Closing the door softly behind me, I walked over to the white and pink princess desk at the other end of my room.
Now that I had the beginning of a plan, I needed to map it out better. I'm sure that a therapist would have a field day with me and my need to have a plan for everything and at least two backup plans, but this was what I needed to do to be sane.
Pulling out the white chair, I sat down and pulled open the top drawer.
Inside was a pink notebook with a glittery cover and a matching pink pen with a fluffy pompom on the end. I stared at both items for three full seconds in disgust before I forced myself to pick them up.
The notebook felt expensive in that useless way that rich people seemed to like. It had thick paper and an embossed cover that probably cost more than I used to make in a week... but if you liked pink, this was the perfect thing.
But no matter how bad the notebook was, the pen was worse. It was the kind of thing a 10 year old girl would love and would think was cute.
I hated the color pink. Always had.
It was impractical, drew attention, and signaled weakness in a way that made people underestimate you for all the wrong reasons.
But this body's previous owner had clearly loved it, and the room was full of it—pink curtains, pink and purple throw pillows, pink jewelry boxes lined up on the dresser like soldiers.
In fact, there was so much pink that If I suddenly started buying everything in black or gray, someone would notice. Someone would comment. And comments led to questions I didn't want to answer.
So the pink would stay for now, and I'd phase it out slowly over the next two months.
Replace one pillow at a time.
Buy a black notebook next week and leave this one half-finished on the desk where Xu Zhenlan or Zhou Chenghai might see it. Make it look natural. Make it look like the spoiled girl was just getting bored with her aesthetic.
I opened the notebook to the first blank page and clicked the pen. The pompom bounced a few times and I resisted the urge to rip it off.
What I did not write was the timeline.
There was no dates, no "May 6th, 2130," no "Stage 1: Zombies," no "Stage 2: Bioweapon."
That information stayed in my head where it belonged, because the second I put it on paper, it became evidence, and evidence could be found....evidence could be questioned.
And I had no interest in explaining to anyone how I knew the world was going to end in exactly fifty nine days.
So instead, I wrote what anyone looking over my shoulder would see as the obsessive planning of a girl with too much money and too much time on her hands.
Supply lists.
I started with food.
I wrote 'rice' at the top of the page, and then beneath it: 500 kg minimum. Next was the beans—black, kidney, pinto, chickpeas—I would need about 300 kg total.
As much as I hated them, canned vegetables, canned fruit, and canned meat were also a priority.
I didn't bother with brand names or preferences. In ten years of surviving the first apocalypse, I'd learned that taste didn't matter when you were starving, but monotony could kill you just as surely as hunger.
Eating the same thing for months until your body rejected it, until you couldn't force another bite down your throat—that was how people died.
It wasn't from starvation like most people thought, but from the slow refusal of their own bodies to keep going.
So variety mattered, but only if I had enough of everything to rotate through without running out.
What mattered was calories, and quantity, and the fact that I was 99% sure that nothing in my space would ever spoil. I heard stories of a cup hot coffee would still be hot three years from now, that a fresh apple would still be fresh, and I was banking on that being the same with mine.
If time didn't exist in there, that meant that I could take everything and never worry about waste.
And on the off chance that I was wrong, I would include different things for a Plan B.
I wrote down quantities that would make a doomsday prepper look reasonable.
Cooking oil, 100 liters.
Salt, 50 kg.
Sugar, 50 kg.
Honey, 20 kg.
Dried milk powder, protein powder, vitamin supplements. I added a note beside the vitamins: Get everything. Stock it all.
Next to go on the list was water.
In my past life, clean water had been worth more than gold by the end of the first year since water type powers weren't strong enough to provide water for everyone.
That meant that people killed for it, factions went to war over a single uncontaminated well, and I wasn't going to be caught without options.
I wrote: Bottled water, 10,000 liters minimum.
Water purification tablets, 5,000 count.
Portable filters, 10 units.
Collapsible water containers, 50 units.
I paused, tapping the pen against the page, and then added: Bleach, 100 liters.
Multiple methods meant multiple backups. If the tablets ran out, I had filters. If the filters failed, I had bleach and the knowledge of ratios to make it work. If the bottled water was somehow compromised, I had three other ways to make water safe.
