My Romance Game Updated – Chapter 60

All Cleared Out

The entrance to the underground warehouse was marked on the mini-map. After entering the charred husk of the supermarket, Ren Chenxi deliberately guided everyone toward the location. She feigned nonchalance, pushing at a few blackened shelves and asking the girls beside her if that thing behind the racks looked like a door.

At her words, the girls immediately started heaving at the piled-up shelves. With Lu Ping, the strength esper, taking the lead, they easily moved all the shelving aside. Sure enough, they saw a large, soot-blackened door. The steel door hadn’t been destroyed in the fire, but the intense heat had warped it, jamming it tight in its frame. It was practically fused with the equally blackened wall beside it; if you didn’t look closely, you’d never know there was a door there at all. Several of the strength espers went to work, and after a round of savage, brute-force destruction, the steel door was finally opened.

            

With a loud CRASH, the door fell inward. They could clearly see a landing with a flight of stairs leading up and another leading down.

Outside the supermarket, there had been quite a few zombies shambling about. But inside, perhaps because the floor was a chaotic mess of burnt shelves and half-incinerated goods with barely a place to step, there were hardly any zombies at all. And at the stairwell, its door just torn off, there wasn’t a single one.

Chen Gu and the other guys conferred with Mu Ning, then went upstairs first to check the situation and see if there were any surviving goods they could salvage¹. But they were back down in just a few moments, looking completely dejected². According to them, the upstairs was an even bigger mess than the ground floor. Not only was all the merchandise destroyed, but the shelves were toppled everywhere, and in some places, the ceiling had collapsed onto the floor.

            

That being the case, their only option was to check the basement.

However, after seeing how thoroughly the supermarket’s interior had been ravaged by the explosion and fire, no one held out much hope for the basement level. So when Wei Yuze, the first one to reach the bottom, saw the state of the warehouse, he couldn’t help but let out a shriek of delighted surprise.

“What’s with you! You’re a big, macho man—we’ll ignore the fact that you have such beautiful long hair—but your scream is so girly³… Ahh—!”

            

Chen Gu, who was right behind Wei Yuze, hadn’t even finished his teasing before he, too, let out a rather cute shriek of his own.

“…”

Though Chen Gu’s scream was disgusting, hearing two of the guys shriek like that in a row told the girls everything they needed to know. There really was something in the underground warehouse! And probably a lot of it!

            

The whole group excitedly rushed down the stairs. When they saw the warehouse, filled to the brim with goods, they collectively broke into frenzied, ecstatic howls. No one could blame them for losing their composure. This was a whole warehouse full of supplies! Forget everything else, just the staple foods⁴ alone would be enough to last them for a year or two! In the two years since the apocalypse began, they had spent countless hours searching for supplies in various cities. But they either had to fight tooth and nail with other people for them, or they arrived too late and could only scavenge for whatever scraps were left behind.

But now, this entire warehouse of supplies belonged to them!

“Xi-jie, ahhh! You’re the best! If you hadn’t pointed it out, this whole warehouse of stuff would have just been left to rot!”

            

Unable to vent their ecstatic emotions, several of the girls just hugged Ren Chenxi and started jumping up and down. Mu Ning, watching from the side, couldn’t take it anymore. “That’s enough,” she said in a cold voice. “Shout any louder and attracting zombies will be the least of your problems. If you draw over some other passing survivors, are you willing to give them half of what’s in here?”

The moment she finished speaking, everyone fell silent.

You’ve got to be kidding. Everything in this warehouse was theirs! No one was getting a single scrap!

            

Though they stopped shouting, their gazes on Ren Chenxi grew even more fervent. Tang Ying leaned in and whispered to her, “Xi-jie, can you fit a whole warehouse of stuff in your inventory?”

Based on the full map of the underground warehouse on her mini-map, Ren Chenxi converted it to a real-world area and estimated the warehouse was about two thousand square metres. Could she fit two thousand square metres of stuff into her inventory? She honestly didn’t know how many slots that would take up. But seeing the goods neatly arranged on row after row of shelves, she was reminded of the sets of bedding. So, deciding to give it a try, she walked into the warehouse and casually stored the shelf nearest to her in her inventory. And just like that, the entire shelf, which reached all the way to the ceiling, vanished, along with every item on it.

“Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” Although they had seen Ren Chenxi make the bus disappear and reappear many times, the crowd couldn’t help but let out a collective gasp of amazement as the massive shelf vanished.

            

Ren Chenxi had no time to pay attention to their expressions. She just opened her inventory panel, found the slot with the shelf, and checked its information. Seeing the description “One shelf of goods,” she breathed a small sigh of relief.

“It shouldn’t be a problem to fit all this stuff in my space. But…”

“But what?” everyone asked nervously.

            

“But if I just pile all these shelves into my space, they’ll all be crammed together in a mess. It’ll be hard to find anything when I need to take it out.”

The maximum stack size for an inventory slot was 999. So, if 999 shelves were stacked in a single slot, retrieving a specific one would be completely random.

