Ch 19: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

This was the first time Hao Zhenye had said so much to Fu Qing.

She signaled with her eyes for him to let go. He froze for a moment before releasing her, but his gaze remained fixed on her, rare agitation flickering in his eyes.

So he was not as indifferent as he looked.

When she had first hired them and explained the situation, Fu Qing had barely spoken about herself. She had only said that it was one year before the virus outbreak, that she had gathered a group of students to teach them how to survive the apocalypse.

It was not strange that Hao Zhenye, lacking key information, had not put things together.

On top of that, he was taciturn and kept to himself. Even if he had questions, he likely buried them deep inside.

Bai Tang and the other two had, during mealtimes, asked Fu Qing about things here and there. Only Hao Zhenye had remained like a sealed jar, who knew how many matters his own temperament had delayed.

Fu Qing barely hesitated before deciding to tell the truth. “As far as I know, humanity only lasted five years.”

No embellishment, no softening. She laid the fact out plainly before him.

He stood there for a full five or six seconds. “…Is that so.”

Fu Qing waited patiently. “Finished asking?”

A flicker of something wavered across Hao Zhenye’s face, so fast it was almost an illusion. He quickly steadied himself. “No. You didn’t answer the first question.”

And you?

How long did you live?

“Five years,” Fu Qing replied. Seeing the undisguised shock on his face, she remained calm. “Anything else?”

“…”

Hao Zhenye studied the young principal for a long moment, then slowly let go of her arm. “No.”

Fu Qing nodded, picked up the bag of peaches hanging from a nearby branch, and prepared to leave.

What was the use of surviving five years? Even after rebirth she was still grinding like a wage earner.

How exactly was she supposed to earn more points? What a headache.

Distracted, she wiped a peach on her hoodie and was about to bite into it when her vision was suddenly blocked by a large light screen.

【Completed: Side Quest “Improve Interpersonal Relations – The Fierce PE Teacher”】

【Requirement: Gain “Hao Zhenye’s” recognition. (Completed)】

【Reward: 150 Teaching Points】

Fu Qing nearly bit her tongue. “…?”

She hesitated and glanced over.

Hao Zhenye stood with his hands behind his back, watching the students chasing each other across the field, as if he were not looking at her at all.

The tension in his profile had returned to the cold severity of a drill instructor.

No one but Fu Qing knew what quiet shift had taken place within him.

She watched him for a moment, then turned away and took a large bite of the peach.

Sweet juice burst across her tongue. For some reason, she felt in a good mood.

*

【Building Upgrade】

【Add “Climbing Safety Devices” to All Buildings?】

【Cost: 100 Teaching Points】

Fu Qing tapped “Yes.”

One hundred teaching points vanished instantly from her balance. It made her chest ache.

In the blind spots of everyone’s vision, unnoticed by anyone, the tops of every building across Fangzhou University suddenly sprouted more than a dozen fixed anchor posts.

They looked as if saplings had grown straight out of the concrete, encircling each rooftop. On every side were several anchor points, already connected to safety ropes.

The ropes hung down to reachable height at ground level. Treated by the system, they were even sturdier than standard outdoor climbing ropes, capable of enduring long exposure to wind, rain, and sun while maintaining high tensile strength.

The system issued another notification:

【Obtained: Wearable Safety Harness x100】

【Stored in System Space】

Upgrading a single building’s safety system granted 50 harnesses. Since she upgraded all at once, an additional 50 were included, for a total of 100.

These items were placed into a game-like system inventory, from which Fu Qing could retrieve or store them at will.

It was worth noting that only items purchased from the system shop or related to the system could be stored there.

The ten realistic zombies she had suddenly produced in front of Hao Zhenye earlier had also been kept in system space beforehand.

Fu Qing took out a harness. Its design was lighter than the typical leg-loop climbing harnesses used for mountaineering and would not hinder running.

Before each PE class, students would just need to put them on. Once they reached the building, they could clip directly into the safety rope’s carabiner.

With practice, the action would take no more than three seconds.

With the system backing it, safety was guaranteed.

After confirming everything, Fu Qing found Hao Zhenye, explained how to use the safety ropes, and stored the remaining harnesses in the sports hall’s storage room for him to distribute as needed.

When Hao Zhenye took the ropes, he looked slightly stunned, as if he could not fathom where she had gotten all of this in barely half an hour.

But perhaps still immersed in the shock she had delivered earlier, he did not question her this time. He simply responded with a complicated “Mm.”

Each class at Fangzhou University lasted two hours, divided into two sessions with a ten-minute break in between.

