Reborn One Week Before the Apocalypse

Tang Mo let herself drift out of the human settlement, floating slowly along as she watched the earth below.

When she floated low, all she could see was a vast expanse of white snow, pure and flawless. Everywhere she looked were untouched fields, creating a scene of sacred beauty that made it easy to forget it was this very same whiteness that had driven humanity to the brink of extinction.

Often, heaven and Hell can be one and the same; it all depends on your perspective.

And clearly, given Tang Mo’s current pathetic state of not even having a body, everywhere was heaven, because things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

If a golden age was a scene of prosperity, and the apocalypse before the Ice Age was one of desolate, ruined walls, then the current apocalypse was a blank slate.

It was like a vast, white canvas with nothing on it.

The white made all the desolation disappear, and the thick snow buried the ruined walls and all the horrifying traces of the past.

No one could have any sense of direction in such a landscape.

And a few minutes after leaving the settlement, Tang Mo had also completely lost her bearings. Not that she cared where she was going.

She was like a little pony that had broken free of its reins, joyfully taking in the scenery—sometimes far, sometimes near, sometimes high, sometimes low. She was having the time of her life.

Amidst the vast white snow, Tang Mo saw many small human settlements.

The larger ones had a few dozen people, the smaller ones had ten or so, and some consisted of only a handful of individuals.

Without exception, each group was protected by a Protective Shield maintained by a Spiritual Ability User.

Since the beginning of the Ice Age, Tang Mo hadn’t seen anyone other than the people from her own settlement.

Curious, she floated over, wanting to see how people were surviving.

Tang Mo was genuinely curious. After all, her own settlement had the vast amount of food she had left for everyone. But in this world of ice and snow, where on earth did these other people find anything to eat?

Tang Mo floated into the small settlement and observed their lives, watching their every move.

It turned out they had all learned how to create a Spirit Protection Shield from a guide on the forums, right when the Ice Age first began.

And the one who posted it was, of course, Tang Mo.

With the Protective Shield, their basic survival was guaranteed. But if they wanted to truly live, there was still so much more to be done.

The first problem was food.

When the world was turned upside down by collapsing mountains and splitting earth, people fled in a panic, not thinking to bring much food with them.

And with no supplies, they had to start scavenging.

In this world of ice and snow, forget about meat—you couldn’t even find a blade of grass.

People could only turn their attention to what lay underground. They began to dig.

In this Ice Age, the most useful attribute was spiritual power, as only it could be used to create a shelter.

The second most useful was Life Force. Before, Life Force was arguably the most useless attribute, but in these days of cold and hunger, those with strong Life Force suffered far less and felt much less pain than ordinary people.

Other superpowers were basically useless at the beginning of the Ice Age.

But once people turned their attention underground, Power Attribute Users finally found their calling. They were natural-born diggers.

They barely needed tools; with any hard object, or even their bare hands, they could dig a massive pit in the ground.

Driven by hunger, people worked together, digging the pits deeper and wider.

And they did end up finding quite a few good things down there, such as mutant beasts buried in the earth and the roots of mutated plants.

Tang Mo watched them dig a few times and couldn’t help but marvel at their ingenuity.

The mutant beasts down there weren’t just frozen solid—some were still alive.

The living mutant beasts were generally the burrowing types with tenacious Life Force.

As for the frozen ones, thanks to the mutant beasts’ own attributes and the natural deep freeze, they were perfectly edible even after being frozen for a long time. In fact, their texture was quite good.

In the apocalypse, fire-starters were essential travel items, so a source of fire wasn’t hard to come by.

And with meat and fire, there was food. After all, you can roast just about anything.

The mutated plant roots were even more amazing. In the previous apocalypse, people had plenty of Exotic Beast Meat, so they never considered eating plant roots.

After all, many of the mutated plants themselves looked too unappetizing to eat, and many were highly toxic.

But their roots were clearly different—big, plump, and almost always non-toxic.

People roasted them over a fire, and they became a delicious staple. Tang Mo couldn’t taste them, of course, but they looked a lot like roasted sweet potatoes or regular potatoes.

Perhaps finding the diet a bit monotonous, people even rendered oil from the skin, flesh, and bones of the mutant beasts to fry sliced roots. The sight made Tang Mo’s mouth water—or it would have, if she had one.

But it didn’t stop there. With their ingenuity, people also managed to create two kinds of seasoning: salt and spice.

Extracting salt wasn’t easy. Everyone pooled their minds and came up with many ideas, but in the end, it was the Spiritual Ability Users who, by painstakingly separating particles from the soil again and again, managed to extract a mineral crystal with a salty taste very similar to salt.

The spice was much easier to come by. Some of the underground roots had leaves that were naturally spicy. People would simply take the non-toxic leaves, mash them into a paste, toss the paste outside to freeze into a solid block, and then smash the block into powder. A little sprinkle was all they needed when cooking.

Of course, human ingenuity is limitless. Inspired by this success, people began extracting different flavors from all sorts of underground plants, creating a variety of tastes even richer and more diverse than what they had before.

The advent of seasonings clearly took the quality of human life to a whole new level.

After all, with full bellies and shelter from the cold, their basic physiological needs were met. Although life was harder in some ways, these people, who had already been ravaged by countless disasters, had a surprisingly optimistic outlook. Having survived the initial hardship, they were now all quite content.

After all, their thinking was the same as Tang Mo’s: since they weren’t going to live long anyway, why not live happily, one day at a time?

With their basic physiological needs met, people started wondering, ‘How can we improve our quality of life even more?’

And so, some small groups started specializing in excavating the ruins of collapsed and buried settlements and camps.

This wasn’t a particularly cost-effective endeavor. In the previous apocalypse, households didn’t keep food stores; they either relied on rations from their base or ate Exotic Beast Meat they hunted themselves.

Therefore, all that strenuous digging usually only yielded daily necessities.

And for the small groups that specialized in digging up these old settlements, those daily necessities were precisely the goal.