The Reborn Otaku’s Code of Practice for the Apocalypse – CH252

Chapter 252 — A Houseful of Gluttons

Luo Xun desperately wanted to kick Zhang Su straight off the dining table, because this was already the fifth time the guy had snatched meat right from under his chopsticks! Five times! Meat!

The bastard didn’t even touch the tripe, sliced fish, or fish balls; his eyes were glued exclusively to the meat. Sliced beef, sliced mutton, sliced waterfowl—and what made it even more infuriating was that he didn’t care whether it was from the spicy red broth or the clear white broth, nor did he give a damn about who had put the meat in. His chopsticks hadn’t stopped moving since the absolute moment he sat down at the table!

Luo Xun’s mouth twitched as he scrambled for meat. What made it even more aggravating was that Zhang Su had actually channeled his wind superpower into his arms to increase his speed. Coupled with Wang Duo acting like a total lapdog, relentlessly piling meat into his Queen’s bowl, this pair of dogs almost incited public outrage. Fortunately, before sitting down at the table, they had meticulously sliced a massive mountain of mutton, partitioning the batches into individual containers to freeze inside the kitchen storage units.

Suddenly, Xu Mei stood up. Rolling up her sleeves, she grabbed a large platter holding most of the remaining sliced mutton and unceremoniously scraped the entire batch into the pot. Handing the empty platter over to Song Lingling, she commanded, “Lingling, go fetch another platter from the freezer.”

“Got it,” Song Lingling replied, grabbing the platter and dashing straight toward the freezer alcoves, though she didn’t forget to shout a reminder back: “Sister Xu, help me grab some meat from the pot!”

“Will do.”

The paper-thin slices of lamb didn’t even need to be held up against the lights to be translucent. Once dropped into the boiling pot, they merely required a quick swirl before they were perfectly ready to eat. Catching sight of Xu Mei’s heroic display, the group aggressively raised their chopsticks to launch a synchronized raid. Before Song Lingling could even make it back with a fresh platter, the pot had instantly bottomed out once more.

Cradling a fully packed platter of sliced mutton back to the table, Song Lingling stared at the mere couple of loose slices sitting inside her and Xu Mei’s bowls, her forehead instantly blanketed in a row of black lines. “I might as well just fetch a literal basin to haul the meat.”

“Hand it over, you go fetch the basin.” After dumping the entire platter of meat evenly across both sides of the split pot, Xu Mei set the empty platter aside, directing Song Lingling to secure a vastly larger container to hold the meat.

True to form, by the time Song Lingling returned with a full basin of mutton, the pot had already been swept mostly clean once more.

However, following this heavy round, the group finally slowed their frantic pace. Having packed their bellies with a baseline of mutton, everyone sequentially began cooking alternative items they personally favored.

“Stuffed past completion on mutton.” Although Luo Xun had heard this expression in the past, he had never truly, personally experienced its literal manifestation. Until today…

It wasn’t until he evaluated that he had eaten to a point of being slightly overstuffed that he finally laid down his chopsticks. Yet roughly half an hour after the meal wrapped up, a sharp, bloated ache inside his stomach almost left him wondering whether he had consumed far too many chilis today… though he had indeed overindulged a bit.

Consequently, throughout the vast winter afternoon, he could only lie semi-flat across a recliner, cradling his bloated belly while meticulously massaging his stomach.

Having finished lunch and successfully coaxed little Baozi to sleep, Yan Fei waited until the baby was completely settled inside his crib before gliding over to check on Luo Xun with deep concern. “Still feeling miserable?”

“Yeah…” Luo Xun let out a muffled groan. “It’s entirely that bastard’s fault. If he hadn’t kept snatching, would I have eaten to a point of being this stuffed?” Dining required a baseline atmosphere, didn’t it? When an adversary explicitly and maliciously competed to snatch specific food items from you, you would inevitably follow suit to match their pace, wouldn’t you? Thus, handily eating past completion under the momentum was a perfectly natural outcome, right?

Yan Fei let out a helpless chuckle, placing his hand gently over Luo Xun’s to assist him in lightly massaging his stomach.

Resting his head flat against Yan Fei’s chest, Luo Xun raised his eyes to blink at him. “To think that before the world ended, I completely forgot to stockpile digestive enzymes and antacids at home. Talk about a total tactical oversight…”

Who on earth could have predicted it? That within the grim reality of the post-apocalyptic world, a survivor could actually eat to a point of being painfully overstuffed? Ever since his rebirth, Luo Xun had never dreamed he would blunder into a scenario of this caliber. After all, across his past life, even if he overindulged a bit on his household greens after a bountiful harvest, that waste volume comprised pure vegetables! Exactly how much physical capacity could that occupy inside a stomach? But currently, this was meat! Authentic, solid, heavy meat!

Yan Fei let out a helpless smile. “I just recalled, didn’t the hawthorn tree inside our greenhouse bear fruit as well? Should I deploy downstairs to pluck a few pieces for you?”

