Chapter 79 - 78: Emotions

Chapter 79: Chapter 78: Emotions

Chen Xiaobao, ever the sensible child, took the initiative to apologize. "Mommy, Xiao Bao knows he made a mistake. From now on, I’ll always tell Mommy before I go out to play."

Only then did Chen Momo let the matter drop.

Once Chen Xiaobao retreated to his room, Xu Xiaoka couldn’t help but whisper, "Sister Momo, you’re being too harsh on him. He’s so little, and he’s already very well-behaved."

"I’m actually being very lenient," Chen Momo replied. "If you think about..."

She swallowed the rest of her sentence.

She thought about how she had treated him before the apocalypse—that had been true strictness. Math Olympiad, Go lessons, vocal training... Extracurriculars had monopolized every second of Xiao Bao’s free time. Furthermore, she had demanded excellence in every single subject. Anything less meant he would be punished with standing in the corner once he got home.

It wasn’t until the apocalypse struck and she lost him that she realized Xiao Bao had never truly enjoyed his childhood. She wondered what his real interests were, and if he had actually liked any of the classes she had forced upon him.

Having deeply reflected on her past mistakes, Chen Momo had canceled all of Xiao Bao’s extracurriculars the moment she was reborn. She didn’t even make him go to regular school anymore. She swore off tiger-parenting; her only strict requirement now was his safety.

Because of this, she forbade him from leaving her line of sight without permission. Wherever he wanted to go, he had to report to her first. Clearly, he had failed to do that today. She had already endured the agony of losing a child once—it was a kind of pain Xu Xiaoka could never understand.

After the three of them finished cleaning up the food stall, Xu Xiaoka and Xiao Bao held hands while Chen Momo led the way back home.

Back at the apartment, Chen Momo did some rough calculations. Assuming they sold a hundred fish a day at five hundred base credits each, they were making fifty thousand base credits daily. They had been open for half a month now, bringing in at least six to seven hundred thousand base credits. After deducting rent and other overhead costs, their net profit sat comfortably around six hundred thousand.

She was immensely satisfied with this figure. Before the apocalypse, she wouldn’t have dared dream of making even three thousand a month. To think that the end of the world had somehow turned her into someone pulling in over a million a month—it was simply unimaginable.

Meanwhile, Huang Yuqing was at home, relentlessly pestering her husband, Yang Shunsheng.

"Shunsheng, the small-plate food stall diagonally across from Chen Momo is up for transfer. I want to rent it!"

Seeing Chen Momo drive that luxury car last time had left a deep, traumatic mark on the vain Huang Yuqing. She wanted to drive a top-tier luxury car like that, too.

Unfortunately, their living conditions had plummeted since the apocalypse began. Before the disaster, Yang Shunsheng ran his own company, raking in about two hundred thousand a month and netting around two million annually. Back then, he had been a certified cash cow! But the end of the world had changed everything. Yang Shunsheng’s company had been buried under the blizzards, along with all his business operations. Now, earning even three thousand a month was a struggle, let alone two hundred thousand. Their family was entirely dependent on selling off their pre-apocalyptic possessions just to scrape by.

Hearing his wife’s demand to open a stall, Yang Shunsheng frowned. "Stop causing a fuss. Have you ever even done business before? If I let you run a stall yourself, could you even manage it?"

"Chen Momo can run one just fine!" Huang Yuqing shot back stubbornly. "Why couldn’t I?"

Chen Momo’s business was booming. Every time Huang Yuqing went to the cafeteria to eat, seeing the long lines snaking in front of the pickled fish stall made her so jealous she felt physically contorted with envy.

"Chen Momo can endure hardship. Can you?" Yang Shunsheng retorted. "Back when Chen Momo and I were married, she would wake up at five in the morning to cook for the whole family, drop Xiao Bao off at school by seven, and still be up tutoring him with his homework at ten at night. Could you do that? You complain for half the day just being asked to change a diaper for Zijie. In the years we’ve been together, you’ve barely cooked a single meal. Do you really think you can handle the grueling work of the restaurant industry?"

Struck speechless by his interrogation, Huang Yuqing deflated. When it came to enduring hardship, she was utterly useless.

The sheer thought of manual labor killed her ambition on the spot. Running a food stall meant waking up at the crack of dawn and coming home in the dead of night. She had no desire to suffer like that. It would be much better to let Yang Shunsheng shoulder the burdens and earn the money while she lived a life of pampered luxury, relying solely on him for support.

Thus, she abandoned her business venture. As for Yang Shunsheng, he had no plans to rent a food stall either. He was aiming for something far bigger.

The apocalyptic blizzards had wiped the slate clean, leaving him with next to nothing. He needed to establish a firm foothold in the base as quickly as possible, and he had spent the last few days racking his brain for an opportunity to make a grand comeback.

Recently, he had caught wind of a rumor: the base’s central management was planning to select one outstanding location from among the ten major bases to fund and construct a massive production center. This facility would house agricultural activities like vegetable farming and fish breeding to supply the daily necessities of the population. Anyone who managed to contract a zone within this production center—whether for vegetables, fish, or fruit—would undoubtedly reap astronomical profits. After all, the center would be supplying all ten of the nation’s major bases. With the contracting rights secured, one would never have to worry about finding buyers!

Since learning of this golden opportunity, Yang Shunsheng was raring to go. He immediately liquidated every single pre-apocalyptic asset he could. By a stroke of sheer luck, he had taken a sudden interest in speculating on gold right before the apocalypse hit, buying up a massive quantity in one go. He hadn’t expected that impulsive decision to actually pay off. Even in the post-apocalyptic world, gold held the exact same value it always had.

He exchanged all of his gold at the base’s trading windows, scraping together a total of one hundred thousand base credits. This was no small amount of startup capital. Clutching this fortune tightly, he had no intention of wasting it on a measly food stall. He was going to use those funds to invest in the production center’s contracting rights!

Once the center was built, securing just a single zone would make earning back his initial investment absurdly easy. Now, all Yang Shunsheng had to do was wait for the construction to finish so he could swoop in and claim a slice of the pie.

Yang Shunsheng wasn’t the only one who had heard the news about the new production center; Chen Momo had caught wind of it as well.

Despite running her pickled fish stall all day, she still made it a habit to stand on her balcony every night, tuning her radio to intercept signals from a mysterious broadcast channel. This frequency routinely leaked classified information ahead of time. And what was classified information? If utilized properly, it was pure, unadulterated cash.

Having stumbled upon this channel purely by luck, there was no way she was going to let it slip through her fingers. Every single day, she tuned in to stay a step ahead of the latest policies and directives.