The Reborn Otaku’s Code of Practice for the Apocalypse – CH230

Chapter 230 — Rolling Over

Luo Xun personally cooked lunch that day. The staple was still fragrant, perfectly steamed rice. For the main courses, he made a faux oyster sauce beef—since oyster sauce had long vanished from their shelves, he stir-fried it with soy sauce instead. There was also a quick stir-fried pork with hot peppers, and a pan-seared tenderloin. The mutated quail eggs were now as large as regular chicken eggs, making them much more practical to cook with. Finally, he prepared a stewed pork trotters dish—skinless, because the thick outer hide was far too tough for anyone to chew.

Aside from these four meat dishes, he stir-fried a few plates of fresh, seasonal greens and made a massive pot of mushroom soup. The moment the lids were lifted, the rich aroma of food saturated the entire room, making everyone’s mouths water.

In truth, while Xu Mei and Song Lingling were usually responsible for the daily meals, their skills were better suited for large-batch, simple cooking. When it came to delicate stir-fries, their pre-apocalyptic experience was limited to one or two specialty dishes each. For everything else, they could merely get the food cooked through or replicate a vague approximation of dishes they had eaten before. In terms of flavor, they were no match for Luo Xun when he actually focused on cooking—even if he was a bit of an amateur himself.

Today’s menu was a collaborative effort between Yan Fei and Luo Xun. Luo Xun couldn’t quite remember the exact flavor profiles for some of the dishes, but Yan Fei, who used to eat out constantly before the apocalypse to the point of wishing someone would just make him plain millet porridge every day, came to the rescue with helpful tips. The two experimented and taste-tested the half-finished dishes along the way, filling themselves up halfway before finally bringing the food to the table.

The group huddled around the dining table. They ate merrily while chatting over the background noise of roaring zombies and screaming humans echoing from the TV. The core topic of discussion was: it would be early August in another two days, so should they make a trip back to the Southwest Base?

“Have we picked up any new data recently? Do we know what’s specifically happening inside the Southwest Base?” Luo Xun asked, taking a bite of the stewed trotter Yan Fei had thoughtfully placed in his bowl. Stripped of its skin during the stewing process, the meat had lost some of its rich aroma and texture, but the flavor itself was still excellent, having already rendered soft and completely bone-tender.

At the question, He Qiankun, who was primarily responsible for gathering data, swallowed his mouthful of beef and wiped his mouth. “At the start of last month, the Southwest Base seemed to be aggressively restructuring the inner city. Judging by those internal files and deployment orders, they still seem to be tinkering with the inner city layout right now. It shouldn’t involve the outer city for the time being, though the outer city is likely deploying additional personnel to maintain public order. We don’t know the exact details yet.”

Although they could intercept critical data regarding major internal and external treaties or decrees broadcast between the various bases, they ultimately lacked a way to visually inspect the exact situation inside the Southwest Base. Consequently, none of them knew for certain what the current state of affairs was within those walls.

Luo Xun instinctively tapped his chin with the blunt end of his chopsticks, sinking into deep thought for a moment. “Let’s not go back in early August. The Southwest Base is right in the middle of its internal restructuring. Returning now won’t be much different from returning at the start of this month. We might as well wait until the situation completely stabilizes before reassessing.” As for liquidating their crops… whatever they could eat, they would eat; whatever they couldn’t finish could be dried into reserve rations, or simply used to feed their flock of quails. In any case, they hadn’t expanded their vegetable cultivation footprint by much.

Although a full two acres of land in the basement were dedicated to cultivating all kinds of vegetables, it truly consisted of an “assortment” of crops. With so many varieties planted together, the absolute volume of each specific type was actually quite small.

“Exactly! Besides, the weather is so scorching hot right now. If we haul a massive load of fresh greens out, won’t they rot past redemption by the time we even reach the Southwest Base?”

“Yeah, exactly. The weather is terrible right now. Even if we wanted to head out, the roads outside are awful to navigate!”

