Chapter 1: Chinese Restaurant
[You have bound with the Doomsday Management System.]
Following a deafening explosion and blinding flames, Ling Jing opened her eyes to see this single line of floating text.
[Please select your business type.]
Frowning slightly, she gathered her wits. After all, not just anyone could accept reality with a straight face immediately after dying once.
A moment later, Ling Jing reached out and selected “Restaurant” from the various panels suspended in the void.
Her old trade.
[Congratulations! You have bound with the Doomsday Restaurant business line. You will now be deployed to a matching apocalyptic world.]
[Your customized Starter Pack has been distributed. Wishing you a pleasant management experience~]
Immediately afterward, Ling Jing’s vision blurred, and the void, along with the floating text, vanished without a trace. A fierce wave of vertigo struck, forcing her to squeeze her eyes shut.
When she opened them again, she was standing on an unfamiliar patch of ground.
Taking in her surroundings, she saw gigantic plants of unnatural proportions tangled together, wrapped in an eerie green mist. Even the dark soil beneath her feet had been eroded into a sickly shade of deep green.
Looking up, she spotted massive birds soaring across the distant sky—so horribly mutated and misshapen that their original species was entirely unrecognizable.
Behind her, grotesque, mutated vegetation blotted out the sky, its gnarled green boughs thrashing about like grasping demons. In the distance, the faint, unrecognizable roars of wild beasts drifted over.
It was, without a doubt, a thorough apocalypse. There wasn’t the slightest sign of human life.
Well, not entirely.
Looking ahead, Ling Jing spotted towering, dark gray walls perched on higher ground not far away.
It resembled some sort of human settlement. Those walls stood at a height never seen in times of peace, clearly built to keep some kind of enemy from invading.
[Ding! Please claim your Starter Pack!]
The system’s prompt rang out.
Ling Jing brought up the floating interface, pointed at the “Starter Pack,” and pressed [Claim].
Several flashes of white light went off, and a few strangely familiar items materialized out of thin air before her. Looking closely, each item came with its own description.
[A Simple Tricycle (Mobile Stall, Absolute Safety)]
[A Roasting Machine (Can ignore ingredient defects to produce fragrant roasted potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other ingredients)]
[A Tent (Your residence, Absolute Safety)]
[A Lantern (Provides illumination)]
[A Cash Box (Automatically identifies genuine and counterfeit currency)]
[A Restaurant Signboard (Please name your restaurant)]
[Reminder: You have entered an apocalyptic world. As the host of the Management System, you are granted system protection and absolute immunity against all forms of harm from the apocalypse. Please expand and strengthen your restaurant, and have fun running your business~]
…Wasn’t this the exact roasted sweet potato stall she had set up by the university gate to support herself when she first started out?
Aside from those bizarre functions tacked on by the system, these items were practically a walk down memory lane from her early entrepreneurial days.
This was what the system meant by “customized”?
A restaurant?
Crude. It was downright pathetic.
Ling Jing fell silent.
It had been years since she last fought a battle with such meager resources. Before dying, she was, by all accounts, the CEO of a publicly listed catering corporation. The days of pounding the pavement and scraping by with a little cart felt like a distant lifetime.
This system had thrown her right back to square one before her career even began.
Even so, she didn’t lack the courage to start over—even on this strange, apocalyptic wasteland.
[Please name your restaurant.]
The system prodded once more.
A restaurant name, huh…
Ling Jing fell into thought.
Given a second chance at life in a boundless wasteland thick with the suffocating stench of despair, what could grant her the strength and hope to keep marching forward?
Familiar, warm flavors were the very driving force behind her original venture into the restaurant business. That was also what she had felt just now when she picked “Restaurant” without a second thought.
Let’s just go with that.
—”Chinese Restaurant.”
She typed it out character by character and pressed confirm.
The signboard resting on the small cart flashed with white light, the words “Chinese Restaurant” appearing upon it. Red lettering on a white background—still thoroughly bare-bones.
