Jing Shu felt a little troubled about this particular logistical issue. In her Cube Space, the female sheep had previously given birth to a litter of seven healthy lambs. She had moved one male and two females to the villa's yard as a visible, plausible flock, while the remaining four lambs stayed hidden within the Cube Space.
The real and growing headache was the prolific black pig. According to everything she knew, pigs usually gave birth to litters of five to eight piglets. But the black sow in her Cube Space, supercharged by Spirit Spring, had astonishingly given birth to twelve. She had moved only two of the squealing piglets to the villa's new pen, leaving a full ten piglets remaining and growing rapidly within the Cube Space.
The villa simply couldn't sustain too many large livestock, not without raising impossible questions. The animals were still small and manageable now, so it was hard for a casual observer to notice the discrepancy, but once the cows, sheep, and pigs grew to full size, this modest villa yard wouldn't suffice. After the apocalypse truly set in, just raising and protecting people would be difficult enough, let alone tending to noisy, needy poultry and livestock.
Even though she had dedicated one entire upstairs room to bags of commercial feed, and there was no immediate worry about animal food at the very start, Jing Shu knew the first year of the apocalypse would bring murderous, unprecedented extreme heat. That would require running air conditioning just to keep the livestock from dying of heatstroke. She had already started storing vast quantities of water, knowing that in a few months, all water would become desperately scarce. If humans were dying of thirst, caring for livestock would become a laughable, impossible luxury. The villa's outdoor animals might survive for a year with careful management, but after that, the relentless waves of natural disasters would make raising them in the open utterly impractical.
Raising ten full sized pigs solely for future family consumption within the Cube Space was also becoming a burden, considering space and feed. Jing Shu decided that in about six months, when societal structures were crumbling but before total chaos, she would discreetly trade some of the pigs and other surplus resources to repay her family debts and reduce her own load. To put it bluntly, in six months' time, in the right trade, one healthy pig could likely be exchanged for something as previously valuable as a small BMW.
No matter what the future held, Jing Shu was determined to repay anyone who had lent her money. At the very least, she wanted them to live decently, to survive well during the apocalypse. Anyone willing and able to lend her such a significant sum in these uncertain times could, in her books, be considered trustworthy and worth protecting.
By now, all types of dried, smoked, and braised meat had been prepared and stored. Her Cube Space was no longer pushing maximum reproduction rates. For a while, to accelerate growth for processing, all the Spirit Spring produced had been immediately consumed by the animals. With the long apocalypse far from over, Jing Shu knew she needed to start conserving some of the precious Spirit Spring for future, more critical uses.
For the general poultry and livestock, she now used a much more diluted mixture, what she labeled Number 5 Spirit Spring, one drop mixed into two full liters of water, which she then mixed into their dry feed. After over a month of careful testing, this formula was proven to strengthen the animals' constitutions, improve meat quality and density, and slightly increase yield. Their growth was only a bit faster than normal poultry while consuming roughly the same amount of feed. This helped significantly slow the reproduction rate, easing the management burden on her Cube Space.
When she had first begun her Spirit Spring experiments, she had left one control rooster completely unexposed to it. Less than half a month later, she found it pecked to death in a corner by an unknown hen. After observation, Jing Shu concluded it had been systematically rejected and killed by the dominant Hen Number 1's flock.
Hen Number 1 itself was a special case. It had been given the stronger Number 3 Spirit Spring dilution, the same one Jing Shu herself now used daily. It was the only animal with this privilege. Every morning now, Jing Shu took it for a run in the nearby hills, treating it more like a pet dog than a chicken, and she diligently cleaned up after it too.
Hen Number 1 didn't disappoint. Flapping its powerful, brown speckled wings with a grace reminiscent of a small phoenix, it followed Jing Shu's heels closely, never straying far. Whenever she paused to stretch or look at the view, it would strut over and nuzzle her legs with clear affection.
Jing Shu: "..."
"What is this?"
She mused to herself, "Other people's apocalypse companion pets are usually something cool like Tibetan mastiffs or German shepherds, strong enough to fight and cute enough to sell. They're impressive to show off. Mine is just a very large, very clever old hen." She felt a strange, indescribable mix of resignation and bemused affection.
The only physical consolation was that Number 1 now weighed a solid 30 jin, roughly 15 kilograms, and looked remarkably imposing, more like a large turkey or a small ostrich. A few mornings ago, during their run, it had suddenly darted into the brush at the mountain's edge and emerged triumphantly with a small, wriggling snake in its beak, as if presenting a gift and asking for a reward or a cuddle. Jing Shu, both horrified and impressed, had given it an extra sip of diluted Spirit Spring. Training it to submit good things, she realized, could be very useful.
Jing Shu now had a plan to train Number 1 more formally, like one would a dog, teaching it simple voice or gesture commands like "sit" and "hit" in hopes that it would become an obedient, unusual guardian.
Managing her Cube Space increasingly felt like playing an intricate, high stakes strategy game. Maximizing efficiency with severely limited space and a finite, magical resource required meticulous, constant planning.
