Rise of the Phoenix - Apocalypse Rebirth

Chapter 19 - Compress Food Production

May 17, 3031 - Country C, City S

Aria woke up before noon with an empty stomach and the familiar aching body.

Damn the system cleanse.

Looking around the familiar room, she felt a burst of nostalgia. Leaning back against the headrest, Aria hugged the pillow to her chest and squeezed her eyes closed.

Tears fell to her cheeks as she got lost in her memories. All the hardships from the last life and the fast pace events from the last two days just was too much at this moment.

Being in her own room, surrounded by her own things and being reminded of her simpler life before all the bad stuff that happened.

She thought she was stronger than this.

After some time, she stopped crying and picked up her (The disappeared Aria's) phone. No messages or missed calls. Aria smirked self deprecatingly. Her family surely did not care about her. Only coming to her whenever they needed something since she was the "dependable" one.

Sweeping the whole apartment clean, she sent an email to the apartment manager telling her she's moving out effective immediately. Then Aria left her old home.

Grabbing a quick bite for lunch, Aria went to the DMV and requested a physical copy of her license for official use. After touching the computer system, she had S3 create a new identity for herself.

Aries Wang
Gender: M
Age: 20
Place of birth: Country C, Town GHX
Mother's name: Vicky Zhang
Father's name: Henry Wang

Aria chose the place of birth to a small town that burnt down 18 years ago leaving no records or people who remembered living there.

She then had S3 create over 20 random identities for use later on. After the ZA, each base still scans the citizen's ID chip. But a physical ID was useful in some cases too.

Once the physical ID of the Li identity was ready, it was packaged together with all the others at the pick up window.

Deciding to get rid of Edward's batch of clothes and materials, she went to the donation site and gave away everything unidentifiable. She did the same for Sara's clothes and the clothes she found in her apartment.

Moving on to the homeless shelter, she left all the food that Edward found. She doesn't need his food, she can buy her own.

Then she burnt the remaining identifiable things before heading to the mall to replenish her wardrobe after the purge. She bought a few comfortable outfits, both male and female in her size. Mall clothes are good enough for everyday wear pre-ZA, but she'll need to visit a military town later to buy better defensive clothing.

City S is a 1st tier compress food production city. The city comprised half farmers and half food and water production. During the war, they contributed a good amount of compress food production to the army so their consumable production was very advanced. After the war, they and a handful of cities continued to produce half of the food within Country C.

But within the past decade due to the fact that people's wealth allows them to dine more and more extravagantly. So even though the compress food production (CFP) companies are still earning money providing for the public, mostly to the lower income families with healthy nutrient compress food, they are not doing as well. A few months before the ZA, the majority of the compress food production companies relocated overseas where the market was still booming.