Along with the white light, another cardboard placard appeared.
—Restaurant Rules.
After skimming the rules, Ling Jing grasped the tricycle’s handlebars to test them out. She could push it just fine; in fact, it handled quite smoothly. It was far better than the secondhand tricycle she had bought back during her first startup.
Next, she needed to scout the area for ingredients she could roast.
Across the dark green earth, two heavily bundled, hooded figures trudged forward, supporting each other. One of them leaned heavily on a crude crutch.
Beneath their hoods, their faces were masked with black cloth, leaving only small slits cut out for their eyes and noses. Looking closer, the skin of the one with the crutch was cracked, a sickly dark green already seeping through the veins around her eyes, straight into the bone.
“Sister, let’s rest for a bit. We can see the city wall already,” the shorter girl said softly.
“No… Anywhere outside the wall is dangerous. Mutated plants are best at ambushing humans from the shadows.”
The woman addressed as “Sister” was visibly running on fumes, struggling just to speak.
“B-but that giant bug took a bite out of you earlier…”
“I already bandaged it. Here, take this. I counted just now—three small crystals. Add that to our remaining city coins, and we can trade for a ration.”
“No! Sister, don’t give it to me.”
As if realizing what this meant, the girl resisted despite her lack of strength, refusing to take the cloth pouch her sister was untying from her waist.
“Lina, be good. Keep your voice down! Don’t draw their attention!” Lilin hissed in gentle reproach.
“…Okay.” Lina was an obedient girl, lowering her voice at her sister’s reminder.
Lilin did her best to use what little strength she had left to give her sister instructions:
“If I collapse, leave me and get inside the city as fast as you can. When I’m gone… go stick with Auntie Qian and the others. Don’t go outside the wall by yourself—it’s too dangerous. Hide this pouch well. When you get inside, take the crowded routes so nobody steals it from you. Take this cloak, too. It gets cold at night, so wrap yourself in it when you sleep.”
Struggling, she unfastened the tattered cloak from her shoulders and draped it over Lina.
Lilin knew full well how perilous the world outside the walls was. If she died, there was a near-certain chance mutated plants would absorb her for fertilizer, leaving nothing behind.
“Sister… Sister, have a sip of water, okay?”
Listening to her sister deliver what sounded like her final words, Lina clenched her jaw tight to keep her tears from spilling over.
Their parents had perished in the jaws of mutated beasts three years ago. The sisters had depended on each other ever since. And now, even her sister was… If she lost her, she would be completely alone in the world.
“All right.”
Most people who couldn’t trade for rations filled their stomachs with water instead, and the sisters were no exception.
Lina carefully brought the canteen to her sister’s lips, lifted the face cloth, and fed her a mouthful.
Gurgle—
It was hard to tell whose stomach growled first, but a paralyzing wave of hunger surged through them, making Lina’s hand tremble as she pulled the canteen away.
They hadn’t managed to trade for rations yesterday, meaning they had gone without food for nearly two full days. On top of that, her sister had been bitten by a mutated insect. With the poison spreading rapidly, she was barely hanging on.
Frantic, Lina patted down the cloth pouch, finally managing to pinch out a few measly, blackened crumbs of food. She held them out before Lilin. “Sister, eat.”
As if to comfort her little sister, Lilin opened her mouth and let Lina drop the food scraps inside.
Both of them knew it was a drop in the bucket. It wouldn’t do a thing.
Tears spilled from Lina’s eyes anyway. Pulling her hand back, she wiped them away as fast as she could.
“You… hm?”
Lilin seemed to have more to say, but the moment she opened her mouth, her nose twitched.
The mouthwatering aroma of food drifted over with undeniable force, filling their nostrils.
Lina froze as well, glancing around in confusion.
This scent… Lilin’s mind went blank for a second.
It was a smell she hadn’t encountered in years—the smell of roasted potatoes????
