Chapter 184

At that moment, Mr. Xu felt almost the same fear Zhao Yi had experienced.

A vague foreboding, an indescribable unknown.

The next moment, Mr. Xu abruptly turned around. “Xiaoxiao!”

He set the candle on the table and hurriedly put on his clothes.

Director Yu asked, “What’s wrong with Xiaoxiao?”

Mr. Xu said, “I’m afraid she didn’t listen. I’m going to check on her again.”

Of their entire group, only Wu Yan and Tao Xiaoxiao were women.

The young girl’s endurance hadn’t been tempered to the same degree as that of the older women.

Back when they had been trapped in the company, everyone had greasy hair and foul breath. She had secretly hidden a bottle of mouthwash and rinsed her mouth with it every day.

She thought no one knew.

During the nightly room inspection, Tao Xiaoxiao had also been very reluctant to sleep in the living room.

The stove was burning there, and a pile of honeycomb coal was stacked nearby, so the floor was inevitably dirty. She hated it.

She had agreed in front of Mr. Xu, but he was afraid she would say one thing to people’s faces and do another behind their backs.

He knew his employees far too well.

He pounded on the door.

The male employee who opened it was shivering violently from the cold. “W-What’s going on? Holy crap, why is it so cold?”

Mr. Xu asked, “Where’s Xiaoxiao? Did Xiaoxiao sleep in the living room?”

The man stammered, “She, she didn’t—”

Mr. Xu shoved him aside and rushed in with Director Yu and the others.

Sure enough, there were only two mattresses on the floor, one double and one single.

The two male employees were sleeping on the double mattress, while Wu Yan occupied the single one. They all sat up with their blankets wrapped around them, exhaling clouds of white vapor through their open mouths.

Mr. Xu’s expression changed. “Xiaoxiao didn’t come out to sleep?”

Wu Yan said, “She...”

Tao Xiaoxiao was young, sweet-tongued, and good at winning people over. Even Wu Yan usually indulged her. Since she didn’t want to, Wu Yan hadn’t forced her.

Tao Xiaoxiao was still sleeping in her own room. Fortunately, she hadn’t been completely foolish—she knew enough to leave the door open so that the heat could spread through.

Even so, in the short distance from the living room to Tao Xiaoxiao’s doorway, Mr. Xu could already feel the change in temperature on his face.

It was icy.

The instant he stepped into Tao Xiaoxiao’s room, the cold pierced straight to the bone.

The size of the doorway and the distance between the rooms ultimately limited how much heat could travel.

Tao Xiaoxiao’s lips were as pale as gold paper. She had already lost consciousness in her sleep from the cold.

Everyone hurriedly carried her into the living room.

“Add more coal! Get the fire burning hotter!”

They placed two blankets beneath her and covered her with two more.

Everyone on the same floor was woken up, and all their hot-water bottles were stuffed around her.

The men rubbed her hands, feet, and ears.

Wu Yan knelt above her head, reached one hand inside her collar, and frantically rubbed her abdomen and chest to generate heat through friction.

Someone else poured hot brown-sugar water into her mouth.

That was how a whole group of colleagues dragged Tao Xiaoxiao back from the brink of death.

By the time Tao Xiaoxiao was able to open her eyes, everyone else was utterly exhausted.

What a remarkable girl.

Though still so young, she had experienced two completely opposite brushes with death: nearly being burned alive and nearly freezing to death.

Both times, they had forcibly pulled her back from the gates of hell.

At the Youth Apartments, everyone slept in communal dormitories.

Most of the apartments there were basically single large rooms—bedroom and living room combined, without any partitions. The spaces were relatively large, which made them inefficient to heat.

The emergency plan for dealing with the cold was to create large communal dormitories.

They connected several apartments, removed all the unnecessary furniture, filled the rooms with beds, and set up more stoves. The heating efficiency immediately improved.

The rooms couldn’t be too large, either. Generally, three apartments were connected to form one dormitory, and people were packed into them one dormitory at a time.

Jiang Cheng, of course, stayed with the girls. They also brought along the little girls from the children’s group.

The boys followed the uncles.

Mo Li tried to sneak into the women’s dormitory in cat form, but Li Jiangbing grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and carried him away.

