyway, she had already spent this much money, so there was no point thinking about all those hypothetical scenarios anymore.
She continued along the road of stockpiling supplies.
Then, one day, she suddenly saw a post on a senior student’s WeChat Moments.
He was selling a second-hand Mercedes-Benz Unimog motorhome.
With just one glance, Tang Yuan was captivated by the picture on her phone.
This was the legendary Unimog, known as an “apocalypse fortress”!
She immediately contacted her senior.
His name was Zhang Haisheng, and he was one year ahead of Tang Yuan in school.
She had heard that his family owned two 4S dealerships, making him something of a rich second-generation heir. However, he normally didn’t put on airs. He was a decent person who didn’t like fooling around or partying. His hobbies were mainly racing and modifying cars.
After asking him about the vehicle’s details, Tang Yuan learned that the Unimog originally belonged to a wealthy second-generation heir in Beijing.
The man’s family had gone bankrupt, so he was selling the vehicle to repay debts.
The brand-new vehicle had originally cost a little over three million yuan.
But it had been extensively modified, and the modifications alone had cost nearly ten million yuan.
Everything had been upgraded, from the exterior and tires down to the smallest screws.
The current asking price was 8.5 million yuan.
After going to the 4S dealership and seeing the vehicle with her own eyes, Tang Yuan immediately felt that this was her dream car.
It was simply too cool.
She decided on the spot to buy it.
After purchasing the motorhome, she had only a little over four million yuan left in savings.
Then Tang Yuan thought:
What if I end up in ancient times?
Gold and silver were hard currency in any era.
She decided to buy some gold and silver as well.
Maybe some gold bars or gold ingots.
She checked the current gold price.
It was 281 yuan per gram.
That wasn’t too bad.
She decided to start with two kilograms.
Then she looked at various pieces of jewelry: gold bracelets, gold necklaces, earrings, studs, rings, and so on.
There were also various silver ingots and silver jewelry.
Tang Yuan thought that modern silver jewelry was actually incredibly beautiful.
After buying all of that, another million-plus yuan was gone.
She still had more than two million yuan left, which she kept on hand as liquid cash.
Whenever she thought of something else or happened to see something useful, she could always buy more.
And so, after she had more or less finished stockpiling everything and had spent nearly all the money she intended to spend, Tang Yuan happily waited for the day she would suddenly travel through time, be reborn, or face the apocalypse.
But guess what?
Nothing happened.
Tang Yuan waited and waited.
She waited from her third year of university into her fourth.
Then she graduated from university.
After that, she was accepted into graduate school.
Eventually, she was already in her early thirties and had been working for several years.
Still, nothing happened.
Later, Tang Yuan began to wonder whether traveling through time or being reborn had simply been her own imagination.
Perhaps none of those things would ever happen.
It was just a shame that she had spent so much money stocking up on supplies.
Her thoughts returned to the present.
Tang Yuan stopped thinking about those things.
She glanced at the time and thought that tonight she would work overtime and finish the basic version of the drawings first. She could make the remaining revisions over the next two days.
Just as she opened her laptop, her phone rang.
It was already late.
Who could be calling at this hour?
Tang Yuan picked up her phone and saw that it was a WeChat video call from her cousin, Tang Min, the granddaughter of her paternal grandaunt.
The two girls had grown up together.
They had attended the same elementary and middle schools and had stayed together all the way through high school. Later, they went to different universities and eventually lived in different cities, so they gradually lost touch.
Nowadays, they only contacted each other a few times a year through WeChat, and they would see each other in person during the Spring Festival.
Tang Yuan answered the video call.
She immediately saw Tang Min on the other end.
The lighting was rather dim. It didn’t look like she was in the city. Judging by the surroundings, she seemed to be standing in the open area outside her family’s courtyard back in their hometown.
“You’re still back home? What’s going on? Why are you video-calling me at this hour?”
“Hey, Dayuanzi, I need to tell you something.”
Tang Yuan asked, “What is it? Why are you being so mysterious?”
“We’d already finished dinner and were about to close the door and go to bed. Then your biological father showed up with the woman he married afterward. They came looking for me and asked for your contact information.”
Tang Min sounded furious.
“Ugh, what shameless people! They didn’t raise you when you were little, but now that you’re grown up and can make money, they’re coming to find you. Where were they all those years?”
Everyone in the village had watched Tang Yuan grow up. Naturally, the uncles and aunts there had plenty of things to say about her biological parents.
“Do you know why they came?”
Tang Min rolled her eyes dramatically.
“What else could it be? They came to ask you for money!”
“You don’t know how shameless your father’s new wife is. At first, she came over saying that your father missed you. She said he missed you so much that whenever someone mentioned you, he couldn’t sleep all night.”
“Seriously, how do they even have the nerve to say something like that?”
“Back then, they didn’t care about you at all. They didn’t care about you when you were little. They didn’t care when you needed money for school. And now you’re already grown up and capable of earning money. You don’t need their fatherly or motherly love anymore, so now they come looking for you? How shameless can they be?”
Fatherly and motherly love…
When Tang Yuan was little, she had longed for it.
But now that she was in her thirties and had spent years struggling and making her way through society, she genuinely no longer needed it.
Tang Yuan frowned and asked, “You didn’t give them my contact information, did you?”
“Of course not! To hell with that. My parents persuaded the two of them to leave. Later, my mom was still worried, so she called some relatives who were close to your father and asked what was really going on. That’s when she found out the whole story.”