"The modest maiden, so fair, waits for me at the corner of the city wall." That was how Jing Shu's name came to be. Her father had recited the line from the ancient Book of Songs when he first held her, hoping his daughter would grow with both the gentle beauty and the quiet, steadfast strength of someone who could wait by an ancient wall, rooted and resilient.
Under the iron rule of the Government, that resilience was tested daily. Jing Shu's family barely scraped by, their lives worn thin like old cloth, until the ninth year of the apocalypse. By then, corpses littered the land, silent and swollen under a grey sky, and a single bite of food had become unbearably precious, a treasure measured in heartbeats.
It was during that bleak time that Jing Shu accidentally awakened the Cube, her fumbling fingers finding a sequence of turns that opened a door within it. She gained a portable space, a small, sunlit pocket of earth where she could grow crops. At last, her parents were able to live without the constant, grinding terror of starving. They could close their eyes without seeing the ghost of hunger behind their lids.
But who could have imagined that, after surviving so cautiously for so long, holding their breath through every day, Jing Shu would fall into the pit dug by her own kin? The very people who shared her blood.
Jing Shu regretted it bitterly. She shouldn't have let her parents give food to her aunt. Her mother was always guilt-ridden, her voice a thin whisper in their dark home. "Your uncle's family died such a terrible death. Now only your aunt is left. We should secretly send her a little food. Just a little."
Yet one day, her aunt brought her entire family to their door. They stood there, a gaunt little crowd with hungry eyes.
"Sis, I knew you had found Wang Congsi's secret grain stash," her aunt said, her voice slick with false certainty. "Otherwise, where would you get so much food? Just take us there, will you? That way you don't have to keep sending me such little portions that never last. Don't worry, only our two families will know this secret."
Mother Jing was dumbstruck and then furious. Her face paled, then flushed with a hot anger. How could she explain? There was no grain stash. Helping her sister was only because of blood ties, a fragile thread of obligation, not something to be taken for granted or used as leverage.
Enraged, Jing Shu directly drove them out, her voice cold and final, cutting ties once and for all. She barred the door and leaned against it, feeling the wood solid against her back.
Later, her father's old friend, Uncle Sun, arrived with his wife and child. They looked even worse than her aunt had, hollowed out by need.
Kneeling on the rough ground, Uncle Sun raised trembling hands clutching money, the paper notes brittle and faded. He had owed Jing Shu's father for thirteen years—one hundred thousand yuan. Tears streamed down his face as he pleaded, "For the sake of the help I gave you back then, please pull us through this. Just through this winter."
Because Uncle Sun had shown kindness in the past, a lifetime ago it seemed, Father Jing couldn't turn them away. That night, the two men sat long into the evening, talking by the guttering light of a single candle. The shadows leaped on the walls.
"This money might have been worth something ten years ago," Jing Shu said later, holding the stack of bills. "Now, in the apocalypse, its only use is kindling. As for the old favor, this debt should've been repaid long ago." She sneered as she lit a stack of bills and tossed them into the stove. They curled into black ash, glowing briefly.
"Debts of gratitude are the hardest to settle." Her father sighed, the sound heavy in the quiet room. He was thinking of her aunt's shameless fight over food. "In this world, everyone is driven to madness by hunger. It scrapes away the person inside."
Who would've thought that the very next night, Uncle Sun and her aunt colluded, their shared desperation making them allies. They forced their way in. In the chaos, a wild, scrambling fight in the dark, Jing Shu fought too fiercely and was killed. A sharp, shocking pain, and then a great cold. Even so, she dragged a few down with her, her last act one of fierce defiance.
"Heh, tomorrow the Government will pass judgment. None of you will escape." That was Jing Shu's final, fading thought before losing consciousness, a thin satisfaction in the face of the void.
The Cube space, unfortunately, couldn't hold living people. She had learned that too late.
…
No one knew how much time had passed. A burning pain rose in her throat as if she would spit fire. Jing Shu coughed violently, the convulsions wrenching her body, and suddenly jolted awake. She sat up, bewildered, her mind thick with confusion, and scanned her surroundings.
What entered her eyes was achingly familiar: a wall lined with bookshelves, the books neatly ordered, a computer desk with a monitor dark and dusty, and her large, soft bed with its faded blue duvet.
This was her bedroom, just as it had been before the apocalypse, preserved in memory like a photograph.
Jing Shu's heart pounded wildly against her ribs. Trembling, her fingers clumsy, she fumbled for her phone on the nightstand, flipped it open, and saw the numbers glowing on the screen: November 1st, 2022, Tuesday, 10:39 a.m.
Two months before the apocalypse began. She had returned ten years into the past, back to when she was twenty-two, a girl fresh out of university, still in the springtime of youth, her skin unmarked by hardship.
"Reborn?!" Jing Shu clutched her blanket tightly, the fabric soft under her whitening knuckles. She knew this wasn't a dream. Ten years of hardship, hunger, and terror were carved into her very bones, a deep and permanent record. Time and again she had pinched herself, the skin of her arms turning purple and yellow, praying it was all a nightmare, that she would wake up safe. It never was.
