Chapter 96

Back in her room, Lin Tu let out a sigh of relief. Thank goodness she had the [Peace Token]; otherwise, how could she have bundled up all those supplies and tossed them out before making a run for it?

If she hadn't been quick, and if Malin En had already refused while she was still digging through the Single-Use Backpack, she'd have been stuck in a whole tug-of-war of refusal and insistence—that would have been Lin Tu's nightmare.

In any case, she'd managed to give away the supplies, and her [Envoy of Peace] ability would grow from it. Who knew how much more the [Peace Token]'s supplies would hold during the next disaster...

After a hot shower, Lin Tu checked the surveillance feed, confirmed everything was in order, then lay down and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning, Lin Tu was woken by the butler at exactly eight o'clock.

She thawed some food, washed up, and started exercising. First, she lifted weights in her room, then did a few sets of pull-ups, crunches, standard handstand push-ups, one-arm half handstand push-ups, leg raises, and glute bridges.

Since she always stayed in her room during disasters and couldn't afford to set up a home gym, she'd learned this prison-style bodyweight workout online.

Only the strong deserve to survive—Lin Tu knew this well.

After finishing her first training session of the day, Lin Tu started preparing breakfast.

She was ravenous after exercising, so the whole process was filled with the anticipation of filling her stomach with the ingredients in her hands, giving her a sense of happiness.

First, she cut the thawed beef into strips, then mixed it with egg white, light and dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, and cornstarch, kneading until it was well combined. Then she went to the Back Mountain and picked some green and red peppers, onions, chili peppers, mung bean sprouts, bok choy, and scallions. She washed them and sliced or minced them as needed.

Different vegetables have different names in different cultures. The tatsoi she'd eaten often during the last disaster was delicious, and she'd regretted not bringing seeds when she left. But just a couple days ago, when she was stockpiling supplies at the market, she suddenly learned that the bok choy she'd grown up eating was actually tatsoi—the difference being that bok choy is professionally cultivated, selected for good seeds and picked young, while the tatsoi from the disaster had more mixed varieties, less water, and was older and tougher, so it tasted different. That's why she hadn't recognized it.

It was like seeking something far and wide, only to find it right under your nose.

Lin Tu boiled a pot of noodles, cooled them in cold water, and set them aside. Heated oil in the wok, stir-fried the minced onion until fragrant, added a large bowl of beef strips and stir-fried until they changed color, then added the bean sprouts and sliced peppers. Finally, she added half a basin of bok choy, stir-fried until just cooked, then added the noodles and tossed everything together with seasonings.

The soy aroma of dark and light soy sauce seeped into the noodles under high heat, mingling with cumin, five-spice powder, and white pepper, giving off an intensely rich fragrance. Once every noodle was coated with the flavors of onion, peppers, and beef, Lin Tu dumped the fried noodles onto a plate, turned off the heat, and washed the wok in one smooth motion. Within about two minutes, she was sitting by the window, eating noodles while watching the surveillance feed and putting on a TV drama—

Before, she'd been too busy making money and planning for retirement to watch TV dramas. Now she was catching up on classics she'd heard of since childhood, like *Empresses in the Palace* and *The Legend of Sword and Fairy*. She hadn't known what she was missing until now!

Lin Tu was starting to worry: if the real world really did come to an end, and there were no new dramas, what would she do after she finished watching all the old ones?

In between watching, she checked the surveillance feed.

Today, the cruise ship was more "lively" than yesterday. Yesterday, many people had cowered in their rooms, eating what little they had left, so today they had to come out and find food no matter what. The second-deck deck was almost packed, especially near the supermarket and dining hall, where the shelves were empty but the entrances were so crowded you couldn't see the floor—they were all waiting for the official relief food.

The sixth deck also had some crowds, but many people went in empty-handed and came out empty-handed, then headed back to the second deck. Lin Tu guessed there was a small market there, but not much supply.

The real authorities should be the cruise ship's official staff, but for some reason, they hadn't responded well since the first case of plague.

They should make everyone stay in their rooms, Lin Tu thought, then send healthy crew members to check on passengers daily, deliver meals to their doors at mealtimes, to "isolate" and reduce the risk of infection as much as possible.

Instead, they were doing this—Lin Tu quietly watched on her phone as a large crowd huddled together waiting for food, some even laying out bedding near the supermarket and dining hall entrances, planning to stay overnight, which inevitably led to contact.

When she'd taken her first bite of fried noodles, most people's infection levels were 6%–10%. Now, before she'd even finished breakfast and while Noble Consort Xi was still at Ganlu Temple, several people in the crowd had already shown 13%, 17%... It was spreading fast.

Lin Tu sighed and turned off the surveillance.

She couldn't blame these ordinary people. People have to eat; when hungry, they forget everything else.

.

