Chapter 4
Closing the door, Ji Yang surveyed the house where she would be living for at least a year.
It was a new house she had never lived in. The only furniture inside was a simple gas stove, a water heater, and two fireplaces she had specifically installed. There was nothing else.
That included things like cabinets.
Ji Yang was afraid of formaldehyde, so she didn’t plan on using new furniture. All of her furniture from the old villa was in her space, and she took out whatever she could use now.
Anyway, she was alone and had her space, so her need for furniture was much lower.
She subconsciously stored everything she ate and used in her space; it was much more convenient than putting it anywhere else. The moment an item entered the space, it was within her consciousness. Whatever she wanted, she could make it appear in her hand with a single thought.
Therefore, after a quick search in her space, Ji Yang took out a sofa, a table and chairs, a set of pots and pans, a rice cooker, a refrigerator, and other appliances. She also put out some daily necessities like a toothbrush, face towels, basins, buckets, winter clothes, and a computer before stopping.
She had originally planned to cook, as the gas, water, and electricity were all working.
But the moment she picked up the spatula, she thought of the food delivery apps.
She had been running around outside for the past two months. Even with her space, her palate had been wronged. She couldn’t be perfunctory anymore. Her cooking skills… it was best if only she knew about them.
Ji Yang immediately grabbed her phone to order food.
As soon as she opened the app, her screen was filled with all sorts of delicacies. In the past, she had eaten very little of it. Although it was delicious, she felt that takeout was unhygienic, used bad oil, and the ingredients weren’t good enough. Most importantly, she had to maintain her figure.
But now, she only regretted wasting so many years of opportunities to taste delicious food.
Ji Yang picked and chose, placing orders worth several hundred yuan from each restaurant. She also ordered a lot of milk tea. After the apocalypse, none of this would be available. Now that she was back in the country, she had to stock up on these cooked foods to ensure she wouldn’t be eating her own cooking every day in the future.
Delivery speeds were getting faster and faster. The first order, fried chicken, arrived in just half an hour.
Ji Yang lifted the lid, and the wafting aroma made her mouth water. She quickly spread the sauce, put on gloves, picked up a large, crispy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside chicken leg, and took a bite.
A satisfying “crunch” echoed between her teeth.
Just as Ji Yang was about to continue, the doorbell rang. It was the second batch of takeout.
She quickly took the two large bags, and after thanking the delivery person, the elevator dinged again before she could even put the bags down.
After this busy and blissful round of receiving deliveries, and confirming that all her orders had arrived, she gave each of the delivery riders a one-hundred-yuan tip.
They had worked really hard.
After closing the door, she moved the takeout into her space to keep it fresh. The ten-thousand-square-meter space was now crammed full of supplies. Due to the rush of collecting everything, she hadn’t organized much. Many of the supplies were stored just as they had been in the warehouse.
The categorization was unclear. Ji Yang figured that once the temperature dropped and she couldn’t go out, she would have to properly organize the space. She estimated that she could free up quite a bit of room.
—
Thirty-four days until the apocalypse.
Ji Yang began flying all over the country.
She hadn’t traveled through the entire country yet, but time was short. Ji Yang decided to first buy the specialty items from several of the more famous provinces, such as hot pot base, spicy stir-fry sauce, cold pot skewers, and boiled fish. There were also cold noodles, barbecue skewers, beef and lamb, hot dry noodles, alkaline noodles, beef noodles, ramen, roast duck, and soy-marinated pressed duck, roast goose…
There were also various vegetables, fruits, meats, and semi-finished food products. She could also purchase some of the pork and chicken she hadn’t bought abroad.
Oh, right, and seeds!
Although she couldn’t plant anything in her space, once the apocalypse was over, these would be valuable.
But she couldn’t buy too many; she didn’t have that much time to transport them. So, she bought twenty of each type of fruit tree, fifty of each type of other seedlings, and a large bag of each type of seed, with special emphasis on buying heirloom varieties that could be re-seeded, especially rice, upland rice, barley, and wheat.
She couldn’t forget traditional Chinese medicine seeds either.
In every city she visited, Ji Yang would go directly to a car rental agency, rent a van, and drive around to shop.
After finishing her procurement for the day, it would be nearly dark. On her way back to the hotel, she would pass by various restaurants. She would go in to take a look, and if she found something she liked, she would ask the owner to pack fifty portions of each dish.
From morning till night, the pace of her spending never stopped.
While ensuring she got enough sleep, she wished she could travel day and night.
The main reason was that each province had its own unique cuisine. Ji Yang couldn’t get everything, but she visited several of the most famous provinces.
During this time, she hadn’t terminated the lease on her warehouse in Changnan City. She contacted several traditional Chinese medicine dealers and had each of them deliver a batch of herbs to the warehouse. She herself also continued to purchase various foods online.
All kinds of canned cooked food, canned fruit, canned luncheon meat, pickles, fermented tofu, self-heating pots of various flavors, lemon boneless chicken feet, hand-shredded rabbit, spicy rabbit legs, spicy duck tongues, braised duck tongues, cold-dressed rabbit, cold-dressed chicken tendons… a constant stream was sent to the warehouse every day.
New Year’s Day and her birthday passed quietly amidst this busyness. Before long, people began preparing to celebrate the Spring Festival.
It wasn’t until twelve days before the apocalypse that Ji Yang returned to Changnan City. After clearing out the warehouse for the last time, she terminated the contract with the master who was in charge of guarding it.
This had been agreed upon in advance; the procurement was only for these three months.
One party got the money, the other got the goods. They parted on amicable terms.
Ji Yang didn’t bother with the warehouse anymore and began to focus on hoarding cooked food from all over.
