Happy First Day: Reborn.
Where’s my knife?
Jiang Muyun groped around beneath herself.
She remembered that someone had just twisted her arm until it broke, and the dining knife she had been holding had been driven into her own back.
The dining knife wasn’t particularly sharp. It had practically been forced into her body.
It hurt.
But Jiang Muyun didn’t care.
Every part of her body hurt. One more wound made no difference.
In the first year of the apocalypse, Jiang Muyun would cry for two hours over having a piece of flesh sliced off.
In the second year of the apocalypse, when Jiang Muyun discovered her arm had been cut, the torn flesh had already stuck firmly to her clothes.
By the fifth year of the apocalypse, Jiang Muyun could already take out her treasured needle and thread, stitch up her own wound, and sing herself a song for comfort—comfort for having used up one precious strand of fine cotton thread.
Now, in the tenth year of the apocalypse, Jiang Muyun didn’t care whether her hand was broken or not.
As long as she wasn’t dead, as long as her hand could still move, she would pull the knife out of her own body and stab to death every living thing that wanted her life!
So, where was her knife?
Jiang Muyun felt around for a long time, but found nothing.
Not only did she fail to find the knife, she also realised that something seemed wrong.
No, not just wrong.
Very wrong!
Jiang Muyun instinctively flipped over and sprang up, wanting to assume a posture suitable for attack.
Bang—
With agile movements, Jiang Muyun flipped over the bed guardrail and smashed forehead-first onto the dormitory’s tiled floor.
Jiang Muyun touched her forehead, then looked at her hands, momentarily stunned.
These hands were fair and slender. The nails were neatly trimmed, rounded and clean, with a healthy pink sheen. On the knuckle of the middle finger of her right hand was a hard writing callus.
Familiar, yet unfamiliar.
Just like her surroundings.
Jiang Muyun lifted her head and looked around.
A four-person dormitory, with beds above and desks below. The other three desks were piled with thick stacks of books, and scattered daily necessities had been placed in the corners, most of them still unopened.
West University dormitory.
A place she had only lived in for less than two months in her previous life.
Sitting cross-legged on the cold tiled floor, Jiang Muyun stared blankly at her phone for a while.
I’m back.
As she thought of those four words, she almost couldn’t stop herself from laughing out loud.
It was now August 20th, 2023, in the Blue Star calendar. The day before military training began at West University in Hua Country.
Because her adoptive father had passed away, Jiang Muyun had delayed her arrival at school. Before she could even walk out of the shadow of grief and get familiar with her roommates, Blue Star had welcomed the apocalypse.
Following this small opening, Jiang Muyun slowly tore open her memories.
Right now, she was the only one in the dormitory, because her roommates had all gone to eat lunch. They would push open the door amid laughter, then ask her if she needed any help.
At that time, Jiang Muyun had been somewhat withdrawn. Without even thinking, she had rejected their kindness.
And then… then, one month later, a gust of wind that blew in from above the Arctic Ocean brought an abnormal drop in temperature across the entire world, pulling open the curtain on Blue Star’s apocalypse.
Disasters followed one after another. Her roommates were picked up by their families at the first moment after the disaster arrived.
Before leaving, at a time when a single bag of bread could sell for hundreds of yuan, they hid their snack box in Jiang Muyun’s wardrobe.
Those little snacks became the life-saving food that helped her survive the early stages of the apocalypse.
Jiang Muyun had been forced to become a lone survivor in the early stages, and later actively chose to remain one. She worked hard to cherish her own life and struggled through ten years in the apocalypse, finally making her way back to her hometown and saying, “I’m back.”
Then she died because some rich wastrel took a fancy to her looks.
The tenth year of the apocalypse!
And there were still people trying to assault a lone survivor!
No matter how hard Jiang Muyun thought about it, she could not believe she had actually died for such a reason.
Forget it. At least before she died, she had taken her first clean bath in ten years, and she had successfully stabbed to death the culprit who had provided the bathwater.
Jiang Muyun recalled the situation at the time. She felt that she had truly done her best. Besides, she had returned home. She could not exactly say she had died with regrets.
If there was any regret, it was probably the half fantasy novel in her bundle.
