Farming
I decided to go farming for the first time in a while. Munch, munch. I chewed on an energy bar while filling my canteen with water, then threw a thin windbreaker over my short-sleeved shirt. The weather was still hot, so short sleeves were more than enough, but the windbreaker would protect against scrapes and other minor injuries. It also had two zippered pockets, which made it perfect for farming.
It would definitely get hotter once I started moving, but if it became unbearable I could just take it off and tie it around my waist.
“Now that’s what I call fashion,” I said to myself.
I slung the shabby, empty backpack over my shoulders, slipped on my usual comfortable shoes—no, the sturdy sneakers this time—and pulled the laces tight. Farming preparations complete. Comfortable clothes were always best for farming.
Zombies? It’s not like I’d run into any anyway.
I’d heard that back when exploration teams still worked the undeveloped lands, some of them wore gas masks or motorcycle helmets to protect their faces. They’d also worn thick, tough clothes that zombies couldn’t bite through. Probably because they were terrified of getting even a scratch and turning. Just like I used to be.
But despite all those precautions, the people dressed like that actually died more often. Their helmets narrowed their field of vision. Their bulky clothes slowed them down. They couldn’t react quickly enough. The truth was, unless you were planning to trade punches with a zombie, the best thing to do if one got close was to run like hell.
After plenty of painful lessons, people who went farming learned to value mobility above everything else. The ability to hit and run. Or just run. All of it came from experience.
Crunch, crunch.
I stepped out of the house and crossed the yard. A moderately sized home on the outskirts of E-Sector. This was my place. Just because it had a yard didn’t mean I was living large.
Houses are a dime a dozen around here.
What I called a town was actually a lot of land for the population. There was a one-house-per-person limit, but if you picked an empty place that wasn’t completely wrecked and registered it at the community center, it became your house.
“As long as you have money, it really is a convenient world.”
Even in E-Sector. That was because the Shelter provided welfare benefits to the surrounding sectors. The perks were simple. First, free electricity. Find a decent house that still had power and register it, and they’d supply electricity for free. The power plant generated far more than all the sectors combined could ever use.
Second, free water—excluding drinking water. Since electricity was free, you could use hot water as much as you wanted. Something about launching rockets into the sky to create rain clouds? Or pulling moisture from the air to force rainfall? I’d heard there was some kind of technology involved, but I didn’t know the details.
Drinking water cost 1,000 coins per liter. It was cheap, and the high-nutrient concentrated energy bars sold for 1,000 coins each as well. On top of that, daily necessities were produced nonstop by AI robots that didn’t need wages or rest, so there was never any shortage no matter how much you used.
In short—free house, free electricity, free water.
Compared to the old days when a house cost hundreds of millions and you had to work yourself to death just to eat, this world might actually be more livable depending on how you looked at it. That thought had crossed my mind more than once.
Maybe… those benefits existed to fatten up the powerless citizens of E-Sector with abundance. To keep us content even though we were still fighting desperate battles against zombies. In other words, the welfare wasn’t simple kindness toward the lower sectors—it served some greater purpose.
We had forgotten how to struggle. We had forgotten our resentment toward the upper sectors. We had even forgotten that we’d been cast out and abandoned.
In the beginning, riots broke out regularly. To tear down the walls between sectors. Not to steal the upper sectors for ourselves, but to live together. We felt it was unfair.
Anyone who had survived long enough to reach the Shelter was basically a veteran of survival. Yet non-Awakeners without any special skills were labeled useless and thrown out? Of course it hurt. Even if the Awakeners and specialists were understandable, the fact that their blood relatives could live in the upper sectors without any effort became the main cause of the riots.
By the upper sectors’ own standards, those relatives were useless too. Just like us.
Even in school, the kids who cheered on the bullies were always more hated than the bullies themselves, right? It was exactly like that. If they had just stayed quiet it might have been better, but those people who gained upper-sector citizenship through family connections became arrogant supremacists and discriminated against everyone else.
They were just as powerless as we were. How unfair must it have felt? How painful?
“No wonder there were riots.”