“Yes please, yes please! Personally, I’m desperately craving something tart right now!”

“Then you stay put inside the room and behave, do not move around.” Neither of the two noticed that Luo Xun’s current demeanor mirrored a pregnant woman down to the absolute letter—cradling a bloated belly while desperately demanding tart snacks.

Their household possessed only a single hawthorn tree. Exactly like the jujube tree, it was a wild specimen Luo Xun and the team had accidentally unearned along the roadsides during a field run and meticulously transplanted back home. This mapped onto its very first year of yield, meaning the production parameters ran exceptionally low; a sparse few dozen individual fruits clustered across the thin, compact branches. Furthermore, the absolute mass ran small, and the coloration hadn’t fully turned red yet. Originally, the plan dictated letting the branch sit for another few days before plucking them for consumption, but who would have thought it would be put to perfect emergency use right now?

By the time Yan Fei walked downstairs to draw near the hawthorn tree, he unexpectedly caught sight of Xu Mei and Li Tie actively plucking the fruits; the pair was remarkably harvesting hawthorns as well!

“Brother Yan? What brings you down here?” Li Tie froze for a split second upon catching Yan Fei approach, his hands currently cradling a dozen or so plucked hawthorns.

Yan Fei raised a finger to point toward the branches. “Plucking hawthorns. Don’t tell me your faction ate past completion as well?”

Hearing his words, the two exchanged a quick glance. Immediately after, one clamped a hand over their mouth while the other let out a muffled burst of chuckles.

“H-He Qiankun and the other two guys are completely stuffed past completion, aching so badly they can barely move.”

“Lingling overindulged as well, and Xinran is throwing a fit demanding hawthorns to settle her stomach.”

Analyzing the loop, the three individuals currently standing on their feet happened to be the lone survivors who hadn’t eaten to a point of being completely stuffed, forcing them to act as errand runners to cater to the gluttons who had overindulged… Talk about absolute, profound injustice.

A single heavy round of hot pot handily left the stomachs of the entire Otaku Team thoroughly stuffed for a full two days. That exact evening, the crew explicitly simmered a massive pot of cracked-corn porridge strictly to cut through the heavy grease, yet by midday the next morning, this pack of completely unrepentant blockheads unceremoniously hosted a secondary round. It was merely that during this secondary match, absolutely no one put on an uncultivated display to frantically snatch the food anymore.

Winter thoroughly settled over the region, a blanket of pristine white snow completely encasing every corner of the Divine Land. Luo Xun and the team utilized the satellite imagery to meticulously track and monitor the shifting movements of that massive zombie tide. True to expectations, following their departure from the previous structural base, the advance velocity the horde displayed while marching toward their next target coordinate had slowed significantly compared to past durations. If their past pace permitted them to log fifty to sixty kilometers daily, currently, managing to clear ten kilometers within a single day was already an excellent achievement. Naturally, a zombie column’s natural speed generally couldn’t touch premium parameters anyway; after all, they would intermittently blunder into the ruins of past urban cores, where the physical architecture along with the lingering scents left behind by scattered loose survivors would heavily compromise their advance velocity. Currently, the weather merely rendered the pace significantly slower.

Although the zombie tide absorbed a fair degree of climate degradation that compromised its speed, the scenario the group had previously hypothesized—where the zombie units would be completely buried solid beneath the heavy snow drifts—failed to materialize. This specific blizzard turned out to be a nationwide phenomenon; apart from a few cities flanking the absolute southern fringe, virtually the entire map was completely choked beneath the snow cover. It was merely that the snow depth in the south ran thinner, while the northern blizzard was significantly heavier and more ferocious.

Once this massive blizzard thoroughly blanketed the roofing framework of Luo Xun’s base—with Zhang Su receiving official directives to deploy his wind attribute to siphon and clear at least over half of the snow drift from the apex panels—the household fruits and grains sequentially hit their final harvest windows.

Luo Xun and the team first prioritized their absolute timeline to wrap up harvesting the golden paddy rice and wheat crops, before finally carving out a window to manage the household fruits that had thoroughly matured.

Apples, pears, peaches, cherries, plums, and jujubes, rounded out by the sparse few remaining hawthorns.

Although the absolute variety of fruit strains cultivated at home didn’t count as cartoonishly diverse, the absolute volume delivered by these trees was immensely substantial. Among the yield, the apples were relatively durable to store, while the jujubes and hawthorns could be systematically sun-dried to lock in a long shelf life. However, alternative assets—especially the peaches—were exceptionally fragile to preserve long-term.

Luo Xun and the team gorged on the fruit while plucking the yield, casually grumbling along the way: “If I had known, I would have brainstormed a strategy to ensure their fruiting timelines separated across distinct windows. Who would have thought they would completely cluster into a single unified match?”

