Happy Fourth Day: Creating an Uncle Out of Thin Air
Following the auntie’s directions, Jiang Muyun found Huimin Processing Factory.
The place was not hard to find. Mainly, villagers were driving back and forth outside the factory, transporting grain in a lively, bustling scene. All she had to do was follow the vehicles.
From what Jiang Muyun saw, Huimin Processing Factory was quite large, and its business scope was broad. It handled rough processing for all kinds of agricultural and sideline products.
Jiang Muyun casually found a worker who looked relatively free and struck up a conversation. As soon as she said Auntie Feng Cui had sent her, the worker immediately showed an “I understand” expression and led her into an office.
“Dad, someone’s here to buy grain. From Auntie Feng Cui’s family.”
Inside the office was a middle-aged man, holding a booklet and writing something down. Without lifting his head, he replied, “Got it.”
Then he looked up and asked, “Young lady, what do you want to buy?”
Jiang Muyun stretched her head out to look outside. “Fifteen tonnes of rice, ten tonnes of white flour, and two tonnes of peanut oil. If you have sesame oil and rapeseed oil, one tonne of each as well. Uncle, do you sell anything else here? Starch, noodles, that sort of thing?”
After hearing the quantities Jiang Muyun listed, the middle-aged man did not immediately agree. Instead, he said, “Auntie Feng Cui’s family, right? Let me check first.”
He flipped through a few pages of the booklet and took out a calculator to tap away for a while before saying, “We have rice and flour, as well as cornmeal and starch. But if you want to buy oil, you’ll have to pay the processing factory’s price. Auntie Feng Cui’s family doesn’t have enough volume.”
Jiang Muyun asked the price and only felt that things really were cheaper without middlemen. She promptly paid the deposit.
After leaving her phone number and warehouse address, Jiang Muyun asked again, “Uncle, are there any farms nearby? I want to buy some chickens, ducks, fish, and the like.”
The middle-aged man pointed her in a direction. “Just follow the road that way. It’s not far. They’re all around that area, and they’re owned by the same boss. If you want to buy cured meat or anything like that, it’s also nearby.”
Jiang Muyun first went to the aquaculture area. Seeing that the prices here were cheap and that there was also a quick-freezing storage room, she directly bought prawns and had them quick-frozen before being delivered to the warehouse.
Although the person in charge thought this girl was rather silly for buying them alive only to freeze them to death, he did not ask anything more. He simply treated it as a city child not knowing better and agreed with a wave of his hand.
After Jiang Muyun went to the fish processing factory and ordered a large batch of fish that had just been killed but not yet finely processed, the person in charge became even more convinced of this idea.
After buying the river produce, Jiang Muyun found the poultry farm and bought two hundred old hens, two hundred old ducks, and one hundred old geese.
She wanted to buy the poultry fresh to stew into soup, which was why she bought them alive and freshly slaughtered.
As for chicken thighs and wings, Jiang Muyun planned to buy all of those as frozen products.
Ordinary common meats were not like fish and prawns. With Jiang Muyun’s cooking skills, after one round of cooking, there was not much difference between fresh and frozen. At least Jiang Muyun’s tongue could not taste it, so frozen products were better for saving money.
So after hesitating for a while at the livestock slaughterhouse, Jiang Muyun ordered four adult pigs, one cow, and one sheep.
They would be bought and slaughtered on the spot. Once they were processed, the goods could be delivered immediately. They even thoughtfully included a rack for hanging the meat.
By the time Jiang Muyun went to the neighbouring processing factory to order a batch of cured and pickled products, then rushed back to the warehouse to receive the seasonings, she happened to run into the delivery truck from the farm.
When the two delivery vehicles met, the drivers chatted for a few sentences and discovered their destination was the same, so they drove over side by side.
Jiang Muyun followed the truck carrying the cured products back. Along the way, she chatted nonsense with the driver. By the time the two drivers had finished helping unload the goods, they were still reluctant to leave and insisted on hearing the entrepreneurship story of Jiang Muyun’s second uncle.
After Jiang Muyun paid the drivers’ labour fees and the remaining balance, she saw that the other things had not arrived yet, so she simply continued chatting with the two drivers.