“Then… can you sort the shelves as you put them in your space?” Mu Ning suggested from the side.

            

Hearing that, Ren Chenxi’s eyes lit up. Right! Why was she only thinking of cramming everything into one slot? She could put shelves with food in one slot, shelves with daily necessities in another, and shelves with miscellaneous odds and ends in a third! She had plenty of slots, after all! At this thought, Ren Chenxi nodded happily at Mu Ning. Then, the group started from the warehouse entrance, sorting the shelves by category and having Ren Chenxi store them in her inventory in an orderly fashion.

The warehouse, once packed with rows upon rows of fully stocked shelves, began to empty out bit by bit. After the very last shelf disappeared, before anyone could even cheer, they noticed another sealed steel door at the far end of the warehouse.

Perhaps on the other side of this door was another warehouse full of goods?

            

The group of youths, fresh off a massive haul, greedily used brute force to destroy this steel door as well. Unfortunately, while there was indeed a lot of food on the other side… it was all frozen food. After two years of the apocalypse, the food inside the freezers in this room had completely rotted and gone foul. The moment the door was broken down, they were hit with the stench of decay.

“Aigh…” What a waste of so much food.

Someone sighed first, but soon the stench became unbearable. Holding their breath, they quickly checked the room, confirmed there were no other doors, and then turned and retreated to the large warehouse they had first entered. Seeing the vast, empty space around them, their gloomy mood quickly dissipated. After all, on this trip, they had scored an entire warehouse of supplies!

            

Now that they had cleared out the whole warehouse, they had to hurry back to the base. It might have seemed like Ren Chenxi was just storing shelves one by one, but sorting the items on them had taken quite a while. Some goods were in boxes, and some of those boxes weren’t labeled, so they had to open them one by one to see what was inside. And to make finding things easier later, their sorting became more and more detailed. By the end, the goods from this one warehouse had taken up more than twenty of Ren Chenxi’s inventory slots! Grains alone were meticulously divided into rice, flour, and powders!

By the time Ren Chenxi had finished sorting and storing all the shelves, more than an hour had passed. It had taken them nearly an hour to get here, and it would take about an hour to get back. Ren Chenxi was worried they wouldn’t make it back to the base in time to pick up Huo Keyu and the others.

And in fact, just as she feared, despite rushing back, it was past eleven o’clock by the time they reached the base. Ren Chenxi, Jian Dan, and a few others hurried to the area outside the Nanhai Base Quarantine Point, but they couldn’t see Huo Keyu’s group anywhere.

            

“Xi-jie, I don’t see Keyu and the others!” Jian Dan and the other two searched the vicinity and even asked others who were about to be quarantined to check the isolation rooms, but there was no trace of them.

It was a large group of people. If they were really waiting nearby, it would be impossible not to find them.

“Xi-jie, could it be… Keyu was still afraid of being a burden, so she went to find a place to live in the base on her own after leaving quarantine?”

            

“Let’s go! We’ll check near the Teaching Building!” Ren Chenxi agreed that, given Huo Keyu’s personality, she might very well do something like that.

Just as they were running toward the Teaching Building, Mu Ning, who had split off to search, came over. Following behind her were none other than Huo Keyu and the three non-esper students from S University who had been in quarantine.

“Xi-jie!”

            

“Xi-jie!”

Seeing Huo Keyu, Ren Chenxi let out a breath of relief. Before she could even ask where they had been, Song Xin and Chang Ling rushed forward.

“Keyu! Honestly, where did you run off to? I thought you were going to abandon us!”

            

“How would we dare abandon you?” one of the S University students retorted with a smile. “We came out of the isolation room and didn’t see anyone. We thought you had abandoned us.”

Knowing they were joking, Ren Chenxi still stepped forward to explain seriously, especially to Huo Keyu. “We wouldn’t. We would never leave you behind! We just went to check the underground warehouse at the supermarket we passed yesterday…” Ren Chenxi knew that what Huo Keyu had been through since the apocalypse was unimaginable, and that she had been betrayed by her own friends. Worried that the highly sensitive girl might misunderstand, she rushed to explain.

“We figured,” Huo Keyu said, shaking her head with a smile to show she hadn’t been overthinking things. “You said yesterday you would come get us.”

            

“That’s right! I will always come get you!” Ren Chenxi grabbed Huo Keyu’s hand and started leading her toward the Villa Area. “So, let’s go back to our new home together now.”

“Okay.”

Mu Ning followed silently behind Ren Chenxi, watching the two of them walking so closely together. A sour feeling began to creep into her heart again.

            

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The author has something to say:

Wooden-head: My heart feels so sour. Let’s have Pickled Vegetable Beef Noodles for lunch today!

(The ‘suān’ in ‘suān cài’ (pickled vegetables) is the same word for ‘sour’ used to describe jealousy in Chinese. Mu Ning is literally turning her sour feelings into lunch.)

            

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