When the first half of PE ended, Hao Zhenye gathered the students, had them put on the harnesses, and led them to a random building to demonstrate how to use the safety ropes.

*

After resolving the sudden situation, Fu Qing returned to the principal’s office and began considering how to use the remaining 100 teaching points.

After some thought, she pulled out paper and pen she had bought over the weekend and decided it was time to make a serious plan.

It had been a long time since she had written by hand. At first, her strokes were stiff, but soon the characters regained their shape, flowing smoothly.

She had almost forgotten that as a child, under her parents’ urging, she had practiced calligraphy for a long time.

She glanced at the crooked handwriting in the first few lines and continued writing.

…

First, expenditures.

One: excluding herself, there were currently four faculty members on campus. Their monthly salary totaled 13 teaching points.

This was not much, and nearly three weeks remained before the first payment was due, so it did not require immediate concern. But as staff numbers increased, this would become the system’s only fixed expense, and she would need to remember to reserve enough points each time.

Two: campus construction costs.

Within this year, besides completing instruction, Fu Qing also needed to renovate the campus to prepare for the apocalypse. Because these renovations involved housing large numbers of students and their parents, they would have to rely on the system. In other words, they would consume a massive and unpredictable amount of teaching points.

Her pen paused. She marked that line heavily.

If she ignored the students and their parents, she could perhaps save a huge amount of points. But without a second thought, Fu Qing crossed out that possibility.

As the virus progressed into its later stages, infections increased, evolution accelerated, and the traits zombies displayed became more and more bizarre. They even developed an instinct to track human scent within a certain range.

One person alone could never withstand a disaster like that.

But with students and parents added in, thousands of people together could form a small settlement. Within it, labor could be divided harmoniously, risk-response capacity strengthened, endurance extended.

A few thousand people might look insignificant on the world map, like a ladle of water in the ocean, but Fu Qing had a persistent feeling: what she could not accomplish alone might turn out differently with the others at Fangzhou.

If the system had chosen to bind her and let her start over, was it not precisely because there was a possibility of changing the ending?

Third, supplies for the apocalypse.

In other words, stockpiling.

This was the first thing most apocalypse protagonists did after rebirth. Fu Qing would not neglect it.

She planned to stockpile mainly in these categories: food, clothing, consumables, medicine, generators and radios, common tools, energy sources, and weapons.

This part did not need to factor in students for now.

Once a warehouse was built, she would allocate part of it for student use and remind them in advance to stock up themselves and find ways to bring supplies to campus.

In addition, Fu Qing would prepare extra materials for emergencies. At present, the system shop and mission rewards already included many related items, such as the 100 medical supply crates rewarded in the “Build a School Hospital” quest.

Completing such missions as much as possible would save a considerable amount of money.

Teaching points were extremely precious. During the stockpiling process, unless absolutely necessary, she did not plan to use points. She would rely on her own savings to purchase things privately.

She also needed to keep an eye on whether the system shop sold firearms or other large-scale lethal weapons.

To defend a shelter housing thousands, cold weapons alone would never be enough. And there was no way she could acquire large quantities of gunpowder or chemical materials on her own without attracting official attention.

If none were available, she would have to wait until after the apocalypse erupted, when social order collapsed, and then find another way.

Finally, the fourth expense: recruiting teachers.

The pencil spun lightly between her fingers before she stopped, troubled.

Although this semester’s schedule had already been arranged, she did not intend to keep using it until the end of term.

Time was far too precious. For example, a stockpiling course simply did not have enough content to sustain half a year, an entire semester.

Her original plan had been to replace or add some courses after midterms, depending on the situation.

Therefore, when recruiting teachers, she hoped to find people as versatile as possible, or at least with two or three skills. Otherwise, once a course ended, the monthly salary paid to that teacher would become a burden.

And she would never fire teachers once their course concluded. That would be no different from discarding someone after they had served their purpose.

The higher the requirements, the harder they were to meet.

And card-drawing, which depended entirely on luck, made expenses impossible to predict.

Fortunately, the students were still in the adjustment period of the new semester. The demand for new courses was not urgent.

…

Fu Qing employed the tactic of postponement. After the fourth point, she marked it heavily, then drew a dividing line and started a new section.

After expenditures came income.

Aside from her savings, Fu Qing’s other income mainly came from missions of various types.

From her observations, while the system’s missions appeared random, they were not without pattern.

They could roughly be divided into several categories: main storyline missions, which seemed to appear at special nodes; campus infrastructure; interpersonal relations and teacher evaluations; student education, demonstrated through assessments; and daily unexpected incidents.