To sum it up, this was a collective onset of utter laziness from a group of geeks who had secured a genuinely comfortable lifestyle.

Luo Xun raised his eyes to look at the bleak, overcast sky outside and gave a deep, solemn nod in agreement. Right as he peered out, the sky obliged by unleashing another torrential downpour.

The weather had been miserable over the past few days. Even when Luo Xun and the team intercepted satellite data, the images covering their base coordinates failed to display clear ground conditions. There was no helping it; the cloud cover was far too dense to pierce through. The recent photos transmitted by the satellites looked exactly like the meteorological cloud maps they used to see on TV before the apocalypse. After dinner, this squad of amateurs conducted a mock-serious analysis of the images, collectively declaring their consensus: the weather in this region wouldn’t clear up for at least a week!

Consequently, when they rolled out of bed early the next morning and witnessed a brilliant, blazing sun hanging in a sky completely devoid of a single cloud, everyone was left thoroughly stupefied. Predicting the weather was truly beyond the scope of ordinary human comprehension; none of them had anticipated that a massive gale would kick up during the night, completely blowing the storm clouds away.

Sigh, it was entirely the fault of their base being constructed far too solidly. It allowed them to sleep soundly inside without catching a single whistle of the wind.

The return of clear skies didn’t mean everyone was ready to head out—not that they harbored any desire to leave right now anyway. Exactly like last time, following the conclusion of the rainstorm, the thoroughfares outside flooded severely, living up to everyone’s expectations. Luo Xun and the team didn’t even need to step outside or check the greenhouse roof to see that the water inside the distant “ponds” had risen once more, even overflowing onto the highway. In certain low-lying fields where the ridges were shallow, the individual puddles had completely fused into an expansive sheet of water!

Holding the freshly changed baby, Luo Xun stood by his bedroom window to gaze into the distance. Truly, the sky was washed a pristine azure, so clean and bright it made one’s eyes tingle with an instinctive urge to sneeze. Reaching down to pinch the infant’s tiny nose, a child of this age truly changed by the day. The fragile preemie from back then had grown remarkably robust by now.

Amusing the child by the windowsill, a sudden commotion outside caused Luo Xun to raise his head once more.

The two wolves, who had vanished to god knows where during the downpour, were currently bounding joyfully through the water-logged ponds and zipping along the shallow, stream-like highway. Like a pair of brainless, unteachable brats, they were frantically chasing a flock of waterfowl, sending the birds into a wing-flapping frenzy.

Perhaps the wolves intended to exploit the immediate aftermath of the rain, operating on the theory that the birds wouldn’t be able to take flight easily with waterlogged feathers. However, a few of the waterfowl unluckily possessed the water attribute, unleashing a barrage of water arrows that sent the meddlesome wolves fleeing in absolute panic. The fur they had managed to shake semi-dry instantly transformed into a waterlogged mess once more… leaving them looking like a pair of thoroughly drenched mutts.

“What are you looking at?” Yan Fei walked into the room, holding a warmed cup of cream-fruit formula after washing up downstairs, and spotted Luo Xun standing by the window.

“Watching those two wolves get chased by a few water-type birds… Ah, they finally remembered they possess the earth attribute. They managed to erect an earth wall to block the birds’ attacks.” Luo Xun shook his head speechlessly. “Tell me, given how incredibly stupid they are, are they truly wolves? I still remember reading Three Stories of Wolves back in school. Even if the wolves in those tales died in the end, weren’t they remarkably clever before their demise?”

“That’s hard to say. Don’t forget, before the apocalypse, word was that our country no longer hosted wild wolves naturally, right? Maybe after living in a park for too long, their survival instincts completely degenerated. And…” Yan Fei also looked out the window at the two wolves, who had finally located a safe haven and were currently shaking the rainwater from their coats. “What if they carry canine bloodlines? A wolfdog, or maybe they’re just pure dogs for all we know.”

