Chapter 6 – A Sharp Tongue, But an Honest Heart
After Luo Xun remodeled the house, there was now a small vestibule immediately inside the front door. To reach the living room, you had to go through another door. This was a safety precaution—if someone came knocking after the apocalypse began, they wouldn’t be able to see straight into the house the moment the door opened.
At this moment, he was sitting on the shoe cabinet in the small entryway, changing his shoes. From the living room came pitiful little whimpers—one, two, three… enough to make his liver tremble.
“F*ck! Could you be any more pathetic?!”
The veins on Luo Xun’s forehead bulged. He strode back to the living room, opened the cage, grabbed the scruff of the little thing’s neck, and carefully lifted it up with both hands, not daring to use any real strength. “You want to go out with me?!”
“Ha, ha, ha…” Its little tongue poked out halfway, and its thin little tail wagged so fast it was a blur.
“It’s freezing outside, and you’re still so tiny! Stay home like a good boy. Behave, understand?”
The tail kept swishing.
He bent down and put the little thing back into the cage.
“Woo…” The pitiful whine started again, and the pencil-thin tail drooped miserably.
Forcing himself to calm down, Luo Xun pressed down each throbbing vein on his forehead, reached out to pat the little head, and softened his tone. “I’ll be back soon. I’ll even bring something tasty for you, alright? Stay here and don’t whine.” If the weather weren’t so cold and the pup weren’t so small, Luo Xun might actually have given in to its wheedling and carried it outside.
But one, the pup was far too little. Two, it was simply too cold…
Maybe it really was smart. Knowing that no matter how much it fussed, Luo Xun wouldn’t take it out, it simply flopped onto its thick blanket, staring at him with big, sorrowful eyes, but without making another sound.
With a sigh, Luo Xun deeply felt he had probably brought home a huge trouble. Even if this little thing didn’t mutate, when it grew bigger and the world outside was full of zombies, how the hell was he supposed to walk a dog?!
Shoes changed, door opened, door locked. Luo Xun sighed as he headed for the elevator. The moment he stepped out on the first floor, he saw a few notices pasted at the entrance.
Printed on them: December 10th, the property office would be open. Water, electricity, and gas meters might be replaced around New Year’s, exact time to be announced.
Since the complex wasn’t fully completed yet, the meters were all temporary. Meaning—for now, no matter how much he used, he didn’t need to pay monthly bills! Only when they switched the meters later would the utility companies start collecting fees.
After carefully confirming the notice several times, Luo Xun shook his head and sighed as he walked out of the building—well, that was one expense saved.
But since construction wasn’t complete, occasional water outages still happened. Once he finished his current tasks, he’d need to properly start storing and reserving water.
When the secondhand mini van rolled back into Hongjing Complex, it marked the end of Luo Xun’s last shopping run.
Over the past few days, he had gone first to the farmer’s market, buying a load of bulk and vacuum-packed rice, flour, oil, and grains. Then he had driven almost all around the Southwest District, visiting every big and small pharmacy.
Medicines weren’t easy to buy online, especially since some required prescriptions or purchase restrictions.
Although Luo Xun had ordered things like first-aid kits online, antibiotics and cold medicine still had to be bought in person.
At each pharmacy, he never bought more than one or two boxes of each kind. But there were so many pharmacies—dozens, maybe even a hundred across the Southwest District! By the time he had made a round of them all, the amount piled up was considerable.
All sorts of medicines useful after the apocalypse but hard to find, plus common drugs and foodstuffs, had cost him the last of his funds.
Normally, medicine didn’t look like much. But buy it in bulk, and tens of thousands of yuan vanished easily. Luckily, City A was big enough. If he’d had more money, he would have gone around the whole urban area as well!
He lugged big and small bags back home.
The little pup ran circles on the floor, overjoyed that its owner was home early today! Its den had even been put out in advance!—Ever since the day it had tried to sneak out the door and failed, Luo Xun’s attentiveness toward it had risen several levels.
“Don’t run around, move aside, or I’ll step on you!” Luo Xun used his foot to nudge the rolling little furball sprawled belly-up on the floor. Only then did he set down the last bag of soil and exhale heavily.
Looking at the now-crammed living room, Luo Xun couldn’t help but sigh. So much stuff—when would he ever finish sorting it all?
If you didn’t organize, a room would never be clean!
Earlier, he had bought a huge batch of water barrels, tanks, and fish tanks online. But once he stacked everything inside, he realized—if he used them all, there would be no room left to move.
