Jude quickly concluded the day's business and went up to the second floor, where he went over the background story of the beta in his mind.
For a whole year before the end, the weather had gone mad, and no one had been able to explain why. Then a virus spread through the air across the world. Many different living beings, humans and beasts alike, were infected by it, and the humans turned into mindless zombies. The virus spoiled food and medicine too, and all kinds of monsters appeared to threaten the handful of survivors.
He closed his eyes. All of the recent happenings could no longer be dismissed as accidental. The weather, the status window, and the strange hills. What this meant was quite clear.
The end was approaching.
The objective of the survivors back then had been to preserve their food and water and to travel through the dangerous zones to find safe areas, while fighting off the monsters. But the safe zones were never truly safe, because the monsters and the zombies could find any place where survivors gathered.
But what if all of it became reality?
For a long time Jude sat there. His eyes went to the window. Children were jumping down from a yellow van and taking the hands of their mothers, who were waiting for them, and on the other side of the street, students were leaving the school, chatting happily with their friends.
It was a quiet day, just like any other, and he could not come to terms with the idea that this world would soon come to an end.
"Then when exactly is it coming?"
There, the end had begun on the first of September.
It was the fifth of August. In just twenty-seven days, he would never be able to see the street in front of his shop again. Monsters that only existed in books and games would appear, and there would be countless lunatics attacking people.
The weather would turn on the world, gas pipes would burst, and the power grid would be cut off. Then there was the virus. Under its terror, the civilization that humanity had kept standing for so many years would collapse.
Very few people would survive the catastrophe. In fact, he was not entirely sure that the virus would not turn him into a zombie as well.
The most dangerous thing in an apocalypse was to reveal himself and all the information he had. Without overwhelming power, exposing his existence was the same as suicide, and that was exactly what had happened in the early days.
Testers who had barely passed the first stage attacked testers who held unique items, without mercy. They did not care about dying, since they could simply start over from the beginning. For now, Jude had to throw away any idea that the other veterans would be as kind to him in real life as they had been in the simulation.
He had been the last one left in the beta. Most of the testers had left early, and what they knew was little more than the first stage and the rough outline of the world.
A slow smile spread over Jude's face. No one else knew what he knew. Every update the Lab had announced, every balance change, and every day of those seven months was still in his head, as clear as if he had lived it yesterday.
"I didn't expect it to be helpful now."
He was curious about who the Lab were, but he would not find any answers.
Only those who prepared for the end would survive.
Jude let out a long breath and tried to calm down and think about what he needed to do.
Weapons, food, tools, medicine and so on came to mind. He had to collect all of it before September, and that meant money.
The store would be of no use yet. As far as he remembered, it sold almost nothing until a tester reached level ten, and there was also a chance that it would not open at all.
He checked his account. There were 102,200 Ecu in it, the result of three years of living frugally after he opened the shop.
Could he store everything he bought here in the house? It might be possible, since it would be hard for looters to break in. But was there any safer place? A place no one knew about, which only he could enter.
Jude opened the status window and stared at it blankly. The hills that Random Teleportation had registered were certainly suitable as a warehouse. And since they were in a different world, it was safe to assume that the virus would not reach them.
There were imps there, but he could fight them and kill them all, and make the hills his own territory. There was no reason to be afraid of them when the world outside would soon turn into hell. The hills would become a safe haven, one that had to be pioneered.
There were animals to hunt for food, and he remembered the sound of flowing water there.
"All right."
He pulled himself together and called out Random Teleportation. As he arrived on the hills and breathed the fresh, cold air, he thought about what he would need to live there.
A tent, weapons, food and water, and many other things. Above all, it was important to buy a great deal of food and medicine, since on this side, the virus would spoil them.
He needed weapons too, and he wondered whether to order them from a workshop abroad. If the virus spread onto these hills as well, he would be forced to live on whatever he could hunt, but he would prepare as much as he could.
The money in his account was not enough to buy everything he needed, so he would have to take out a loan with the house as collateral. He also needed a source of power for when the grid was cut.
A solar generator sounded good. Aside from that, there was also the option of buying a diesel generator and stocking up on fuel, and he had heard that many people abroad used small hydropower generators for electricity.
His thoughts started to run wild, so he returned to his house, took out a notepad, and began to write.