Chapter 12: Emptying a Billion-Yuan Warehouse

Zhang Yi hired a courier to deliver a hundred giant water buckets to a warehouse, slid them into his dimensional space, then brought them home. He turned on every faucet in the house and started filling buckets one by one. At that pace he’d fill all a hundred within a week.

He didn’t waste a single day. Zhang Yi burned through his cash—fine dining every day, then buying huge batches of restaurant meals to stash in his dimension. He trained at Tianhai City’s shooting range every day, practicing crossbow and firearm work. You don’t become a combat expert in a month, but a crossbow, a gun, and a full-metal, super-secure safe house would make him a lot less vulnerable.

People noticed, of course. They whispered that he’d gone mad. Even Fang Yuqing kept her distance. Nobody took him seriously. Zhang Yi didn’t care. Time was running out. The apocalypse was on the horizon.

More than twenty days flew by. Zhang Yi had stockpiled food, weapons, heating gear—enough to last a lifetime, but it still didn’t feel like enough. He set his sights on Walmart’s massive warehouse. Take that, and he’d control supplies no one would use up in ten lifetimes.

He didn’t wait until the last day. From a previous life he’d heard rumors: high-level insiders had early warning of gamma-rays and quietly moved huge caches before the public knew. He wouldn’t risk it; he’d act early. Even if the Walmart stock vanished, officials distracted by evacuations wouldn’t investigate right away. That gave him a buffer.

So he went in. The warehouse ran round-the-clock, but nights only had ten on duty. Zhang Yi chose the bluntest solution — slip sleeping pills into their tea. With three days left, he didn’t worry about being found out.

Because most of those guards were acquaintances, the plan went smooth. Within an hour they were all out cold. Zhang Yi slipped into the monitoring room and shuttered the cameras. He knew the place like the back of his hand; his rehearsals paid off. Execution was surgical.

He changed into shoes two sizes too big, pulled on gloves, and moved into the cavernous warehouse. Standing before the stacked aisles, he breathed in and started filling his dimension. A glance, a thought, and whatever shelf he scanned folded into his private space.

First: beverages. Tens of thousands of tons—mineral water, soft drinks, high-end wines, imported liquor. He didn’t sort; he swallowed it all. Thousands of cubic meters vanished.

Next: fuel and daily fuel substitutes—smokeless coal, canned gasoline, denatured alcohol for stoves. Tens of thousands of boxes of smokeless coal alone. Enough to keep fires burning for generations. He packed it methodically, allocating sections inside his dimensional stash as if running a warehouse overnight.

Then food. Mountains of it. Multiple storage halls stacked floor to ceiling with canned goods, rotisserie chickens, roast ducks, snack packs, instant meals—enough to eat for ten lifetimes. He filled his space without hesitation.

He grabbed sports gear, too—baseball bats, fencing foils, ski and mountaineering sets, professional cold-weather suits built for minus-100°C. The 2050 tech cold suits made his eyes light up. If the world froze, those sets would be priceless. He took dozens.

Two hours later Zhang Yi had emptied the million-square-meter Walmart facility. Standing in the vast, hollowed-out warehouse, satisfaction washed over him. No matter how cold the ice age became, he’d be comfortable.

He returned to his monitoring post, swapped gloves and shoes into the dimensional space, took a pill-laced cup of tea and lay face down on the table. Sleep came like a curtain.

How long he slept, he didn’t know. A shout jerked him awake. “Manager! Manager — wake up! Something big’s happened!” Groggy, Zhang Yi opened his eyes. Colleagues stood over him, shaking.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“A ghost! The warehouse — it’s empty!” an employee stammered, pointing to the open docks.

Zhang Yi sat up, pretending shock. He walked out and saw it with his own eyes: aisle after aisle, racks stripped bare. He let his knees go weak for show and managed a trembling voice: “What happened? How did everything disappear so fast?”

The staff were rattled. “Those supplies are worth at least a billion! Even with trucks, it would take days to move everything. How could it vanish overnight?”

No one mentioned the sleeping guards. Night-shift naps were common, and no one wanted to confess.

Zhang Yi put on his most anxious face, paced, then said, “This is beyond us. Let’s call the higher-ups.” It was the perfect play — a problem this big would get escalated, and with a payroll of a few thousand yuan a month, nobody there wanted to stick their necks out. They all agreed reluctantly.

Zhang Yi called the warehouse manager. On the other end, silence, then stunned disbelief. Zhang Yi listened, said the right things, kept his composure, and let the lie carry itself: a billion-yuan cache gone in the blink of an eye.

Inside, he let a private smile curl. The dimensional space hummed quietly in his mind — his warehouse, his luck, and a future he finally felt prepared for.