Chapter 3

In the end, what was coming came.

Just as in my previous life, it began with a typhoon warning from the weather bureau. They called it the largest typhoon in recorded history and ordered everyone to stay indoors.

Even so, the storm exceeded every meteorologist’s prediction.

Gales raged for five or six days. Tsunamis and earthquakes followed, wiping out many major coastal cities. Then the virus began to spread.

Zhang Pingping and I slipped home under cover of the storm. We locked every door and window and spent our days organizing supplies while the wind howled outside like a legion of ghosts.

Zhangjia Village lay deep inland and far from any fault line, so the damage here was relatively light.

In my previous life, our greatest enemy had been the shortage of supplies.

The demonic wind kept blowing, exactly as I remembered. Only on the fifth day did it begin to weaken.

The disaster had struck too suddenly for anyone to prepare. Early the next morning, Zhang Pingping took the loudspeaker she once used while hawking goods from village to village and marched through the streets shouting, “Zhang Pingping is here to repay her debts! Everyone, come to Zhang Pingping’s house!”

Simple. Brutal. Effective.

Within minutes, the news was racing through the village.

“Zhang Pingping is paying everyone back! Get to her house!”

When my mother opened our front gate, the crowd fell silent.

Our three-story house was packed with supplies from the ground-floor courtyard to the rooftop. Even the cellar was full.

The village chief stared in disbelief. “Pingping, what is all this? Where’s our money?”

Zhang Pingping looked exhausted. “I turned it into food for everyone.”

It took us a great deal of effort to explain that food shortages were coming. The virus was already spreading; it simply had not reached us yet.

Many of the village elders had received calls from their children in the cities urging them to stock up, so some were ready to listen.

One person still complained, “But you didn’t have to buy this much!”

Zhang Pingping gritted her teeth. “Take your supplies now! If you don’t need them, I’ll pay back the money later!”

She pulled a thick fistful of IOUs from her pocket. “You have these. What are you afraid of?”

Only then did everyone relent.

Afterward, Zhang Pingping said, “You can’t blame them. I wouldn’t have believed us either.”

I had prepared the accounts in advance. Every household received supplies worth exactly what it had lent us.

The villagers were still moving goods that afternoon when the news broke: the virus had arrived, and all surviving residents were ordered to quarantine at home. Prices in the cities soared, and stores everywhere were being stripped bare.

No one complained after that. They only carried things faster.

Soon, our house was empty.

The village chief asked my mother, “Pingping, what will you two do?”

She waved him off. “I still have stock in my store’s warehouse.”

He remained uneasy. “Tell us if you need help.”

“I know.” She shoved him out and locked the door.

Neither of us even had the strength to climb upstairs. We collapsed on the sofa and slept like the dead.

We still had a great deal to prepare. In three months, the power grid would fail.

For the villagers, my mother had bought some fresh ingredients and a larger supply of canned food and compressed biscuits. Afraid they might beat us to death if they discovered the truth too early, we had not even opened the packaging.

Now she took advantage of her storage dimension and said, “The two of us should eat something fresh.”

We had bought dozens of food-grade storage barrels. Every pot in the house was soon cooking rice. We planned to put the cooked rice into her storage dimension so we could take it out whenever we wanted.

While the rice cooked, my mother mixed dough with frantic energy and tried to teach me at the same time. Soon, we were both sneezing our heads off.

“I have a feeling everyone is at home cursing us over all those cans,” I said.

Zhang Pingping was an optimist. “Nonsense. That’s just the flour making us sneeze. Achoo!”

She sniffed. “This won’t do. Open the window and let the flour dust out.”

The moment I opened it, Granny Chen, the elderly widow who lived across the street, began berating us from her own window.

“You heartless cheats! You even swindled an old woman’s funeral savings—”

The wind tore away half her tirade.

My mother slammed the window shut and stuck her tongue out at me.