The Earth completed another rotation, and the calendar turned to a new page.
The natural tyrant that had ravaged the land for days finally loosened its grip for the moment, and only then did the blizzard outside grudgingly stop reshaping the world with its terrible power.
The white ground at last stopped growing thicker. Walls that had been buried halfway by the snow now looked like low fences.
But beyond those "fences" there was no cozy garden. Beneath the heavy snow lay devastation everywhere. Fortunately, the snow covered it all, serving as a kind of shroud that hid the ugliness underneath.
The snow stopping did not mean spring had come.
Look closely.
Dark clouds still piled up in the pale, cleared sky. An even fiercer disaster was waiting for the land to answer its call.
When the winter winds formed by the Mongolian-Siberian high-pressure system came sweeping in again, crossing the Sea of Japan laden with moisture and combining with the local cloud layers, they would give birth to a disaster beyond imagination.
It was as if Amaterasu herself had once again hidden away in the Heavenly Rock Cave. Whether anyone would call her out this time was another matter entirely.
The clouds over the Japanese archipelago looked like divine punishment, descending to chastise this sinful nation, this fetid Avici hell.
Yet for now, the snow really had stopped falling.
At least for a little while, the people here could still look up at the sky.
After all, who knew what came next?
This might be the last clear day they would ever see.
For the survivors indoors, however, this was not good news at all.
The infected were about to grow active again.
The monsters trapped inside buildings began to wander. If humanity's satellites were still functioning, what they would see would look like ants on the move.
Infected creatures in the high-latitude regions were now migrating like birds, gathering into groups and heading toward warmer areas.
From the north in Aomori, from the west in Nagano, from the east in Iwate, the infected scattered across the prefectures of Honshu were merging into a single tide and advancing toward Tokyo, the promised land.
Worse still, the hordes coming from Aomori were being reinforced by infected crossing the sea from Hokkaido. The main horde would later pass through Akita, Iwate, Miyagi, and Yamagata.
A secondary force would move down the western coast to Niigata, then reunite with the main force in Fukushima, forming a terrifying undead calamity.
After that, they would gather further strength in Tochigi, Ibaraki, and Gunma before finally reaching Tokyo.
Even now, those flourishing hordes had already begun their campaign of storming cities and tearing down strongholds.
O tireless dead, what is it you seek, racing day and night like this?
The sharp winter wind whipped the tree branches back and forth like war banners saluting the march of the infected army.
[Actually, it's Mea-san launching another campaign into Edo, starting a new anti-shogunate uprising. Total nonsense, I know. Hahaha. (No comments from readers, so the author is writing their own.)]
And now, the viewpoint drops from the upper atmosphere back down to the ground, to the fifteenth floor of an apartment building in Nihonmatsu City.
Early in the morning, strange noises were coming from Kyoko's bedroom.
If we moved just a little closer, we would hear some extremely misleading dialogue.
"Ahh... ngh... ow, ow, ow... that hurts..."
"Sister Kyoko, don't say it like that. People will totally get the wrong idea."
"It really hurts, okay? Huaxiu, slower. Yeah, right there. That pressure."
Now then, children, do not misunderstand.
Kyoko and Huaxiu were not doing that.
No need to panic; the author is opening the door right now.
The truth was simply that Huaxiu was helping Kyoko remove her bandages and change the dressing.
Kyoko had originally intended to do it herself. It was not like the injury was anything too serious.
But Huaxiu refused and insisted on doing it personally, wearing the kind of expression children wore when they threatened to play tricks unless you gave them candy.
In the end, Kyoko gave in.
And thus the scene above came to pass.
Because Kyoko's recovery ability was so strong, the wounds on her skin had actually healed very quickly.
The downside, however, was that the bandages stuck to the scabs on the surface of the wounds.
When the adhesive dressing was peeled away, it also took a whole patch of fine body hair with it.
And not just a little, either.
A whole broad strip.
A pain like that was something no one wanted to experience.
With that warm little domestic interlude over, it was time to get back to serious matters.
The blizzard had paused for the moment. Kyoko needed to finish the last few steps in building up the safehouse. After that, it would probably be time to start farming and clearing out even more secure territory.
Taking Huaxiu with her, Kyoko went next door, where they planned to build a stove and then run a pipe so that heat could be transferred into the apartments where they actually lived.
There was not much to explain here.
Simple, practical handicraft class began.
They fetched bricks left behind in an unfinished rough-construction apartment downstairs, along with five large wooden boards.
Huaxiu was sent to move flowerpots and gather dirt from the potted plants.
Once the materials were ready, the two girls took buckets and headed to the rooftop.
Watching Kyoko fill an entire bucket with snow until it was practically overflowing, Huaxiu asked in confusion,
"Sister Kyoko, how are we supposed to boil all that? Won't it overflow once it starts melting?"
"Relax. Once snow melts into water, the volume shrinks."
"Ohhh... so that's how it works."
"Huaxiu, what exactly were you doing during your middle-school physics classes?!"
"Reading light novels..."
After discovering that Huaxiu was, academically speaking, a total lost cause, Kyoko laughed and said,
"At the end of World War II, Japan conscripted student soldiers.
'Officer: What's your specialty?'
'I study classical literature.'
'Officer: Excellent! The Empire desperately needs talent like you. Kamikaze unit, report immediately!'
So now, Huaxiu, I'm going to use you as a Teletubby antenna. Hahaha."
