Jing Shu's family followed the rules to the letter. They locked the RV doors while eating, and thank god she'd installed a fresh-air system back when she was prepping for the seventh year's "super rotten egg gas." Without it, that stench outside would've made it impossible to swallow a single bite.
Lunch was Grandma Jing's potato patties from the morning, reheated in the oven with sausage, ham, chilies, and mushroom chunks, then smothered in gooey cheese. Jing Shu scooped up a piece, the cheese stretching in strings, and popped it into her mouth. It was like the cheese was dancing on her tongue, so rich and savory it made her eyes flutter.
She really ought to make more cheese. Suddenly, she was craving a bubbling pot of cheesy seafood hotpot. That meant milking the cow every single day though. Well, that job could only be dumped on Wu You'ai.
The side dish was roasted chicken. She'd wanted to try beggar's chicken, but the roasted version turned out just fine. Marinated for an hour, brushed with her secret sauce and honey, then baked until the skin was golden and crispy, the chicken was so juicy it dripped when she tore off a piece. The crunch of the skin alone was divine.
There were roasted oysters too, topped with minced garlic and bird's eye chilies fried in oil. The soul of the dish was the oyster sauce. Each oyster sizzled as it baked, the garlicky fragrance filling the air. Slurping one down in a single bite, the briny sweetness lingered long after.
That meal was pure happiness. Afterward, Grandma Jing loaded the dishes into the washer, Jing An tidied the dining area, and Su Lanzhi sorted the food they'd taken out that morning, even setting aside a portion for Wu You'ai, who was still on patrol outside.
Zijin had stayed behind in the Banana Community. The second squad organized patrols to keep order and stop people from digging up corpses in the back hills. The government was paying out virtual coins for every body dug up, and plenty of people jumped at the chance. They'd strip the dead for clothes too.
Zijin was full of energy, convinced it was like before, a race against time to save people trapped underground. Otherwise, why would the government organize teams if the victims were already dead? Just to dig up corpses?
Yes, it really was for the corpses.
In the first year, with droughts and heatwaves killing thousands, the government had fed bodies to maggots for food. In the second year, though the death toll wasn't as high, they still used corpses in scattered experiments.
This third year, those experiments had succeeded. The order came down: recover every corpse. A small reward was added to motivate people, and Jing Shu finally understood—the bodies were being turned into new energy.
She didn't get all the details, just the basics. The corpses were recycled into the artificial sun project. Some were converted into energy, while the fat and oil from refining bodies became what was called corpse oil.
That corpse oil went into emergency rations, those crisp, life-saving energy bars. Nobody knew exactly what they were made of, but she was pretty sure the secret lay in deep-frying with corpse oil. The government probably only distributed them in critical times, when survival mattered more than squeamishness.
After enough refining, the oil became what they called "thousand-times oil," an industrial-grade fuel. It explained how, during the freezing fifth year when every other source of fuel was gone, the government still somehow rolled out fresh batches to stop people from freezing to death.
All of it came from corpse oil.
Every corpse had its use. A human body was roughly 25 percent fat. Malnourished people yielded less, while pigs had up to 70 percent. Add in soybean oil, peanut oil, and whatever else, and the government's so-called "mixed oils" started making sense. Jing Shu suspected those oils weren't missing a key ingredient: corpse oil.
After all, tens of millions of people died in China every year. If their bodies were all processed into energy for the artificial sun and the leftover oil went into food or industry, the savings were massive.
By the fifth year, when a tyrant came into power, technology had advanced enough for him to push something even darker: the "Human-Made Recycling" plan.
If natural disasters wiped out crops and food, so what? Humans could recycle themselves.
That meant reusing human waste. With scientific refinement, feces could be converted back into edible products. Before the apocalypse, a certain island nation had already experimented with "golden poop" food, making edible waste in flavors like banana or chocolate. With a week of cultivation and adjustments, models with perfect diets could produce safe, nutritious excrement that people could actually eat.
Science could even extract usable energy directly from human waste and inject it into the body, creating a self-sustaining cycle.
And the tyrant really made it work. It saved countless people, though he also doomed just as many. He was impossible to judge. Did he care about life, or didn't he? He saved lives, but he also ruined them.
Jing Shu shivered. She wasn't in any position to say if that path was right or wrong. She couldn't think of a better way to keep humanity alive. But she swore one thing—she'd never eat food from outside again.
She'd barely had a moment of peace when the park grew noisy. Survivors poured in from the Banana Community's back hills, group after group streaming inside. Staff scrambled to assign them to filthy areas, some shoved straight into the garbage zone to clean up. Those people looked longingly at the clean, open parking lot, but as soon as they heard the steep price in virtual coins, they gave up.
By late afternoon, the Ling Mountain crowd arrived too, and the arrangements dragged into the night. The whole park was a cacophony of rumbling tremors, sudden shakes, cries, and wails.
Wu You'ai came back once to eat, then left again. Jing Lai never showed up.
Amid all the chaos, Jing Shu sat calmly, playing with her Rubik's Cube and chewing on a fried chicken leg, as if the apocalypse outside had nothing to do with her.