The wildfire continued to spread until evening, and even as the sun set, it still hadn’t been extinguished.
At this time, all the surrounding villages and communities in the suburbs were evacuating people. During the day, those wearing protective suits left first. In the evening, the evacuation was for those without protective suits.
However, this round of evacuation did not include Qingshui Manor’s villa district.
Almost everyone living in that villa district had managed to get protective suits during this period, so they all left during the daytime.
But this did not include Old Cheng’s family.
Ever since the warehouse theft incident, Old Cheng had not been released. Rumor had it he was sent somewhere for labor reform. At home, only Old Cheng’s wife, their eldest daughter Cheng Zhihua, and their youngest son Cheng Zhixuan, who had previously suffered from blistering disease, remained.
Although the boy was only a few years old, he had a cunning mind. He used to enjoy bullying his older sister. Now, with many sunken scars on his body, he had become even worse.
Sure enough, when the community announced daytime evacuation, the boy locked his sister in a cabinet, determined not to let her leave with the others.
However, his mother had no intention of leaving during the day. She planned to take him out at night.
“Zhixuan, are you really not taking your sister with you?”
Old Cheng’s wife was a traditional, son-favoring type, but she wasn’t cruel enough to abandon her daughter. Her original plan was to sweep through the villa district tonight with her son and then take both children to the city.
Cheng Zhixuan’s face had a large depression caused by tissue loss from his previous blister disease. Originally a plump child, these indentations made him look quite frightening.
“I don’t want to take her, I won’t take her!”
Old Cheng’s wife could never understand the boy’s mind. But since he was resisting, and she would need him to handle things later, she ultimately decided to take only her youngest son out of the house.
They didn’t immediately go to the community workstation for help. Instead, they headed to the nearest building, Building 8, where Zhou Mi and her boyfriend lived.
This apartment had been vacant before, with only the developer’s basic finishing. Naturally, the mother and son quickly slipped inside.
“This family is really poor.”
After spending an hour searching the entire villa, Old Cheng’s wife only found half a bag of flour. When she opened it, it even smelled slightly moldy.
“What bad luck…”
Complaining, she gestured for her youngest son to put the items into his secret stash.
Yes. Not long after the child was brought home, Old Cheng’s wife noticed that things in the house kept disappearing. Later, after checking the home surveillance, she discovered it was her youngest son who had been making the items vanish.
Old Cheng was almost fifty, but his wife was still young, just past thirty. In her early twenties, she had relied on her own “efforts” to push aside the first wife and secure her position. Then she gave birth to an unremarkable daughter. It wasn’t until she finally had a son that her status was truly secured.
Being so young, she naturally understood why things kept disappearing.
Wasn’t this exactly like the “space” powers that appear in novels and TV shows?
After discovering this secret, Old Cheng’s wife was overjoyed. According to the usual trope in novels and TV shows, having a space made you a winner in this world. The sorrow she had felt over her only son’s disfiguring blister disease vanished in an instant.
She didn’t even worry about her son’s future anymore. Being disfigured wasn’t a problem, he could still marry ten or eight wives in the future if he had the means.
With her confidence swelling like this, she naturally had no intention of following the community’s evacuation.
Cheng Zhixuan didn’t think much as he watched the craziness in his mother’s eyes. When she told him to put the items in the secret stash, he did so obediently.
From Old Cheng’s wife’s perspective, the items simply vanished in a flash right before her eyes.
She smiled and hugged her son. “Zhixuan, with this treasure, we’ll never go hungry again. Once your father comes back, life for the three of us will only get better and better.”
Old Cheng loved his son dearly, and the son naturally had some affection for his father as well.
After some affectionate chatting, the mother and son began sweeping through other houses.
But it wasn’t long before they were disappointed.
Whether it was Building 4 (the He family), Building 5 (the Lai family), Building 6 (the Qu family), or the homes of Lin Su, the Wen family, and the Hu family, each front door had been upgraded.
They struggled to pry open the windows to get inside, only for alarms to sound as soon as they did.
Frightened, the mother and son barely had time to do anything mischief-related before running off.
In fact, their luck was fairly good. With the wildfire raging outside, if those alarms had gone off under normal conditions, they would have drawn a lot of attention.
Meanwhile, at the city stadium,
It was still relatively empty during the day, so the neighbors from the villa district who had evacuated earlier quickly joined Lin Su and her group.
The gathering had been organized by Lai Huaming to keep everyone together. The stadium was still empty, but that was only because many people hadn’t yet obtained protective suits. By nightfall, it would surely be packed with evacuees, and disputes over space and petty theft were bound to happen.
“Xiao Lai, I should’ve just come with you from the start. This trip, the community vehicles brought us here, and we couldn’t even bring much luggage.”
As soon as they arrived, people started complaining to Lai Huaming.
“Old Hu, it’s no use talking now. Hurry up and set up the tents. If we wait any longer, there won’t be any space left.”