But not anymore. After the welfare benefits began, our predecessors stopped fighting and settled for comfort. The upper sectors stopped being a place to resent and became something to admire from afar. All that remained was gratitude for their consideration.
When I thought that far, one phrase rose naturally to my lips.
A well-fed dog doesn’t bark.
We might have been tamed. To the point where we couldn’t even bark anymore.
“…What am I even thinking about?”
This was what people called the complaints of the well-fed. Once your belly was full, idle thoughts crept in. They say if you keep receiving favors, you start thinking they’re rights. That was exactly me. Sigh.
Tap.
I kicked a random pebble on the side of the road. After walking about ten minutes, I finally started seeing houses with people living in them. That was how far out my own place was.
The way to tell if a house was occupied was by the flag. If a flag hung from the gate or a window, it meant someone lived there. The colors varied wildly. Some people cut up old clothes to make flags. Others hung panties on them. Women’s panties, the sexy kind.
Women had desires too, so widows or women living alone would occasionally hang them when loneliness became too much. It was a signal that if a man saw it and felt the urge, he should come visit that night. Very rarely, even married women would do it—secretly, when their husbands were away for a day or two.
It sounded like a ghost story, but I had seen it myself. The first time was ten years ago, when I was very young. I was walking past a house when I saw a small mesh panty that was obviously a woman’s hanging there. My eyes went wide. Then the uncle following behind me rushed over, snatched the panties, and stuffed them in his pocket.
Back then I didn’t understand, so I thought, Is that uncle a panty beggar? Even though they’re clearly women’s, does he want to wear them? …But later I learned the truth. That by taking those panties and returning them at night, history was made.
Is it real?
It probably was. I’d heard it from Jack. As someone who lived up to his looks, Jack loved women more than anything, and he had never lied to me about them. There was this incredibly sexy auntie he had his eye on. One day he saw panties hanging at her house. They were the ones she had been wearing. When he sniffed them, they carried the faint scent of pussy.
Jack, thinking it was some kind of gift from heaven, immediately took them and went to her house that evening… and fucked her brains out.
He would brag about those experiences to his friends. After hearing his stories, I started looking for houses with panties hanging too. Because I was a man, after all. I actually found some once. But even after taking them… I was too scared she would be disappointed when she saw me, so I never went.
“Hoo… That’s a shame. Maybe I should have gone after all.”
It was the curse of the beta male—missing opportunities even when they were handed to you. I had heard that aunties cared more about a man’s body than his face, which made me lose confidence. Otherwise why would they say “He looks sturdy” instead of “He looks handsome”?
It meant the body was what mattered. And when an auntie used the word “sturdy,” it apparently meant she saw the man as a sexual partner. Sex appeal, basically. According to Jack, if you replied with “My lower half is sturdy too,” they would melt completely…
So in the end I couldn’t go. She would be waiting expectantly after her panties disappeared. If the man who showed up was a weakling like me, I had no idea what she would say.
“If I want to act like a real man, I need to build up my body…”
That required money too. Someone like me who lived on one or two energy bars a day had no business exercising. I’d just collapse. By the way, I still had the panties I took that day at home. Unfortunately they weren’t freshly worn, so they didn’t carry a woman’s scent, but the texture was completely different from men’s underwear. I would sometimes fondle them for inspiration.
To be honest, I used them as very effective fap material…
Yes. I had simply become a panty thief.
“Ugh, damn it.”
When I reached the rear gate, I climbed up to the guard post roof and scanned the developed land with a telescope. I was checking where people were gathered and which areas looked empty.
“There are a lot of people.”
It was early afternoon, the busiest time for farming, so quite a few people were out. Guess I’ll have to go farther today. Actually, the farther you went, the easier it was to find good stuff, so it worked out perfectly.
I trudged down the stairs and headed into the developed land. The reason I had finally come out to farm after so long was because my mother’s birthday was coming up soon. I only saw her once a year. Showing up empty-handed felt wrong. No matter how poor you were, you should at least bring a birthday present. Even I could manage that much.