Norman intended to immediately start processing the blood. But he made the mistake of sitting down on the couch to decide on the best way to go about it. Before he knew it, he was fast asleep. When he woke up it was twelve hours later. The lost time annoyed him, but at least he felt rested and his body was feeling better.

　　He had still been a bit sore the previous day and all the activities have drained him more than he realized. When he looked at the clock on his phone it said it was about four in the morning. He groaned at that.

　　All the shit with the Sin had started before dawn. By the time Sin and his people had left, it was around noon. Getting woken up in the middle of the night hadn`t helped Norman`s state of mind the previous day. Not that Sin seemed bothered by that fact.

　　After they left, it took another few hours to dispose of the corpse. Then when Norman got back home, he spent another hour or so cleaning the kitchen.

　　All-in-all it was a completely exhausting experience.

　　Norman rolled himself off the couch. After standing up, he stretched his back getting an audible crack. "Oh, that`s good."

　　He continued stretching his tired muscles before scratching at his face. The scruff from not shaving for three days was making his face itch but he didn`t feel like wasting time doing that at the moment. He also got a whiff of body odor, wondering if he should shower. He chose to forgo that as well. He was likely to get dirty anyway and could shower later.

　　There was one thing he had to do before starting his little project. Norman wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There wasn`t much in it. He pushed aside the bottles of blue blood looking for something to eat. There was a half-empty bottle of milk with an expiration date that was long past. He opened it and gave it a sniff. Seemed to still be good.

　　The date couldn`t be trusted since it was printed on the original release date for the milk. Not the date the bottle was refilled at a local farm. In the post-collapse world, nothing was simply discarded if it could be reused. And plastic containers were a prime candidate to be reused many times.

　　Norman set the bottle on the counter and dug through the dozens of cereal boxes above his fridge and in the cabinets until he found one that wasn`t empty. He really should get rid of the empty boxes if only to make his life easier. Norman set a reminder on his phone to go to the grocery store later to see if he could restock his diminishing supply.

　　With his bowl of cereal poured, Norman sat at the table and silently ate. He savored each and every mouthful. He wasn`t in any hurry to finish eating since he hadn`t eaten in over a day. And what little he had eaten before that had been wasted in the sink, leaving him famished.

　　Eventually, his spoon clinked against the bottom of the bowl, signaling the end of his meal. Norman drained the remaining milk into his mouth and let out a satisfied burp. He might not be full, but he wasn`t starving anymore.

　　He threw the bowl into the sink along with the rest of the dirty dishes, it would be a project for a different day. He did have to rinse off the pan he used to dry the previous sample of blood. Once it was dry, Norman finally grabbed a bottle of the blood from the fridge. He had a pretty decent plan for how to process the blood.

　　When he uncapped the bottle and tried to pour it onto the pan he ran into a bit of a snag. The blood had coagulated inside the bottle or at least the top layer did. Norman was forced to use the backside of a fork to break the top layer and get the thickened blood out. It was a good thing he hadn`t waited any longer to convert the blood into the powdered form. It would probably be okay if it dried in the bottles but he didn`t want the hassle of having to cut them open and scrape apart the mass.

　　Norman spread a thin layer of the blood on the baking sheet. It seemed to work well the night before so he decided just to stick with that approach. The only change he made this time was to line the pan with some wax paper first.

　　It didn`t take long for him to hit another snag in the process. He quickly realized he had way more blood than would fit in his oven at one time. And not enough pans to properly dry it all anyway. He couldn`t leave it sitting around inside the bottles either because of the hardening issue.

　　Norman looked around for a solution to his problem, his eyes landing on the relatively clean kitchen table. That could work. Norman didn`t need all of the blood right away. As long as it didn`t dry inside the bottles, it didn`t really matter how it dried. He covered the entire top of the table with wax paper while the stuff in the oven was drying. He then spread a line down the center of each piece and used a spatula to spread it out as thinly as possible. It looked like a Yves Klein painting with most of the tabletop covered in blue streaks.

　　Even with all that extra space and his entire oven full, Norman had only used up half a bottle of the blood. He realized this was going to take some time so he decided to raid his stash. Since he wasn`t hard up for money now he could smoke some of the stuff he had originally planned to sell.

　　Norman set his phone to blare some harsh metal song. He moved his head in time with the beat of the music while puffing away as he cleaned the bottles he was going to store the blood in. The bottles were normally for his potions but that was fine. He was going to have to store all of this powder somewhere. Seeing as he was all soapy and wet anyway, he did the rest of his dishes, setting everything on the dish rack to dry.

　　Every hour or so he checked the progress of the blood. The stuff in the oven was coming along nicely. He had only set the temperature on low, not wanting to nearly burn it like the previous night. The smell that the blood emitted when it got too hot was very unpleasant and he didn`t want to find out what two whole baking pans worth would smell like. Even so, his entire house was starting to smell like& well, he wasn`t really sure what it was. It was a sickly sweet smell but it had an undertone of rotting vegetation to it.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

　　It wasn`t as bad as the smell of a rotting corpse but it certainly wasn`t enjoyable.

　　After hours the stuff in the stove was done. Norman easily broke it up into a powder and managed to fit all of it in two bottles that he tucked into his pocket. There was a partial third bottle that he decided to hide in his stash just in case.

　　He checked the time on his phone and saw it was nearly eight in the morning.

　　"Store should open in about an hour. Just enough time to take a shower and get there early."

　　Norman decided to leave the rest of the blood to air dry while he was out, He did drag an old box fan into the kitchen and turned it on to help the process along.