The person complaining to Lai Huaming was Hu Minhai, the owner of Building 3. His wife was Liu Xianglan, and they had a daughter, Hu Shanshan, who was 18 years old.
“Exactly, I wanted Dad to go with Brother Wen’s family, but he refused,” Shanshan said, holding a pack of wet wipes and brushing off the ash and soot that had gotten on her. She complained as she cleaned herself, but when her eyes caught sight of Wen Shiyun in the distance, holding his phone, her gaze grew sticky and infatuated.
When her eyes shifted to Lin Su standing next to Wen Shiyun, her expression turned sharp and hostile.
Lin Su naturally noticed the malicious glare but paid it no mind, shaking her head and focusing on her phone instead.
Her attention was on tracking the wildfire.
More than half of An City fell within the range of Wu’an Mountain. If this wildfire couldn’t be contained, combined with shifts in wind direction, it was entirely possible that the entire city could be engulfed in flames.
So, they had to monitor the fire constantly. Any sudden change might mean they wouldn’t just be evacuating the neighborhoods, they might have to evacuate all of An City.
“The closest city to An City is Lincheng. It’s an industrial city with little greenery. If things get worse here, we can consider moving there,” Wen Shiyun said after studying the map carefully, ultimately designating Lincheng as a potential fallback.
“It shouldn’t come to that, right?” He Rongxuan, sitting nearby with his sister He Qingfei, added. They were discussing possible escape routes with Wen Shiyun and Lin Su, but still dreaded the thought of the city being surrounded by fire.
“We’re just preparing contingency plans. Who would want to leave if they didn’t have to?”
All of them had reinforced homes. In a world like this, staying at home offered the highest level of safety. Their households included elders, and if a real evacuation were necessary, the older family members wouldn’t handle the disruption well.
Lin Su didn’t join in the conversation. She kept scrolling through every online report related to the An City wildfire. The latest news indicated that the authorities were preparing to deploy a secret unit.
Being far from the fire, she couldn’t know the exact situation, only that many people were likely to be injured or even die.
Feeling heavy-hearted, she only ate one bun that evening and skipped the rest of her meal. Around that time, she heard that the secret unit had been deployed and had successfully established a firebreak for the first time.
News like this was highly encouraging.
The stadium gradually received more people as well. As the crowd grew, the noise increased, and the air became thick. Even though the sun had set, ash from the burning vegetation still drifted through the air, so the stadium’s roof remained closed.
After Lin Su shared the news of the successfully established firebreak with those around her, she realized that Old Cheng’s family wasn’t among their neighbors.
She asked Lai Huaming, who had also inquired, and he said, “I don’t know either. Our villa district doesn’t have many neighbors to begin with. I thought they would have evacuated early in the day. We didn’t see them during the day, and even among the people coming in tonight, including those from the high-rise area, I haven’t seen any sign of them.”
Lin Su wasn’t particularly kind-hearted; she was just curious and asked. After all, Old Cheng’s wife was an adult. Naturally, she was responsible for her own children, and if she chose not to evacuate, that was her decision.
But soon, Lin Su learned Old Cheng’s wife’s intentions from a sudden notification that popped up on her phone.
“Look at this…”
Lin Su handed her phone to her parents, who were chatting nearby.
On the screen was the live feed from their home security camera. It showed Old Cheng’s wife sneaking around with her son, trying to pry open their door. Of course, she failed.
“Doesn’t she know we have cameras?” Mother Lin said, her expression impossible to read. Lin Su shook her head: “I heard that this afternoon, due to the wildfire, the surrounding areas lost power. She probably forgot that we have a solar power generator.”
Still, it was pathetic for Old Cheng’s family to steal like this. Since they didn’t succeed, they couldn’t call the security team. Lin Su thought for a moment and decided to post the video of the mother and son trying to break in to the villa district’s small group chat.
Soon, neighbors who were sitting or lying in their tents all jumped out one by one.
Lai Huaming: “Whoa, is she trying to pry the door?”
Hu Minhai: “Why is she stealing from your house?”
Zhou Mi: “Serves her right, haha…”
The He siblings poked their heads out from their tents and said, “She’s stealing stuff, and she brought her son with her…”
Old Cheng’s wife’s expression was impossible to read, while Lin Su just shook her head in disbelief. Still, she couldn’t help forming a faint suspicion in her mind.
The topic seemed to die down there. Later, many people, bored and with their phones running out of battery, gradually lay down on their bedding to rest.
Lin Su returned to her own small tent and quickly fell asleep.
By this time, a lot of people had arrived at the stadium. Those without tents simply lay down on their own bedding, or directly on the grass if they didn’t have any. It was hot anyway, and the stadium’s air conditioning wasn’t very effective. With so many people crowded together, nobody risked catching a cold.
The faint smell of burning vegetation still lingered in the air. But after a long day of evacuating, most people fell asleep as soon as their heads hit the bedding.
However, this comfortable sleep was doomed to be short-lived. At three o’clock in the morning, a piercing scream shattered everyone’s peaceful dreams in the stadium.