Stockpiling ten thousand tonnes of pork

"Mr. Chen, the hundred family buckets of fried chicken you ordered have arrived at the time you requested."

On a side road near the suburbs, Chen Luo glanced at the delivery vehicle and said, "Load them into my truck. Stack them neatly."

Chen Luo had brought a small truck, with more than enough room for a hundred family buckets of fried chicken.

The delivery supervisor from Chicken Crunch smiled and agreed.

Normally, they didn't offer loading services, but Chen Luo had simply paid too much to refuse. He'd paid extra and placed orders like this for the next half month.

The fried chicken delivery crew had barely left when the duck delivery crew arrived.

"Mr. Chen, your hundred roast ducks are here."

After both crews left, Chen Luo checked his surroundings and climbed into the cargo compartment. Then the freshly delivered fried chicken and roast ducks miraculously vanished.

They hadn't disappeared for good. They had entered Chen Luo's Ability Space.

He had to clear out the truck. Plenty more deliveries were still coming.

His Ability Space wasn't all that big—only the size of twenty-odd soccer fields, with a height of twenty meters.

Time stood still inside the Ability Space. Even if he took out a portion of fried chicken or roast duck twenty years later, it would still be perfectly fresh and steaming hot.

Three days earlier, Chen Luo had been shocked to discover that he had returned from twelve years into the apocalypse to one month before it began.

What was in shortest supply during the apocalypse?

Supplies, of course.

More precisely, food.

Food was a basic necessity. Who could hold out without anything to eat?

That goddamn apocalypse had made resources desperately scarce. Even Chen Luo, known as the Void Monarch, had often gone hungry.

He had eaten either convenience food that had expired who knew how many years earlier, or the bitter, sour meat of mutated creatures.

In twenty-seven days, for reasons unknown, the apocalypse would erupt, turning eighty percent of humanity worldwide into zombies.

Of the remaining humans, at least another ninety percent would die at the hands of zombies.

The surviving humans had begun evolving at different rates, developing abilities-some physical, some elemental, and some mental.

Chen Luo had possessed an extremely rare spatial ability. His talent had been so extraordinary that he was called the Void Monarch. Nobody could put up a fight against him.

With his mastery of Void Walk, Chen Luo's Gou ability was unmatched. His combat prowess was first-rate, and his ability to save his own skin was even better.

Whenever danger struck, a single Void Walk took him out of there.

As he kept lying low and surviving, Chen Luo realized that he seemed to have outlived every other survivor. Across the entire world, apart from increasingly absurd monsters, he could no longer find another human being.

Human hearts were unpredictable during the apocalypse, but being the only person left in the world was unbearably lonely.

Chen Luo couldn't endure that loneliness. There was no point in living any longer, so he found a pit and buried himself.

It wasn't that Chen Luo couldn't survive. He no longer wanted to.

When he woke up, Chen Luo discovered that he had been reborn. The Ability Space he had created in his previous life was still there, and he could freely put supplies into it and take them out.

All his other powers had vanished.

Chen Luo couldn't make sense of what had happened to him, and he couldn't be bothered to think about it.

Good food was the one thing in this world he couldn't let go to waste. He needed to stock up first.

Three minutes later.

"Mr. Chen, the dishes you ordered are here."

Chen Luo had specifically chosen several hotels renowned for their food and asked each to deliver a hundred packed meals with drinks.

Every dish was one Chen Luo loved.

Fish with pickled mustard greens, chicken stewed with mushrooms, beer-braised duck, sweet-and-sour pork ribs, braised crucian carp...

And every dish had been prepared by a professional chef.

After the apocalypse, forget eating them-just seeing dishes like these would have been unbelievable.

Want a taste?

Keep dreaming.

A single piece of bread was enough to make people come to blows.

Chen Luo had once fought a bloody battle over a single sausage.

If someone could offer him a proper meat dish, Chen Luo would have done anything they asked. He had been deprived for far too long.

In less than an hour, five hundred hearty dishes had entered Chen Luo's Ability Space.

Until the apocalypse arrived, Chen Luo would keep doing this whenever he had the time.

Ordering food like this was a little strange, but Chen Luo didn't care. He wasn't stealing or robbing anyone.

What if I'm taking it to an orphanage or giving it to construction workers? Or what if I'm crazy and buying it for fun? Is that not allowed?

If ordering a thousand portions hadn't been too strange, and if the hotels could have kept up, Chen Luo would have bought even more.

Just then, his phone rang.

"Mr. Chen, the first shipment of two thousand tonnes from your ten-thousand-tonne pork order is almost at the cold storage facility. Would you like to come take a look?"

Chen Luo replied that he would be right there.

That was right. Chen Luo had ordered ten thousand tonnes of pork, but that wasn't all. He had also ordered two thousand tonnes each of beef and lamb, and five thousand tonnes each of chicken, duck, fish, and more.

It wasn't as if cooking would become impossible after the apocalypse. With fresh ingredients, he could make anything.

Not long after the apocalypse began, the power had gone out. Even if people had ingredients, they couldn't keep them fresh. Chen Luo had only gained his Ability Space two years later. By then, what ingredients had been left for him to preserve?

How much could he stockpile by loading a small truck one batch at a time?

More importantly, it wasn't cost-effective.

Pork was cheap and the meat Chinese people ate most, so Chen Luo stockpiled more of it than anything else.

At a wholesale price of 9.6 yuan per half kilo, ten thousand tonnes cost less than two hundred million yuan. If he'd had enough money, Chen Luo would have stockpiled a hundred thousand tonnes.

Chen Luo sighed. "I picked a good time. A couple of years ago, when pork was pushing fifty yuan per half kilo, even having money wouldn't have made it easy to stockpile."

Once all the supplies arrived, Chen Luo would find a suitable opportunity to put them all into his Ability Space.

When he reached the cold storage facility, Manager Wang from the trading company that had accepted Chen Luo's huge order came over with a smile.

Chen Luo said, "Once everything's unloaded, we'll go to the bank and transfer the money."

Manager Wang's smile grew even wider, though he said, "No rush, no rush."

Chen Luo merely smiled, not taking him seriously. He had paid a ten-percent deposit for the goods. He would pay for each shipment as it arrived, bringing the total paid to seventy percent, and settle the remaining thirty percent a month later.

If possible, Chen Luo would have liked to get the goods without paying anything up front. But he didn't know these people well, and Manager Wang didn't have the means to cover the cost himself.

Chen Luo called out to the butchers he had hired, Old Zhang and Old Li. "Old Zhang, Old Li, keep a close eye on things. Don't let them fob us off with meat that's been frozen for decades."

The fat on Old Zhang's face jiggled as he smiled. "Don't worry, Mr. Chen. I've been slaughtering pigs for decades. One look at the pork, and I can tell you when it was slaughtered."

Chen Luo joked, "I've been alive for over twenty years. One touch of a wire, and I can tell you whether it's live."

Everyone froze for a moment, then burst out laughing. "You're a funny man, Mr. Chen."

Once the unloading was finished, Chen Luo went to the bank with Manager Wang from the trading company to transfer the money. He had just said goodbye when his phone rang again.

A furious voice came through the phone.

"Chen Luo, you sold shares worth over three billion yuan for just one billion?"

"You didn't even tell me before doing something this big! Do you still have any respect for me as your uncle?"