Adults had been assigned to both the boys’ and girls’ middle-school dormitories, while some children were staying with the adults as well.

The children chattered away.

They all said it felt as if they had returned to their school days, when everyone had crowded together and slept in the classrooms.

The bed boards beneath them were made by piecing together classroom desks, and they were hard enough to make anyone sore. It had only been a month, yet they already missed those days.

Someone sighed. “Why does time pass so quickly and so slowly at the same time?”

When Jiang Cheng woke up, she immediately felt the chill at the tip of her nose.

The temperature had really dropped.

Fortunately, there were more stoves and more people in the communal dormitory, so no one had frozen.

Several fire-element girls released fireballs, and the temperature in the dormitory quickly rose.

Everyone held their clothes around the fireballs to warm them before daring to put them on.

When they went to the windows and wiped away the white frost, they were all stunned.

“Come and look!”

Everyone crowded around the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The courtyard outside had already become a world of white.

They could see the public toilets and cafeteria, as well as the heated corridors that had been hastily constructed over the past few days to connect the various buildings, the toilets, the cafeteria, and the communal heating rooms.

Because they had been built in a rush to ward off the cold, the heated corridors had not been made particularly tall. Still, they had been high enough for a six-foot-tall person to walk through.

But now, the corridors were almost completely buried in snow.

In other words, the snow was more than a person deep.

The girls’ dormitory buzzed with excited chatter.

Because the provisional government had issued an early warning and made thorough preparations, everything had been arranged properly. Everyone was surprised and excited, but no one was afraid.

Su Yu helped Zhang Lesi get dressed.

Zhang Lesi asked, “Where’s Jiang Cheng?”

Su Yu turned her head and saw Jiang Cheng standing beside the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing outside.

The middle-school girls, excited beyond measure by the heavy snow, stood around her.

Jiang Cheng stood among them, as if a still image had been embedded in an animated scene.

What was Jiang Cheng looking at?

What was she thinking?

Su Yu called out, “Jiang Cheng?”

Jiang Cheng turned to look at them, then came over to help Zhang Lesi get dressed.

Winter clothes were too thick and difficult to put on.

“Were you cold last night?” she asked.

Zhang Lesi replied, “Not really. I could feel the cold, but I didn’t freeze. What’s it like outside?”

Jiang Cheng said, “The snow has buried the heated corridors.”

Su Yu and Zhang Lesi both paused. “The heated corridors?”

Zhang Lesi shoved Su Yu. Su Yu ran to the window and took a look, utterly shocked.

Jiang Cheng helped Zhang Lesi into her pants. “Lift your leg. They’re buried. Almost completely. The snow is nearly as high as a person.”

Zhang Lesi said, “I remember Zhao Yi saying the corridors were designed to be two meters high?”

Jiang Cheng replied, “That’s right.”

Zhang Lesi found it unbelievable.

Su Yu came back. “The corridors are almost invisible. The snow is higher than a person.”

Zhang Lesi angrily pounded the bed. “Why can’t I see it too!”

She was from southern China and had always dreamed of seeing heavy snow.

Su Yu said nothing. She had seen it with her own eyes, and the sight had shaken her to the core.

She glanced at Jiang Cheng.

Jiang Cheng lifted her eyes and looked back at Su Yu.

Su Yu hesitated, unsure how to begin.

Jiang Cheng shook her head.

“Go ahead,” she said. “What kind of person do you think he is?”

The person who had warned them in advance about the extreme drop in temperature.

It had turned out that he wasn’t crazy.

If anything, he had become famous in a single battle.

The girls worked together to fill hot-water bottles and basins, then poured water into them to wash up.

After a while, someone knocked on the door to announce, “You can go downstairs to use the bathroom now.”

The fire-element ability users on duty that day had already gotten up and gone downstairs.

There were stoves in the public toilets, but at this temperature, they might as well not have existed.

The fire-element users first used fireballs to warm the entire restroom before daring to let everyone in. Otherwise, they were afraid people’s urine would freeze to their bodies.

The hastily repaired enclosed walkways connected the buildings in the center of the courtyards.

Stoves had been placed in the middle of the walkways as well.