Luo Xun burst into a laugh, nodding as he looked down at the puppy curling nearby. “True. The puppy at our home is already quite dimwitted, but looking at those two… let’s just keep calling them wolves. Perhaps their bloodline is actually closer to our puppy’s than we think.”

Catching Luo Xun mentioning his name, the puppy resting on the floorboards cracked his eyelids open, twitched his ears, and blinked twice. Seeing that the two humans were no longer paying attention to him, he closed his eyes to resume his nap.

The two returned to the edge of the bed, placing Baozi onto the freshly laid sheets of the massive mattress. Luo Xun took the bottle to test the temperature of the formula, while Yan Fei reached for the miniature clothes and tiny shoes resting to the side. Although their baby’s physical size was still quite compact, he was rapidly approaching the six-month mark. Keeping his arms and legs bound tightly inside a swaddling cloth would inevitably hinder his growth and development. Therefore, Luo Xun and the team had previously selected the softest cotton fabric to craft a simple set of infant clothes, dressing him in them every morning.

Right as Luo Xun verified the temperature of the formula and Yan Fei walked over holding the tiny garments, two pairs of eyes witnessed an event in absolute, synchronized astonishment. The infant lying flat on his back gave a few sharp twists—and actually rolled completely onto his stomach!

“H-He rolled over?!” Luo Xun froze for a good while. He watched the baby resting on his belly on the massive mattress, looking up with an intensely curious face as he reached out a tiny hand to grasp a pair of underpants resting a short distance away… It was a freshly washed, sun-dried pair Luo Xun had folded and brought inside this morning.

Yan Fei snatched the underpants away immediately to prevent the baby from stuffing them into his mouth, gesturing toward Luo Xun. “He’s ready to eat.” Only after Luo Xun cradled the infant and nudged the nipple into his mouth did the two men face one another with a touch of tender melancholy.

“He can roll over…”

“He can finally roll over.”

The two stared at one another, before bursting into a synchronized chuckle.

Their child was a preemie, and his physical constitution had been incredibly frail from the moment of his birth. Early on, Luo Xun and the team couldn’t even guarantee whether the child would survive. Yet remarkably, this child born into the apocalypse turned out to be quite resilient. He frequently trailed along inside the trucks while they executed missions and fought zombies, and he had weathered a brutal winter, breaking through to grow up perfectly healthy and unscathed until now. It could truly be said that his luck was excellent.

According to the medical data He Qiankun and the guys had unearthed from some forgotten digital archive previously, ordinary infants usually learned to roll over around the three-month mark. Granted, that timeline depended on the infant’s specific physical constitution, but generally, it hovered around three months.

Yet their own baby had shown zero development on that front. No matter how Luo Xun and the team tried to coax and play with him—hoping he would display some new milestones beyond flailing his claws and babbling in his alien language—Baozi simply refused to oblige.

Considering his premature birth and factoring in the possibility that the cream-fruit formula might not possess the exact nutritional balance of genuine milk, Luo Xun and the team had patiently overlooked the delay. It wasn’t until today… right as Baozi was about to hit his six-month milestone, that he finally achieved his first successful roll.

Feeding him his fill of formula, Luo Xun announced with immense delight, “Why don’t we try introducing some solid baby food to his diet soon?” Previously, because he worried about his child’s frail constitution, Luo Xun hadn’t dared to casually alter his diet. Now, swept up in the joy of Baozi’s successful roll, he brought up the idea. In any case, they had an abundance of fruits and vegetables stashed at home; they could select a few nutrient-rich varieties to mash into a smooth puree, testing a small spoonful to see how he handled it.

Yan Fei naturally harbored no objections. In truth, he had felt for a while that they could probably introduce alternative foods to the child, but Luo Xun had been overprotective. Who would have thought that a single roll from Baozi today would trigger a structural shift in his menu? Smiling at the thought, Yan Fei poked the baby’s completely full, round stomach, and systematically dressed the child in his tiny clothes.

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