Jiang Ning remembered death before she remembered her name.
Blood. Hunger. Darkness. The rotten breath of people who had stopped being people.
"Ah..."
Jiang Ning shot upright in bed.
Sweat rolled down her forehead. Her eyes were empty for one breath, desperate for the next, and then sharpened as the room around her came into focus.
This was her apartment before the apocalypse.
The phone on the bedside table kept ringing.
Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
She grabbed it with trembling fingers.
September 14, 2029. 9:32 a.m.
More than a dozen unread emergency alerts warned that super typhoon "Kitchen Knife" was expected to make landfall on the coast before dawn on the seventeenth. Wind force could reach level fifteen to nineteen. Several days of torrential rain would follow.
Jiang Ning stared at the date until her eyes burned.
Wasn't she dead?
Hadn't she died in the man-eating darkness of the end times?
Another alert came in at 9:37.
She pinched her arm with all her strength. Pain tore through her skin. It was not a dream.
She had really returned.
Three days before the typhoon that opened the apocalypse.
No joy rose in her chest. Only an exhaustion so deep it nearly swallowed her.
Typhoon. Flood. Extreme cold. Extreme heat. Earthquakes.
Every stage had been hell. What was there to celebrate about living it again?
But since she had returned, was she supposed to sit here and wait to die?
No.
Never.
She splashed cold water on her face. The girl in the mirror was young, pretty, and still full of collagen. She had not yet been starved into a ghost by three years of disaster.
Her gaze fell on the jade pendant at her throat.
It had been on her when she was abandoned at the hospital as a newborn. Later, Yang Weicong had coaxed it away and given it to the campus beauty, Su Mengyao.
In her previous life, Jiang Ning had once fainted from hunger. Through the blur of her vision, she had seen Su Mengyao take an ice cream out of that pendant and lick it clean while the world outside rotted.
Jiang Ning's breath turned cold.
She took a blade, cut her finger, and let a bead of blood fall onto the jade.
Light burst out.
When she opened her eyes again, she stood inside an empty apartment with no front door. It had water and electricity, two bedrooms, a living room of about eighty square meters, and beside the balcony, a ten-square-meter patch of black soil.
In the living room, a holographic timer floated in the air.
01:55:13.
So this was the space that had let Su Mengyao live cleanly and beautifully through the apocalypse.
And it had been stolen from her.
Jiang Ning left the space. A house now existed in her mind. As long as she focused, she could sense everything inside it.
She tested it with hot water. Except for the balcony and the little garden, the rooms could preserve anything she stored. She could move objects in and out with thought. The timer stopped when only objects entered, but counted down once a person stepped inside.
There was no time to study more.
If she had been given one more life and one space, she had to reverse her ending.
She searched every kind of disaster she could think of and nearly laughed from despair when the answers filled the screen.
Living was hard.
But dying once had taught her something useful: feelings were luxuries. Supplies were life.
She took out paper and began writing a list.
Jiang Ning had grown up in an orphanage. The place looked peaceful on the surface, but beneath it, children fought for food, attention, and a future. She had learned early not to lose money, not to lose face, and not to let anyone take advantage of her.
She had picked cardboard in primary school, worked part-time in middle school, tutored, cleaned toilets, wrote homework for others, sold insurance, made videos, and accepted any job that was not illegal.
After more than ten years, she had saved two hundred thousand yuan.
It had been meant for a down payment after graduation.
Now it was just a number waiting to become supplies.
She cancelled classes, told parents she was sick and hospitalized, settled the tutoring fees, and quietly reminded them to store food and emergency medicine. A few wealthy parents even sent red envelopes. Five thousand yuan came in.
Then she photographed three full pages of medicine and sent them to Zhang Chao, her childhood friend who worked in pharmaceutical sales.
[New rich client. Urgent. Delivery tonight. Give me the broken-bone discount.]
Zhang Chao called five minutes later.
"A-Ning, this list is strange. Are you joking?"
"The money has arrived. The client only wants the goods tonight."
She transferred fifty thousand yuan and hung up.
The next stop was the city's largest outdoor supply store.
The shop was closing down, and everything was on clearance.
Jiang Ning bought two assault boats, four inflatable rafts, earthquake and fire first-aid packs, tents, fire axes, climbing ropes, binoculars, radios, waterproof flashlights, and high-capacity solar chargers.
Life-saving supplies could not be sloppy.
The owner saw a big customer and enthusiastically recommended jackets and sleeping bags.
Jiang Ning asked, "Do you have anything that can handle minus sixty or seventy degrees?"
The owner froze. "This is the south. People wear short sleeves in winter."
"I'm going to the Arctic for research."
He did not laugh. He called another seller and found polar cold-weather suits and mummy sleeping bags in another province. They would arrive by express the next afternoon.
Jiang Ning bought two sets without blinking.
At a repair shop, she bought siphons and barrels. Private buyers could not buy diesel, so she filled the car at gas stations, drove to blind spots without cameras, siphoned fuel into barrels, and repeated the process until she had five hundred liters of gasoline.
Then came anti-cut clothing, stab-resistant suits, body armor, winter clothes, military coats, thermal underwear, scarves, gloves, snow boots, slippers, quilts, toothpaste, lighters, hot-water bags, alcohol stoves, gas stoves, induction cookers, insecticide, disinfectant, water-purifying tablets, menstrual pads, and twenty thousand heat packs.
She swept through fruit markets, medicine cartons, charcoal sellers, gas canisters, and coal-ball shops until the sky went dark.
When she finally returned to the apartment, she was so tired her bones hurt.
But the space was full.
And that meant she could breathe.
For now.
Because in three days, the first storm would arrive, and every person who had once taken from her would still be alive.