Huaxiu said nothing to the teasing. She only gave a mischievous little smile, then placed her ice-cold hands—frozen from digging snow—right against Kyoko's neck.
"Wah! Huaxiu, you little menace! I was just joking!"
Kyoko shivered violently from the shock of it and nearly dropped the bucket.
"I was joking too, okay, Sister Kyoko?"
Seeing Huaxiu like this, Kyoko did not even know what to say.
Just a short while ago she had seemed timid, nervous, soft, and sweet.
How had she suddenly turned into a little devil?
If the system had still been online, it definitely would have told Huaxiu:
[Isn't this all because Kyoko spoiled you rotten? She brought this on herself.]
The old firepit was nearly spent, so Kyoko used a flowerpot from one of the neighboring apartments as a base and lit a fire inside it.
Then she set the iron bucket full of snow over the flames and began melting it down.
Once it turned to water, it could be poured into the dirt. Then the mixture had to be stirred slowly, water added bit by bit rather than all at once.
After that, plant stalks were mixed in as well, otherwise the mud slurry would be too thin to use.
On the other side, Huaxiu set up the wooden boards as a mold, then took some of the already-opened rice and started cooking it to make a sticky paste that could be used as a binder.
Along the wall closest to Kyoko's apartment, they built up the stove, plastered it with mud, fixed the shape, then lit a fire to dry and harden it.
In truth, a simple earthen stove like this did not require much technical skill.
It was just troublesome.
If they could have found a ready-made stove somewhere in the building, there was no way they would have gone through the trouble of making one like this.
Unfortunately, because the building had underfloor heating built in, private stove installation had been prohibited, so not a single household had one.
Naturally enough.
They were time-consuming, laborious, dirty, and they carried a real risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Now, though, with the underfloor heating gone, everything had fallen apart.
By noon, Kyoko was handling the final details alone, while Huaxiu went off to organize supplies.
Between them, the two girls had practically looted the entire apartment building.
This was not a video game town where you could search the whole map and somehow not find a single wrench.
This was reality.
What household had only "a little" stuff?
Every family kept some stock of basic necessities.
Even if a family of three did not store vegetables or meat and simply bought fresh food whenever they needed it, they would still have staples like flour, rice, seasonings, and so on.
They would also have a set of furniture, at least two changes of clothes per season, basic tools like screwdrivers and wrenches, kitchen utensils, chopping boards, pots, pans, bowls, chopsticks.
Were those not all necessities of life?
At present, the building held enough supplies for Kyoko and Huaxiu to survive for a month.
And once Kyoko bought the virus detector, the water problem finally had a solution too.
There was all that snow outside.
As long as it was not contaminated, then by following the process of melting it over high heat, collecting the steam, letting it settle, filtering it, filtering it again, and boiling it once more, they could obtain safe drinking water.
Kyoko had cut sheet metal from a cheap security door and rolled it into a smokestack to solve the ventilation problem.
Technically, the broken window in Room 1501 could have served as an exhaust vent already, but Kyoko still made the flue for the sake of neatness.
As for how she intended to transfer heat into the bedroom where she and Huaxiu actually slept—
rest assured, Kyoko had her own clever method.
In the subarctic regions of Japan, exterior residential walls were generally around twenty-four to thirty centimeters thick. Interior walls were thinner, probably only about fifteen centimeters.
For Kyoko, a claw hammer was more than enough to punch through a wall only two bricks thick.
After that, she would use plastic piping as hot-water pipes, guiding heated water into her room. For safety's sake, she replaced the section where the earthen stove heated the water with a metal pipe she had found.
This was not a traditional radiator system.
Instead, she was using pipes to transport hot water into her apartment, where she had enclosed a basin to store it—something more like a little indoor hot spring.
This work continued well into the afternoon.
The stove and the hot-water bath section were ultimately built by Kyoko alone. Huaxiu had been sent to the rooftop to sort out her own apartment and the neighboring one. In the future, water storage, snow-melting, and rain collection would all be handled there.
Neither girl had rested much all day. They had worked nonstop until both of them were covered in dust and soot, their pale faces dotted with yellow mud like decoration on cream.
Not long before, Kyoko had used the virus detector to test the snow and found that its viral content posed no threat to immune individuals.
A good life was finally within reach.
At least for now, the water problem was solved.
Dinner was simple.
The boiler was already hot, and before long they would be able to take a proper hot bath.
By evening, as the sun tilted westward, Kyoko noticed that the safehouse mission had been completed.
[Build a Safehouse: Keep the horde, hunger, and danger far from you. Before January 15, transform your chosen residence into a safehouse.
Requirements: Nearby infected must not pose a major threat to you. Store at least one month's worth of food and water for one person. Possess basic stockpiles of supplies, including weapons, tools, medicine, and clothing.
Reward: 800 points.]
[System Mission: Completed.]
"Eight hundred points incoming. Add tomorrow's haul and I'm back to being a four-digit account holder. Hehehe."
She grinned stupidly at the future while grinding the edge of the blade that had been damaged in the earlier fight.
Nearby, Huaxiu, fresh from a hot bath, reached out and rubbed her head helplessly.
A beautiful day had come to an end...
No, it had not.
An emergency was incoming.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 115)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter108)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter82)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter144)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 70
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 99
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 95
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 99
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 92
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 47
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 44
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 43
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 26
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 32
Uma Musume: From Beginner 26
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