Twelve days seemed very short, especially since these days were around the Spring Festival. Some people were busy returning to their hometowns, while the rest were preparing to do so.
Fortunately, many shops remained open.
With fewer customers, when Ji Yang requested dozens or even a hundred portions at once, the owners would be all smiles, delighted, and even gave her larger portions than usual.
Ji Yang was also quite happy. She frequented everything from Michelin-starred restaurants to greasy spoons on the street every day. In her spare time, she used her consciousness to assemble shelves in her space.
She had already purchased the frames for the shelves, but they had all been disassembled for transportation.
At first, Ji Yang had considered finding a few people to help her assemble them, but one night, out of boredom, she tried assembling them with her consciousness in the space and found it surprisingly easy.
The stainless steel frames, which weighed dozens of jin in reality, felt as light as a feather in her consciousness.
It was amazing!
Ji Yang immediately gave up the idea of hiring help. Whenever she had a spare moment, she would assemble a shelf, neatly arranging all the miscellaneous items in her space on them and even adding labels. This way, she wouldn’t have to scan the entire space with her consciousness when looking for something.
Just as she finished assembling one, Ji Yang checked her phone. It was time for the first scheduled food pickup of the afternoon. She immediately drove over. At the restaurant entrance, the waiters, who were already prepared, lined up to place the packed food into her car.
A total of two hundred portions.
Ji Yang closed the trunk door and was about to leave when someone suddenly called out to her, “Ji Yang!”
Ji Yang instinctively paused.
The voice immediately became somewhat excited. “It really is you, Ji Yang! How did you end up so down on your luck that you’re driving such a wreck? Did Dad stop giving you money?”
Ji Yang turned to look at the person walking towards her. With the Spring Festival approaching, the weather had reached its coldest point, but she was still dressed lightly. Her exquisite coat was open, revealing a slender figure.
Her beautiful, wavy long hair was meticulously styled and draped over her shoulders, her makeup was tasteful, and her jewelry was just right.
She was a perfect picture of a fashionable urban woman, a world apart from how she looked when they met again during the extreme heat of the apocalypse. At that time, both of them had been tormented by the disasters beyond recognition. When they ran into each other, they simply exchanged a glance and went their separate ways.
No one had the energy to bicker and fight like they did before the apocalypse.
This person was her half-sister, Ji Siyue, a few months her junior. Old man Ji had cheated on his wife during her pregnancy and hidden it for over a year. The mistress appeared with her daughter at Ji Yang’s first birthday party, thoroughly humiliating her mother, Qiao Yi.
Afterward, her mother divorced him and, in the second month, remarried a handsome middle-aged uncle who was a widower with a son.
If Ji Yang had a say, she’d say Ms. Qiao Yi wasn’t open-minded enough. She should have just sponsored a few young, handsome “little puppy” and “little wolf” types. Take old man Ji, for example. After the third party successfully took her place, the fourth and fifth parties followed suit, each a young, beautiful, single woman.
In comparison, Qiao Yi had really lost out.
And the third party remained the third party. She was tolerant and didn’t care about this at all. Holding Ji Siyue, she gave birth to a boy, secured her position as the lady of the Ji household, lived a life of luxury, and constantly groomed her daughter to enter the company and seize power.
However, for the past two years, Ji Yang had prevented this with her loud protests. Therefore, Ji Siyue also found Ji Yang particularly disagreeable. Calling out to her now, her excitement was certainly not the joy of a long-lost reunion, but rather the schadenfreude of seeing a disliked person in a sorry state.
Seeing that she didn’t speak, Ji Siyue assumed she was ashamed. She flicked her long hair and said with a smile, “Hey, if you’re not doing well, you should have told your little sister. If I hadn’t happened to run into you while having dinner with a client, I wouldn’t have known.”
With that, she took out her phone. “I’ll transfer you a million. You’re welcome.”
Ji Yang found it somewhat amusing, but her face remained expressionless.
Before her rebirth, she would definitely have been angry, but now she felt nothing at all, even a little happy. Although she still had several million left, who would complain about having too much money?
When the snowstorm first started, order hadn’t completely collapsed, but prices skyrocketed. At that time, she would have to pretend to spend money to buy some supplies.
Besides, before the apocalypse, she could still buy all sorts of unpolished jadeite, which was more than a little cheaper.
Therefore, she accepted it calmly and said, “Thanks, then.”
Her punch had landed on cotton. Ji Siyue was stunned for a moment. Especially looking at Ji Yang’s cool and detached expression, as if nothing mattered, she felt that something was off.
In the past, if Ji Yang had known she had joined the company, she would have thrown a huge fit, eventually taking it to her father, where a scolding would have been the least of it.
Feeling uneasy, she couldn’t help but add, “By the way, I remember New Year’s Day was your birthday, right? Dad was too busy with work and forgot. Why don’t you come to my place tonight? The family can have a meal together.”
Ji Yang waved her hand. “No thanks, I have things to do. Good luck to you.”
Ji Siyue: ?
She wanted to say more, but Ji Yang had already opened the car door and gotten in. The van, though it looked rustic, was easy to drive. It started up and drove away quickly.
Leaving Ji Siyue with a face full of exhaust fumes, her expression darkened as she cursed under her breath, “What bad luck!”
What good luck?
She was having plenty of good luck right now.
Ji Yang was acting crazy for some reason, having not shown up for a long time. She had to hurry and use this time to establish a firm foothold in the company. By the time Ji Yang realized what was happening, it would be too late to drive her out!
It’s all that damn old woman’s fault. We’re both her granddaughters, but she only dotes on Ji Yang!