There might also be mission types she had yet to encounter.

In addition, what concerned her most was something the system had “casually” mentioned earlier: “Any action that helps alter the ending of human extinction and world collapse may be rewarded.”

So far, Fu Qing had made no progress on that front and found no clues.

When she first bound the system, it had said the virus outbreak was the destined endpoint of this timeline reset.

If she could not change the outbreak itself, that left only saving people after it began.

But if she waited until then, would it not already be too late?

If the system was saying this now, it meant there had to be something she could begin working on immediately, one year before the outbreak.

Yet she could not reveal anything about the apocalypse to people outside the campus…

Fu Qing spun her pen unconsciously and suddenly recalled her previous suspicion.

But without more evidence, she ultimately decided to note it down and pay closer attention to anomalies in the news.

As for what she could do now…

The noise from the PE class outside briefly drew her attention. A decision began to take shape in her mind.

…

When listing missions, she was reminded of something and checked her teacher interface again.

Student favorability had risen slightly, breaking past five percent from just above zero.

What had happened?

Fu Qing was puzzled.

After thinking it over, she could only attribute it to her climbing demonstration earlier, but she truly did not understand why that would increase favorability.

What she did not know was that during the ten-minute break, a student from the previous PE class had already rushed to the forum and posted:

—[Suddenly kind of regret that the principal doesn’t teach personally. I want to take her class.]

The post was quickly drowned in question marks. Some asked if the original poster had a fever and fried their brain. Others asked whether they had masochistic tendencies.

Only two or three scattered students, also slacking during PE, chimed in to agree, saying Fu Qing’s explanation had been easy to understand. One even said they felt encouraged and suddenly gained a bit of confidence.

Recognition of teaching ability was also part of the favorability metric.

Fu Qing had little awareness of her image in the students’ minds and could only rely on experience from playing games.

In games like this, favorability usually had different thresholds. Since the system had specifically issued a mission emphasizing twenty percent, she tentatively treated twenty percent as the first special node.

After that, would the next nodes also be at intervals of twenty? Twenty percent, forty percent, sixty percent, one hundred percent?

She wrote four words on the paper: recognition, respect, affection, trust, and aligned them under four imagined thresholds.

From initial recognition of strength and character, to willingness to place full trust, this was her guess at what each stage represented.

At the current rate, the first threshold did not seem far off.

Thinking of the thousand teaching points waiting at that milestone, Fu Qing felt rather pleased.

With the current situation sorted out, she made a decision and closed her notebook.

The school lacked many facilities, but few were urgently needed. Since she had just purchased the realistic zombies and upgraded building safety systems, she decided to keep the remaining hundred teaching points for emergencies.

She tapped her cheek lightly with the eraser of her pencil and looked around the office, feeling a sense of calm.

To sit undisturbed in a room, using pen and paper to plan for the future, such an ordinary day was something countless people had longed for after the apocalypse arrived.

Only after losing something did one learn to cherish it.

But just a few seconds later—

Smack!

A sharp slapping sound, accompanied by violent rattling of the glass window, shattered the office’s tranquility.

Without turning around, Fu Qing felt something go splat against the window.

She slowly swiveled in her chair and saw a flattened, terrified face pressed against the glass.

A safety rope dangled above, swaying in the wind, locking him firmly at the height of the principal’s office window.

Judging by his expression, he probably wished he had simply fallen instead.

Fu Qing: “……”

The boy’s heart was dead. The light had left his eyes. “Principal, if I say it wasn’t on purpose, that my foot just slipped, will you believe me?”

Fu Qing was silent for a moment, watching him cling to the glass with both hands and feet. “Are you planning to maintain this posture while we talk?”

The boy shook his head frantically. “No no no—”

“I’m leaving. I mean, I’m climbing away right now.”

He adjusted his position, sticking out his backside and groping downward with his toes for a foothold, nearly missing once.

When he finally found one, he let out a huge breath of relief. “Then I’ll just—”

“Wait.” Fu Qing pointed to the smudge shaped exactly like his face. “Wipe the window before you go.”

The boy: “……”

Fu Qing watched as he despairingly used his sleeve to scrub away the face-shaped smear that matched him perfectly, then flattened himself and shuffled off.

Excellent. She could already foresee Fangzhou’s future “unique scenery” gaining another feature.

Aside from uppercuts everywhere and late-night reading sessions straight out of feel-good web novels, there would also be people swinging and climbing like monkeys through the campus jungle.

She consoled herself: at least this proved the new safety equipment was reliable.

Those hundred points had not been wasted.

₊˚.🎧📓✩