The Reborn Otaku’s Code of Practice for the Apocalypse – CH253

Chapter 253 — Overwintering

This winter was clearly much colder than the previous two. Ever since the season began in November, heavy snow had fallen outside one blizzard after another. It went down almost once a week on average, with each storm lasting two to three days or even longer.

Luo Xun and the team had dispatched their capable glutton… data error, their capable team member, Comrade Zhang Su. He had to go up to the roof two or three times a week to shave away the snow to prevent it from getting too thick and completely blocking the air vents of the base.

Although the plants inside could produce oxygen, they couldn’t risk being completely sealed inside by the winter snow.

What left everyone feeling fortunate was that after a prolonged, detailed study of the satellite photos during these idle winter days, they discovered that the zombies’ advance velocity was indeed growing slower and slower. The delays along their route were growing increasingly long. By now, they had been besieging a certain base south of City A for two full weeks without making any major movements. This was definitely a massive disaster for that particular base, but for the other bases—especially the several large ones in the north—it finally provided a brief window to breathe.

Amidst these days where heavy snow sealed the mountains and the zombies had yet to arrive, the entire country ushered in the New Year.

There were no firecrackers, no fireworks, and no candy, yet it was still the New Year. This was the third New Year Luo Xun and the team had spent since the onset of the apocalypse, and it was also the very first Spring Festival since little Baozi was born. As it turned out, this child had been born on the first day of the lunar New Year last year, which happened to be the absolute last day of January on the solar calendar.

By now, that tiny, once-crimson infant whose cries had been softer than a kitten’s meow could already wobble and stumble his way up to take a few steps, plummet down, and scramble back up to keep walking.

Furthermore, little Baozi could already vocalize a few simple single syllables to call out to people. For instance, whenever he saw Luo Xun, he would let out a “poo-poo” sound; when he saw Yan Fei, he would shout “pa-pa”; and when he saw the puppy, he would call out “goggy”… Why on earth was his pronunciation for that last one so laser-accurate? This remained an absolute unsolved mystery to everyone in the base. Even little Xinran normalized calling the puppy “little guy” when she played with the baby. Heaven only knew how little Baozi figured out that this creature was a dog. Could it be from listening to Luo Xun complain about the “dumb dog” all the time?

In any case, setting the baby’s affairs aside for the moment—since it was the New Year, they naturally required a baseline of festive atmosphere. In the country, this day was, as a matter of routine, dedicated to wrapping dumplings.

Although Luo Xun and the team normally stashed an immense variety of ingredients and intermittently brainstormed novel recipes to test out, honestly, dumplings weren’t a common occurrence. Wrapping them was quite tedious, so managing to eat them once or twice a month was already a stellar record. Throughout regular days, their flour was primarily utilized to bake flatbreads or steam mantou.

The Otaku Team didn’t run short on personnel, meaning the raw labor available to wrap dumplings was abundant. Consequently, the variety of fillings they prepared multiplied substantially.

This pack of gluttons couldn’t step past the threshold during the dead of winter, and they didn’t even require venturing past the gates to harvest scrap metal anymore. They holed up inside the complex all day long, and aside from spending an hour or two daily managing their household crops, they either passed the idle hours gaming or plotting what exactly to eat. Thus, after a brief communal brainstorming session, the group locked down several distinct varieties of fillings.

Mutton and carrot filling—this flavor profile had consistently been a massive hit with everyone. Three-treasures seafood filling—because their complex had secured a substantial hoard of fish and shrimp previously and the interior parameters remained immensely warm, the populations had rapidly multiplied across the greenhouse stream and the third subterranean level, leaving them completely unconcerned about running short. Pork and cabbage filling—a highly traditional flavor profile that required absolutely zero explanation. Beef and onion filling—this was proposed by a few individuals whose inner cravings had violently flared up after suddenly remembering beef meat pies. Mushroom and pork filling—their household’s mutated mushroom yield was immensely substantial, and after a few operational cycles, the production baseline for standard mushrooms had scaled up as well. Currently, the ratio separating standard mushrooms from mutated variants hovered around ten to one; evaluating how monumental the planting footprint of their base truly was, one could easily guess exactly how jaw-dropping their mushroom production capacity was.

