Ch 114: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

“Attention all residents: In accordance with the Emergency Response Regulations, starting today at 18:00, civilian gas supply nationwide will be fully suspended. Please shut off the gas valve in your home immediately…”

Zhao Ya stood by the window. Through the gaps between residential buildings, she could see a convoy moving slowly along the empty road in the distance.

In the middle, escorted by two dark green armored vehicles, an emergency broadcast truck drove on, looping the same announcement over and over.

The broadcaster’s voice was steady, clearly meant to soothe the public, yet it still filled her with wave after wave of despair.

“Attention all residents…”

It played once in standard Mandarin, then again in the local dialect. The two versions repeated as the convoy gradually drove farther away.

Only then did Zhao Ya close the window.

Just before it shut completely, she heard a heavy sigh from somewhere above or below. “Ai…”

Zhao Ya bit her lip, locked the window carefully, and left the balcony.

In the living room, Grandma Zhang was holding a picture book and telling Yaya a story. Seeing Zhao Ya come back, she hurriedly set the book aside. “Well? What did it say?”

“First water and electricity rationing, now they’re shutting off the gas too. I think the internet won’t work before long either.” Zhao Ya was deeply troubled, but with a child present she didn’t dare let her face show too much despair.

Grandma Zhang, on the other hand, was perfectly calm. “We stocked up plenty at home. No need to panic. Besides, it’s not like we’ve never lived through days like this.”

She wasn’t like the younger people who couldn’t live without the internet. Translated on Hololo novels. In a moment like this, she was the steady one.

Zhao Ya sat down beside her mother, leaning into the warmth of her body as her own agitation slowly eased. Noticing Yaya looking at them with curiosity, Zhao Ya suddenly felt her cheeks heat up and stood. “We can’t waste time. We need to hurry and get a few more things ready.”

Last night, after learning power rationing was coming, she’d cranked the fridge to its coldest setting and shoved some meat inside, freezing it rock hard along with the frozen foods below. Translated on Hololo novels. She’d even copied a method she’d seen online and frozen a few bottles of mineral water in the storage room, trying to extend the food’s shelf life as much as possible.

Then she’d started eating through the things on the upper shelves, the stuff that didn’t store well.

But there was too much. Even with three people eating, they couldn’t finish it all, and with food so precious they didn’t dare eat freely. They could only rack their brains for other ways to preserve it.

First, relying on freezing food solid, then keeping it that way until the next one-hour window of electricity to freeze it again in a cycle was completely unrealistic. One hour wasn’t enough to refreeze food properly, and repeated thawing and freezing would breed bacteria inside. Zhao Ya didn’t dare do that.

She could practically foresee it: fresh produce, along with the frozen foods in the fridge, would be consumed within a few days. After that, her family would have to live on whatever snacks and canned goods they had stored indoors.

Even so, they were still better off than most.

In the homeowners’ group chat for Zhao Ya’s complex, some young people living alone had already begun begging for food this morning. Everyone else was worrying too, wondering what they’d do once the vegetables at home ran out.

Watching the messages, Zhao Ya remembered there were still a few packs of instant noodles at her place. Since she and her family likely wouldn’t be able to go back anytime soon, she privately messaged a young woman in the group she’d interacted with a few times, giving her her address and the password for the keypad lock.

If she got truly desperate with hunger, she could go to Zhao Ya’s place and take the instant noodles and whatever rice, noodles, seasonings, and the like were left. At least it might help her hold on a little longer.

Just be careful not to run into zombies.

The girl nearly cried with gratitude.

Listening to the repeated thanks, Zhao Ya’s feelings grew complicated. If not for Song Rushuang, she and Yaya might have ended up in the same situation.

And now, on top of rationed water and electricity, even gas was being cut. People who were already worried became even more so.

Zhao Ya wanted to cook up everything that couldn’t keep in the fridge, but her cooking skills were only average. She knew only a few simple home-style stir-fries, and in a summer without air conditioning, cooked dishes wouldn’t stay fresh for even a day or two. She stood in the kitchen, helpless.

At some point, Grandma Zhang came in. One look at Zhao Ya and she knew what she was thinking. With a sigh, she shoved her toward the door in disgust. “Go on. While there’s still hot water, wash Yaya’s body and hair. Later, if you want hot water again, it’ll be a hassle.”

