Thirty-three

Over the next two days, she took a trip to the warehouse to collect the remaining items, then immersed herself in the grand undertaking of tilling the land, hoarding water, planting crops, and digging fish ponds.

From 9 PM to 7 AM the next day is eleven hours, which translates to fifty-five hours in the space.

During those two-plus days in the space, aside from sleeping, she worked on the farm. When she got tired, she slowly sorted through the clothes and various odds and ends salvaged from the dormitory.

She and her mother were about the same height, both around 1.7 meters tall, so anything she could wear, her mother could wear too.

There were nine hundred people in the dormitory, with seven or eight thousand pieces of clothing. After finally selecting the best, she kept over two hundred down jackets, over four hundred pairs of thick pants, and over three hundred base layers. The rest were sorted and packed into cardboard boxes to be traded for supplies when the Extreme Cold arrived.

While tidying up, she remembered that there were also quite a few skincare products, cosmetics, and jewelry belonging to the girls in the room where miscellaneous items were stored.

Lotions and creams could be kept for use, so those were left out. Cosmetics probably wouldn't be useful, so she packed them all into cardboard boxes and placed them in the very back.

Jewelry, however, could not be treated so carelessly.

Yi Shui held a delicate gold chain and smiled with pure delight.

Gold and silver jewelry had been very popular over the last two years, and many young people liked to buy it. Most of this pile of jewelry was silver, with a small portion being gold. Although the quantity wasn't huge, selling it would still earn a decent profit.

Moreover, there were two large gold bracelets in the mix!

She had found these on the second floor. She guessed they probably belonged to a young girl from a wealthy family; the dorm managers had mentioned her when they gathered together, noting that she bought three down jackets worth several thousand each in a single month and carried bags costing hundreds.

To Yi Shui, whose monthly living expenses were just over a thousand yuan, this was a textbook definition of a rich person.

She weighed the gold and silver separately using a small electronic scale: 37.75 grams of gold and 436.9 grams of silver. With the gold price recently hovering around 600 and silver at a little over 5, the total value was nearly 25,000 yuan.

She would sell these tomorrow, then buy some shelving units. The dormitory items were fragmented and numerous, so she really needed shelves to organize them.

Right, she also needed to buy some gunny sacks and woven bags. She couldn't just pile up the harvest directly on the floor after gathering the crops.

The shelving came from an unlucky seller on Xianyu whose supermarket had gone out of business. They were warehouse-style shelves, fifty yuan each. She bought two hundred for 10,000 yuan. Woven bags cost seven cents each; she bought 21,500, spending 15,000.

Her pockets were empty again.

The length of the shelves was just a bit shorter than the width of the dormitory, and the height was just a fraction lower, so she could arrange them in a row facing the door. The miscellaneous items she had found in the space—such as unopened toothpaste, toothbrushes, facial cleansers, lotions, and leftover conditioner, shampoo, and body wash—could also be neatly displayed, making them easier to find.

As for the clothes, she sorted them, folded them neatly, and packed them into boxes; it would be a year before she needed them.

There was also a lot of half-used soap and bar soap here. She planned to buy an iron bucket and molds to melt down the soap and recast it. As for the laundry soap, she would wait until the weather turned warm to take it out, dry it, and crush it into powder for laundry. Looking at the huge pile she had found, along with the unfinished laundry powder and detergent, she figured she wouldn't have to worry about cleaning supplies for the next few decades.

For bottled items like shampoo and conditioner, she looked for brands with the same scent and poured them into a single bottle, throwing away the empty ones to save space.

"Shampoo, 423 bottles. Conditioner, 495 bottles. Body wash, 344 bottles. Hair masks, 135 boxes. Unopened laundry powder, 135 bags. Opened and combined laundry powder, 372 bags. Laundry detergent, 645 buckets..."

Yi Shui slowly counted the cleaning supplies that filled an entire room, with some odds and ends like bleach and disinfectant nearby.

It turned out that the snacks from the girls' dormitory were arranged and occupied ten rooms.

There were also hair dryers, electric kettles, small dormitory pots, and similar items, which were placed together with the appliances she had bought previously.

Cosmetics, skincare products, various backpacks, shoulder bags, tote bags, and cross-body bags that could still be used, along with various jewelry and accessories, were placed together with the neatly folded bed sheets and duvet covers, as well as a large number of thermoses.

She couldn't bear to throw away these sheets and duvet covers, and she hadn't figured out what to do with them, so she simply folded them and put them away. If they were truly useless, she could use them to make soles for shoes later, or since there was a sewing machine at home, she could learn how to use it and stitch some summer clothes; that would be a decent pastime.

As for the mattresses and bedding, she set aside a separate room for them.

Most students' bedding was relatively thin, with quilts weighing about four jin. She planned to take them back and have a master craftsman remake them into large, thick quilts and mattresses weighing ten jin each; she could probably get over three hundred sets of thick bedding out of them.

Just as she had said before, such a large dormitory building filled with the daily necessities of hundreds of people was enough for her to live a rich and luxurious life during the apocalypse.

Provided she didn't get sick or lose her mind.

Speaking of which, she couldn't help but sigh.

Her parents were reasonable and not saintly; their interactions with others were based on reciprocity. The problem was certain relatives in the family, which were truly a headache.

For example, Mu Yuanshan's ex-wife, Wu Yuzhen, and the daughter of Mu Yuanshan and Wu Yuzhen, Wu Erruo.

These two didn't have personalities much different from the average person; they weren't manipulative or overly saintly, but the problem was that they never did anything decent.

She still remembered that this mother-daughter pair had shown up at their door during the Extreme Heat, claiming that their home was too poor to have a meal, implying and demanding that Mu Yuanshan provide them with relief.

At that time, because their family had built a detached small building in the countryside, kept a yard, and dug a well, they had grown some vegetables at home during the Extreme Heat and traded them for food. Although the well didn't produce much water in the later stages, it was enough for the family to drink, so they didn't look as emaciated as others.

However, their family absolutely, definitely was not wealthy enough to provide relief to others.

She didn't know where this mother-daughter pair got the information. It was a distance that took over six hours to drive, and they had braved temperatures of over sixty degrees to trek here on foot.

Just for this, Yi Shui respected the two as talented individuals.

If they had this kind of stubborn energy, they could have found a manual labor job with the authorities and made a fortune. Why go through so much trouble to find their home? Did they think their family was more reliable than the authorities?

Yi Shui didn't understand.

Mu Yuanshan didn't understand either. The two had been divorced for nearly ten years; what was the point of looking for an ex-husband now? Not to mention that after the divorce, Wu Yuzhen had remarried someone else. Just the fact that the mother and daughter were willing to travel such a long distance to rely on him rather than work showed that they were lazy and loved ease. Mu Yuanshan was not a confused person; he knew exactly what his family's situation was. He had a wife and a child; how could he support others for free? Therefore, even if there was...