Call Me Daddy

In this life, he had it all. His daughter had incredible abilities, and now it seemed like his mother, who had survived, also had some special abilities. He could rely on both his mother and his daughter—he was unbeatable!

Although it seemed a bit shameless, Su Aobai decided to take the easy route this time around.

Maybe his previous world had been too miserable, but the difficulty of this one felt surprisingly low. The system had brought him to this specific point in time, where his mother had survived, and in his daughter’s eyes, he was still that great father. Although, due to their long separations, his daughter wasn’t as close to him as she was to her grandmother, her initial affection for him had already reached 78, something he hadn’t even come close to in his previous worlds. He was only a step away from reaching the system’s required passing score.

Even if he didn’t deliberately do anything, spending time with her every day would gradually increase her affection for him.

Things would naturally work out in the end. Su Aobai chose to stop overthinking. In this life, he just wanted to be a good-for-nothing and listen to his mom.

***

“Is the power still not back?”

“Why is there still no signal?”

“I can’t get online, and I can’t even dial emergency numbers like 110 or 120!”

Early the next morning, a number of people gathered one after another at the village chief’s house.

In a small village like Tuanjie, the village chief held a position of considerable authority. Whenever there was trouble, people’s first thoughts were always to turn to the village chief or the village party secretary.

Deng Guohua wheeled out an old, rusted bicycle from his warehouse, reassuring the villagers.

“Don’t panic. I’ll head to town to find out what’s going on.”

These days, he usually traveled by electric scooter, but the power outage last night had left it only partially charged. It would be enough to make a round trip to the town government office, but if the town couldn’t fix the issue and he had to go to the county for answers, it wouldn’t make it.

So, Deng Guohua thought of his long-abandoned, old-fashioned bicycle. His thrifty wife hadn’t let him throw it away, so it had just been sitting in the warehouse.

He tested it and found it still usable. After oiling the chain, he was ready to head out.

Meanwhile, Kong Yao was also in a hurry to leave.

She was thinking beyond what most villagers had considered.

Power outages were common, but for all communication signals to disappear completely—that was unusual.

If there was an issue with the nearby signal tower, logically, someone should have come to notify them by now. But there had been no movement or news, and after such a long time, neither the power nor the signal had been restored.

Because Kong Yao had woken up early to cook, she also discovered that the faucet had stopped running, meaning that the local water pipes or even the entire water supply plant might have encountered problems. All these issues happening at once definitely suggested that this was no small matter.

So, after she finished making breakfast with bottled water, she prepared to head back to the city to check with her husband, who worked at a government office, to see if he had any information.

If the problems were only affecting their village, she would take the kids and the elderly to stay in the city for a while, at least until water, electricity, and signal were restored.

She also needed to contact her parents to see how things were on their end.

“Sister-in-law, I’ll go with you. I need to buy a few things and return the car to my friend,” Su Aobai said, offering to accompany her to the city. His mother’s health had stabilized, and Su Su and Yuan Yuan could be left in her care.

“Alright.”

Kong Yao glanced at the seven-seater SUV parked in the yard, thinking that they should indeed return the borrowed car. Besides, her younger brother-in-law could drop her off at her husband’s workplace, where they would have already started the workday by now.

“Wait a moment!”

As they were about to leave, Deng Caihua called out to her younger son.

“Er Bai, when you go to the city, stop by Siji Commercial Street and buy some spices for me. I’ve written everything down for you on this piece of paper.”

Deng Caihua pulled out a piece of paper densely covered with a list of seasonings.

“We don’t know when the power will come back, and if the meat in the freezer spoils, it’ll be a waste. The weather’s so hot right now, so I’ll marinate it and make salted meat or spicy meat sauce—those things keep well.”

As a seasoned woman with plenty of life experience, Deng Caihua had already started planning for the worst-case scenario in which the power wouldn’t be restored anytime soon.

