The Apocalypse Solution Provider

Chapter 11: The Doomsday Plan

After a long, hollow sigh, Su Jin’s legs gave out. He slid down the wall and slumped onto the floor, his chest heaving with ragged breaths.

He had always considered himself braver and more optimistic than the average guy. And until today, he had been right!

Even after entering the corporate meat grinder and becoming a quintessential wage slave, his spine had never bent.

But right now? He was terrified. Shaking in his boots terrified…

Su Jin buried his fingers in his hair, drowning in an ocean of regret.

I was wrong. I was wrong from the very beginning.

If he hadn’t gone drinking with that VIP client, he wouldn’t have offended the bastard. If he hadn’t offended him, he wouldn’t have had to job-hunt. And if he hadn’t job-hunted, he wouldn’t have been shanghaied by this psychotic agency and dumped into this godforsaken timeline!!

“Is the company listening… can anyone hear me?” Su Jin swallowed hard, his voice wavering as he stared nervously into the empty air.

Disappointment quickly settled in. He was just a crazy person talking to the walls.

A corporate slave’s value was a simple equation: market value minus the cost of jumping ship.

The sycophants who endlessly kissed management’s ass and preached company loyalty were just broadcasting their desperation. It meant their cost of leaving was too high, making them the prime targets for the layoff chopping block.

If the guillotine was coming down, pleading for mercy by flashing your car loan, mortgage, and screaming kids only handed HR more leverage to squeeze your severance package.

Su Jin had weaponized this theory the day he graduated, mastering the dark art of “managing up.” He always projected an aura of absolute confidence, forcing even the most arrogant clients to respect his boundaries.

He had survived multiple rounds of corporate purges without a scratch. If he hadn’t completely nuked that last account, Old Li would never have dared to cut him loose.

But this damned Heavenly Dao Infinite Liability Company was a ghost ship! He couldn’t even find a middle manager to manipulate!

He sat paralyzed on the floor until the sun dipped below the horizon.

The last sliver of twilight faded, plunging the apartment into pitch black.

In the gloom, Su Jin vigorously scrubbed his face, exhaling a long, weary breath.

Pushing himself up, he flicked on the light switch. After a solid session of wallowing in self-pity, the rigid panic in his face had finally softened.

Resolutely, he marched toward the bathroom.

The situation was FUBAR.

His only option was to ditch the denial, embrace the grind, and clear the mission objectives!

Management ghosting him was actually a net positive. It likely meant no one was actively monitoring his live feed.

Considering they could beam audio directly into his skull, he’d spent the whole day feeling like a lab rat under a microscope.

The paranoia was so intense he hadn’t even dared to take a shit. He’d been holding it for twenty-four hours!

He genuinely wondered how all those webnovel protagonists with voices in their heads managed to use the toilet without performance anxiety.

….

The next morning, harsh sunlight pierced the room, glaring directly onto Su Jin’s face.

He groaned, his eyelids twitching. After a long, internal struggle, he finally cracked his eyes open, clinging to a desperate sliver of hope.

The unfamiliar ceiling of the rented bedroom stared back at him. Even though he expected it, a bitter wave of disappointment washed over him.

The only silver lining was that the sketchy leafy greens he’d scavenged for dinner hadn’t given him food poisoning.

Six days until server wipe.

He had slept fully clothed, tossing and turning in a state of high alert, managing barely three hours of broken sleep.

Hauling himself out of bed, he dragged himself to the sink to splash some cold water on his face.

Su Jin paced into the living room, checked the two sheets of blank white paper he had taped to the window glass, and dropped into a chair at the dining table.

Pulling out his notepad and a stale piece of bread, he began to eat and strategize.

He had an established protocol with Fu Qingdai. He was renting the unit directly across from hers. The minute she was discharged, she would rally at his location.

Give it a three-day observation window. If she was still MIA, he’d have to breach the asylum again.

Right now, babysitting the client wasn’t priority one. Hardening his defenses and stockpiling for the crisis took precedence.

Six days on the clock. Securing bulk Supplies of water, rations, and medical kits was non-negotiable.

But water was the logistical nightmare. The municipal supply would inevitably be contaminated, making future extraction nearly impossible.

Daily consumption rates were high, the volume couldn’t be compressed, and the sheer density outweighed almost any other resource.

Bottling it up meant concentrating massive structural weight onto a tiny footprint. Storing a sustainable quota would stress the apartment’s floor slabs to the breaking point. Dispersing the barrels would devour crucial floor space.