Just as Jiang Muyun was telling the part where her second uncle had been robbed on the road while transporting goods, the seasonings she had ordered that morning arrived.
Along with the truck came several porters to help unload the goods.
The two drivers from the farm had no other work anyway, so they simply helped unload too, listening all the while as Jiang Muyun told them how her second uncle had outwitted unscrupulous merchants.
As soon as this batch of goods had been unloaded, the processing factory’s grain trucks arrived.
The amount of grain was enough for Jiang Muyun to eat for several lifetimes, yet the factory arranged it without even blinking. If not for the time needed to load and unload, Jiang Muyun could have ordered it on the spot and taken it away immediately.
Even Jiang Muyun herself had not expected that she would only need one day to buy most of the main types of food.
At this speed, if Jiang Muyun wanted to, she could even take tonight’s high-speed train back to Nan City.
From Xi City to Nan City, in her previous life, she had stumbled along for ten years.
But now, she only needed a few hours. It could not be more wonderful.
After the goods were unloaded, Jiang Muyun handed out all the cigarettes she had bought during the day. She paid every driver and worker a very sincere labour fee, and even agreed with the two farm drivers that if they met again next time, she would introduce them to her legendary second uncle.
Jiang Muyun crouched in the warehouse and counted her treasures again.
After receiving the takeaway order from the small restaurant, Jiang Muyun shut the warehouse door.
The last glow of the sunset gradually faded, and the warehouse lost all light.
Jiang Muyun pulled the tattered curtains over the warehouse windows. After confirming that no one nearby was paying attention to this place, she placed her hand on the goods.
The mountains of goods piled up inside the warehouse vanished into thin air bit by bit as Jiang Muyun moved.
Only Jiang Muyun knew they had all been transferred into another floating space.
Rice, flour, and other staple foods were placed in one pile. Fresh produce was placed in another. Common seasonings and spices were separated. Liquids and solids were also separated.
There was also an area Jiang Muyun had specially marked out alone. It held a pile of huge plastic meal boxes, which were the dishes she had ordered from the small restaurant.
This time, ordering meals from the restaurant gave Jiang Muyun inspiration.
After the apocalypse, fuel would also be scarce. And even if she could stockpile a large amount of fuel in advance, the smell produced by cooking in a place where people gathered could easily become her death warrant.
If she bought ingredients and cooked them herself, the time she had to make cooked food would only be the one month before the apocalypse arrived, and the first two or three months of the apocalypse when people still had enough stored food.
And from that, she would still have to subtract the time she spent buying supplies.
She really did not have that kind of spare time.
Rather than risking her life to cook later, or guarding a pile of supplies she could only look at but not eat, it would be better to spend more money now and store a certain amount of cooked food to get through the early period when crowds gathered.
Once order completely collapsed, she could avoid the crowds and become a lone wanderer like she had in her previous life.
The only problem was that having no one to talk to was truly suffocating.
So mental food had to be fully prepared! Jiang Muyun thought. She still had not found the ending of the novel she had read in her previous life. Later, she needed to search the protagonist’s name and see if she could find it.
Jiang Muyun spent half an hour putting all the results of her entire day’s work into her space. Then she turned and left the warehouse, gently locking the warehouse door.
Jiang Muyun returned to the guesthouse and forced herself to sleep.
Early the next morning, seeing that there was no one at the front desk, she placed the room key on the counter, left a note for the owner, dragged her luggage, and stepped onto the road home.
The things she had bought in Xi City looked numerous and complicated, but on Jiang Muyun’s shopping list, they were only the most basic and easiest items to purchase.
Her stockpiling plan had only just begun. There was still a huge pile of things waiting for her.
According to the national broadcasts during the early stage of the apocalypse, the cold wind that swept across the globe had been detected in late September.
It had only brewed for a few short days before spraying outward in all directions, dragging the entire Blue Star into the vortex of doomsday.
If Jiang Muyun wanted to buy supplies in bulk, the safest time was before late September, before that abnormal air mass attracted attention.
There were many things to do.
Fortunately, she was going home.
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