Redundancy wasn't paranoia—it was the difference between surviving and dying. And I could carry all of it at once.
Once food and water had been accounted for, I got started on the medical supplies.
If someone thought my lists of food and water was extensive, that was nothing compared to my need to hoard medical supplies.
I had watched people die from infected cuts, from fevers that could've been stopped with antibiotics, from blood loss that could've been prevented with proper bandages.
I had seen a man lose his leg because no one had antiseptic, and I watch a woman while she died from pneumonia that would've been nothing in the old world.
I wasn't going to be that person. I wasn't going to die from something preventable.
So I wrote everything I could think of, and then I doubled what I considered to be a reasonable amount.
Antibiotics—amoxicillin, azithromycin, ciprofloxacin—500 doses each. Painkillers—ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin—10,000 pills total. Bandages, gauze, medical tape, tourniquets, suture kits, scalpels, scissors. Antiseptic, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol. Insulin, epi-pens, antihistamines, antacids, anti-diarrheal medication.
Everything. I wasn't going to run out.
I wasn't going to suffer through something treatable because I'd been too cautious in my stockpiling.
Finally, weapons were last, and I underlined the word twice.
To me, any weapon was a good weapon.
A spoon could kill if you knew how to use it. A rock could crack a skull ( I had first hand experience with that). A piece of glass could open an artery.
In my first life, I'd survived with a kitchen knife and a metal pipe I'd pried off a collapsed building.
I had killed zombies with both, and I'd killed a man who tried to take my food with the pipe.
It had been efficient but messy, and I'd spent a week scrubbing blood out of my clothes because I didn't have spares. That was desperation, not strategy. That was survival by accident, not by design.
This time, I had money, I had time, and best of all, I had access.
This time, I was going to arm myself properly.
I thought about the warehouse I had found in my past life.
It was one of those 'Holy Grail' things that every survivor was searching for desperately, but only I found. It had been whispered that the head of one of the most feared Triad's had been buying weapons of every kind before getting ready to sell it to foreign countries.
Too bad for him, the apocalypse hit before he could, but his shitty luck was my... even shitter luck. After all, it was yet another reason why Meilan was so determined to kill me in my past life.
But it was too good of a thing to pass up in this life, no matter what happened as a result.
I knew for a fact that there was tanks, surface-to-air missiles, every gun imaginable from handguns, to rifles, to shotguns, to assault weapons, and even sniper rifles. There was also things like grenades, explosives, swords, machetes, axes, knives in every configuration.
And now I knew the location of this 'Holy Grail'. The warehouse was still there, still full, and still waiting for me to find it.
And I was going to take it all.
I needed all of it. I needed redundancy in my weapons the same way I needed redundancy in my food and water. If one method failed, I had ten others. If I lost a gun, I had a hundred more. If a blade broke, I had a thousand replacements.
I leaned back in the chair and looked at the list. It was long. It was excessive. It was exactly what I needed.
Because survival wasn't about having enough.
It was about having more than enough, and then doubling that, and then doubling it again.
Before, every time I thought I had enough food, I went hungry. Every time I thought I had enough water, I ran out. Every time I thought I had enough weapons, I lost one or broke one or had to leave it behind when I ran.
So this time, I wasn't going to stop at "enough." I was going to take everything I could put in my space, and then I was going to take more. I was going to fill my spatial storage until there wasn't room for another grain of rice, and then I was going to figure out how to fit more anyway.
I clicked the pen closed and set it down on the notebook. The pompom bounced one last time, and I ignored it.
I stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the perfectly manicured lawn, the tall iron gates, the quiet street beyond.
Soon, the world would collapse, but this mansion would still be here. And I would still be here, in this room, with enough supplies to live comfortably for decades.
Alone.
That was the point. That was always the point.
I had paid my dues in the last life—ten years of scraping, of barely surviving, of watching everything slip away. This time, I was taking it all. Everything. And I wasn't sharing it with anyone.
I turned back to the desk and looked at the notebook one more time.
Step one: grocery stores..... scratch that... bulk grocery stores.