Another half a month passed.
Tang Mo's life had fallen into a simple routine. She didn't go fishing anymore; now that she had the abnormal treasure, it was easier to just follow the crowd up the mountain.
Her days consisted of experimenting and training. Occasionally, Tang Mo would use breadcrumbs to lure a couple of fish and find Qin Ling to satisfy their cravings together.
She would even coax Qin Ling into figuring out a way to steal a chicken so the two of them could feast on roasted chicken legs.
Even when she was just hanging out with her roommates in the dorm, she didn't feel like the current apocalypse had much of an impact on her life.
'The first six months of the apocalypse are just a transitional period for people,' she had always thought.
If it weren't for the strange smell wafting from the neighboring dorm room, everyone's lives might have continued on so peacefully.
It happened one night. After finishing her training, Tang Mo gave herself a routine wipe-down with water and got into bed to sleep.
But after a long while, she, Song Qing, and Li Lanlan were all still tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep.
"I can't take it anymore! What in the world is that smell? It's disgusting," Lanlan said, sitting bolt upright after having tossed and turned dozens of times.
They had been without running water for two months now. Aside from people like Wenqing and Tang Mo, who possessed special items, almost no one had showered. You can imagine what everyone smelled like.
But since everyone stank, no one held it against anyone else.
But the smell coming from the room next to Tang Mo's today was just too much. It was unbearable even through two doors and two walls.
"No, I have to go check. They aren't eating something weird, are they?"
Unable to bear the hunger, many people had started catching insects on the mountain to eat. Although there was no vegetation on the mountain anymore, the number of insects was terrifyingly high, and no one knew what they were living on.
The smell of boiled insects was like boiled shit, and anyone with a shred of decency wouldn't cook them in the dorms.
"It's too dark. I'll go with you." Song Qing got ready and climbed down from her bunk.
Tang Mo also grabbed a flashlight and followed behind them. It was after the 11 p.m. lights-out, and the dormitory building was pitch-black.
"Is anyone there?"
Fearing Lanlan's fiery temper would provoke the occupants, the task of being their diplomat fell to Song Qing, who was universally acknowledged as the gentlest and best-tempered girl in the dorm.
Tang Mo was smart and always seemed to be smiling, but anyone who knew her even a little knew she was no pushover. When she got serious, her fighting ability was far more terrifying than that of the fierce-looking Li Lanlan.
"Is anyone there?" Song Qing knocked on the door again.
Standing at the door, Tang Mo could smell the stench more and more clearly the closer she got.
It wasn't just the smell of boiled insects; there was something else mixed in, a scent she was very familiar with from her past life...
BANG!
Almost instinctively, Tang Mo raised her leg and kicked open the door to the neighboring dorm room.
The dorm room doors were made of wood. Tang Mo's Strength Value had increased recently, making her quite strong among the girls, so kicking the door open wasn't difficult.
"Tang Mo, you..."
Li Lanlan's mouth hung open in an 'O' shape. From now on, if anyone dared to call her violent, she would fight them to the death. Clearly, anyone who thought *she* was violent was just naive; they'd never seen Tang Mo in action.
Kicking aside the now-askew door, a powerful stench assaulted their nostrils.
Tang Mo covered her nose and mouth with one hand while shining the flashlight into the room with the other.
"AHHHH!!!"
Li Lanlan's scream tore through the silent dormitory building.
"I was so hungry I could barely get to sleep! Who the hell is that? Do they have a death wish?!"
The awakened girls cursed angrily, but they were ultimately scared, so they threw on some clothes and came out into the hallway to see what was going on.
Everyone crowded around the entrance to the dorm room Tang Mo and the others had just entered. Those squeezed at the front immediately saw the scene inside, illuminated by the flashlight's beam.
There were two highly decomposed corpses, their bodies covered in writhing maggots and unknown insects gnawing at their flesh.
The cheeks of both corpses were sunken and gaunt, and by each of their mouths was the clear, dried stain of vomit.
An alcohol lamp sat nearby, and a small pot lay spilled on the floor. A soup made of various boiled insects had flowed out of it—or what was once a soup, now just a dry, lumpy mess.
There were no bloodstains on the floor.
"They were poisoned to death. They must have accidentally eaten toxic insects," Tang Mo concluded after a single glance around the room.
The insects weren't just foul-smelling; there were also countless varieties, and an ordinary person would have no way of telling which were poisonous.
No one would have eaten them unless they were desperate with hunger.
Tang Mo found An Yang's contact information on her watch and placed a video call. An Yang was now in charge of all student affairs.
The crowd of girls turned pale with fear. Already unsteady from hunger, several of them were so frightened by the sight that their legs gave out and they collapsed to the floor.
It wasn't that they didn't know people had been constantly dying at the school over the past few months. Everyone knew that over thirty people had died at once during the last water poisoning incident.
But they had never come face-to-face with death like this, so direct and in-your-face, impossible to avoid.
Tang Mo was also silent after returning to her dorm. She had been used to seeing such things in the past.
Perhaps her life had been too easy lately, making her forget just how hard it was for ordinary people in the apocalypse, where one small mistake meant a permanent goodbye.
And in her previous life, she had been one of those people struggling to survive.
"Those two... isn't the school handing out two meals a day now?" Tang Mo asked.
No one in the dorm was asleep. After seeing something like that, sleep was impossible.
"They were on Wenqing's blacklist. They used to run a small shop and had a lot of stuff left over. Wenqing didn't like them," Li Lanlan said in a low voice.
At the mention of Wenqing's blacklist, a chill went down everyone's spines.
It was like a death list, casting a huge shadow over everyone's hearts. It was as if getting on that list meant you weren't far from death's door.
It was said that there were already more than forty people on it. It seemed they were all destined to die.
Aside from the few who had their own skills, like Tang Mo and Qin Ling, life for everyone else was unimaginably difficult.
'In that sense, Wenqing really is God. The people she doesn't like just... die.'
'Or maybe, she's only saving the ones she wants to save.'
Tang Mo asked herself if she would contribute her own Space to save everyone, and knew she wouldn't. Therefore, she felt she had no right to criticize or condemn Wenqing.
She just found it all a bit sorrowful.
Everyone was just doing what they wanted to do. She wanted to protect the people she loved, and Wenqing was truly playing the role of the God she wanted to be, at least getting what she wanted inside the cage that was the school.
"What about all the stuff they had left over?"
Tang Mo didn't understand. With so many boxes of supplies, if the two girls had been frugal, it should have lasted them several months.
"One time, the boyfriend of the girl with short hair said he was coming to hang out, but he brought his buddies and they carried all of it away. They only left the two of them two packs of instant noodles and two bottles of water."
That incident caused a big scene last time; a lot of people saw it.
"And no one did anything?" Song Qing asked, her voice laced with anger.
"They can't keep an eye on everything."
Li Lanlan's voice grew quieter and quieter. Among the group, she had the most contact with outsiders and knew the most news and gossip. She had heard of too many things like this.
The school could barely fend for itself, so it didn't get involved in such matters at all.
The miserable final state of those two girls replayed endlessly in her mind. Tang Mo closed her eyes and lay back down.
Things like this were happening far too often, in every corner of this world. Everyone was just living like ants.
'It's not that easy. Everyone has to give it their all just to stay alive.'