Chapter 2

Zhang Pingping owned a self-built house in the countryside, along with a few fields she had reclaimed beside it.

My father had died many years ago. Ever since, she had been both mother and father to Shen Chunni. She had even opened a little grocery store in the village to support the girl.

The moment we got home, she went straight to the store and started calling suppliers. She contacted every flour mill she could find and began hoarding flour and rice like mad.

“We can’t buy only rice and flour,” I said. “We should get compressed biscuits and canned food too. They’ll keep longer.”

She waved that concern away. “You don’t need to worry about storage.”

I blinked. “Why not?”

She leaned closer, looking mysterious. “Your mom has one of those… what do you call it? A storage dimension!”

I stared at her.

Of all the miracles that could happen, this one had happened to us?

I nodded furiously. “Great, great! I’ve made a little over two hundred thousand yuan drawing comics these past two years. Spend all of it!”

I grabbed a sheet of paper and began scribbling a list.

With my mother’s wholesale connections, we could get almost anything. We started with rice and flour, then bought every kind of meat. She had survived the apocalypse once too, so she needed no prompting. Once we had enough staples and meat, she moved on to vegetables.

We also stocked sanitary pads, clothing, and medicine.

After the essentials were covered, I made a timid request. “I also want some spicy snacks, coffee, ice cream, and chips.”

My mother answered without hesitation. “Take the three-wheeler out and pick up the medicine while you’re at it.”

“You got it.”

Within three days, she had bought more than five tons each of grain, meat, and vegetables. We spent nearly all of my two hundred thousand yuan and the two hundred thousand or so she had saved over the years.

Her storage dimension could hold virtually anything, preserving it as fresh as the moment it went in. By our calculations, there was enough for the two of us to eat as much as we liked for twenty years.

After she disappeared in my previous life, I survived another two years. Even then, there had been no end in sight.

For days, we did nothing but buy, receive, and organize supplies. After another exhausting day, my mother and I lay on the roof and watched the stars.

The local population was small, and nearly everyone lived in a house like ours.

I scrolled through a video app on my phone and saw that Shen Chunni was livestreaming “A Real Heiress’s Life After Coming Home.” She sobbed to the camera about the “abuse” she had endured.

Most viewers were not fools, though. The comments tore her apart.

“Your adoptive mother was a widow who raised you all by herself. That couldn’t have been easy.”

“She was an uneducated woman doing the work of two parents. How gentle did you expect her to be?”

“You even tried to get us to dox your adoptive mother. Thank goodness you’re not her biological child.”

Shen Chunni ended the stream in tears.

I grinned.

Because I was wearing earbuds, Zhang Pingping had no idea what I was watching. She sat beside me, waving a broad palm fan to keep the mosquitoes away.

Then she said, “Sweetheart, we have enough food for ourselves. What about the rest of the village?”

I considered it. “They won’t believe us if we tell them.”

I had already used anonymous accounts to post warnings on every forum I could find. No one believed a word. Out of more than a dozen posts, I received only two replies, both calling me insane.

“Then what do we do?” Zhang Pingping asked. “Share our food when the time comes? That won’t work. We can’t feed this many people, and we’ve spent all our money.”

Her conscience would not let the matter rest.

After thinking for a long time, I came up with an idea.

“Mom, let’s go borrow money tomorrow. We’ll swallow our pride and borrow as much as we can.”

She froze. “What for?”

“We’ll use it to buy supplies for everyone and keep the goods at our house.”

We were only two ordinary women. This was all we could do.

Zhang Pingping sprang to her feet. “Why wait until tomorrow? Let’s go now.”

There was no time to waste.

When Zhang Pingping said she would shamelessly ask for loans, she meant shamelessly.

She knocked on every door in the village and told each family she had cancer.

I had no words.

Then she demanded tens of thousands—sometimes more than a hundred thousand—from each household.

What stunned me even more was that many villagers actually handed over their retirement savings. Of course, a scheme like this could only work in the dead of night, when no one had time to compare notes.

Zhang Pingping swept through every household with me in tow like a bandit raiding the entire village.

Only the next morning did everyone discover that she had borrowed from every last one of them.

No matter how they looked at it, she seemed like a swindler. Worse, she had made off with the whole village’s nest eggs.

At daybreak, an angry crowd surrounded our house.

Fortunately, I had anticipated that. I had dragged Zhang Pingping away during the night, and neither of us dared go home. There was no way to explain what we were doing.

We spent another four days traveling around, buying vegetables, rice, and flour wherever we could. Somehow, we managed to spend every cent of the several million yuan we had “borrowed.”

Only then did Zhang Pingping start to worry.

“Sweetheart, what if the apocalypse doesn’t come?”

I did not know whether to laugh or cry. “Then we repay our debts. Anything would be better than the apocalypse.”