Thirty-four

Day Fortress, at worst, has motorhomes and off-road vehicles costing millions, yet for her, she winces in pain over spending three hundred yuan on a decent backup battery.

"It's really expensive!"

These small vehicles will only increase in price after many cars spontaneously combust in the high heat, so now is the best time to buy.

Sedans and off-road vehicles are different. The sixty-degree heat forces office workers and students to work and study from home, reducing most travel needs. Furthermore, incidents of vehicles spontaneously combusting or exploding due to the extreme heat are endless, so those who have to go out avoid using cars whenever possible.

Vehicle prices are ridiculously low.

A BYD hybrid car is only seventy thousand yuan each.

Back then, outdoor gear was also heavily discounted. Now, four-thousand-yuan assault boats, three-thousand-yuan flood-proof titanium alloy kayaks, and one-thousand-yuan inflatable fishing boats can be bought for as low as thirty percent of their original price.

Plus, outdoor camping gear, fuel, and heating supplies are all on sale.

She checked her balance: three hundred sixty-three thousand yuan.

With her balance dwindling, she couldn't help but open it and look at it again and again.

When the high heat arrives and most people can't even leave their homes, oil prices will plummet for a while. Then, she can find professional "oil rats" to buy some fuel to stockpile.

Her going out now is just to find these types of people, leave contact information, and buy a large amount when oil prices drop.

At that time, everything related to food will be rising in price, while most other things will be falling. Once she makes a fortune selling vegetables, she won't feel bad about buying any amount of oil.

It took two days of asking around before she got a lead on the "oil rats."

She hadn't been idle these past two days, either.

Aside from freezing ice and stockpiling water every day, the alfalfa in her space had grown quite tall. She harvested one batch, found time to set up fences into six circles of varying sizes, and planted various flowers around the fruit trees, preparing to release the pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese after harvesting another batch.

She also dug half a fish pond, but she really couldn't finish the rest and planned to do it slowly in the future.

From the "oil rats," she bought one barrel each of 92 and 95 octane gasoline, and one barrel of diesel. For standard two-hundred-liter oil drums, 92 was fifteen hundred yuan, 95 was seventeen hundred yuan, and diesel was fifteen hundred yuan per barrel.

Yi Shui roughly calculated the prices in her mind.

During the heatwave, oil prices would be cut almost in half, and by the extreme cold period, they would rise to twice their original price. In other words, by the time the heatwave hit, a barrel of oil would basically cost eight or nine hundred yuan.

(Experience comes from the oil price halving during the pandemic; after all, the author has only witnessed this one major disaster.)

Twenty liters of fuel can make a small car run two to three hundred kilometers, meaning one barrel of oil can go at least ten thousand kilometers. If she bought more, she wouldn't have to worry when she had to hit the road.

Her balance was three hundred sixteen thousand yuan.

The land wasn't fertile enough yet, but she was anxious. At nine o'clock that night, she slipped into her space to finish tilling the rest of the land, then, before the dormitory curfew, she snuck over to the school's fish pond.

The fish pond was huge and must have cost a lot of money to build. Not only were there trees and flowers planted around it, but they also kept quite a few koi in the pond. However, for some reason, the school just finished building it and ignored it. The water was excessively green; once you put your hand ten centimeters into it, you couldn't see it at all.

Although the water was incredibly dirty and the students usually wouldn't touch it, to her, this water was pure wealth!

Using this water to irrigate the land would be a perfect way to fertilize it!

The water flowed through her hands into her space and then directly into the soil.

Unlike collecting tap water before, the water in this pond was sitting right out in the open. As long as she reached out to touch it and focused her mind, a deep trench would immediately collapse on the water's surface, and the water would flow onto the land.

Perhaps she needed to buy a few buckets specifically for the water used to irrigate the land.

Yi Shui frowned as she watched the water level of the huge pond drop by nearly a meter.

She hadn't thought it through and hadn't realized that irrigating the land required so much water. Now that she calculated it, one mu of land required ten tons to be thoroughly watered, and watering her space once took two hundred tons.

Two hundred tons—how many times did she need to water it thoroughly before the vegetables matured? How long would the water towers in her space last?

She couldn't not grow vegetables, but using up the water she needed for the rest of her life just to grow them wasn't worth it.

There were still two months until she could sell the vegetables, and these two months were in an awkward position. Vegetable prices weren't high enough to make money, and the temperature was gradually rising. With no rain, water usage would slowly be restricted. By the time the vegetables were valuable, water prices would be skyrocketing, and bottled water would be in short supply; dreaming of hoarding water on a large scale like she was now would be impossible.

The water source would only be replenished when the heavy snow fell on March 12th next year. At the very least, she had to ensure she wouldn't run out of water for irrigation before then.

No, perhaps she needed to ensure it lasted until the floods on March 12th of the following year. Next year would be extreme cold the entire time; it would be impossible for her family to melt that much snow into ice—think of how much fuel that would consume!

Moreover, she had to raise fish, livestock, and grow fruit trees in her space; all of these required water.

With this much land, the water in her space was far from enough.

When the water thoroughly soaked the last acre of vegetable land, Yi Shui made a decision.

Perhaps she could start farming now, harvesting once every five or six days using the school's water. When the temperature got too high and students were sent home, she would plant one more batch at home and then call it quits. There was a large river near her home, so if she used too much water, she could just replenish it from the river. Since it was for watering vegetables anyway, the vegetables wouldn't mind.

While water wasn't scarce yet, she should hurry up and grow some vegetables. She could keep the good ones for her family, reserve a room on the first floor, and fill it with various vegetables. Even if her family stir-fried two dishes a day, it would be more than enough.

Small bok choy could be harvested five times a month in her space. In her previous life, it seemed the school didn't start sending students home until early May when the temperature reached fifty degrees, which was also about when water rationing began. In other words, she had a month and a half to grow vegetables.

There were five days left until the temperature rose.

She purchased another fifty water towers as a supplement, took fifty out of the remaining ones, and then snuck back to the school fish pond.

Watching the water level of the entire fish pond drop by another meter, she rubbed her nose guiltily.

Since she had already taken the water, and the small fish in the pond she dug were living quite well, she might as well catch some more fish to keep them company.

"Just kidding, just kidding. Koi are omnivorous; they will eat small fish, so it's not recommended to raise them together."

Her balance was two hundred sixty-one thousand yuan.

She spent all this money on various medicines, alcohol, iodine, disinfectant, masks, gloves, protective suits, cooling oil, floral water, insect repellent, mothballs, insecticides, and borax. She also took the opportunity to buy many items that might be needed in daily life but weren't in the dormitory, such as lighters and lubricating oil, spending every last cent.