The Many-Faced Space

She was hardly an internet novice. As someone who spent plenty of time online, she was familiar with webnovels, where the apocalypse and storage spaces often went hand in hand. After some experimenting, she discovered that this cube really was a storage space! The discovery left her both delighted and dismayed.

She was delighted to have gained an enormous storage space, but dismayed that the world really had stopped being normal.

Once she recovered her senses, the cube stopped rotating, as though its initial motion had merely been a ceremonial startup sequence.

Now the Rubik's Cube Space stood upright in her sea of consciousness, perfectly quiet.

Xu Duoduo finally came back to herself.

She was no longer dizzy.

She got up and walked to the window, looking down at the people strolling below. None of them knew what would happen in the future, so everyone carried on as usual.

Some were hurrying home after work, while others were out walking with their families after dinner.

Every so often, a delivery rider zipped past.

The streetlights bathed everything in a soft glow, making the scene look wonderfully peaceful and happy. It was an utterly ordinary evening, just like countless evenings before, and she had no idea whether she would ever see another one like it.

Xu Duoduo remained tense. She drew the curtains, then put all the supplies by the door into the space. Sure enough, she could store and retrieve things at will.

Turning around, she opened the room to the right of the front door. It was a storeroom containing three enormous shelving units and a large chest freezer.

Thanks to the earlier epidemic, food and other necessities had been in short supply when the residential complex was locked down.

Xu Duoduo was also a devoted survivalist, so she had stockpiled plenty of food. After the epidemic ended, her urge to hoard supplies had only grown stronger.

That was how she had ended up with this reassuring little granary. Inside were a full twenty cases of assorted canned foods with shelf lives of up to ten years.

There were both meat and vegetable varieties.

There were also ten cases of compressed biscuits in assorted flavors, ten cases of high-calorie energy bars, five fifty-jin bags of rice, and all kinds of instant noodles, rice noodles, and self-heating meals. She even had ten cases of bottled water in reserve.

As for things with short shelf lives, such as milk and vegetables, she replenished those occasionally in her everyday shopping.

There was still plenty in the big kitchen refrigerator.

The storeroom also held seasonings, including three cases of salt. For everything else, she kept a few of each kind, such as light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, and aged vinegar.

Then there was her survival gear: a fully equipped survivalist backpack containing plenty of handy little tools, along with food for one person.

Outside the backpack were a chainsaw, a battle-axe, and a dagger.

She had three cases of gasoline.

It was mainly for generating electricity. If the power went out, she also had a home generator.

Of course, she had several large boxes of medical supplies as well: things to stop bleeding, reduce inflammation, relieve pain, and dress wounds, along with oral and topical medications, including vitamins.

These were all things Xu Duoduo had collected as a hobby, but looking at the storeroom now, she could not help feeling conflicted. She had truly never expected any of it to come in handy.

She swiftly put everything into the Rubik's Cube Space, sensing the connection between herself and the space. That feeling was also why Xu Duoduo felt safe putting everything she owned inside it.

It felt as though they were connected by blood. At least while she was alive, everything would remain there, and she alone could put things in or take them out.

It gave her a real sense of security.

After emptying the entire storeroom, Xu Duoduo went into the bathroom, where she kept a large barrel filled with water year-round. After experimenting, she found that she could store water in the space on one face without needing a container. She turned on the tap, intending to transfer the water from the barrel into the space at intervals.

She planned to use one compartment to hold water. From what she could sense, the space on each face was roughly two hundred cubic meters, and this cube-like space had countless faces.

She could not even count them all!

Xu Duoduo suddenly felt much more at ease. She decided against going downstairs again to replenish her supplies. Nighttime was always a little more dangerous than daytime.

She decided to wait and see how things developed.

So she went to the kitchen to make dinner. Although she worked for an internet company, she at least had alternating one-day and two-day weekends. On weekends, she would prepare some meals for herself and put them in the freezer. When she wanted to eat, as she did now, all she needed was three minutes in the microwave.

Soon, she had a steaming bowl of rice topped with eggplant and shredded pork. Xu Duoduo also washed a small bowl of fruit: extra-large blueberries, which were good for her eyes.

Finally, she carried everything to the coffee table in the living room to eat and switched on the television. Although many young people used projectors these days, she still preferred a television. It always reminded her of watching TV with her grandparents, which made her feel safe.

The first thing she opened was the local news channel the three of them used to watch together.

[Welcome to Daily Latest News. This is Xiaowei, reporting for our station.]

[According to a tip submitted by a resident, a rabies incident occurred at the Flying Fast Internet Company on the third floor of Software Park Phase Two, Building B, in our city. The victim was a young woman, and the person who bit her was a colleague surnamed Liu. Ms. Liu received a rabies vaccine just last night, but unfortunately, the symptoms developed even faster.]

After opening the channel, Xu Duoduo had lowered her head to take a bite of rice. Those words made her freeze, and she jerked her head up to look at the screen. The female reporter delivered the news with a regretful expression, then brought up the issue of keeping dogs on leashes.

Daily Latest News was the final highlight of this news program, covering the latest events around the city each day.

That meant something that had happened shortly after six that evening could make the news right away.

As the reporter spoke, a clip of what had happened in the office played in the upper-left corner. From the camera operator's perspective, when Sister Liu first went berserk and bit Colleague A, Colleague B, who was filming, was still joking, "Hahaha, we're done for! All this overtime made Sister Liu come down with rabies!"

But when Colleague A screamed, and Sister Liu bit hard enough to draw blood before viciously tearing away a chunk of flesh, Colleague B screamed in fright too. The rest of the video consisted of shaking footage as the person filming fled, everything blurred. The people nearby went from watching the commotion to panicking.

[Many internet users have claimed this was a zombie attack, but those claims are unfounded. Ms. Liu simply had somewhat sharper teeth, which was why her bite left the victim's flesh so badly mangled.]

[To avoid causing public panic, please do not readily believe rumors.]

Once the reporter finished her closing remarks, the anchor took over with a smile and began signing off.

Xu Duoduo could no longer stomach her food. She cast her phone screen directly to the television and tried opening Weibo's trending searches. Sure enough, the incident at her company that day was listed there.

#K City zombies

#The end of the world

She connected to her home network and tried refreshing several times before the connection improved a little.

At the same time, as though they had been delayed, a flood of messages finally arrived with a flurry of notification chimes.

Some were from Colleague C.

-Holy shit, Xu, what kind of good-luck charm possessed you? Sister Liu went crazy right after you left!

-Oh, no, I mean her rabies flared up.

-Thank goodness you left so quickly!

Colleague C had joined the company around the same time she had, just one day apart.

They got along reasonably well.

Xu Duoduo was in no mood to reply to her, and she could not eat another bite. Cold sweat broke out all over her body. It had been so close, so very close. If she had not left, she would have been the one bitten, because she had been closest to Sister Liu.