Kids weren’t like adults. Their resistance was weaker, and bathing in cold water could make them sick easily.

Their bathtub was already filled with stored water. Translated on Hololo novels. It wasn’t drinkable, but it was enough to heat a basin and wipe down properly.

Zhao Ya had nearly forgotten that, but she still hesitated. That was when Grandma Zhang said, “Leave the kitchen to me.”

She opened the fridge and took out a chunk of pork belly wrapped in a plastic bag. “I’ll render some lard. Then I’ll divide out some flour and rice and toast it. I’ll use another portion to make travel cakes. Once they’re dried, they’ll keep for a while. When you’re done washing her, come help me knead the dough.”

“Toast flour?” Zhao Ya understood the rest, and she knew raw rice could be toasted too, but toasted flour was something she’d never actually eaten.

“It’s yóuchámiàn,” Grandma Zhang explained. “You toast the flour with animal fat, sugar, and salt. You can even add sesame and peanuts. It’ll keep for quite a while.”

Zhao Ya’s eyes lit with understanding.

She knew yóuchámiàn. Back in the Long March, soldiers were said to carry it too. It stored well, and when you wanted to eat, you just mixed it with hot water into a paste. If you didn’t have hot water, you could eat it dry or mix it with cold water. Nothing could be more convenient.

Animal fat, salt, sugar, all of them were good for extending shelf life.

Sealed properly, toasted flour could last at least half a year. That wasn’t much worse than raw flour’s shelf life, but when it came time to eat, it was far easier to prepare than flour.

Rice kept longer than flour, so before the gas shutoff they should prioritize processing the flour first, then the rice. Toasted rice could keep three to six months. The remaining flour could be turned into travel cakes, which would keep one to two months as well.

Handled this way, with all the flour processed and only part of the rice toasted while the rest was left as-is, their staple food supply for at least the next year would be secured.

And if they got sick of it, they could always change things up with other foods.

Thinking that far, Zhao Ya finally relaxed.

While she’d been floundering, her mother had already arranged everything neatly and methodically. Zhao Ya felt a little ashamed. In this household, it seemed like the only thing she was good for was labor.

She was a graduate-school alum, yet she still couldn’t match her mother, a little old lady who’d only finished middle school. Was that really fair?

Why couldn’t schools offer a few classes that taught life skills alongside academic knowledge?

Zhao Ya sighed to herself.

But at least it was her own mom, not someone else. She quickly got over it, rolled up her sleeves, and went to wrangle her daughter into a bath.

*

“Damn it, damn it, why won’t it load?”

Shi Guangyao clutched his phone, scrolling down again and again, trying to refresh the webpage.

All he could see was the small loading circle spinning endlessly while the page itself remained blank.

He checked once more. The network was still connected, but the signal had already dropped all the way from 5G to 2G.

“There’s still electricity, so why is there no internet?!” Shi Guangyao roared.

And it wasn’t just him. The same thing was happening in households everywhere.

Civilian networks hadn’t been completely shut off yet, but once power rationing began, it was practically the same as losing internet altogether.

Because of their high energy consumption, 5G base stations were the first to be turned off. As for data centers, once servers lost power they required a full reboot, which took at least half an hour. In the end, the actual usable internet each day might amount to less than thirty minutes, and even then the speed was painfully slow. Sometimes refreshing a page took several minutes, making it exhausting just to check the news.

Phone calls and text messages with family and friends still worked. Watching videos online, however, was out of the question.

But just last night, things hadn’t been like this.

When the stay-at-home order first began, people couldn’t go outside, and nearly all information exchange moved online. Every app had been bustling with activity. Yet overnight, not only did webpages refuse to open, even when they finally loaded people often discovered that during those offline hours, there were barely any new posts on the front page.

Users who had once been active gradually fell silent. Some had encountered danger. Some were busy preparing before water and electricity were cut. Others simply chose to spend their limited time with family and friends instead of chatting with strangers online.

During that brief half hour when the internet worked, it hardly mattered whether social media posts could even be sent out. Even if they were posted successfully, how many people would actually see them?

Influencers stopped chasing traffic and returned to real life.

Once power rationing began, the internet became a deserted wasteland even earlier than the streets.

It inevitably sparked panic.

A kind of panic born from living in a bustling city yet slowly losing all connection with others.