As if recalling something urgent, she jumped from bed, her feet hitting the soft carpet, and yanked the curtains open. Warm, golden sunlight spilled into the room, a solid bar of light full of dancing dust motes.
Ten years had passed since she had last seen such light, light that warmed the skin instead of just blinding the eyes. Her mind flashed like a film reel with scenes from those long years, the grey filters of survival, and again with the chaotic shadows of her final moments before death.
Jing Shu clenched her fists, her nails biting into her palms. The sharp pain was an anchor. In this life, she would never repeat the same mistakes.
She rejoiced at the sun, her face turned to its warmth. She hated herself for being too weak in her past life. She raged, grieved, and exulted all at once, a storm of feelings with no clear beginning or end. Joy, anger, sorrow, delight—they surged through her, a tidal wave leaving her mind blank and buzzing.
Several minutes later, a familiar, gnawing hunger twisted in her gut, pulling her back to reality. She had overslept, and her stomach was empty, complaining. Jing Shu ran to the kitchen, her socks whispering on the floor. There, on the counter, she found a bowl of warm milk still steaming slightly, two boiled eggs, a cooked ear of corn, and a plain steamed bun waiting, likely left by her mother.
She grabbed the bun and devoured it in huge, tearing bites, gulped down the milk in long swallows, then sank her teeth into the corn. Its chewy sweetness exploded across her tongue, a flavor so vivid it was almost a sound. In that instant, Jing Shu thought the happiest thing in the world was simply eating real grains, feeling their substance become part of her.
In the ninth year of the apocalypse, even with her farmland Cube space, countless species had already gone extinct, vanished from the earth forever. Seeds were rare beyond belief, more valuable than gold. To plant enough to survive was already a distant luxury for most, a dream of stability.
Carefully, reverently, Jing Shu peeled an egg. She bit into the soft white, savoring its simple, clean fragrance. Then she sprinkled a few grains of salt over the yolk and slipped the whole thing into her mouth, chewing slowly, savoring every note of flavor, the rich yolk mixing with the salt.
The finest ingredients often required the simplest preparation. Eggs, whether boiled, fried, scrambled, steamed, braised, or steeped in tea, were a delicacy that could make any starving child cry with longing, a symbol of everything that was lost.
Those who had never endured famine would never understand why the old would pick up a single grain of rice from the floor and eat it without a care for dirt. That grain was a tiny victory.
If she wanted to eat well and live well in the future, Jing Shu had to reconsider the Cube. It was the key to everything.
The Cube was a 3×3×3 puzzle, a toy mixed until its colors scrambled, then solved by returning it to its pristine state, every face a solid color.
At sixteen, Jing Shu solved it in 6.8 seconds, the fastest in Wu City's high schools. After that, she lost interest. It was just a toy, a momentary thrill.
At eighteen, Father Jing An gave her a Rubik's Revenge for her coming-of-age gift, a four-layer Cube, 4×4×4, its English name hinting at revenge, a puzzle for a new challenge.
After failing to solve it in a few days, her frustration mounting, Jing Shu abandoned it to a box of odds and ends. Only after the apocalypse began did she pick it back up out of boredom, during the long, silent hours, gradually growing faster. Yet it wasn't until the ninth year, in a moment of focused desperation, that the Cube finally activated. Jing Shu had long wondered about the conditions, turning the problem over in her mind during watch shifts.
"It must've been speed," she whispered now to the quiet room. "That one time, I solved it in under thirty seconds, and that's when it activated. The space opened."
Back in her bedroom, Jing Shu dug into a storage box of random things, pushing aside old notebooks and cables, and pulled out the four-layer Cube. It felt cool and light in her hand. This was the very artifact, this plastic puzzle, that could open her farmland space, her future.
She flexed her hands, shaking out her fingers, set a timer on her phone, and took a deep breath, filling her lungs. At the beep, her fingers flew across the Cube, a blur of practiced motion. The clicks and turns were loud in the silent room. Piece by piece, color after color fell into place. Finally, with one last twist, the final layer clicked into position, perfect and aligned. Jing Shu slammed the timer stop.
"00:28:59!"
She had done it.
She had succeeded.
===
The original opening was "静女其姝,俟我于城隅" (Jìng nǚ qí shū, qí wǒ yú chéng yú)
That line is a quotation from the Book of Songs ("诗经", Shijing), one of the oldest collections of Chinese poetry. It comes from the poem "静女" (Jìng Nǚ, "The Modest Maiden") in the Airs of Zhou section.
The poem depicts a young man speaking of a maiden he loves. He describes her as beautiful, reserved, and graceful, waiting for him in a secluded place near the city wall. The tone is tender and filled with admiration, highlighting her modesty and allure.
The author is using this line to explain the origin of the protagonist's name: Jing Shu (静姝).
静 (Jìng) means "quiet, modest, serene."
姝 (Shū) means "beautiful woman, fair lady."