The Apocalypse Survival Manual (Three Days Before Doomsday, I Stockpiled Billions) novel Chapter 252

Chapter 252

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Seeing Nicole still unmoved, the man winced like his heart was bleeding. He clenched his jaw.

“Ten pounds of rice or flour, and it’s yours.”

He didn’t want to sell it, but his family had already run out of food. If this dragged on any longer,

someone would die.

When Nicole still didn’t respond, panic crept into his voice. “Eight pounds. I really can’t go any lower. I paid five million for these. I took better care of them than my own kids.”

“I only have potatoes.”

The man froze for a second before quickly nodding. “Potatoes work, too, but it’ll have to be 20 pounds.”

His family had terrible luck. They had missed out on the first lottery for cold-resistant seed potatoes. They finally got selected in the second round, but the harvest was still more than a month away.

Nicole nodded and pulled potatoes out of her large backpack.

The man handed over the artwork while carefully explaining preservation methods. His love for antiques practically seeped through every word.

The piece looked like it went into her backpack, but she actually tossed it straight into her storage space.

They had barely taken two steps away when the man suddenly called out again. “Miss, I still have more pieces at home. Are you…interested?”

Nicole didn’t answer right away. Instead, she checked her storage space with her consciousness.

Just as expected, it had absorbed the artwork.

There was now an extra bathroom on the second floor. Twenty pounds of potatoes for that was an

absolute steal.

Nicole screamed internally, but her expression stayed calm and steady. “Sure, but I only want authentic

pieces.

Worried about safety, the man hadn’t brought everything with him at once.

But he still owned more than 20 pieces total, including sketches, manuscripts, and paintings from the Renaissance through the Victorian era, worth over 20 million altogether.

He also had an exceptionally fine, ornate silver quill set from the Renaissance period.

This collection represented his entire life’s obsession. Plenty of wealthy collectors had tried to buy

pieces from him over the years, offering several times what he had originally paid, and he had refused every single time.

Now, he couldn’t even trade them for a pound of rice.

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In prosperous times, people chased antiques. In chaotic times, they chased gold. In the apocalypse, all that mattered was food.

He had tried selling to middlemen before. At first, he could still exchange them for supplies, but eventually even the resellers stopped taking them.

Now that he had finally found someone willing to trade food, he forced himself to let go of the collection, though unease still lingered in his eyes.

“If you really want them, I can lower the price.”

Nicole thought it over. “What’s your offer?”

The man hesitated for a long time before answering. “A hundred pounds of rice or flour, plus another hundred pounds of potatoes?”

Nicole and Zeph had stocked plenty of rice and flour, but nobody knew how long they would survive. If she somehow made it to 100 years old, there was a good chance even that wouldn’t be enough.

“I can only do potatoes.”

Nicole refused to trade nonrenewable supplies unless she absolutely had to.

Sure, she could always exchange other materials for grain later, but after surviving both the deep freeze and extreme heat, even well-preserved food could only stay good for so long. 1

The man clenched his jaw and compromised. “Three hundred pounds. In batches.”

A single trade that large would attract too much attention. He worried he wouldn’t make it home alive, and he also feared Nicole might decide to rob him outright.

Nicole couldn’t have been happier with the arrangement. “Deal.”

On the way home, Zeph finally asked, “Those manuscripts can expand your storage space?”

He had already held her hand halfway across the city, so Nicole stopped hiding it from him.

“Gold, silver, antiques… Valuable old objects seem to work. After the storage space absorbed that manuscript earlier, it added a bathroom.”

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