Chapter 4

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio  Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

It didn’t take long for Chen Xu to choose a restaurant at the intersection. It was on the first floor, no need to climb the stairs, and with a big enough freezer. The best thing was that there was a diesel generator inside.

He was no stranger to diesel generators. Before he went to college, his parents ran a supermarket in the suburbs. For a period of time, the area was changing power lines and would often blackout. It was precisely with diesel generators that the supermarket used to generate electricity.

After wiring up the electricity, he cruised through the dozens of restaurants nearby and brought back all the meat until the freezer could fit no more.

Although it was definitely impossible for two to finish so much meat within half a year, it wouldn’t hurt to be on the safe side.

“Oh yeah, I wonder how Luo Xiyun is doing now.”

While he was frying a steak and counting the amount of food, he thought of Luo Xiyun who should have appeared long ago.

According to the nature of this dream world, this simulated Luo Xiyun might also have woken up at home as in real life. She had not appeared yet, and neither did Chen Xu know where she had gone.

He had no idea about where she lived. As enormous as this city was, finding a person would undoubtedly be like finding a needle in a haystack.

“The best plan is to make some movements and lure her in.”

Taking a whiff of the fragrance of the fried steak, he uncontrollably swallowed. After being busy all morning, he was already starving.

And so, he spent day one moving supplies.

At night, Chen Xu, who had just finished showering, sat in the only office of the restaurant. He was feeling a little guilty as he actually needed to use mineral water for bathing. It was too much of a waste.

“Can’t help it, there’s no tap water.”

He couldn’t help but sigh. When there was only one person left in the world, surviving was much more difficult than he had imagined.

There were no delivery services, no tap water, and he had to do everything by hand.

He could forget about all these, but the most unbearable thing was that there was no internet!

He couldn’t surf the web, login into forums, watch videos, swipe through TikTok, catch up on web novels… this was detrimental to him. As he wasn’t into games, he didn’t even have simple games like pattern matching installed on his phone. He could only hold his phone and gaze at it.

There was, however, a computer at his office, but a password was needed to access it.

“I’ll need to make a trip to the office tomorrow and bring the computer here.” With this thought in his mind and a yawn, he slowly fell asleep to the noise of the rotating diesel generator.

The next morning, Chen Xu woke up and felt cramps all over his body. It was very tormenting for him.

“F*ck this.”

He held his breath and sat up. His muscles were sour and numb. “Uhh, I’m going to die from this.”

He had not done physical work for a long time, and he seldom exercised. Having moved so many things yesterday, he was overworked, and the sequelae had now arrived.

“Is this really a dream world?” This was the nth time he was doubting the authenticity of this incident.

It was hard to imagine that everything in this world and the surreal pain and soreness of his body were all simulated in a dream.

He took a deep breath and got off the bed.

“Either way, I should go stock up on more resources.”

This suspicion gave him a profound sense of crisis. In case that all of this was not a dream but something happening in reality, that he was the only one person left in the world, in order to get along better, he had to make preparations in advance.

Bearing the pain of his sore muscles, he ate some food and went out along with some tools.

In addition to food, there was one thing that was very important – medicine. These were life-saving items. Other resources could wait for another time, but medicine had to be collected first.

From this moment onwards, he felt that he couldn’t regard this entirely as a game. Instead, he had to seriously think about the ways to survive in such a post-apocalyptic world.

It was seven in the morning and the sun had risen.

Chen Xu woke up and looked at the poster on the ceiling, depicting a female celebrity whose name he couldn’t remember. Two seconds later, he sobered, sat up, picked up the pen, and wrote the number “31” on the wall.

The entire wall was filled with numbers from 1 to 30. It would mean that he had been here for a whole month.

He put down the pen, went to the mirror, picked up the razor, and carefully scraped the stubble that had just grown out.

He then entered the washing closet to brush his teeth and wash his face.

After cleaning himself, he came out of the office.

There was a table next to the corridor, and on the table there was a rice cooker. Under the lid, there was porridge that was still fuming hot.

He had put in the rice last night. The time was set for it to cook automatically so that he could feast upon it the moment he woke up. It saved him a lot of hassle.

Paired with crispy fried peanuts, he finished half of the porridge. He felt very comfortable with his stomach full and warm.

After finishing breakfast, he cleaned up the utensils and put them back in place. He took out the small book that he carried with him and flipped it open to have a look. Written in it were all the things he had to do.

After having a quick glance, he picked up a pen and circled two items on the list.

Diesel fuel is almost used up.

Look for vegetable seeds.

Subsequently, he closed the book, stuck it back in his pocket, took his stuff, and went out.

Before going out, he swapped the power source to a battery pack and switched off the diesel generator.

In order to extend the life of the diesel generator, he assembled a battery pack as a backup power source. Whenever he left, he would use the battery pack to supply power.

