Grandpa Jing took another slow puff of his pipe, the embers glowing bright in the dim room, before he spoke. "Wu County is about to get buried by a mudslide. Your Paternal Eldest Aunt and Paternal Second Aunt's families can't get into Wu City right now. They said Wu County hasn't been completely flooded yet, but they can't move until the official relocation order comes down. I asked your father to bring some gifts and talk to people, see if he could claim they are just visiting relatives in Wu City so they could stay here with us."
"Did it work?" Jing Shu asked, setting her mug down on the table.
He shook his head slowly. "No. Even if they sneak in, anyone without a registered address here is considered undocumented. If they caught them, they would be detained. The community has been doing full inspections every few days because they are afraid outsiders will slip in."
He exhaled a long, thin stream of smoke. "So now we can only wait or try to get an officially approved travel permit. Those things cost thousands of virtual coins, and even then, you can't buy one unless your household registration is already here. What scares me is that once Ningshan City sends another wave of people into Wu City, your aunts' families will never make it in."
Grandma Jing looked troubled too. All her children were her flesh and blood. She might have favored Jing An a bit more, but knowing her two daughters were out there suffering—hungry, cold, and without a roof over their heads—made her heart ache. The thought of them being unable to enter the safety of the city was unbearable.
"Ningshan City. That million-level metropolis," Jing Shu murmured. In her previous life, she had lived at the very bottom of society and never bothered herself with such high-level logistics. Back then, people only talked about how much they had worked, how many virtual coins they had earned, or when the higher-ups would announce another rare buffet day.
She did know Wu City had merged several times, absorbing more people every round, even as deaths occurred every day. Beyond that, she hadn't known much. She did remember that Wu City's leader was called the Tyrant. It was like how people in the old world used to only know the country's leader's name but nothing about the mechanics of power.
"Don't worry, Grandpa. Wu County hasn't been completely flooded yet, right? That means they can still live there for another ten days or half a month. Don't panic. I will ask around during this time and see if I can get them some legitimate ID passes."
"Ah, it would be best if the flood never reaches them. Who wants to leave their hometown?" Grandma Jing clasped her hands together, muttering a quiet prayer. She hoped the water would rise slower, that it wouldn't drown Wu County or Banana Community, and that everyone could just stay safely inside their homes.
After that, Jing Shu started telling all the fun stories from her trip, carefully leaving out the dangerous parts. Since she had been keeping in touch every day with messages and video calls, her family didn't feel too anxious. Before dinner even started, she couldn't keep her eyes open and went back to her room to sleep.
Even in her dreams, she was still practicing inside the Cube Space. She also multitasked to reorganize everything within the void. She wrote a new plan sheet, calculating every type of supply down to the cubic meter. By the time the migration happened next year, she would only have seven hundred and twenty-nine cubic meters of usable space, minus the several dozen cubic meters taken up by the farmland.
With the new upgrade adding two hundred extra cubic meters, she wanted to plan carefully what to fill it with. Before the migration, she would have to move all the supplies she couldn't carry into the Cube Space. If she messed up and couldn't fit everything, it's was a disaster.
Now that she had reached the third form and could eat inside the space, that little comfort made her want to adjust her crops again. Even if it cost some Spirit Spring, she planned to stockpile more food so she could eat directly inside the space anytime. That way, she could eat less while traveling, saving supplies for the migration.
Then she discovered another perk of the third form: inside the space, the environment felt wonderfully warm and cozy, like she was basking in gentle sunlight. It was amazing, nothing like the bitter cold of the real world, where temperatures would soon drop to minus seventy degrees and everyone would see their breath with every step.
Crack—!
Jing Shu split open a massive watermelon, easily weighing over twenty kilos, and started digging in with a large spoon. Before, she had always had to sneak food in her house, making sure the smell didn't spread or the sound wasn't noticed by her family. But now, she didn't have to care about any of that. The freedom was incredible.
She wondered if she could cook and store hot food inside the space too. That would be so much more efficient. She decided to try it in a few days. If it worked, she would start using her nights to prep supplies and save her days for other tasks.
As for the six new plots of land from the upgrade, she planted all of them with different fruits, harvesting and storing as she went. Once she got more seeds, she would save a few plots for the rice she had been dreaming about so she could bring it back home before the migration.
The weather in Wu City was getting colder, and the muddy water was rising higher. Cars and buses could barely move through the sludge, but that didn't stop the rich. The wealthy person's joy was something ordinary people couldn't even imagine. To them, there were no obstacles, only minor inconveniences.
Jing Shu clicked her tongue as she sat in a modified Maybach. The engine roared, and the large propellers modified onto the exterior spun wildly. The car crawled through the muddy swamp at a turtle's speed of thirty kilometers per hour.
It was the same driver as before—quiet but with a dry sense of humor—and he was quite proud of the car. He had modified it himself.
Qian Duoduo was picking her up to attend the shareholders' meeting at Xingfu Shiyuan. She hadn't even known about the meeting, but Qian Duoduo had somehow heard she had returned and insisted on pausing everything just to fetch her.
"All the shareholders are waiting for you, miss," the driver said, stepping harder on the gas. Not that it helped much against the resistance of the muck.
"Well, isn't that flattering?" Jing Shu muttered, her lips twitching. "It's just a meeting. What is the big deal? Did they have to drag me out first thing in the morning?"
Yawning, she thought about how her parents had been getting to work this past month using the hover-skates Grandpa Jing gave them. They each used two pedal paddles to navigate the silt. Their own car was useless now. Walking six or seven kilometers every day in this weather was brutal.
Her father had tried using the amphibious shark submarine before. It was powerful and flashy, but the problem was that the mud around here reached thigh-deep. The land mode was too high, the water mode was too shallow, and it would just sink into the muck. It worked, sure, but it was such a hassle—and a total gas guzzler.
"Hey, driver, was this modification expensive? Does it burn a lot of fuel? I was thinking about modifying our car too to make traveling easier. But can it still be restored afterward?"
"Fuel consumption is around twenty percent higher. As for the price, that's hard to say. This one used parts straight from Mr. Qian's private yacht. But restoring it? No, that's impossible. Once it's modified, the car is permanently changed. If you are interested, Mr. Qian still has a few yachts lying around."
"Oh, I will think about it," Jing Shu said. Spending several million just like that wasn't something she could afford. Their car was all they had, and once the ground froze solid and it snowed, it would still be usable in its original form.
"It's just that traveling for the next few months is going to be a pain."
===
Author's Note:
Been a bit busy these days. My dad's chemo cycle started again—once every 21 days. Sigh.