Malin En was busy helping distribute relief food—a piece of bread cut in half with two slices of pickled cucumber, and a bottle of water, that was all a person could get for a day.

She wore a mask, feeling increasingly stuffy. The line was enormous, people packed shoulder to shoulder. Were there really no infected people among them? Malin En looked at those without masks, at their unnaturally red faces, and couldn't help but worry. If any of them were infected, she dreaded to think how far the plague had already spread.

At least she had the food and masks given by that kind lady. Malin En once again silently thanked the anonymous miss. If not for her kindness, she would have been no different from these people by now. At least she still had confidence to hold on for a while. Sometimes, hope was more important than reality.

"Is this all?" The woman receiving supplies complained. "How is this supposed to fill anyone up?"

"Better than nothing," Malin En advised. "At least you won't be starving."

"That's true," the woman said as she took the bread. "My family only has a bowl of flour left; everything else is gone. This morning, I stared at that flour, almost ate it raw. I really don't know what to do—plague and food shortage on top of it all," tears welled up in her eyes. "We're all doomed. I don't know where I'll be tomorrow, and I can't bear to think of how I'll die..."

"It'll be fine." The soldier nearby warned them to hurry along, so Malin En could only offer words of comfort.

Then came the next person in line.

The food was clearly not enough, and almost everyone complained. But they couldn't get past the armed guards on the deck, nor could they afford the inflated prices like the truly wealthy. So they just vented to Malin En.

The more Malin En heard, the more alarmed she became. The situation seemed worse than she'd imagined.

It wasn't just the lower class—many middle-class people had run out of food too. Even those who kept rice, flour, oil, and grain at home had far less than she'd expected. Most people wouldn't last a week on relief rations alone.

At around eight or nine, Malin En finally finished her work. She got an extra relief ration and decided to go down to the sixth floor first to collect the bed rent, then go to the school to give her daughter the tuition and food.

The bottom floor had ten or more people per room. Malin En passed door after door, hearing continuous groans from within.

Her eyes involuntarily glanced into the rooms on either side. She saw faces flushed with fever, foam vomited from lack of food, and trembling and chills from illness. Hunger, disease, and despair cycled across people's faces, as if contagious, filling the entire room with an atmosphere of terror. Malin En didn't take off her mask, but she seemed to smell that awful stench—the unique smell of plague.

How had it come to this in just one day?

Fearfully, Malin En walked forward, deeper into the plague. She saw the man sleeping in her own bunk, his sweat already soaking the entire sheet.

"Are you okay?" Malin En asked.

"Just the flu," the man muttered. "I hope so. Experience from the Great Plague era tells me that plagues spread fast but develop slowly. I've got all the classic flu symptoms. I wonder which damn superspreader gave it to me. If I had medicine, I'd get better soon."

He made some sense. Malin En was about to nod when she heard a curse from inside the room—

"Damn it! Is this water ever going to be clean again?"

Malin En walked further inside. She saw that the plastic tap was trickling a slightly yellow liquid, like diluted pus.

"Let me check? Maybe too much cleaning agent?" With the responsibility of a half-professional, Malin En leaned in and sniffed. Instantly, a heavy hammer struck her head.

Fear tightened like a thin rope around her heart. She could tell—this was the smell of plague!

There was plague pathogen in the water.

.

Dinnertime.

To keep up with her TV drama, Lin Tu decided to braise a pot of duck feet, chicken feet, chicken wings, and beef. She enjoyed the pleasure of gnawing on chicken feet while lying in her recliner, watching the show, and taking a sip of ice-cold cola with lemon slices when she got bored. Midway through, Lin Tu decided to make her life a little more decadent. She paused the scene of Noble Consort Xi laying waste to her enemies, got up, and boiled a pot of luosifen, adding a pack of beef rolls and two fried bean curd sheets.

As the rich broth bubbled and the sour, pungent smell of pickled bamboo shoots wafted out, Lin Tu joyfully carried the small pot back to the table, picked up a chopstick-full of noodles dripping with soup, and was about to resume the drama when she suddenly remembered she hadn't checked the outside situation for nearly ten hours since breakfast—

Lin Tu reflected on herself for a moment, then picked up her phone to check the surveillance.

She swiped through the feeds one by one—everything normal, everything normal... Suddenly, in the screen, she saw, not far from her door at the stairwell, a corpse lying face-down, bent over the stairs like a dog.

Lin Tu was sure it was a corpse, not someone sleeping, because when she zoomed in, she could clearly see white foam bubbling from its mouth, and a filthy rat busily crawling in and out of its mouth, devouring the foam along with its already whitened lips, leaving only disgusting bloodstains.

A woman, blocked by the corpse, stood in terror before it.

And around her, both in front and behind, were rats attracted by the corpse—rats with red eyes, some even with festering sores on their bodies. One of the rats was as big as a cat!