The black fields were incredibly fertile and produced high yields, but the land area was fixed, only six cubic meters of soil. She had to constantly decide how much and what to plant to directly feed her family, how much to grow as feed for the livestock, while also managing the aquatic sections for fish, shrimp, and crabs. It was a delicate balance. Excess Spirit Spring caused waste and dangerously accelerated reproduction, while too little was ineffective for her own strengthening needs.
Currently, her Cube Space felt slightly imbalanced. She had focused perhaps too much on future fruit cultivation for vitamins and morale, so readily available feed for the growing lambs and piglets had become a slight issue. Fortunately, she still had the dairy cow producing milk, which could supplement feed in a pinch.
On the day she processed the beef cow and made spicy beef jerky on stream, her livestream audience count surpassed 500,000 concurrent viewers, all morbidly or curiously drawn to the rare spectacle of slaughtering a whole cow. That day, Jing Shu and her family provided a thorough, practical demonstration, teaching viewers how to use every single part of the cow with minimal waste.
Neck meat was ground and made into hand rolled meatballs, which were then frozen for future hotpot or soup. The meat along the spine was carefully cut into the most tender cuts for premium steaks, all of which were cooked immediately and stored in the Cube Space for her private late night snacks.
The top sirloin was sliced paper thin for hotpot. That very evening, the family enjoyed a lavish beef hotpot feast. Rump meat was set aside for roasting, while the shoulder cuts and large bones were boiled down into a rich, gelatinous stock, which was then frozen in blocks. When needed, a large spoonful of the stock could be melted and cooked with thin noodles, topped with sliced beef and scallions, for a quick and delicious beef noodle dish. The pork belly equivalent, the beef brisket, was prepared as hearty braised beef brisket, offering multiple easy frozen meal options.
The tough but flavorful shank meat was slow cooked until tender, then braised in a savory sauce and sliced to serve cold. Its soft, satisfyingly chewy texture lingered pleasantly in the mouth. Beef offal, like the lamb offal before it, was cleaned, cooked, and frozen. Only items like tripe, which couldn't be stored long, were eaten fresh during the family hotpot meal. For the next several days, as a result, most family meals would creatively revolve around beef in various forms.
Luckily, since Grandma Jing had arrived and taken over the kitchen, she had saved Jing Shu from her own ravenous appetite. Jing Shu now regularly ate double portions of her grandmother's cooking, and over time, perhaps due to the hard physical labor or the diluted Spirit Spring in their water, the entire family's collective appetite had grown noticeably as well.
The front chest meat and all remaining scraps were finely shredded and made into the main event, spicy beef jerky. Jing Shu packed the finished product into 170 of the now standard 2 liter sealed glass containers. Most normal cows barely reached a thousand jin in weight, but Jing Shu's cow, according to the experienced slaughterman, had been deceptively dense and heavy. He had even tried to request the valuable cowhide as part of his payment, but Jing Shu had refused. The thick hide, she knew, would have other survival uses later.
Although the livestream was extremely popular that day, Jing Shu also received tens of thousands of virtual "rotten eggs," the platform's dislike symbol, from viewers who were frustrated. People were anxious, wanting to stock up on practical grain and staples for the coming Earth's Dark Days, yet her stream was focused on luxury meat processing and selling expensive jerky.
She had set a strict purchase limit of 30 jars per customer, which still sold out almost immediately. Jing An was excitedly busy for hours, packing and shipping them out. He might deeply regret this later, during the severe food shortages, that she hadn't made and sold more of the calorie dense jerky.
Back at the villa, the dairy cow was now reliably producing about 50 kilograms of milk daily, a yield slightly higher than the best dairy cows in the United States. In China, a typical high producing cow averaged around 20 kilograms per day. The Spirit Spring had made her livestock exceptionally, almost unnaturally, productive.
Jing Shu used the surplus milk, beyond what the family could drink, to make traditional yogurt curds, known as milk tofu, another preserved food that would store well.
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If you have been reading my historical translations, you probably know I keep a private glossary of ancient China terms in Google Docs. I usually share the link in the chapter comments. I realized some of you read on the app, and copying links there can be a hassle (´･ᴗ･`).
So I am officially uploading the glossary here on Webnovel under The Imperial Handbook: A Practical Guide to Ancient Chinese Society. This will make it easier to access, and I can keep updating it whenever I meet a useful term, office, rank, or cultural note. Whether you are new to history novels or want deeper context, I hope it makes your reading smoother and more fun. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ
If it helps, please add the handbook to your Library and give it a read. While you are there, feel free to add the rest of my handbook series as well:
• The Xianxia Handbook: A Guide to Cultivation and BeyondIn short: for all things Cultivation, Realms, and Daoist magic.
• The Imperial Handbook: A Practical Guide to Ancient Chinese SocietyIn short: for historical topics, courts, bureaucracy, and daily life in the past.
• The Webnovel Handbook: A Guide to Slang, Tropes, and Inside JokesIn short: for community slang, inside jokes, and fun tropes. The cover is ready, chapters will follow soon.
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