Fortunately, boxes stacked together didn’t take much space, and he could repurpose some as storage bins.
Rolling up his sleeves, dragging along the clingy pup that tumbled at his feet and refused to let go of his pants, Luo Xun threw himself once again into organizing the living room.
He hauled bags of soil and chopped wood onto the terrace for temporary storage.
Rice, flour, grains, and oil were all stacked in the kitchen and on the floor just outside the kitchen door.
The storage room next to the kitchen would serve as a seedling room. The temperature there was higher, so it could grow shade-tolerant crops and even mushrooms. The balcony would mainly be for fruit crops, while the rest of the space would be a workspace for tools and hardware.
The living room was now a storage room, holding the three freezers he had bought, along with a microwave, an electric stove, a small stone mill, a peeler, a manual meat grinder, a sausage stuffer, distillation equipment, spare plastic buckets, plastic baskets, and piles of loose rice and flour temporarily stacked in the not-so-small space.
Upstairs, the smaller room was filled with instant foods, vacuum-packed rice, flour, assorted grains, barrels of cooking oil, and seeds sealed in bags. There were also spare PVC pipes and large quantities of charcoal.
The large bedroom upstairs held, besides a wall unit, a king-sized bed, a nightstand, a small desk, and a laptop, dozens of boxes of various medicines.
Inside the wardrobe, besides a large amount of spare clothing for all four seasons and several sets of extra bedding, there were also sturdy, durable fabrics and cotton Luo Xun had bought online—most of it sealed in compression bags to save space.
All of this would eventually come in handy. Luo Xun remembered that it wasn’t until three or four years after the apocalypse that bases finally managed to rebuild textile factories. By then, crops like cotton and flax had mutated on a massive scale, raw materials were extremely scarce, and many families in the bases had gone back to the days of “one pair of pants for the whole household.”
Behind the staircase on the first floor, there were also large barrels of gasoline and diesel that Luo Xun had gradually stockpiled. These fuels had purchase restrictions, but since he had already decided he probably wouldn’t join search or expedition teams in the future, his fuel demand wasn’t that high. Still, it was necessary to keep some in reserve.
Finally, there was the second-floor terrace. On it stood rows of PVC racks he had made. Some already held plants, while the rest were set aside for later use.
Along the edges of the terrace, there were small plastic baskets with holes drilled into them. When spring came, Luo Xun planned to grow crops in them according to conditions.
In the middle of the terrace sat a round barbecue grill. Opening the lid revealed a rack inside: charcoal was placed on the lower layer, food on the upper. With the lid on, charcoal-roasted food cooked much faster than with the lid open. If the house ever ran low on electricity or the days were too overcast, Luo Xun planned to cook with charcoal; if charcoal ran out, firewood would work just as well.
By the time everything in the house was finally ready, it was already mid-November.
That morning, Luo Xun turned on the faucet—time to start storing water.
Recently, he had hired someone to install a solar water heater on the roof. On top of that, he had secretly added two fairly large water storage tanks. Under normal circumstances, once property management moved in around December, these tanks would have to be removed—not only were they heavy, but the rooftop counted as shared property and couldn’t be privately occupied.
But now… if the apocalypse didn’t come and the only ones who showed up were property managers, Luo Xun would obediently dismantle the tanks. But if the end really did arrive, then these tanks would be lifesavers.
The kitchen counters, the floor, the cabinets—everywhere was filled with supplies. Luo Xun happily rolled up his sleeves, hands covered in flour, courageously wrestling with dough up close and personal! How many years had it been since he last made food from wheat flour with his own hands? In fact, had he ever done it properly in his last life? Probably not!
Before the apocalypse, all food was store-bought. Aside from instant noodles, the only things he could cook were fried eggs and omelets.
After the apocalypse, he had been forced by life itself to learn cooking. But back then, ordinary people couldn’t even get rice or flour, so even if he’d wanted to try, he never had the chance.
Now, with so many ingredients in front of him, with water and electricity still available—if not now, then when?
Meanwhile, the little pup twitched its tiny nose in its sleep, its big head resting on its little paws. It had just eaten. The reconstituted milk powder wasn’t as tasty as mama’s milk, but here at least there were no brothers or sisters to fight with.
From the kitchen drifted the fragrance of wheat and the sound of its owner humming—a warm, comforting sound. True, it couldn’t snuggle in mama’s arms with its siblings anymore, but the other day its owner had bought it a big plush dog! Now it could curl up and sleep against that instead!
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