Perhaps after spending those days in the apocalypse, everyone’s nerves had been stretched too taut. Each of them was in a state of extreme mental tension.
After eating and drinking their fill at noon, they lay sprawled on the soft beds, stretching their bodies. They felt indescribably comfortable.
Before they knew it, all of them had overslept. Grandma was the first to wake Cheng Yaoyao.
“Yaoyao, wake up! The chicken from our house is gone. We can’t even find the bag it was in. Was it stolen by the neighbors?”
“All the people living around here are filthy rich and have luxury villas. Who would steal our chicken?” Cheng Yaoyao mumbled sleepily. She fumbled for her phone and glanced at the time, only to discover that it was already two o’clock.
She hurried upstairs and woke everyone else. While she was at it, she took all the live chickens stored in the space out as well and slaughtered them all, so Grandma wouldn’t have to worry about them going missing.
The three of them washed their faces, grabbed the car keys, and went out.
The first thing they needed to find that afternoon was shelving. They couldn’t just pile things haphazardly in the space. That would waste room, and they were also afraid the items would crush one another and turn into a complete mess.
The three of them first went to a factory and bought a batch of load-bearing shelves. They were all made of steel and extremely sturdy. While they were there, they also bought twenty inventory robots, so they wouldn’t have to waste their own strength.
Luo Jiu sent a message to the group, telling Cheng Yaoyao to wait for the delivery, then hurried to a water plant to order water. But when they calculated the quantity, they ran into a problem.
A normal family used more than a hundred tons of water a year. If they ordered enough for fifty years, that would be five thousand tons—a huge amount of space.
Zhong Jialing said, “It’s fine. Once the apocalypse begins, we’ll implement a water-conservation plan. We’ll use the water we stockpile only for drinking, so we won’t need to store quite so much, right?”
Feng Qi didn’t believe her. “I could manage that, but don’t you feel uncomfortable if you go even one day without a shower? Can you really stand it?”
Luo Jiu scratched her head. “How about this? We’ll stockpile three thousand tons of drinking water first, then buy several more water-purification systems. Once the water supply is cut off, we can handle our household water ourselves.”
And so, they stockpiled three thousand tons of Wahaha drinking water and bought three large water-purification systems.
With the water problem solved, they still had to deal with electricity.
Generators were essential. They bought ten diesel generators, ten wind turbines, ten hydroelectric generators, and ten thermal generators of each type. No matter what happened, they had to make sure everyone would have electricity.
At the same time, they purchased a large amount of fuel: twenty tons of coal and twenty tons of firewood.
Diesel was a problem. The relevant authorities stipulated that private individuals could not possess more than one thousand liters of diesel. Anyone wanting to buy a large quantity had to go through the proper procedures and obtain a certificate issued by the local authorities.
Zhong Jialing asked, “Can’t we get a fake certificate?”
“No. If it’s discovered, we’ll be held legally responsible. Forget delaying our stockpiling—we’ll end up in prison.”
Luo Jiu thought for a moment. “Let’s buy some empty barrels and keep them ready. We’ll find a way after the apocalypse begins.”
After the apocalypse, the world would enter a period of disorder. By then, no one would care about rules or laws. But there would be zombies everywhere, and if they wanted to go outside, they first had to prepare enough equipment.
The three of them searched for useful equipment in a large outdoor chain store. There was waterproof gear, fireproof gear, and all kinds of other things—everything except equipment for defending against zombies.
Feng Qi was somewhat discouraged. “It looks like none of this is useful. How about we just stockpile some garlic?”
Luo Jiu smiled helplessly. “They’re zombies, not jiangshi. If garlic worked, the cafeteria wouldn’t have fallen. We can buy dozens of sets of all this equipment. The apocalypse usually comes with extreme weather, so there’s nothing wrong with being prepared for water and fire.”
“Exactly,” Zhong Jialing said. “If you’re bitten by a zombie, you mutate within seconds. But I don’t want to drown or burn to death. That would hurt terribly.”
A thought suddenly flashed through Luo Jiu’s mind. “You two keep shopping here. I’ll be back.”
Luo Jiu hurried out, and no one knew where she had gone. Zhong Jialing looked around and began placing orders frantically.
Fifty sets each of outdoor camping tents, inflatable mattresses, sleeping bags, and windproof blankets.