Coincidentally, some of the spices she usually used at home were running low. Since her son was going to the city, it made sense for him to stop by Siji Commercial Street. That area was known for wholesale prices, and she would get the best deals there.

The elderly woman hadn’t only listed the items she needed but also included their usual prices on the paper. She didn’t expect her son not to remember everything; she was simply being efficient.

Su Aobai glanced at the list. It included salt, MSG, soy sauce, and oyster sauce—ingredients that weren’t easy to make at home. As for dried chili and pepper, those weren’t listed since they grew them in the fields and the back mountain.

This gave him a good excuse to stock up on seasonings.

Su Aobai nodded, putting the note into his pocket. After promising his daughter to buy rainbow candies for her and her cousin, he drove off with his sister-in-law.

***

On the way to the city, Kong Yao’s expression grew more serious.

She had asked Su Aobai to stop the car several times along the way, each time getting out to ask people about the situation. The power outage, water cut, and signal loss weren’t just happening in Tuanjie Village. Everywhere they went, people had been facing the same problems since the previous night.

Kong Yao suspected that the entire city might be experiencing the same issues.

Citywide power and water outages, along with signal loss, were something she had never encountered in her lifetime.

A deep sense of unease crept into her heart.

“Er Bai, let’s not go to your brother’s workplace first. Let’s head to Siji Commercial Street,” she said after buckling her seatbelt.

“I have a bad feeling about this. It seems like this power and water outage isn’t just a simple issue.”

Siji Commercial Street was filled with privately owned small shops selling all kinds of goods. They had the seasonings Deng Caihua wanted, along with rice, flour, grains, oil, and a variety of dried goods from all over the country. It was basically a food street. There were also a few stores selling household items and hardware.

The reason she chose this street was because it was run by independent shop owners, where payments could be made in cash or through scanning the owner’s QR code. Larger supermarkets, on the other hand, were different. They carried too many items, and the cashiers couldn’t possibly remember the price of every product. Their payment systems relied on electricity. If the power outage was citywide, the supermarkets might not even be able to operate unless they had backup diesel generators.

Kong Yao had no idea how long the power outage would last, but a troubling thought occurred to her.

People nowadays were so accustomed to mobile payments that they rarely carried cash. Without electricity, they wouldn’t be able to withdraw money from banks or ATMs. This meant that once their phone batteries died, they would have no way to pay for goods.

Part of her believed that the power would be restored soon. A massive power outage like that would cause huge financial losses for the government every minute it continued. There was no way the authorities would allow such a crisis to escalate.

But another part of her worried that this sudden blackout, combined with the loss of signal, might be a bad omen.

As a precaution, Kong Yao thought it best to stock up on supplies.

While she was confident the power would return eventually, it wouldn’t hurt to buy some essentials before her phone ran out of battery. They already had enough rice and grains at home, and items like oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar wouldn’t spoil, so she could stock up on those. She also planned to get some shrimp, seaweed, and other seafood that wasn’t locally available.

Things like tissues, sanitary pads, and medicine—calcium tablets, vitamins—would also be worth stocking up on. After all, they were good for the body and wouldn’t go to waste.

Kong Yao leaned towards thinking that she might be overreacting, but since these were daily essentials, stocking up on them wouldn’t lead to waste. She calculated the balance in her Alipay and Feixin accounts and planned to buy a few things without touching the family savings.

When Su Aobai and his sister-in-law arrived at the commercial street, there weren’t many people around. It seemed that few were as anxious as she was.

Some of the shop owners on the street were complaining about the power outage, but they continued operating as usual. Although some scanning devices couldn’t be used, they all remembered the prices of their goods. They used calculators to tally up purchases, which was more cumbersome but didn’t prevent them from doing business.

Kong Yao quickly rushed into the stores with her younger brother-in-law, beginning a large-scale shopping spree.

Meanwhile, at his workplace, Su Yiqing also started paying serious attention to the power outage and the signal loss.