For people living alone and lacking basic life skills, the fear was even more overwhelming. Suddenly trapped at home without preparation, they had no idea what to do and could only seek answers online.

How long food lasted. How to cook it. What needed to be preserved. What tasks should be prioritized before water and power outages…

Without search engines, they either didn’t know these things at all or only had vague notions.

Not just people in their twenties. Even many in their forties and fifties depended heavily on the internet.

With the sudden loss of access, some people might not even know how to get to the nearest hospital once they stepped outside.

In fact, voices online last night had already predicted that the government might soon restrict water and electricity supplies. Many major bloggers urged people to store water, fully charge electronics and power banks, and download essential information in advance.

But no one expected rationing to arrive so quickly, or to be implemented so drastically.

One hour of electricity per day rendered the internet almost meaningless.

As for water rationing, although there was no fixed usage window, the flow from taps had been reduced to a mere trickle. Someone calculated that even if the faucet ran twenty-four hours a day, it would collect less than twenty liters of water.

Twenty liters per household. What did that mean?

Just for survival, each person needed at least two liters of drinking water daily. The UN refugee standard set the minimum total daily water usage per person at 7.5 liters.

Living alone was one thing. But for larger households, without stored water they would drop to bare survival levels within days relying solely on tap supply.

Some people online tried to reassure others, saying these were only temporary measures. Rationing was better than a complete shutdown. Once the zombies were cleared, normal supply would gradually resume.

But the reassurance did little to ease public fear. Zombies still needed to be eliminated, but people still needed to live. If they couldn’t survive until the end of the apocalypse, what use was clearing the streets of zombies?

In just a single day, the situation had deteriorated this far. People finally realized reality was worse than they had imagined. Even the state could no longer fully maintain everyday life, only doing its best to preserve the minimum conditions for survival.

Everything else, people would have to handle themselves.

Once that realization set in, many began to break down emotionally.

Including Shi Guangyao.

Since yesterday, he had followed online instructions and made some preparations, but it was far from enough.

The flood of information online the night before had been overwhelming. New posts appeared every second. Afraid of missing something, he bookmarked countless articles and videos that were too long to finish immediately, planning to watch them later one by one.

After staying busy all night yet absorbing little actual information, he took a short nap. When he woke and tried to continue, he was met instead with news that electricity would soon be cut.

Shi Guangyao felt like the sky had collapsed.

After waiting forever for power to return, he rushed to open his bookmarks. But whether from bad luck or not, an entire hour passed without a single page successfully loading.

Just as his frustration peaked, the desk lamp beside him suddenly went dark.

The power was out again.

“AHHH!!” Shi Guangyao nearly exploded with rage.

He grabbed the desk lamp beside him and hurled it straight at the closed bedroom door.

Just then, the bedroom door was pushed open. Shi Guangyao’s mother, who had just stepped inside, nearly got hit by the flying desk lamp. She hurriedly dodged aside. Watching the lamp smash against the doorframe and shatter into pieces, her heart sank halfway.

But remembering why she had come, she swallowed and gently urged, “Guangyao, come out and eat something.”

“The broadcast outside just said gas supply will stop this afternoon. Your father and I hurried to cook whatever food we still had at home. You barely ate anything yesterday. At least fill your stomach.”

In truth, it wasn’t only Shi Guangyao who had barely eaten. His parents hadn’t eaten much either.

There had still been electricity last night, so the food in the refrigerator could be stored. To conserve supplies, dinner had only been a bowl of vegetable soup with leftover rice from two days before.

More than ten hours had passed, and they were already starving.

When they heard that natural gas would soon be shut off, others felt despair, but a flicker of relief unexpectedly passed through his parents’ hearts.

If the gas was about to be cut, then at least they finally had an excuse to cook.

Thinking this, his mother tugged nervously at her clothes and forced a smile. “You need to eat well to have the strength to get through this. You eat first. We’ll eat later. Go on.”

Shi Guangyao, still bent over and breathing heavily from throwing the lamp, sweat soaking his hair and sticking it greasy against his face, obscuring half his eyes, glanced at his mother gloomily.

Without saying a word, he strode past her and headed straight for the dining room.

His father was setting out bowls and chopsticks. He hadn’t dared cook much, only stir-fried the remaining cabbage and sliced in a palm-sized piece of meat.