Feng Qi was puzzled. “Are we going to play guerrilla warfare with those things in the wilderness?”
“Don’t worry about it. What if we end up needing them? I call this preparing for a rainy day.”
Zhong Jialing had no real plan. She simply stockpiled almost everything she saw.
Twenty cases of windproof lighters. Five hundred fire blankets. Four hundred fire extinguishers. Four hundred rescue ropes. One thousand gas masks.
One hundred outdoor survival packs. Four hundred night-vision helmets. One hundred outdoor lamps. Five hundred stab-resistant vests.
Feng Qi picked up a stab-resistant vest and tried it on. “This thing is called a stab-resistant vest, but it’s really just a waistcoat. It does protect the heart, but the key is that we need to protect our entire bodies. We can’t leave even a patch of flesh exposed.”
A store clerk overheard them and hurried over. “Are you looking for protective gear that seals you in completely? We have some. Please, follow me.”
The two of them were delighted. There was actually equipment that could tightly protect the entire body? Why had they never heard of it before? If such useful equipment existed, why did the authorities only use bulletproof vests and bulletproof helmets?
They wondered about this incoherently as they followed the clerk to the designated location. Then they were instantly dumbfounded.
This kind of protection was not the kind they had been talking about.
It was a protective suit specially designed for beekeepers. It really did protect the body from head to toe, and it was a one-piece suit that not even a tiny bee could fly into. The problem was that it was far too cumbersome.
Feng Qi volunteered to try it. She wore it and walked around the store for three minutes, nearly suffocating to death.
There were only two mesh ventilation valves on her back. They were practically useless. When she took the suit off, her face was covered in sweat, and her whole body was damp. Exhausted, she collapsed onto the floor and gasped for breath.
“Forget it,” Feng Qi said between breaths. “I think we should focus our thoughts on offense. We can’t just defend passively. It’s impossible to move in this thing. Wearing it is no different from lying in a coffin waiting to die.”
Zhong Jialing propped her chin on her hand and came up with a bold idea. “Hey, why don’t we buy actual coffins? We could carve some ventilation holes in them and hide inside.”
Feng Qi couldn’t help laughing. “You really are a genius. Think about it. We’d hide in coffins and play hide-and-seek with the zombies. Those things can follow scents. There’s no way they wouldn’t find us. Once they did, hordes of zombies would surround the coffins, and we wouldn’t even be able to run.”
She patted Zhong Jialing on the shoulder. “With intelligence like ours, we’d better not rely on schemes. I think we should use brute force instead.”
Feng Qi climbed to her feet and took a hammer and a military entrenching shovel from the display rack. “What do you think of these? As long as I’ve eaten my fill, one swing of this shovel and I can lop its head right off.”
Zhong Jialing thought about it and realized that it really was possible. In their previous lives, they had experience fighting zombies at close range.
Although those things were frightening and disgusting, they were not immortal. Once their heads were severed, they immediately went limp. The rest of their bodies would collapse on the ground and wait to grow maggots, completely devoid of offensive power.
Once, a zombie had grabbed Luo Jiu by the neck and opened its mouth to bite her. Feng Qi had picked up Zhuzi and launched herself into the air, kicking the zombie so hard that she actually broke its neck.
When they thought about it carefully, they had killed three or four zombies in their previous lives. They had gained a tiny bit of combat experience. The problem was that they had had no food and no water back then. If they hadn’t maintained their strength with instant noodles, bread, and cups of water found in the various classrooms’ desks, they wouldn’t have lasted even fifteen days.
Moreover, ninety-nine percent of the people caught by zombies would be assimilated and mutate into new zombies. The four of them had grown weaker and weaker, while the enemy continued multiplying at a terrifying speed. The longer it went on, the harder it became to endure.
Zhong Jialing glanced at the bustling crowds on the street and couldn’t help sighing.
She didn’t even dare imagine how they could possibly win when all these people turned into zombies ten days later.
Feng Qi selected all kinds of weapons: daggers, bows and arrows, baseball bats, and large iron balls with chains attached.
Feng Qi said she wanted to practice with the meteor hammer properly—one ball to smash one apart, two balls to smash two apart.
These items were only available at large outdoor stores. If the owner hadn’t been a military hardware enthusiast, the store wouldn’t have stocked them at all. There wasn’t much inventory, with fewer than a hundred of each item at most, and the two of them bought everything.
