Socially Anxious Girl Starts Hoarding Before the Apocalypse

While An An was working outside, Wen Qian was busy filling their home with various items.

This behavior had started since she had taken in An An. She could take small objects out of her space without the child noticing, but larger items were different. Bringing them out suddenly would be too conspicuous.

So, for many years, she had been gradually disposing of the things in her space.

Sometimes, she would store items in places where she and An An rarely went.

In the area Wen Qian had divided with the neighbors, she mostly moved around her own home and the hunter's cabin at the edge of their territory.

As for the central area, Wen Qian rarely went there. After An An came into her life, she started moving her collected building materials in that direction.

When the child grew up, she could go and retrieve them if needed, and it would also provide a good explanation to the child.

She placed the clay suitable for pottery-making in a hollow behind the house, and some bricks and stones on the mountain not far behind the house.

The forest was dense, and due to the terrain, these items couldn't be discovered unless one looked closely.

As for some of the finer grains, Wen Qian still planned to keep them in her space, gradually adding them to their food over time.

For books, Wen Qian would bring them out gradually as she taught the child to read, and later even set up a special bookshelf.

The books the child had previously studied filled half the room, and once taken out of the space, they wouldn't be put back in, otherwise An An would notice something was amiss.

Another issue was that even if fruit could be preserved for a long time, its freshness shouldn't be the same as freshly picked. So when An An was still too young to understand, Wen Qian experimented with other preservation methods.

One method involved using clay to make protruding lids, placing grapes in the middle, and sealing them together, which could preserve the fruit for half a year.

Wen Qian experimented with different methods based on this idea and finally found suitable preservation techniques for grapes and some berries.

When An An was younger, she would directly take fresh fruit from her space. As An An grew older, Wen Qian used this method to preserve fruit in autumn for winter consumption.

However, the winters here were very cold, and although the items stored in clay didn't spoil, they became rock-hard.

This meant they had to be consumed during winter, otherwise they would thaw and spoil when the weather warmed up.

In winter, indoors where temperatures were higher, they would open the clay shells, wash the rock-hard fruit, and enjoy a texture similar to sorbet.

For other fruits, like strawberries, they grew them continuously. In cold weather, they kept them in the warm kitchen and bedroom, and in good weather, they left them outside.

Persimmons, apples, and pears were partially dried into fruit leather, with the rest stored in the cellar.

By the time An An was old enough to understand, Wen Qian had already dealt with most of the items in her possession.

Or perhaps Wen Qian felt that she had long been seen through, but An An simply didn't mention it.

Now, Wen Qian's space contained some ice and snow, firewood, a portion of weapons and food, and various miscellaneous items.

The space also held many discarded packages, all sharing a common feature: they were from the same time period.

They all dated from when Wen Qian dreamed of the natural disaster beginning, up until its arrival.

So she kept all these packages with their telling information in her space.

Because there were so many things to store at home, Wen Qian had been building more and more rooms.

Previously, there were three rooms at the front, and later Wen Qian built a total of six rooms at the back of the house against the wall.

These rooms were all used for storage. Some were just filled with jars covering the floor.

Others needed wooden shelves to hold various pots and containers, categorized neatly.

Even with careful management, damage was inevitable as rats and insects would come out at night and nibble on the stored items.

At times like these, Wen Qian would think how nice it would be to have a cat in the house. Back in her old home, cats were the best defense against rats.

As it turned out, rather than a cat, Wen Qian's household first acquired a dog.

It all started when Big Jin went to the market and found out-of-towners selling dogs. They were all month-old puppies of the southern hunting breed.

Big Jin bought one and informed the neighbors, asking if they wanted any, knowing that hunting without a dog was very inconvenient.

They had previously owned a hunting dog, but it had died of illness, so they were now buying a new one.

The other two neighbors had never owned one.

So An An and Ni Sha's child went together to the market.

The market had already dispersed, but the dog sellers hadn't left immediately, planning to stay for a few more days, lodging with villagers.

When the two arrived, there were still four puppies left. One had been chosen but not paid for yet, so the seller wasn't displaying it.

An An had no experience in choosing dogs, so she went purely by instinct, selecting the first one that came up to lick her hand.

All the puppies were earthy yellow, chubby, and sturdy-looking. The one An An chose was particularly lively and friendly.

The two bought their dogs, and the seller also gave them vaccines and deworming medicine before they headed home.

Neither Wen Qian nor An An had experience in dog training, but they had books on the subject, so they followed the instructions.

The puppy, new to the yard, soon demonstrated its ability to catch rats.

Thus, this little dog named Sunshine took on the roles of both hunting dog and cat, and accordingly, received double the rewards.

Wen Qian hadn't kept a dog before, but now having one to keep An An company wasn't bad, and the house indeed needed a good helper to catch rats.

When An An went out hunting, she would take the puppy along, letting it run while training it.

Wen Qian would tend to household matters in the courtyard.

As she grew older, many tasks became more challenging, so she rarely went out now.

An An was now the head of the household, which made it even more convenient for Wen Qian to hide things around the house.

Although she was old, her memory hadn't deteriorated, and her eyesight was still good, so she often put things in various jars and pots.

Needles and thread, medicines, and seasonings.

Including the little cooking oil she had left, which she poured from plastic bottles into the oil jars they usually used for storage.

There were also other materials that she gradually moved in as they decreased, at least to an extent that Wen Qian believed was unnoticeable to the naked eye.

With every addition comes a subtraction. She took out her previous food supplies and would later store some of the grains she grew here into her space.

This way, when she took them out again later, there wouldn't be too many noticeable differences—at least not to An An once she grew up.

Otherwise, the fine flour she had bought before would look starkly different from the flour she ground now.

So, Wen Qian gradually brought out all the original items from her space, taking advantage of An An's ignorance to consume them together first.

Before taking in the child, Wen Qian maintained a balance of inflow and outflow. She still had leftovers from what she had purchased with money before the calamity, as she felt she couldn't just sit idle and deplete her resources.

After taking in the child, she brought out all those items. Subsequently, what she stored away were the foods she could obtain in the northern forest, still adhering to the principle of balancing input and output.

In the end, all that remained in her space of her previous life were just the packaging materials.