　　After grabbing the shopping bags from the hook near the door, he stepped out his back door, locking it behind him. Normally he would bum a ride to the market when Toby went, but since they weren`t on speaking terms at the moment, he decided to go on his own. He could carry everything home but he decided to see if the old bike in the garage still worked.

　　The bike was in working order if a bit rusty but the tires were both flat. After some fumbling around in the garage, he found a hand pump and managed to get both tires to hold air.

　　Norman pedaled out the side door of the garage without bothering to shut it. Not like it mattered. If someone wanted to get in there, they would just go in through the broken overhead door.

　　The distance to the market wasn`t too far but Norman was winded after four blocks of pedaling. He was completely out of shape and it showed.

　　He did eventually arrive at the store, but by then it had been open for a good hour and there were dozens of people coming and going. Norman cursed and hurried to park his bike in the rack so he could try and get some decent items before everything was sold out.

　　The huge chain store was a shadow of its former self. The interior of the store was rather dim, with only half of the lights being on to conserve power. Norman didn`t mind, he didn`t much like the overly bright fluorescent lights that every chain store sported pre-collapse. It did make seeing the labels on the shelves a bit more difficult, but he managed fine.

　　Norman grabbed a cart and tossed his bags inside. It was just his luck that he grabbed one where one of the wheels squeaked and rattled horribly. He didn`t want to waste time going back to get a different one though.

　　It was always weird going through the once-packed store and seeing it nearly empty. The back half of the store had been roped off and only empty shelves remained beyond that point. There simply weren`t enough items to fill the shelves anymore. There were no longer huge trucks of goods brought in from out of state to fill the shelves. Everything had to be grown or produced locally.

　　It was weird to think that this store represented just how much was lost because of the apocalypse.

　　The Jorik might have made good trading partners if they weren`t such jerks. From what Norman saw on the internet, there were no intelligent species to the North of Colorado as far as anyone could tell. And the mountains to the west made it impossible for the local internet to function so there was very little information coming from that side except for sporadic reports from people crossing the unstable terrain.

　　The frequent rock slides were a new development courtesy of the state being plonked down in a new world. Who knew moving entire land masses would make mountains unstable? Not that Norman ever intended on going to the mountains to see for himself. That was for more adventurous people than him. So he didn`t spend much time worrying about the geologic changes caused by the apocalypse, especially not so far from home.

　　Norman pushed his cart past another nearly empty shelf. He knew the store in the walled section of the city didn`t have the same issue with empty shelves. They got priority on resources. And any empty areas were taken up by enterprising merchants who bought out an aisle or quarter aisle to sell their goods. It was a sound decision for everyone involved. But nobody was willing to do the same in the stores outside the wall. Too risky they said.

　　As he had feared, the produce section had been devastated by shoppers already. It wasn`t surprising since everything was now locally grown and fresh produce was hard to come by and in high demand. Still, he did get a few things, some potatoes, onions, radishes, and chives. He quickly moved on to the meat section. The beef, pork, and chicken sections were stripped clean by rabid shoppers, which left only the mystery meat section as his only option. Norman sighed and pushed his squeaky cart over there.

　　The mystery meat section was just that, a mystery. Usually, some alien wild animal that a guilder killed and sold to the local butchers. Some of the meat was rather good, but others not so much. It was a toss-up on which you would get. At least it was all edible.

　　Norman grabbed a package labeled Bacon?` the white butcher`s paper not giving away what was beneath. He grabbed a few more packages that were similarly marked with the unknown question mark.

　　"You`d think they would have started labeling these better by now," an older woman said as she walked up to the meat case to browse.

　　Norman just nodded and moved on.

　　Meat and veggies taken care of, Norman perused the shelves. The scavengers scoured the abandoned properties outside the city for any non-perishable foods. They all ended up in one of three stores within the town. Most people frequented the store that was within the walled-off section of downtown. And while the store inside the wall had a better selection, you needed to get there early if you wanted a chance at it. At least at this store, Norman didn`t need to always arrive as soon as it opened to still find a few items.

　　Case in point, the cereal aisle. Norman scooped every single box of cereal he saw into his cart, which wasn`t many. But it was better than the zero he would have gotten if he went to the other market. Even with the expense, cereal usually sold quickly since it could be stored nearly anywhere for years without much problem.

　　The three boxes Norman had grabbed were twenty dollars each. It was a ludicrous price and also the only reason the boxes were still on the shelf. Despite the price, someone would have snatched them up soon. He had gotten lucky today. It also meant he wouldn`t have to scavenge for more himself.

　　Most of Norman`s cereal at home was scavenged from neighboring houses. All of that was expired cereal, not that the stuff in his cart was any better. He did push his cart past the local equivalent of cereal, which some enterprising locals were trying to produce, but he didn`t buy any of it. He made that mistake once and his teeth hurt for a week after trying to eat the incredibly tough cereal. It also tasted like cardboard so wasn`t even worth the effort.

　　It reminded him of nutbran, or brannut, he couldn`t recall the exact name but the flavor and texture were almost the same as the old brand-name cereal. Eventually, someone might come up with a better-tasting product but until then he was sticking with the old expired cereal.

　　Norman`s last stop was the dairy section where he got some local cheese, butter, and eggs. He also grabbed a loaf of fresh bread from the bakery before heading to the register.

　　Norman handed the flabbergasted teller, two smaller gems and got a bit of paper money in return. It was a bit of a risk paying with gems but Norman didn`t want to waste all his paper currency unless he had to. Besides, he only had three gems on him and not the whole bag. That was safely at home in his stash.

　　Once back outside, Norman found someone had stolen his bike. With a dissatisfied grunt, Norman hefted the bags onto his arms and began the trek home on foot.