“The weather is nice.”

Walking out of the restaurant and looking at the clear skies, he felt that his frame of mind was also cleared up.

On the road outside the gate, there were two rows of cars. There were luxury sports cars like Ferraris and Porsches, vans like the SAIC-GM-Wuling, and medium-sized trucks from Isuzu.

He walked into a nearby shop and pushed out a trailer full of oil drums. He had converted the shops facing the street into warehouses for storing various resources.

Chen Xu pushed the trailer to the front of a blue Isuzu truck and shifted all the oil drums into the vehicle. After moving back and forth a few times and filling almost half of the car trunk, he departed.

He started the car and headed for the road on the right.

In the past month, he had cleaned up the surrounding roads. This was by no means a small operation. There were too many cars in this city. Some of the cramped roads were completely sealed off by cars. It took him a lot of work to clear a road that could be used for driving.

“There are gas stations everywhere, so no worries about that. Vegetable seeds, however, will not be an easy catch. Maybe I’ll start off at that vegetable market,” he thought while driving.

Modern urbanites couldn’t do without vegetables for even a single day, but as for growing vegetables on their own, there probably weren’t many who did that. When he was in elementary school, he helped his grandfather who lived by the countryside to harvest rice. Vegetable seeds, however, were something he had never seen before.

All meat and no vegetables every day was intolerable.

In the past month, the only vegetables available to him, which could barely be considered vegetables at all, were potatoes, tomatoes, and bean sprouts. He was going to puke if he had to eat any more of them.

He never thought that one day he would be so hungry for green leafy vegetables.

…

Half an hour later, Chen Xu stopped the car a few hundred meters away from the vegetable market. This area had not been cleaned up yet. The road was stuffed with cars and he couldn’t get through at all.

He grabbed the tool bag, got out of the car and walked over.

Even from afar, he could smell the rotten scent coming from inside the market. He only dared to walk in after putting on a gas mask.

After ten minutes, he ran out of the market as if he was fleeing from something. The pungency inside was terrible. It was unbearable even with a gas mask on. There were traces of rotten vegetables and meat all over the place.

He went back to the car feeling a little blue. “Must I really go to the suburbs?”

Not many vegetable patches could be found in modern big cities. All of those were shipped from the suburbs. He even found several vegetable bases in the suburbs on the map.

However, the nearest vegetable base was 30 kilometers away from where he was. If he wished to clean up a road, just thinking about the amount of work made his muscles ache.

Finally, he took out the notebook that he carried along and jotted, ‘Go find seeds at vegetable bases’, leaving this matter for a later time.

Next, he went to the nearest gas station and filled all the oil drums.

Such oil drums had a capacity of about 30 liters. After being filled, they would weigh nearly fifty pounds. He took a total of fifty empty buckets. He filled up all of them and then transported them back to the car, spending more than two hours altogether, and tiring himself out.

If it had been a month ago, he absolutely could not have accomplished such work. Moving just a few barrels would already have left him with a broken wrist. This was all courtesy of his training by doing a lot of physical work every day for a month.

After finishing his work, he took a chair and a folded table from the car, found a shaded place, and sat down. From the backpack he always carried, he took out a tablet, placed it on the table with a holder, and opened a movie.

He leaned back on the chair, loosened up the mug, and leisurely drank tea while watching a movie.

After hard physical labor, he would always reward himself in such a way.

Moments of relaxation always passed by ever so quickly. In the blink of an eye, he was done with the movie.

Chen Xu took a look at the time. 11:40 a.m. About time for lunch.

He dragged out a gas-jar, gas stove, pots, and pans from the car, and started to cook on the side of the road. Every time he went out to work, he would bring along a complete set of these things and cook outside at noon instead of running around and wasting time.

Washing the rice, cooking the rice, washing the vegetables, cutting the vegetables, tossing them into the pan…

After a while, food was ready. He prepared two dishes, potatoes with sliced beef and garlic fried bacon.

He sat right in the middle of the road and finished his lunch.

After a half-hour break, he hauled down a folding bed from the car, placed it at a cool place, put on headphones, a blindfold, and took a nap while listening to soothing music.

…

Chen Xu slept until he woke up naturally. By the time he woke up, it was already three o’clock. He stretched out comfortably.

Since he started working, he rarely got to enjoy such leisure. In order to make money, his whole person was like a tightened clockwork spring. Even if it was the weekend, he was just taking a breath. He was never able to relax completely.

He packed his things, moved them back into the car, started the engine, and set off once again.

He drove all the way to the river, parked the car, walked to the river with a few fishing rods, found a suitable place, fixed the bait, and one by one flung the lines into the water.

Subsequently, he fixed the five fishing rods at a distance. He got a stool and sat next to them, watching them float on the river and waiting patiently.