They had weapons now, but once the apocalypse began, the zombies would keep coming endlessly. These weapons were far too crude. Would they really be enough?
Zhong Jialing was pondering this when Luo Jiu returned from outside, her face alight with delight.
“How’s the shopping going?”
“More or less finished. This beekeeper’s protective suit is so cumbersome. Do we want it?”
Luo Jiu felt the thickness of the protective suit. It was three or four centimeters thick. No wonder the shop sold it for a thousand yuan a set. It really was super reinforced, and the quality should be reliable.
“Yes. We can modify it ourselves later. We’ll take forty of these. The rubber boots and gloves should also be reinforced. One thousand pairs of gloves, three hundred pairs of size-thirty-eight rubber boots, and one hundred pairs of size-forty boots.”
She and Zhong Jialing and Cheng Yaoyao all wore size-thirty-eight shoes. “You’re size forty, right?”
Feng Qi nodded emphatically. “Exactly.”
After paying and settling the bill, Luo Jiu linked arms with the other two and happily led them out.
Feng Qi was puzzled. “Why are you so happy after going out once? What happened?”
“Jialing casually said something that gave me a new idea. I went to the factory next door and stockpiled quite a few good things. Let’s find a restaurant, eat something, and take a break. I’ll tell you about it slowly.”
The three of them entered a Western restaurant. The apocalypse was still in the future, and peace and harmony filled every corner.
The restaurant played gentle classical music, and the fragrance of food permeated the air.
Since it was a workday, there weren’t many customers. The three of them found a table by the window and sat down, ordering Australian steak, vegetable salad, the restaurant’s signature Spanish ham and cheese pizza, tiramisu, strawberry juice, and coffee.
As soon as the waiter walked away, Luo Jiu waved to them. The three of them leaned their heads together, and she said in a low voice, “I just bought one hundred chainsaws, two hundred stun batons, and… two hundred flamethrowers.”
Zhong Jialing’s eyes lit up. “Flamethrowers? You want to burn the zombies?”
“Exactly. Although they’re mutated creatures, they have weaknesses too. For example, they die immediately once they lose their heads, and without teeth, they can’t inject their venom into humans. And then there’s fire—it can burn them to ashes. Your family’s backyard has such a large swimming pool. I think we can make use of it. It might prove extremely useful.”
Feng Qi asked, “You want to drown the zombies in the pool?”
“No. Drowning works by preventing people from breathing air, causing them to suffocate and die. But zombies’ bodily functions are different from those of humans. They don’t depend on their cardiopulmonary systems and don’t need to breathe air. So flooding them might not work. But we can fill the pool with fuel. If the courtyard is ever overrun by zombies, we can lure them into the trap, and then…”
Feng Qi slammed her hand on the table in excitement. “Burn the zombies!”
The people around them frowned and turned to look. Feng Qi hurriedly lowered her head.
“Sorry, sorry. We just got too excited talking about a movie.”
Luo Jiu and Zhong Jialing buried their heads on the table and snickered until they felt that the people around them were no longer paying attention.
Feng Qi rubbed her nose. “So, you’re saying we have a very good chance of surviving this time?”
“Of course. A sturdy fortress, ample food, and effective weapons—we’ll certainly be able to survive for a long time. We won’t even have to fear natural disasters, let alone zombies. Once we make another sweep and buy all the equipment for earthquakes and extreme heat and cold, we can sleep soundly until we’re a hundred years old.”
The steak and pizza soon arrived. Each of them tore off a piece of the large, fragrant, crispy pizza, topped with stretchy cheese and salty, savory Spanish ham.
After taking just one bite, Zhong Jialing immediately raised her hand and called the waiter over. She asked them to add another pizza for their table and make another thousand to be delivered to 88 Fengshan Road.
As they ate, Zhong Jialing suddenly thought of a problem. “We have enough money, but I don’t know whether the space is large enough.”
Luo Jiu calculated in her head. “We’ll stockpile household supplies later. Once everything is loaded, we’ll see how much room is left. The space says its upgrade function will unlock in ten days. Perhaps after the upgrade, it will increase by several levels in size.”
The space would indeed become larger after the upgrade, but it required the fulfillment of an extremely strict condition. For now, however, they had no idea what would happen ten days later.