Logically speaking, if these fruit trees had been left to grow across the open wild, they would have inevitably hit their harvest windows sequentially across distinct seasons according to natural biological laws. Yet following their transplantation into the indoor glass greenhouse, who knew what underlying parameters triggered the shift; putting aside the fact that their flowering windows ran completely jumbled and distinct, they had remarkably clustered together to finalize their yield simultaneously!

Ultimately, after a brief team discussion, they resolved to process the peaches and cherries into canned preserves. As for the pears, they would simply consume what their household could digest fresh, liquidating the surplus by juicing them or simmering them into rich pear syrups. The plums and peaches could similarly be dehydrated to craft dried fruit leathers and preserves to pass the idle hours.

In truth, this preservation protocol wasn’t exclusive to those two fruit types; alternative assets, including the apples and pears, could be completely dehydrated as well. However, processing them that way meant the raw nutritional index and natural moisture would absorb heavy degradation, leading them to prioritize consuming them fresh first, only processing the stock once they evaluated their household couldn’t digest the volume.

While the squad was bustling inside the greenhouse to harvest the fruits, the twin eaglets—the plumage lining their expansive wings having thoroughly and beautifully matured into full feathers—were frantically flapping their wings to track right behind little Xinran, who was elegantly riding a sika deer. Currently, the puppy normalized spending his absolute hours huddling alongside the twin dimwitted wolves inside the basement tracks, meaning the little girl didn’t feel overly lonely now that she possessed a fresh pack of playmates. Furthermore, she would intermittently deploy down to the basement floors to join the three creatures to play—the customized rooms engineered for the two wolves delivered an immense spatial footprint, perfectly sufficient to allow the little girl to rustle and play alongside them inside the vault.

Once this massive batch of household fruits was completely harvested—dehydrating what required drying, pickling what required preserves, and stockpiling what required storage—Luo Xun turned his mind to focus on an alternative parameter. “Personally, I evaluate that our household must scale up the cultivation fields dedicated to growing grains…” Saying this, he directed his line of sight straight toward the floorboards below. Those two massive wolves were living out an increasingly pampered, comfortable lifestyle inside their complex, and visibly, once next spring rolled around, it would be immensely difficult for their family to violently drive them out.

“How exactly do we scale it up? Excavating another alternative basement tier?” Li Tie paused midway through taking a sip from his mug, hurriedly setting the cup down to ask.

“No need,” Luo Xun noted with a smile. “Do all of you still recall back when we resided inside the city walls of the City A Base? The cultivation racks we engineered were completely layered into tiers, right? Currently, we merely require adding an extra layer over our existing cultivation frameworks, shifting the racks dedicated to growing agricultural greens straight into the rooms optimized for grain production. That way, we can handily conserve at least over double the spatial footprint.”

This was especially true since the structural clearance height of the second subterranean floor ran significantly loftier than the first subterranean tier, leaving them with absolutely zero worry regarding whether mounting a dual-row cultivation framework would run short of vertical clearance.

“That works beautifully! This protocol is vastly less grueling than digging out fresh sinkholes, plus our household still stashes a massive reserve of pristine topsoil!” The loose dirt excavated during their previous basement expansion runs hadn’t been thrown away; a fraction had been packed back into the newly structured third subterranean tier, while the remaining bulk had been systematically preserved inside their vacant storage alcoves. This material comprised pure topsoil extracted from deep subterranean layers—completely free of environmental pollution while remaining immensely fertile, who on earth would be willing to throw it out?

“Do we kick off the modifications over these next few days?” Wu Xin asked upon catching the development. Over these past few days, the racks dedicated to cultivating their grains had only just been cleared out, the topsoil replaced and high-grade fertilizer administered, and they were currently germinating the fresh seedling arrays for the upcoming grain cycle. If they intended to mount the layered modifications, it would be best to align the construction straight with this seedling window.

“No rush. We can comfortably finalize a single room first, shifting the rack fixtures from the vegetable rooms straight into the cavity. After all, the absolute majority of our metal reserves currently stands deployed to maintain the trap network; our complex must retain a specific reserve baseline for emergency backup.” Saying this, Luo Xun turned his eyes to look at Yan Fei.

The current climate parameters ran intensely freezing. Although the scrap metal stockpiled inside their complex was immensely abundant, these assets were explicitly held in reserve to handle the oncoming zombie tide that would draw near before long. Although they possessed the capacity to execute modifications, they didn’t dare draw down too large a fraction of the hoard.

“Don’t worry. Assembling cultivation racks doesn’t consume an exorbitant volume of metal. If we merely optimize one or two rooms, it won’t trigger a major issue,” Yan Fei calculated the numbers before noting back, catching his partner’s gaze.

“Perfect, then tomorrow we’ll prioritize transferring the vegetable rack frameworks first.” Luo Xun let out a sigh of relief, silently praying inside his heart that their household’s gluttonous animal populations would absolutely refrain from multiplying further… They truly lacked the capacity to sustain any more bottomless pits.

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