After speaking, she couldn’t stop herself from sobbing, tears falling one by one.
Why was the world so terrifying? She was so hungry and so tired.
Liu Yun held her daughter, Huang Xiaoya, tightly, softly humming a nursery rhyme to soothe her emotions.
“Xiaoya, don’t be afraid. Our Xiaoya is the bravest baby. Once the rain stops, we can go home.”
Huang Xiaoya poked her head out from the warm embrace and asked in a milky voice, “Mom, is Daddy coming home with us? Why doesn’t he want us anymore?”
The people nearby spat in disdain, their eyes full of loathing.
Huang Xiaoya was only a three-year-old child; her world revolved around her mother. She had no idea what the abnormal reactions of the bystanders meant when she mentioned her father.
Liu Yun gently covered her daughter’s eyes with her hand, only then daring to let the bitterness show on her face. “Daddy has his own things to do. We won’t disturb him, okay?”
“Heh…” A woman in her fifties was amused by Liu Yun’s “love-brain” behavior. She pulled over a young girl who had previously worked with her in this building. Pressing her unbrushed mouth to the girl’s ear, she spoke in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear:
“Xiao Tu, you must keep your eyes open when looking for a man in the future. Check his character before you decide. You can’t have the kind of man who abandons his wife and child for a tiny bit of food to join a bunch of thugs.”
The girl, gagging at the wave of bad breath, moved a step back, only to be pulled back by the older woman’s brute strength.
“And don’t try to save face. The father is clearly scum, yet she’s still lying to the child. Truly hopeless.”
Tu Zhouzhou: “…”
There was really no need to involve her. As an outsider who had come to City B from another province to make a living, she had no intention of starting a family in this city.
Furthermore, she had watched with her own eyes as the water rose from the first floor to the fifth. Perhaps it would soon reach the fourteenth floor; there might not even be a “future.”
Tu Zhouzhou expressed her desire to be left alone and walked to the massive floor-to-ceiling window. Her thin, long hair obscured her reddened ears as she stared desolately at the rain, which fell in drops the size of stones.
Her homesickness reached its peak at that moment. She missed her parents.
Boom! A thunderclap shook the air, causing Tu Zhouzhou to tremble violently.
The others instinctively huddled together for warmth, only to separate again once the thunder ceased.
After recovering, the older woman curled her lip in dissatisfaction and moved on to the next person. She talked about Liu Yun, talked about the building, and made indirect inquiries about everyone’s family situations, treating it all as entertainment.
Few were as “optimistic” about finding gossip as this woman. Most people, like Liu Yun and Tu Zhouzhou, were consumed by worry for the future.
Behind a two-meter-tall, multimillion-dollar wood carving, Shen Ruoran hid in the shadows. Through the chatter of the gossiping woman, she gained a general understanding of the building’s current state.
The people currently in the building were a mix: some were original employees, and others were owners of nearby shops or residents from surrounding communities who had brought their families here to seek refuge when they realized things were going south.
However, the current rulers of Wantang Building were a group of thugs who, before the apocalypse, had been idle punks who only knew how to collect protection money.
When the heavy rain flooded the first floor, the thugs broke in and used knives to suppress the civilians. They forcibly seized supplies and recruited quite a few people to their side, establishing themselves as the masters of the domain.
The thugs had stationed guards on the 7th floor, the 16th floor, and every floor above that—one guard at the stairwell and one at the elevator entrance.
The 6th floor, not yet submerged, was unoccupied. The 7th through 15th floors housed the “useless” elderly, the weak, women, and children.
Further up lived the wealthy with assets over a million, attractive men and women, skilled fighters, and followers who had joined the thugs’ team to serve as their lackeys.
Despite both being “Building Owners,” the happiness of the tenants (employees) here was extremely low—virtually non-existent.
Shen Ruoran gave herself a narcissistic pat on the back. She was truly a kind owner who cared for her residents.
The people on the 13th floor were lifeless, sitting with their heads bowed and sighing; no one noticed her.
On the 14th floor, however, there was that restless older woman, chatting here and there. Although the topics weren’t things anyone wanted to hear, no one had the energy to deal with her.
Because of this woman’s presence, Shen Ruoran worried that attempting to collect clothes would expose her, so she temporarily halted her movements.
“I wonder if anyone from the upper floors will have a change of heart and come down to suffer with us these next few days. A few days ago, that one couldn’t handle the fall in status and jumped to their death. I wonder when another will come down to add some life to our floor.”
Hearing the woman’s self-muttering, Shen Ruoran’s eyes sparkled. She raised an eyebrow; it seemed the opportunity she had been waiting for had arrived.
On this floor, it would be easier to fish for information about the “Full-function Farmer” Lai Yecheng than on the 13th floor. She also needed to use this chance to create the right conditions to collect the clothing.
Shen Ruoran waited a bit longer. When the woman stopped saying anything useful, Shen Ruoran untied her ponytail with one hand, intentionally mussing her hair. She grabbed some grimy dust from the floor and patted it onto her clothes.
Then, she walked out timidly, her voice carrying a hint of a sob.
She looked utterly pitiful.
“Hello… can I find a place to rest anywhere?”
Just as Shen Ruoran expected, the first person to look up was the talkative woman. Before anyone else could react, the woman scrambled to her feet and walked over to Shen Ruoran, circling her inquisitively.
“Which floor did you come down from?” An older man in the crowd asked before the woman could.
Shen Ruoran kept her head low and picked a middle-tier floor at random. “I think the 17th floor…”
If the 17th floor turned out to be inappropriate, she would simply say she remembered wrong and that it was the 18th floor, giving herself plenty of room to backtrack.
The woman rested her chin in her hand, her eyes darting suspiciously.
The 17th floor… if she remembered correctly, that was the floor specifically for the elites to pick out “fallen girls.”
Her mouth moved faster than her brain, blunting out without a shred of emotional intelligence: “So, are you one of the ‘ladies’ they play with?”
Shen Ruoran was shocked. It seemed her intuition was off; how did her random choice end up giving her such an identity?
Just as she was about to force an explanation and say she had the wrong floor, the old man flared up and scolded the woman on Shen Ruoran’s behalf:
“Cai Juanhua, can’t you have some decency? Don’t just slander a young girl like that. The 17th floor is for the servants. The 18th floor is that kind of place.”
This was the first time the old man had stopped Cai Juanhua’s nonsense. To the older generation, slandering a person’s virtue was equivalent to murder; it was an act of pure evil.
Cai Juanhua turned her head away dismissively and glared at the old man. “So what if I got it wrong? Is a servant any better than a prostitute? Those who work for those thugs aren’t anything good either. In the old days, they’d be no different from traitors.”
The indirect insults made Shen Ruoran’s head ring. If it weren’t for the fact that there were too many people in the building and she wanted to discreetly collect all the clothes from floors 13 to 16 without getting into a physical fight with a bunch of thugs, she really would have given Cai Juanhua a piece of her mind.