Ultimately, the group temporarily locked down these five core varieties. Aside from those, Luo Xun’s personal notebook featured an assortment of highly bizarre flavor profiles that had been proposed by the boys but temporarily crossed off the list, analogous to tomato and egg, black pepper beef, or egg and cucumber fillings. There were also options that, while perfectly normal, were far too labor-intensive to manufacture on top of the current workload, such as purely vegetarian fillings featuring carrots, chives, or bean sprouts, which were immensely popular on regular days but lines they didn’t care to tackle during the New Year.

Following their early morning brainstorming session, the group deployed down to the basement tracks to inspect the household crops, preparing to double back to the canteen before long so every member could pitch in to construct the meal.

Luo Xun and Yan Fei cooperatively pushed a small electric cart, the vehicle container packed with a colossal circular vat that carried immense weight.

The two directly rode the elevator down to the second subterranean floor, pushing this “cauldron” through the corridor tracks before pulling up before a massive set of steel doors after a short while.

The entrance doors swung wide open. Before the pair could even step past the threshold, the puppy came bounding out with absolute, frolicking joy, his tongue lolling out as he ran, systematically trailed by two monstrously large canine silhouettes—this coordinate mapped onto Da Lang and Er Lang’s customized dog room. It delivered an operational footprint of a full acre, its vertical clearance seamlessly integrating the first and second subterranean levels. Yan Fei had explicitly engineered a dual-story layout for them; when navigating between levels, they merely required running up an inclined ramp structured flush against the concrete wall. The upper tier was padded with several massive rugs forged from various animal hides to serve as their sleeping berths.

The pair pushed the cart over to a corner of the wall, where three feeding basins—two large and one small—were neatly arrayed. Luo Xun and Yan Fei unmounted the massive vat lid, utilizing a colossal ladle to forcefully scoop out the dog food, packing the three basins layer after layer. The feed comprised a jumbled blend of mixed-grain mantou made from white flour, cornmeal, and sorghum flour, systematically shredded and mixed with stewed meats, carrots, and an assortment of agricultural greens.

Evaluating the massive water bowl flanking the flank, the liquid inside remained relatively clean. An integrated faucet structure was mounted directly above it; throwing open the valve allowed fresh water to stream smoothly inside—this system linked straight to the primary water tanks of the complex. The central reservoir was systematically managed by Song Lingling, who completed a fluid level check roughly every two days to add fresh water into the containers.

Throughout regular days, the base population extracted water directly from that unified reservoir framework. The pipeline tracks had been systematically laid out by Yan Fei, looping smoothly into every single room that required an operational faucet, while his superpower allowed him to regularly clear out internal rust and mineral scales on the fly.

Luo Xun and Yan Fei finished dishing out the food, subsequently refreshing the basins with pristine, clean water. Only then did they reach down to pat the head of their puppy, who was currently bounding around to fawn and plead for attention: “Behave yourself down here. If you run out of entertainment, climb back upstairs to locate our ranks.”

When Luo Xun and the team originally constructed this room, they explicitly refrained from mounting a massive structural gate across the threshold. For one, those two massive dogs demanded a substantial volume of daily exercise—such as sprinting and circuiting through the secret tunnel tracks—strictly to accelerate their internal digestive cycle. Secondly, although the puppy normalized eating and sleeping alongside the pair, there was zero guarantee regarding when exactly his brain would click to make him run upstairs on his own to locate human playmates. Intermittently, he would similarly desire to accompany little Xinran to frolic through the above-ground greenhouse, which was vastly more comfortable than the parameters mapping onto those two frauds—who, due to their towering physical bulk, were completely unable to squeeze through the standard stairwell entrances.

The puppy let out a sharp “bark” toward the couple to signal his compliance, before lowering his head to tuck into his food bowl.

The pair cooperatively pushed the electric cart and empty vat straight back into the corridor tracks. Currently, the raw meat utilized to manufacture food for the two dimwitted wolves didn’t comprise cuts extracted from their freezer containers. Luo Xun and the team had normalization-maintained a baseline habit of directly air-drying a fraction of their hunts early on. Ever since these two idiot wolves finalized their strategy to permanently nest inside their complex, Luo Xun and the team completed a calculation and recognized that the frozen meats stashed inside the units couldn’t possibly sustain the wolves throughout the winter stretch, let alone account for the human population’s own dietary requirements!

Consequently, they initially experimented with blending mixed-grain mantou into their daily rations, before subsequently testing the addition of air-dried, unsalted meats that had been thoroughly steamed through—and remarkably, the predators gorged on the blend with absolute relish!

This handily made the logistics vastly more convenient.

