Story Synopsis
Title: The Last General Store of the Apocalypse
Tags: #Apocalypse #Superpowers #Survival and Management #Hardcore Realism #Mystery
In the third year of the apocalypse, human lives are worth the least among the ruins, while clean water and unexpired medicine are worth the most.
While others fight over canned food, rummage through trash, and kill for half a ration bar amid the crumbling walls, Shen Xu opens a general store at South Broken Bridge. The shop is small, but its shelves are absurdly well-stocked: thirty-seven bottles of water, eight packs of ration bars, povidone-iodine, cefalexin, vacuum-packed brown sugar, and even a box of matches. In this gray-mist-covered wasteland, the store seems like something that shouldn't exist.
No one knows where her goods come from. Only those who have traveled with her know: she can smell supplies. Within three hundred meters, clean water smells like fresh grass after rain, medicine like mint, and ammunition like cold, rusted iron. This ability is the apocalypse's only compensation to her, and the price was the loss of her entire family.
But the rules of her store have made enemies, too: no credit, no counterfeits, and no questions about where things came from.
The people of the Gray Tower pressure her to "join them." The scavengers' guild wants to exploit her ability, while the mysterious "Root" organization in the underground conduits watches her closely. Worse still, her nose has begun to pick up things that shouldn't exist: zombies carry traces of man-made chemicals, the depths of the Gray Tower reek of formalin, and behind the signal of the Echo Radio Station lies a shocking secret about the truth of the apocalypse.
Shen Xu only wants to survive by looking after her store. But in these man-eating ruins, looking after yourself alone has always been a pipe dream.
The suspense thread is buried deep enough to attract me to keep watching.