She had hugged the first half of that book and read it for seven or eight years, but before she could find the second half, she herself was gone first.
She wondered whether the One Hundred and Eight Treasures had ruled Earth in the end.
Jiang Muyun patted her backside and climbed to her feet. She found her counsellor’s phone number and called, saying that her current mental state was worrying and that she hoped to apply for suspension of studies.
This time, if the apocalypse still arrived on schedule, at least she would have the chance to prepare in advance and face this nightmare.
The counsellor on the other end knew Jiang Muyun’s situation. She hesitated for a moment, but in the end swallowed back her words of comfort and only sighed softly.
“I’ll help you handle things on the school’s side. Come over later and sign the form.”
Jiang Muyun agreed.
After hanging up, she rolled up the bedding she had only half-spread out, then used a plastic rope someone had left behind to tie it up firmly and fix it to the handle of her suitcase.
Fortunately, she had only arrived today and had not had time to unpack the rest of her luggage. Otherwise, she would have had to pack everything back up again.
Suspending her studies was not some bizarre matter. The procedures went very smoothly. When Jiang Muyun dragged her suitcase over to sign, she even ran into the roommates she had been fated to meet but not fated to live with downstairs.
When the girls learned that she was suspending her studies to recover from illness, they were all rather surprised. But since they were not yet familiar with one another, they tactfully did not ask any further questions.
One round-faced girl took out a set of car keys and asked with concern, “Are you going home now? My car is parked at school. With this much luggage, it’s so inconvenient for you to go alone. I’ll drive you. Are you local to Xi City? Or are you going to the train station? The airport?”
The other two also echoed, “That’s right. We’re all roommates. Let us see you off together.”
It seemed they all thought she had dragged her sick body to school, only to realise she really couldn’t manage it and had no choice but to suspend her studies.
Their words carried a hint of cautiousness. They even thoughtfully avoided the matter of “being ill,” only saying that she had a lot of luggage and that it would be inconvenient for her to carry it alone.
Jiang Muyun smiled and waved her hand. “No need. My family will come and pick me up. Thank you.”
After thinking for a moment, Jiang Muyun took out her phone again. “Let’s add each other’s contact details. My illness isn’t serious. Maybe I’ll be back in a few days.”
When the three girls heard her say that, they were quite happy. Not only did they exchange contact details, they also pulled Jiang Muyun into the dormitory group chat and said they hoped she would recover soon and return to school.
Jiang Muyun smiled and agreed, then waved goodbye to the girls she did not really know.
After experiencing ten years of the apocalypse, Jiang Muyun felt that her moral bottom line had only been maintained at the level of “still human.”
For her to go around now saying that she had been reborn and that the apocalypse was coming was absolutely impossible.
But when the first signs of the apocalypse began to appear, she was still willing to pretend to be someone with inside information among a few friends, spread a few rumours, and encourage everyone to buy more supplies.
After finishing the suspension procedures, Jiang Muyun did not immediately go home as she had said.
Suppressing her urgency, she changed subway lines several times and arrived at the outskirts of Xi City. After bargaining with someone for a while, she rented a remote small warehouse.
The province where Xi City was located, X Province, was a major agricultural province. Jiang Muyun wanted to buy the main grain she needed most here before returning to Nan City.
For a large metropolis like Xi City, with a permanent population in the tens of millions, even if Jiang Muyun bought dozens of tonnes of rice at once, it would not attract anyone’s attention. Even if someone did notice, she would already be a thousand li away by then.
There had been far too much madness caused by food in her previous life. Just treat Jiang Muyun as timid, but when it came to “not exposing one’s wealth,” she did not dare to be careless.
If, when famine arrived, she happened to encounter an “acquaintance” who recognised that she had once stockpiled rice and flour, that person would only need to shout, “She bought several tonnes of grain before!”
They would not even need evidence. The starving crowd would riot immediately.
And Xi City was more than 1,500 kilometres away from Jiang Muyun’s hometown, Nan City.
After the apocalypse arrived, that distance of more than 1,500 kilometres would become an impassable chasm.
Not to mention, this matter was also related to her greatest secret—
Her space.
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