The building codes in this dimension were a black box. And design blueprints rarely matched the actual cut-corner construction.

Crappy contractors hired lazy labor, lazy labor used cheap concrete, and cheap concrete degraded over time.

Factoring in the risk of structural collapse, he had called an audible yesterday and leased two separate units.

Baseline human hydration required roughly half a gallon a day. A two-hundred-and-fifty-gallon tank, strictly rationed for drinking, could keep one person alive for about eighteen months.

But spreadsheets didn’t bleed. High-stress combat, injuries, or sanitation protocols would drastically spike consumption rates.

He also had to budget for Fu Qingdai and her parents… plus the potential overhead of recruiting meat shields to boost his own survival odds.

Two apartments. One thousand gallons of water. Dispersing the storage vessels along the load-bearing walls should keep the structural integrity in the green while maintaining a massive safety margin.

That required forty twenty-five-gallon drums… No, he needed to buy larger vats and distribute the PSI using wooden pallets.

Add iodine tablets to the shopping list, and industrial plastic wrap to seal the lids and mitigate evaporation…

Su Jin aggressively bullet-pointed his ledger, his pen pausing briefly before shifting to the caloric intake logistics.

Base carbs were mandatory, but buying rice in bulk required hitting wholesale distributors on the outskirts of town. He’d need to supply them with unmarked cardboard boxes for discreet, after-hours delivery.

Otherwise, parading pallets of grain through the complex would paint a massive target on his back… He needed to bribe the rent-a-cop at the front gate beforehand. Framing it as a late-night move-in was the optimal cover story.

Carbs secured, he needed fats and proteins. Bulk jugs of vegetable oil and rendered lard would do the trick.

Whey protein isolate was the most efficient source, but market analysis suggested it didn’t exist here. Judging by the local demographic, the fitness industry was practically at zero. He hadn’t spotted a single commercial gym from the cab window.

The backup option was powdered milk: nutritionally dense, highly accessible, vacuum-sealable, and loaded with calories.

For micronutrients, he’d have to rely on multivitamin supplements.

After twenty minutes of intense brainstorming and drafting, Su Jin flipped to a fresh page.

Food and water locked in. Next priority: armaments. This world possessed an industrialized base; the widespread deployment of kinetic firearms was a statistical certainty.

But the difficulty of acquiring black-market hardware was an unquantifiable variable. He had interrogated Fu Qingdai on the subject; civilian firearm ownership was strictly prohibited.

Smuggling channels were invisible, and the legal blowback and overhead costs were catastrophic.

Combining his seven thousand with Fu Qingdai’s crowdfunded cash, his total operating budget sat at just over twenty-five thousand.

That barely covered the overhead for the Supplies. Pursuing firearms had to be scrapped. Even if he scored a rifle, the ROI was terrible.

Factor one: without rigorous range time, his accuracy would be garbage. He’d burn through irreplaceable ammunition in seconds.

Factor two: if acoustic signatures pulled Zombie aggro, pulling the trigger was basically suicide… In the early game, a gun was essentially a psychological deterrent against living looters. Threatening to shoot yielded higher value than actually shooting.

The anomalous pistol in his inventory was sufficient.

Therefore, his loadout strategy had to pivot to melee cold weapons. Polearms were optimal for spacing. He could source galvanized steel pipes from local hardware stores and weld them to machetes and heavy axes.

Securing a compound bow would be a godsend; hunkering down in the safe house would provide ample downtime for target practice.

Only…

Su Jin pulled out the city map, his finger tracing the grid for the local slaughterhouse.

If he were still an edgy, blood-pumping teenager, the prospect of hacking into living flesh might actually excite him.

But the corporate meat grinder had matured him. Beyond a healthy fear of the penal code, he had developed a grim understanding of how fragile biological life truly was.

He didn’t shy away from a fistfight, but butchering humanoids? Even if they were just a rotting Zombie horde… the visceral gore would likely trigger a fatal panic attack.

But when the server wiped and the blood started flowing, his aim couldn’t falter. His hands couldn’t shake!

A single micro-stutter meant a Game Over.

The greatest virtue of a pragmatic adult was never overestimating one’s own stats.

The most critical item on his to-do list—after a twenty-four-hour scouting sweep of the map—was booking a session at the slaughterhouse. He needed to hack into some fresh meat. He needed a crash course in psychological desensitization.