LOSS System: Last Store Standing

Jack woke up sweating.

He kept his eyes shut and tried to ignore it for a few seconds, but in the end, he still yanked the blanket off in irritation.

“Ugh, seriously? Did the AC crap out again?”

The moment the words left his mouth, he saw that the vent on the wall was still blowing out cold air. The AC hadn’t stopped. And yet, the room was still unbearably stuffy.

“What the hell…”

Jack muttered under his breath and reached out for his phone, wanting to check the time. But his hand landed on nothing.

He frowned, about to get up and head downstairs to look for it, when he suddenly realized something was wrong.

It was too quiet.

The second floor of the convenience store was where he lived. Normally, at this hour, noise from the street should have already drifted up from below. But now, there was nothing.

Outside the window, it was so quiet it felt as if the whole street had been emptied overnight.

Jack’s drowsiness vanished at once.

He pulled on a T-shirt, slipped into his flip-flops, and went downstairs.

The farther down he went, the more obvious the oppressive heat became. The moment Jack touched the stair railing, he pulled his hand back as if he had been burned.

“Shit!”

He cursed instinctively, but then froze in place.

He had lived in this building for two years. It wasn’t like he had never experienced hot summers before. But a stair railing hot enough to burn his hand?

Even if the AC really had broken down, there was no way the inside of the building should be this hot.

A sense of unease rose inside him.

Jack no longer had the mind to wonder whether the air conditioner was broken. He rushed down to the first floor in a few quick steps.

Then, he saw what was outside the window.

That single glance made him freeze on the spot.

What should have been there was the familiar street of his small town. But now, all of it was gone.

Outside the window, there was only a strange wasteland.

The ground was dry and cracked, a reddish-brown color spreading as far as he could see. Long fissures stretched from nearby all the way into the distance. Gray-red dust rolled close to the ground, occasionally swept up by the wind before quickly scattering again.

Not far in front of the convenience store stood a few withered trees, scattered sparsely across the barren land.

The longer Jack looked at it, the more familiar it seemed.

Why did this damn place look so much like those Mars science videos he used to watch on YouTube?

But that didn’t make sense.

How could there be trees on Mars?

Jack stood in front of the window, his mouth slowly falling open. A dozen thoughts rushed through his mind at once, but in the end, they all turned into one sentence.

“What the actual hell…”

Fortunately, Jack had always been good at rolling with the punches.

The shock hit him hard at first, but once the first wave of panic passed, he forced himself to calm down. Standing there and freaking out would not change anything.

So he turned around, walked to the refrigerator, and pulled out a can of Coke.

The tab snapped open with a crisp hiss, and cold bubbles surged up inside the can. Jack took a long drink.

The icy sweetness slid down his throat, and only then did he feel a little more awake.

Once his breathing steadied, Jack turned back toward the window. He stared at the wasteland outside for a while, then suddenly let out a quiet laugh.

“Well.”

“At least the neighbors won’t be keeping me up anymore.”

Jack was twenty-five years old and ran a convenience store in a small town.

He had taken over the store two years ago. It wasn’t big, but the location was decent enough. There was a residential area nearby, a gas station, and a twenty-four-hour self-service laundromat at the corner of the street.

The store wasn’t making him rich or anything, but it kept the lights on. Once the bills were paid and the shelves were restocked, there was still enough left for Jack to get by.

For someone who had grown up in an orphanage and saved up money from odd jobs after becoming an adult, this already counted as a pretty decent life.

Jack turned and swept his gaze over the shelves inside the store.

The shelves were fully stocked.

A new batch of goods had just been delivered last night, and he had worked until midnight before finishing the restocking. Back then, he had been so exhausted he almost wanted to curse.

But now, looking at those shelves again, the more he looked, the more pleasing they became.

Other people transmigrated and started with maybe a knife, a set of ragged clothes, and a stretch of wilderness.

But him?

He had directly brought an entire convenience store along with him.

The corners of Jack’s mouth couldn’t help but lift.

“Okay, not gonna lie… I came way more prepared than I thought.”

He glanced outside again.

As he continued looking, curiosity gradually got the better of him.

Since he was already here…

He couldn’t just keep staring through the glass forever, right?

Jack set the can down on the cashier counter, turned around, and dragged out a baseball bat from under it.

He had bought the thing back then to deal with drunkards. It had been sitting there for two years, and even the packaging sticker had not been fully peeled off.

Who would have thought that the first time it came in handy would be in a place like this?

Jack held the bat and weighed it in his hand.

“Yeah.”

“Good enough.”

With that, he slung the baseball bat over his shoulder and reached for the door.

Just as his fingers touched the lock, a cold, mechanical voice without the slightest fluctuation suddenly rang out inside his mind.

“Human, unless you’re trying to turn yourself into barbecue, I’d suggest you stop right there.”

Jack’s scalp instantly went numb.

He jumped backward, and the baseball bat in his hand almost smashed into the chewing gum shelf beside him.

“Who the hell said that?!”

Jack spun around abruptly, holding the baseball bat horizontally in front of his chest. But in the next second, he realized something was wrong.

That voice just now had not come from inside the store.

It had sounded directly inside his head.

Jack tightened his grip on the baseball bat.

“What exactly are you?”

The mechanical voice rang out again, still cold and steady.

“Correction. The better question is not what I am, but who I am.”

Jack froze for a second.

Then the corner of his mouth twitched.

“You’re a voice in my head, and you’re correcting my grammar right now?”

“This is not grammar. This is classification.”

Jack almost failed to hold back his laughter.

“Sure. My bad.”

“Then who exactly are you?”

“I am the Limitless Omniversal Supply System.”

Before Jack could respond, the mechanical voice continued.

“You may call me the LOSS System.”

Jack lost it.

“Hahahahaha!”

“Wait, wait. You’re a limitless supply system, and you call yourself LOSS?”

“That’s not a name. That’s a warning label.”

The system fell silent for a moment.

Its mechanical voice remained cold, but somehow, Jack still managed to hear a trace of dissatisfaction in it.

“Human, mockery is not an appropriate response.”

Jack’s shoulders shook from laughter. It took him quite a while before he finally managed to catch his breath.

“Sorry, sorry.”

He tried his best to suppress his expression, but the corners of his mouth still couldn’t help curling upward.

“But come on. With a name like that, you kind of walked right into it.”

The system did not continue arguing with him. The mechanical voice sounded again.

“Human, instead of making jokes, you should probably focus on staying alive.”

The smile on Jack’s face had not completely disappeared yet.

“…What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The outside surface temperature is highly unstable. The daily average is around fifty-two degrees Celsius. During the day, it can reach up to seventy-three degrees Celsius.”

Jack froze.

“Hold up. How hot?”

“Seventy-three degrees Celsius.”

The system’s voice remained steady.

“And one more thing. Before the relevant permissions are unlocked, based on the convenience store’s current stock and usable resources, you can last forty days at most.”

Jack stiffened completely.

His voice instantly rose.

“Forty days? Are you freaking kidding me?”