The Apocalypse Solution Provider

Chapter 8: Exploring Life in Another World

Stepping out of the mental hospital, Su Jin tilted his head back and squinted against the glare of the sun.

The initial panic had faded after meeting the client and successfully negotiating his way out, but a heavy fog of doubt still weighed on his chest.

He wondered idly if this alien sun was going to give him skin cancer.

Whatever.

Looking at the current situation, his connection to the company was completely severed. If he didn’t hit the KPIs for this forced assignment, there was no way he was going home!

Even if he got cancer, it wouldn’t kill him for another decade. He needed to focus on immediate survival prep.

Pulling out the notebook and map Fu Qingdai had given him, Su Jin charted a course as he walked.

Ignoring the gate guard’s wide-eyed stare, he swaggered right out the front gates.

Reaching the street corner, he stopped and scanned the horizon.

According to the map, Fu Qingdai lived in the Talent Residential Community, roughly nine kilometers from the hospital.

He could easily flag down one of the taxis cruising the street to get there.

But securing a rental in the Talent Residential Community wasn’t his top priority right now. He needed critical intel first.

After cross-referencing his map, Su Jin pivoted and headed right.

Two steps later, he paused. Digging a length of rope out of his briefcase, he tied one end to the bag’s handle and secured the other in a tight knot around his wrist.

He concealed the makeshift leash under the sleeve of his trench coat before moving on.

This world’s economy was stagnant, and its law enforcement was clearly a joke. If a drive-by snatcher grabbed his bag, he’d have nowhere to file a grievance.

Broad daylight or not, it paid to be paranoid.

His first objective: a massive local wet market.

Whether the local flora and fauna mirrored Earth’s—and more importantly, whether it was digestible—was a massive blank spot in his data.

For the early stages, he’d stick to his own rations. He planned to procure some basic local ingredients and run small-scale, overnight toxicity tests.

….

Inside the bustling market, Su Jin prowled the aisles.

The place was depressingly ordinary. No grand fantasy bazaar here.

Still, the sheer variety of alien produce made his head spin for a moment.

The good news? A lot of it looked familiar. The bad news? The rest looked like mutant props from a sci-fi B-movie.

Radishes stamped with bizarre fractal patterns, massive single-leaf cabbages, bundles of bleeding-red vines…

Navigating the stalls, Su Jin covertly pinched off stray leaves and stems, pocketing them while feigning interest in the prices to learn their names.

Free samples for the lab. Until he confirmed the food wouldn’t melt his insides, he wasn’t wasting a single dime of his limited budget.

Besides, vegan options weren’t his primary target. He needed meat.

If Earth logic held up here, establishing a food safety hierarchy was simple common sense.

Broadly speaking: Meat ≥ Seeds > Plants.

The muscle and fat of large livestock rarely contained naturally occurring toxins.

Apex herbivores and carnivores relied on sheer physical mass for survival. It was usually the small, fragile organisms that evolved toxic defense mechanisms.

Furthermore, when the apocalypse hit, cold storage facilities would be packed with high-calorie meats. Even slightly spoiled, it carried a higher safety coefficient than questionable forage. It was the ultimate, reliable food source.

But testing the veggies remained a necessary chore.

The real goal was to indirectly verify the safety of whatever processed garbage he’d find in local supermarkets.

Having completed his lap of the vegetable section, he approached the meat and seafood stalls.

Looking at the rows of garish pink lights dangling over the butchers, Su Jin almost laughed.

Who would have thought… butchers in another universe used the exact same scam.

A little mood lighting to make the meat look fresher. Classic.

However, eyeing the massive slabs of marbled meat and the severed, fiercely-horned heads that looked vaguely bovine…

It was a solid indicator of meat safety. A very good sign.

With a pocket full of pilfered salad for the lab and meat cleared from the immediate danger list, only seafood remained.

The aquatic section was a sprawling network of interconnected glass tanks.

Su Jin halted in front of one, analyzing its contents.

The tank held a chaotic mix of species, but most looked comfortingly mundane—just standard, muddy river fish.

Just as he was relaxing, his gaze locked onto something.

A massive gray fish twisted its bulk around, pressing a grotesque mouth flat against the glass to stare right back at him.

When he truly processed what he was looking at, a violent shudder wracked Su Jin’s body.

What the hell is that…?

Clickbait Title: I risked my life infiltrating an alien seafood market! (Live Footage)

Holy shit! An alien botox-lipped mutant carp!

It had a human mouth packed full of teeth, but the kicker? The mouth was vertical. It was pure nightmare fuel… every survival instinct he had screamed that this thing was profoundly wrong.

“Hey brother, you’ve been eyeing that one for a while. Want me to bag it? Freshly caught,” the stall owner’s wife sidled up from behind, her smile aggressively enthusiastic. “Free descaling and tooth-smashing included!”

“Ah?! No, I’m good. Thanks…”

Su Jin swallowed hard, waving her off as he power-walked away.

After finishing his lap of the market, Su Jin finally exhaled.

The food supply seemed viable for now, but letting his guard down was a luxury he couldn’t afford. The toxicity tests were still non-negotiable.

Glancing around to get his bearings, he set off once more.

A hundred paces later, he pushed through the doors of a local pharmacy.

Two clerks leaned against the back counter, gossiping idly. They clearly had zero interest in customer service.

Pausing by the entrance to scan the layout, Su Jin made a beeline for the health supplements aisle.

His eyes swept the shelves twice before he snatched up the most obnoxiously branded bottle of multivitamins.

He dug the bottle of Centrum he’d bought back on Earth out of his bag and began a meticulous side-by-side comparison.

Right before the company officially teleported him to this hellhole, he had panic-bought three things at the supermarket: food, cartons of cigarettes, and multivitamins.

Ten jumbo-sized bottles of Centrum, to be exact.

His logic had been straightforward: if he was getting dumped in an alien wasteland…

Starvation was the obvious threat, but malnutrition was the silent killer. A lack of vitamins and trace elements would ruin him.

He was a gym rat back home; he knew a thing or two about macros and micronutrients.

Deplete your trace elements, and within a month, physical performance tanks.

Under high-stress, high-load survival conditions, that degradation would hit like a freight train.

Prolong the deficiency, and organ failure and disease were guaranteed to follow.

In an apocalypse, declining physiological functions or a simple illness was an absolute death sentence.

Comparing the ingredient labels on the two bottles, the knot in Su Jin’s stomach loosened.

The vast majority of the chemical compounds matched up perfectly. The few unfamiliar terms still looked vaguely recognizable, even if he wasn’t a biochemist.

Similar humanoid species, identical nutritional requirements. It seemed that even without his paranoid lab tests, the local food was about ninety percent safe to consume.

Shoving the local bottle back onto the shelf, Su Jin turned and walked out.

He had gathered enough raw data for now. One final stop to grab a specific item, and then he’d head to the Talent Residential Community to secure a base of operations.

….

A video rental store.

It was located right on the street corner, a little under two kilometers from the wet market.

Standing before its faded entrance, a profound wave of nostalgia hit Su Jin.

Through the grimy glass, he could see walls lined with plastic movie cases and cheap cardboard disc sleeves.

The parallels between the two worlds were uncanny…

It dragged up memories of renting old Lam Ching-ying zombie flicks as a kid—probably the last time in his life he’d actually felt carefree.

Shaking off the sentimental garbage, Su Jin pushed the door open. Spotting the owner parked behind the center counter, he cut straight to the chase.

“Boss, you got any disaster movies?”