Steam rose from the rice and vegetables on the table. He swallowed repeatedly at the sight.

Shi Guangyao sat down, seemingly satisfied. He scooped up a mouthful of rice and asked, “What are you planning to do with the rest of the food?”

His father answered cautiously, “We’ll cook whatever can’t keep first. Some flour we’ll make into flatbreads and dry them so they last longer. The frozen food needs to be cooked soon too. After cooking, we’ll put it back in the fridge and let the remaining cold air keep it cool. It should last another couple of days. We’ll finish it within that time.”

Many of those frozen items had been bought at the supermarket just two days earlier because of their long shelf life. Now they couldn’t even be stored. His father felt heartbroken.

As for other preservation methods besides dried flatbread, neither he nor his wife knew much.

They had heard of roasted rice and toasted flour, of course, but had never made them themselves. How much oil, sugar, or salt to add, they had no idea.

If they didn’t try, the food might last a few more days. But if they ruined it during preparation, that would be an even greater waste.

So they didn’t dare experiment lightly.

Even though there was still some time before the gas shutoff, they suddenly didn’t know what to do.

Shi Guangyao frowned at the frozen food laid out on the counter, his heart aching as if bleeding.

Fortunately, although fresh food wouldn’t last as long as expected, they had bought plenty of longer-lasting supplies. Thinking of the biscuits and canned goods in the storage room, he sighed and reluctantly accepted that some food loss was inevitable.

Though he still resented Fu Qing, seeing many people online describe their own shortages over the past day made him realize his family had far more food than most. The comparison finally restored his sense of balance, and he began to feel smug about his own foresight.

He shoveled rice into his mouth, eating more than half the dish of vegetables by himself before finally putting down his chopsticks, still unsatisfied.

His parents watched from the side. Though hungry themselves, seeing their son devour the food like that filled them with a complicated tenderness.

Only after he finished did they serve themselves rice, dividing the small remaining portion of vegetables between them.

His father didn’t even waste the leftover soup, mixing rice into it and slurping the bowl clean.

It was rare for the family to sit quietly together like this. Seeing that Shi Guangyao seemed calmer after eating, his mother hesitated before speaking.

“Guangyao… something’s been off about you these past two days. Tell your father and me honestly. Did you already know this virus was going to break out?”

The preparations he had made were too deliberate, and his reactions afterward had been strange as well. Over the past two days, his parents had quietly discussed it and arrived at this suspicion.

“If you knew… why didn’t you tell us earlier?” she asked, her eyes reddening.

Just last night she had learned that her sister and father had both been bitten to death by monsters.

His father’s side of the family had fared no better. His elderly parents had gone out the day before and were still missing. They barely knew how to use smartphones. The chances of survival seemed slim.

Realizing their son might have known everything in advance yet never tried to warn anyone, focusing only on dragging them to the supermarket to stockpile supplies for himself, resentment inevitably grew in their hearts.

Even if he was their son… they still had other family members.

Their neighborhood had descended into chaos early on. Security was poor. From yesterday afternoon until late into the night, screams and cries for help had echoed nonstop from downstairs.

It chilled them to the bone.

Shi Guangyao’s mother simply could not understand how her son could remain so cold, listening to neighbors die one by one without saying a word.

Shi Guangyao had been in a good mood after eating, but at her words, the smile vanished from his face. He looked at them coldly and suddenly asked, “Are you blaming me?”

“I… we…” They were left speechless.

He recalled the struggles of the past year. He had once wanted to tell them, but found himself unable to. That pain had gradually turned into anger at his parents’ helplessness.

They were his parents, yet they couldn’t help him with anything.

He had no one to confide in. He had endured the entire year alone, even bringing them along to stockpile supplies so they could live well. And now they still thought he hadn’t done enough?

What else was he supposed to do? Knock on every door and try to save neighbors he barely knew?

He let out a cold laugh. “If they died, that’s because they were useless. They deserved it. What does that have to do with me? Why should I go out of my way to help them?”

“But… your grandparents and your aunt have always loved you so much…”

The mention only made his mother think of her dead sister and father again. Tears streamed down her face. His father turned away silently.

Shi Guangyao watched them expressionlessly, about to say something cutting, when someone suddenly knocked on the front door.

A voice came from outside.

“Is anyone home?”

₊˚.🎧📓✩