After all, because dehydrated foods conserved immense cargo space while locking in a vastly superior shelf life, Luo Xun and the team would systematically air-dry a fair fraction of their hunts whenever they secured prey. Analyzing the loop line over a prolonged duration, the raw volume of these stashed dried assets—coupled with their minimal regular human consumption—meant these supplies were actually significantly more abundant than the frozen cuts. Since these two wolves accepted the food unreservedly, their family naturally welcomed the development to the absolute extreme.

The pair returned to the main lobby of the second subterranean floor, catching that the crew was currently busy inspecting the crops across the various rooms. Setting the electric cart aside, they grabbed the specialized baskets optimized to harvest quail eggs and descended the newly engineered stairwell straight down to the third subterranean tier.

The third subterranean floor had been substantially expanded down the line, the space hanging directly beneath the exact coordinate that housed the two wolves’ room. Currently, the interior of the third subterranean level was a lush, vibrant blanket of greenery, cultivating an assortment of leafy green vegetables alongside massive swathes of pasture grass. Running along the absolute outer edge was a looping stream track, the clear water similarly maintaining a clearance depth of a mere half-meter—a depth baseline where even if a quail or a rabbit accidentally plummeted inside, it was structurally impossible for them to drown. The liquid track was heavily populated with various fish, shrimp, crabs, and crawfish.

Branching inward from the stream track to tap the central sectors were two spacious yet exceptionally shallow watering pools, engineered explicitly to accommodate the hydration demands of the rabbits and quails maintained across this floor.

By this point, Luo Xun and the team had systematically transferred the entire quail flock down into this tier. A succession of quail nests lined the pasture floor, while the alternative sectors showcased structures half-buried within the topsoil—the rabbit warren nests.

Those eleven rabbits had similarly settled into their new accommodations by now. Catching sight of Luo Xun and Yan Fei descend the stairs at this exact hour, they displayed absolutely zero markers of terror, continuing to bounce around unrestrictedly to munch on the grass and play their games.

The pair glided over to the quail nests to execute a check, harvesting a fresh batch of eggs. They systematically partitioned the harvest into separate baskets based on whether they were fertile or standard eggs—the fertile eggs would subsequently be sent straight to the incubator room upstairs to kick off a fresh cycle.

Following that, the pair approached the half-buried rabbit warrens, pulling open one of the structural hatches to peer inside; it was completely vacant. Checking the next… a massive rabbit was nestled flat inside the cavity, its ears alertly upright in high vigilance. Prying open a third… a swarm of newly born, hairless kit rabbits was huddled inside—yes, true to form, the rabbits they had carted back from the wild had successfully begun breeding, and every single litter delivered an immense mass of kits. The most abundant nest remarkably housed a whopping twelve individual kits!!

The absolute moment the base population caught wind that the rabbit herd had successfully begun breeding, they swarmed downstairs in a rapid column to view the spectacle. Catching sight of the jaw-dropping volume, every member expressed their absolute shock with a stunned cadence: “No wonder people claim that if rabbits lack natural predators, they transform into an absolute plague. Being capable of breeding to this dimension, it makes total sense!”

The pair completed a full circuit around the third subterranean tier, verifying that the livestock parameters ran excellent and the growth trajectory of the crops was entirely decent. Right as they prepared to head back upstairs, the cell phone sealed inside their pockets suddenly rang out. Patching the call through, the voice of He Qiankun—who was currently executing a field check across the above-ground glass greenhouse—came blasting through the terminal line, roaring the absolute moment the connection stabilized: “Brother Luo, Brother Yan, get up here instantly! Those two eagles are about to completely tear our house to splinters!”

“Huh??” Those two eagles? Tearing the house to splinters? Exactly what mechanic were they plying to tear down the infrastructure?

“Superpowers! The pair of them can wield superpowers, and they belong to the lightning element! Just now while we were inspecting the fruit trees, we suddenly heard a thunderous crack and watched them violently blast one of our mushroom boxes into smithereens!!”

Heavens, their entire squad had completely busy-minded themselves into erasing that parameter!

Luo Xun explicitly recalled that early on in the apocalypse, he had witnessed an adult eagle lunge down to snare a mutated predator, its talons crackling with a lethal electric discharge that completely paralyzed the quarry. Evaluating the dynamics currently, these two fledglings truly mapped onto that adult raptor’s biological offspring, their elemental traits an absolute, seamless inheritance down the line!

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