Zhang Yi knew the warehouse district like the back of his hand — a grid of corporate storage halls, big and small. If the goods here were intact, he could feed thousands. The only question was whether anything had been left.
He pried into an RT-Mart warehouse with a crowbar and found neat, empty aisles. "They transferred it out," he muttered, unsurprised. In a disaster the powerful get priority; ordinary people are left to scrape. He'd already cleared Walmart's stock days before — proof his instincts paid off.
Most warehouses had been picked clean. What remained were the hulks: cars, excavators, shipping containers, pallets of construction material. Not ideal food, but useful in other ways. He shrugged and started hauling things into his spatial store — ten luxury cars (a Phantom among them), a couple of excavators, heavy equipment. If nothing else, it was nice to own the fantasy.
A practical problem nagged him: fuel. The snowmobile needed gasoline, and the city's largest gas station lay buried under ten meters of drift. Human hands couldn't dig that out.
Then he remembered the excavators he'd just stored.
He pulled a twenty-ton excavator from spatial storage. Years moving forklifts and cranes in warehouses turned into immediate advantage — he climbed into the cab and took the controls like he'd been born to it. The machine ate the snow, sinking a meter with every pass. No shovels, no waiting.
While the hydraulics chewed through the drift, Zhang Yi munched chocolate and scraped warm snow into his thermos — hot water froze in minutes, so it was a luxury. Survival was ugly and blunt, but foresight kept him alive, and in a world of frozen scarcity, that counted for everything.