The Storm Descends

To make sure she would not be bored in the future, she had bought ten secondhand tablets from an online resale platform.

As well as plenty of memory cards.

After all, once the apocalypse broke out, watching television programs and the like would be impossible.

So she spent an entire day downloading every TV series, movie, major variety show, and offline game currently available onto the memory cards and tablets.

After dinner, Jiang You went into her space.

A little moderate activity after a meal was better for nutrient absorption.

So today's after-dinner activity was finishing planting the last hundred orange trees.

Other than downloading movies, she had spent the past few days planting trees in the space. There was so much land there that it felt like a waste not to plant something.

She had plenty of food, so there was no need to grow crops for now.

Besides, harvesting crops was a real hassle.

But she had planted quite a few different saplings. With such a vast stretch of black soil in the space, who knew how much fruit it would produce?

Jiang You had bought some of every sapling and seed she could get her hands on.

Apple trees, orange trees, dragon fruit, plum trees, chestnut trees, peach trees, cherry trees, jackfruit, durian, wax apples, sugar apples, grapes...

Jiang You's method of planting trees was simple: just plant the same type together in one area.

She dug a hole with a hoe, planted the sapling, then watered it with water mixed with rooting powder.

She did not know whether it was because the black soil in the space was especially nutritious or because her rooting powder worked so well.

Normally, a sapling needed several days to adjust. Its leaves would turn yellow, and only after its root system adapted to the new soil would it gradually recover.

But after these saplings were planted, there was no adjustment period at all. Their leaves were lush and emerald green, fresh enough to drip with moisture.

They looked so appealing that she almost wanted to take a bite.

Jiang You had cleared out a small vegetable patch inside the fenced yard, but there were not many greens in it.

She had only planted a dozen or so cherry tomato plants and some strawberries.

She was a strawberry lover and had loved eating strawberries since childhood.

But whenever strawberries were bought for the household, Ge Chunhua would pick out the prettiest ones for her three children.

Then she would give the worse ones to herself and Ling Tianming.

The few unripe ones with green bottoms that nobody wanted were left for Jiang You.

Yet even over that little bit, Ge Chunhua would keep nagging as if she were bestowing a favor. "Strawberries are so expensive. It's already hard enough for our family to support one extra freeloader. The key is that some people have no sense at all and deliberately pick the expensive things to eat. A freeloader really has some nerve..."

So Jiang You did not dare eat even those unripe strawberries.

When she was little and craving them, she had secretly picked up and eaten the strawberry tops Yue had left behind.

But as she grew older, she vaguely came to understand that such a thing was wrong. From then on, she would rather die of craving than touch strawberry tops someone else had eaten.

On the land near the yard, Jiang You had built dozens of wooden pens for raising livestock.

Though the animals were still young, their destructive power could not be underestimated.

Jiang You had planted many fruit saplings in the open space outside the pens. The saplings were only a few dozen centimeters tall and could not withstand being ravaged by livestock.

If she let them out, those little saplings, barely waist-high, would probably be eaten clean by the lambs, calves, piglets, and the like.

She would have to wait until the saplings grew taller before letting those little troublemakers out.

But it should not take long. Plants in the space grew much faster than those outside.

The saplings had only been planted for two days, yet they had already visibly grown around ten centimeters taller. At this rate, they would all be fully grown in two or three months at most.

Then she would not need to restrain the livestock anymore.

Jiang You held a little yellow chick in her palm and idly stroked it. Baby chicks were fluffy and golden, utterly adorable.

But they were nice when they grew up too.

Jiang You loved chicks and adult chickens equally.

The only difference was that the former were adorable alive, while the latter were delicious to eat~

Thinking of fragrant ginseng chicken soup, Jiang You could not help swallowing. Her gaze toward the little yellow chick grew even gentler.

She tossed another large handful of millet into the chicken pen.

"Eat up, eat up, little ones. Grow up big and healthy, okay~"

The space was not limitless. It covered only a few hundred mu in total, and once Jiang You planted all the saplings, it was basically full.

Far from the livestock pens, Jiang You had dug a large pond and stocked it with some fish and shrimp.

As for the water in the pond, it was river water she had collected into the space while pretending to wash her hands by the riverbank.

While collecting the water, she had also scooped up quite a few fish and shrimp.

Natural river water came with a complete ecosystem, so raising fish and shrimp in it was naturally no problem.

At night, not long after Jiang You fell asleep, a thunderclap suddenly exploded overhead, as though the entire building were trembling.

A flash of lightning instantly illuminated the entire room, then plunged it back into darkness.

Jiang You jolted awake from her dream and rushed to the bedside.

The city, originally shrouded in darkness, flickered between light and shadow beneath the explosive lightning and thunder.

At that moment, City A was like a colossal beast awakening from the darkness, roaring furiously as it devoured everything.

The usual neon lights seemed utterly insignificant before it.

With peals of thunder rolling overhead, it was as though the sky had split open, and torrential rain came pouring down in sheets.

Taking advantage of the rain having only just begun, Jiang You hurriedly put on her raincoat and rode out on her electric scooter.

The main reason she had chosen to live here was because, by a chance coincidence in her previous life, she had learned something.

Less than a kilometer from this shopping plaza was a large storage warehouse—the largest warehouse in Central China for Walnut Duck Supermarket.

However, after the torrential rain, millions of tons of goods in that warehouse had all been ruined by floodwater.

The person who said this claimed that he had been a manager at that warehouse at the time and even gave its exact address.

As he spoke, the man lamented how pitiful it was for millions of tons of supplies to go to waste.

Jiang You had found it a pity as well, so she remembered it.

When she had been purchasing supplies everywhere before, she had visited the location in advance. There really was a warehouse there.

Before the warehouse was flooded, she had to put everything inside into her space.

It was such a huge warehouse, with one floor aboveground and three underground. Clearing it out would not be a quick task.

More than twenty minutes later, Jiang You arrived at the warehouse and parked her electric scooter beneath a nearby rain shelter.

The light in the guardroom by the entrance was still on. A security guard was drinking and grumbling about something, his face flushed red with drunkenness.

He swayed to his feet, but before he could steady himself, he collapsed back onto the desk.

He was clearly drunk and had fallen asleep.

But the guardroom was locked from the inside, so she could not get in.

Jiang You looked around. Cameras were pointed this way from three directions. She pulled up the hood of her raincoat and adjusted her sunglasses and mask, concealing herself completely.

Then she pulled a brick from her backpack, smashed the guardroom window, and climbed in through it.

The sound of the shattered window woke the drunk guard. As he opened his eyes, Jiang You gripped the brick in her hand, ready to knock him unconscious with it.

But the next second, the guard mumbled, "Even in a dream, I can't have a spring dream. Fine, no beauties—but why's there a black ghost instead? Hehe, no thanks. I don't want a black ghost, hehe."