But no one had any experience with temperatures this low. It was only when the bitter cold truly arrived that they realized there weren’t enough stoves.

More stoves were added on the spot.

Fire-type superpowered individuals were already heating the communal warming rooms. There were others in the cafeterias, and even in the public restrooms.

With all that, the web-like network of enclosed walkways finally grew warm enough. People could move through them without suffering frostbite from the extreme cold.

Before noon, the statistics from each residential compound came in.

Even with all those warnings and arrangements, there were still people who refused to follow instructions.

People like that existed everywhere. But this would be the last time they disobeyed.

Jixiang Jiayuan had 71 people freeze to death.

Yujing Xiangyuan had 130.

The other residential compounds reported their numbers one after another, most ranging from several dozen to two hundred.

Deqingli had more than 300 deaths, because it was densely populated and housed more people.

The entire Science and Technology New District was sheltering more than 30,000 refugees. In total, more than 900 people had frozen to death the previous night.

There were no deaths at the Youth Apartments, only one case of frostbite.

It was a man who had been unable to hold it in and had gone downstairs to take a dump in the middle of the night.

Halfway through, he realized something was wrong. If he didn’t get upstairs immediately, he might not be able to make it back at all. He hurriedly pulled up his pants and sprinted upstairs.

By the time he got back, he had already suffered frostbite.

His roommates carried him to Zhang Lesi, who treated him.

The man kept his entire face wrapped in a scarf the whole time, refusing to show even his eyes.

That way, no girl would see the face of “the man who froze his butt while taking a dump in the middle of the night.”

Everyone’s butt looked more or less the same anyway. Hiding his face was enough.

Mo Li appeared in the form of a black cat, but he was different from before—he had turned into a long-haired cat.

Everyone almost failed to recognize him.

Li Jiangbing praised Mo Li enthusiastically. “Good cat!”

It turned out that Mo Li transformed into a long-haired cat at night.

When he heard Li Jiangbing say, “It’s so cold,” he began to grow, transforming into a huge—an absolutely enormous—long-haired cat.

Cats had higher body temperatures than humans, and a giant cat’s body temperature was even higher. On top of that, he had long, insulating fur.

A group of grown men fought to sleep pressed against Mo Li. It was warm and cozy beyond description.

They were happy, but Mo Li was not happy in the slightest.

How could he possibly be happy when he couldn’t cuddle up and sleep with Jiang Cheng?

The little cat’s face clearly showed the words: I’m not happy.

But because of the cold, it was better for him to stay in his long-haired cat form to retain body heat, so Jiang Cheng stopped forcing him to maintain a human form.

Mo Li could finally perch on Jiang Cheng’s shoulder again, and he became happy once more.

“Mo Li, get a little bigger,” Jiang Cheng said.

Mo Li: “?”

Mo Li didn’t understand, but he did as he was told.

“A little bigger. Just a tiny bit is enough.”

Mo Li grew slightly larger.

“Good. Just like that,” Jiang Cheng said.

Jiang Cheng draped Mo Li around the back of his neck, then pulled his front and hind legs across his chest and crossed them there.

A genuine fur stole that was practically a living radiator.

With that fur stole draped around his neck, Jiang Cheng went to the radio station.

It was no longer possible to calculate the situation by administrative district. Several districts had already begun merging and had become a handful of major refugee settlements.

The Science and Technology New District had received the mysterious man’s prediction yesterday and immediately used the radio to warn people in the other districts.

Yet even those who had made preparations just like the Science and Technology New District still suffered massive losses to the cold.

Almost every settlement had a death toll comparable to that of the Science and Technology New District.

And that was despite the fact that the Science and Technology New District’s population was one and a half to three times larger than theirs.

At that moment, nearly every settlement leader wanted to ask the same question—

Who exactly was the man who had predicted the extreme cold?

Naturally, there was no answer.

Perhaps Uncle Jiang knew. After all, he often hinted that he was actually familiar with the mysterious man’s background.

But on closer thought, they realized that no one had ever really known who Uncle Jiang was—or who Sister Mao was, for that matter.

They tuned the radio to the right frequency. On November 15, the mysterious man was still broadcasting:

“It won’t be over anytime soon. Give up your fantasies.”