Chapter 4

Before long, the village chief sealed the roads into Zhangjia Village. People could enter, but no one could leave.

Earthquakes and tsunamis were striking all over the country and across the world. One small island nation that had always insisted it possessed no nuclear weapons even had a nuclear blast exposed by an earthquake.

The shadow of the apocalypse gradually settled over everyone.

Zhangjia Village was blessed. We were far from both the ocean and any major fault line. Our only trouble came from the distant typhoon zone, which had brought days of relentless wind and rain.

Some village elders began calling their children in the cities and telling them to come home. After decades of life, they said, they had never seen anything like this and were beginning to believe the end of the world truly was at hand.

Most of their children cursed them out over the phone.

Before, the villagers had cursed my mother and me. Now their own families were saying the same things to them.

As we cooked rice and kneaded dough, we could often hear Granny Chen across the street singing insults at the top of her lungs. Most of them were aimed at her daughter-in-law, whom she called a “vixen” for keeping her son and grandson away.

I frowned. “Does she have to say such awful things?”

Zhang Pingping kept shaping buns as she answered. “Country folk can have sharp tongues without having bad hearts.”

My mother had knocked on Granny Chen’s door in the middle of the night and claimed she had cancer. The old woman had still lent her fifty thousand yuan, all in cash sewn into the pockets of different clothes—five thick bundles in total.

And for all the horrible things she shouted now, whenever her daughter-in-law quarreled with her own family, Granny Chen was always the first to defend her.

“You can’t judge people only by whether they speak nicely,” Zhang Pingping told me.

Just then, the landline rang.

“Sweetheart, wash your hands and answer that,” she said. “Then go play for a while.”

“All right.”

I washed up and picked up the phone. To my surprise, Shen Chunni was on the other end.

“Mom, our house collapsed in the earthquake,” she sobbed. “We almost died!”

During the widespread disasters of my previous life, we had jokingly divided the world into three zones.

Places like Zhangjia Village, which suffered little damage, were “hidden paradises.” Places completely obliterated by disaster were “quick-death zones.” Everywhere left half alive and half ruined became “hell on earth.”

The Shen family was currently living through the early days of hell on earth.

I put the call on speaker. Zhang Pingping drifted over despite herself.

Shen Chunni’s sobs rose and fell with theatrical precision.

“Mom, we’re all crowded into a survivors’ camp. The conditions are horrible.”

“Our food is rationed, and all I get are compressed biscuits and canned food.”

“My biological mother is sick, so all the fresh vegetables have to go to her.”

“Mom, I dreamed about your pumpkin rice last night. Could you bring me some pumpkin?”

I glanced at Zhang Pingping. Her expression shifted again and again, and I could not tell what she was thinking.

“Shen Chunni, have you lost your mind?” I said. “Everyone is under quarantine, and you want my mother to travel all that way to bring you a pumpkin?”

Shen Chunni had skin thicker than a city wall. She burst into heartbroken tears.

“Sisi, I’m sorry. I was in a bad place before. I have depression. Please don’t stop Mom from talking to me. We spent eighteen years together. I miss her.”

“Mom…”

“You don’t miss Mom. You miss her pumpkins!”

Zhang Pingping, who was kneading dough for pumpkin buns, gave me a helpless look.

I hung up in a huff.

She continued kneading in silence.

In my previous life, I had hated Shen Chunni with every fiber of my being. Not only had she turned my adoptive parents against me, she had also lured my biological mother away from my side.

After being reborn, however, my feelings had changed in a strange way. Perhaps surviving the apocalypse had burned the hatred out of me. Now I felt almost nothing toward her.

It turned out the best revenge against an enemy was indifference.

And it felt wonderful.

That evening, while we still had internet access, I happened across Shen Chunni’s livestream again. She had recorded our phone call and edited out the part where she asked for a pumpkin. All that remained were a few fragments of her begging and me scolding her.

This time, she had discovered the secret to attracting viewers. She no longer blamed Zhang Pingping outright.

Instead, she cried into the camera. “I don’t blame her. I know she’s jealous because I received the love of two sets of parents…”

I was about to swipe away when I heard her say, “Thank you to my number-one supporter for the donation! Double-tap and show me some love!”

The water I had just swallowed sprayed from my mouth.

Zhang Pingping rushed over. “What’s wrong? Was it too hot?”

I coughed. “I’m fine.”

She rubbed my head and glanced at my phone. “Oh, is she doing that again?”

“She used to livestream too?”

“All the time. She was forever babbling at her phone. I never knew what she was doing.”

No wonder she was so practiced.

“People can make good money from this,” I said.

Zhang Pingping waved dismissively. “Not her. She never earned a cent.”

Looking at the rapidly growing follower count, I suspected that was about to change.

Shen Chunni was not merely manipulative. She had ambition, and she knew how to act on it.

Since Zhang Pingping did not care, we began watching her streams every day for entertainment. The two of us had apparently become Shen Chunni’s winning formula for attracting traffic.

She called to harass us constantly, then edited the recordings and cried about them on camera. Sometimes I said nothing at all, and she still invented entire stories.

As her follower count soared, I clicked my tongue.

“The world is ending. Why do so many people still want to watch this kind of melodrama?”

The more Zhang Pingping watched, the less she cared about her.

After two months of kneading dough, my mother had started getting creative. One table was covered with little rabbit-shaped buns, another with piglet faces.

At last, Shen Chunni called me one day without recording the conversation.

“You poor loser, do you know how much I’ve made these past two months? Two million yuan!”

I sighed. “You really were born at the wrong time.”

She sounded baffled. “What do you mean?”

I hung up without answering.

The next day, another earthquake struck City C, where she was staying. The cell towers collapsed, the internet went down, and she could no longer log into the app—much less withdraw her money.